>From the Loft to Ashcan
by PAUL LEVY, online.wsj.com
March 3rd 2011
If you weren't there, what you need to realize about the 1960s is that much of
it actually happened in the '70s—from clothes to music, and especially art.
In New York, for example, newly graduated art students began to gravitate
downtown, lured by low rents and lofts, neglecting big spaces that had ceased
to have their industrial functions. While Andy Warhol was holding court at the
Factory at Union Square and Max's Kansas City, the new avant-garde of painters,
dancers, musicians and filmmakers were colonizing the area south of Houston
Street—SoHo. Its denizens cared and were worried about Vietnam, the draft, the
Civil Rights Movement, and burgeoning feminism. They distrusted the gallery
system, recording and movie industries, and saw themselves as a politicized
part of a counterculture—accepting the music, drugs, dress and sexual behavior
of their peers, but capable of joining together, for example, to fight the
expansion of an eight-lane motorway that would have demolished their
neighborhood.
Three shows have just opened in London that capture the countercultural spirit,
not just of these times, but (perhaps surprisingly) of an earlier era as well.
The Barbican Art Gallery has mounted an extraordinarily ambitious show of what
resulted from this, "Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark:
Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York, 1970s." It's ambitious because all
three, who were friends, veered off in the direction of performance, which I
suppose can be seen as the quintessential art form of these years; and dancers
perform three of (now internationally celebrated) choreographer Trisha Brown's
wonderfully weird works every day until the show ends on May 22. These include
her astonishing 1971 piece, "Walking on the Wall."
Matta-Clark (who died in 1978) was fascinating, and has the lion's share of
this exhibition. The neglected son of a Chilean Surrealist painter and godchild
of Marcel Duchamp, he followed his father in studying architecture, an interest
revealed in many of the works displayed here. (The sole flaw in this large show
is that so much of the work on the walls is, by its very nature, documentation
rather than the work itself.) In 1971, a true innovator in connecting food and
art, Matta-Clark started the famous restaurant "Food" on Prince Street, with
really appetizing-looking dishes such as sashimi and bouillabaisse on the menu
really appetizing-looking dishes such as "gazpacho" and "bouillabaisse" on the
menu with "used car stew" and "liver dumpling stew and Alka Seltzer."
Laurie Anderson trained as a violinist, began a pre-med course, shifted to art
history and initiated several street-based works before recording "O Superman"
in 1980 and achieving number two on the British pop charts. She's collaborated
with everyone from Wim Wenders to Robert LePage. Here she's represented by
loads of clever sound pieces and has remade her zany, zooming 1977-78 piece,
"The Electric Chair."
With some of her best work made in the same period, the American feminist
artist and activist Nancy Spero (1926-2009) is being shown by the Serpentine
Gallery (until May 2) in an adaptation of the show initiated by the Centre
Pompidou in Paris. Spero created her own visual language, in which the units
were not only pained-looking faces, often with protruding tongues, but also
quotations from everything from mythology and Etruscan frescos to fashion
magazines.
She and her husband, painter Leon Golub, spent a good deal of time in France.
She rejected the most important American post-War art movements of Abstract
Expressionism and Pop as much, I'd guess, for their domination by male artists
as because she was trained in the figurative tradition, and fascinated by what
she discovered in ethnographic museums. Spero was fired up by the Vietnam War,
but it is obvious to the viewer that she really regarded all war as just
another aspect of the bad influence of maleness.
As you enter the Serpentine, you see her "Maypole Take No Prisoners II" (2008).
Suspended from the central pole that stretches up into a round skylight are
colored ribbons and lengths of chain, each ending in one of her (mostly) pained
faces. The piece has a paradoxically celebratory feeling. Her epic work, "Azur"
(2002) fills the central room with its 39 panels of collaged, hand-printed and
painted paper, some depicting figures familiar from her other work, from
stylized classical friezes to photographed picketers. The colors are so vivid
and lush that I found the work almost decorative—pretty.
The National Gallery is also contributing to our knowledge of less known or
under-estimated American artists with a Room 1 show "An American Experiment:
George Bellow and the Ashcan Painters" until May 30. The Ashcan school was a
loose group of painters, who flourished in the early years of the 20th century,
and took their name from their realist attitude to their subjects, such as the
poorer neighborhoods of New York. Many had backgrounds as newspaper
illustrators, and had studied with Robert Henri (1865-1929) at the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts, and followed him when he moved to New York.
They had in common that they were in rebellion against the dominant school of
Impressionism, with its light colors and genteel subjects. The Ashcanners liked
somber, darker hues and darker, urban subject matter. Poverty and prostitutes
were more in their line than picnics and women with parasols. However, this
very attractive National Gallery show, somewhat under-represents the gritty
side of the group.
Their most prominent painter, George Bellows (1882-1925), is best known for his
later, sweaty boxing scenes. But he first attracted notice for some of the
paintings of the type in this show, wonderful depictions of New York in the
snow, with their strong lighting and vivid contrasts of the textures of the
blue/white snow with the grimy city. Among the seven paintings by Bellows is
the 1909 "Nude Girl, Miss Leslie Hall," a sexy big woman, whose bulk he
lovingly emphasizes. In the 1910s he began to paint non-urban landscapes, with
some terrific views of the palisades of the Hudson.
Oddly, the best of Bellow shown here has affinities to Impressionism. The vivid
palette of his "The Big Dory" (1913) and its dramatic lighting are untypical of
the Ashcan school. However, its forward movement and attention to the costume
and muscular detail of the workmen, while only rapidly sketching their faces,
is echoed here in the work of his teacher. Henri's charming 1910 portrait of a
child-homage to the inspiration of Frans Hals, "Dutch Joe (Jopie van Slouten),"
is painted entirely with rapid, rough brushstrokes.
Write to Paul Levy at [email protected]
Original Page:
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