NYRB's Art Issue: Tallman, Bell, and Salle

Arlene Shechet, Rapunzel (2024)

I just want to highlight three pieces in The New York Review of Books’ recent “Art Issue” that I enjoyed immensely:

1. Susan Tallman’s “String Theory”

This absorbing piece is a review of two exhibitions: the Museum of Modern Art’s Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art. It contains several wonderful descriptions of textiles. For example:

A rollicking pattern of orbs, blocks, and squiggles on a tunic from the pre-Inca Wari empire is so intricate it required six to nine miles of thread, and so jazzy in its peppering of orange, black, and magenta it might be fifty years old rather than a thousand.

In Hicks’s The Principal Wife (circa 1965), hanks of wool, intermittently wrapped in brilliant colors, fall in heavy arcs from a bar like the reins of some Brobdingnagian horse on a festival day. It takes discipline not to reach out and give them a tug.

In Eva Hesse’s 1966 Ennead, yards of brown cord sprout from a wall-mounted piece of plywood, like hair plugs aspiring to dreadlocks. Some drop straight down, while others travel in a sloppy catenary to a hook on the adjacent wall, then flop in a tangle to the floor. It is a work of inexplicable poignancy—the plain carpentry, the expansive eruption, the droop, and the casual splendor. The quixotically reinforced wire lattice of Gego’s Square Reticulárea 71/II (1971) is a lesson in distributed stress, gawky and graceful in equal measure. Alan Shields’s Shape-Up (1976–1977) occupies space in the manner of a minimalist painting, but instead of rigor we get an open crisscross of slightly slack ribbons, adorned here and there with a swag of beaded string, like postseason Christmas lights on an unkempt high-rise. Order and disorder check each other out, shake hands, and decide to get on. 

2. Julian Bell’s “Internalizing the Crises”

In this stimulating piece, Bell reviews Joseph Leo Koerner’s Art in a State of Siege. What’s it about? Bell tells us: 

The three artists on whom Koerner dwells in his highly wrought text—which was long in gestation before the advent of the forty-seventh presidency—occupy disparate historical worlds. He returns to Hieronymus Bosch, the subject of a 2016 book in which he paired and contrasted that astonishing innovator, working at the turn of the sixteenth century, with Pieter Bruegel, working some sixty years later. He crosses campus to Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum and ponders its most formidable holding, Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927) by Max Beckmann. Then, flying to Johannesburg, the renowned art historian hooks up with the yet more celebrated artist William Kentridge. Koerner’s salute to the achievements of this inspiring contemporary becomes warmly bromantic.

I’m interested in all three of these artists, particularly Bosch. Bell disagrees with Koerner’s interpretation of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1490-1510). First, he quotes Koerner:

The devil’s hatred of people, people’s hatred of other people, the Jews’ hatred of Christ and Christians, the hatred of Christians for their enemies, the hatred directed towards an “us” by an invisible “them,” and the wrath of God that consumes just about everyone: this global economy of loathing stands not just portrayed in Bosch’s pictures. It is performed in them, as if his brush were enmity’s instrument. Hatred contaminates. The aversion these images depict and enact defiles how we react to them. Uncertain whether they are for us or against us, we turn against each other. Bosch built his masterpiece to act like a time bomb set to detonate in every dangerous here and now.

Bell responds:

This is swaggering, adrenaline prose. Its assertions seem to me to fail the test of experience. Not defilement but diversion: to these eyes, that is what The Garden of Earthly Delights supplies. Its high, zinging hues go with its hilarity—the amorous sow in a wimple cozying up to one of its males, the flowers sticking out of another man’s bottom. Its crammed market stall of shape-shuffling caprices (ovoids, tunnels, shells, spikes, and soft flesh, vessels continually recombinant) offers a holiday from truth and necessity, one that allows us, in common with its earliest recorded viewer—writing a year after the painter had died—to revel without shame in “things so pleasing and so fantastic.”

Bell calls Koerner’s book “not an argument but an artwork.” I think I’ll check it out.

3. David Salle’s “ ‘Why Not All These Things at Once’ ”

This is a review of Arlene Shechet: Girl Group, an exhibition at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York. And what a review it is – one of the best of the year. Salle’s immense powers of art description are on full display. For example:

Bea Blue (2024) is a plump, rotund, pale blue, benign beast that appeared to be waddling down the mowed path on which it stood. From one side it’s a curvaceous, lumbering sumo knight holding a too-small shield; from the opposite side it’s an affronted pelican resting on a single skinny leg.

And:

The aptly named Rapunzel (2024), a beautiful shade of cobalt blue-violet nuanced by bright pale mauve accents, has something in common with both the Chicago Picasso (itself an essay in sculptural “hair”) and a playground slide or jungle gym. A flattened, shallow trough of metal swoops vertiginously from the apex, ending some feet above the ground. It’s tempting to want to slide down it. Viewed from the opposite side, the construction appears to be supported by a single giant foot. Up close, the tangled mass of wide, cake-pan cantilevered trough and narrow ribbon forms is turbulent, jumbled, almost menacing; from a distance it’s a slow-moving anteater in a purple coat.

And one more:

As April (2024) is a cluster of distorted rectangular shapes notched with semicircular removals, the planes welded together at perpendicular angles to make a top-heavy, squarish mass resting on a narrower base. It is painted in two shades of yellow—a warm cadmium yellow medium and a pale, cool, almost greenish lemon—and beribboned with unpainted metal extrusions. From certain angles the whole thing evokes an explosion in a plumbing supply house; the notched planes are interrupted here and there by flattened tubular forms, and a tangle of wires descends diagonally from a twisted spine. The construction appears to be going haywire. It’s either having a nervous breakdown or skipping rope, either high comedy or low clown (I can’t decide which), a slapstick gag in slow motion, a Beckettian tramp looking for a place to sit down. The crisp late fall day I visited, as the sun picked out the bright yellow notched shapes against the red-rust leaves of an oak, the vibrant ensemble felt satisfying, enlivening.

“A curvaceous, lumbering sumo knight holding a too-small shield,” “a slow-moving anteater in a purple coat,” “an explosion in a plumbing supply house” – Salle’s descriptions surprise, delight, and illuminate. I enjoy them enormously.

Svetlana Alpers's "Is Art History?"

Svetlana Alpers's The Art of Describing (1983) is one of my touchstones. It’s a study of Dutch art in the 17th century. It argues that central aspects of that art can best be understood as being an art of describing as distinguished from the narrative art of Italy. It’s basically a defence of description: “Meaning resides in the careful representation of the world,” Alpers says. I read that over forty years ago; it’s been part of my personal credo ever since.

Alpers has a beautiful new book out – Is Art History? (2024). It’s a collection of her essays, including the great “Describe or Narrate? A Problem in Realistic Representation” (1976), in which she plants the seed that later burgeons into The Art of Describing. Is Art History? surprises in that it contains not only essays on old masters like Bruegel, Velázquez, Vermeer, and Rembrandt, but also pieces on modern artists such as Alex Katz, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Catherine Murphy, and Shirley Jaffe. One of my favorites is “Rebecca Horn: Chorus of the Locusts I and II,” a delightful account of Alpers’s discovery of two of Horn’s installations in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. It begins wonderfully: “I came upon this pair of works by Rebecca Horn on a miserable rainy day in late winter in Hamburg.” Alpers explores the main floors of the museum and finds several “singular things” (e.g., “a dark vertical canvas filled to the top with a flower bed lit from the front – an alternative to a still life painted, surprisingly, by the young Renoir”). She finds herself in a happy and receptive mood – “happy because I was enjoyably involved in looking.” Then she happens on the two Horns. She writes,

Near the top of the building there was another staircase, as if to an attic. Worth the effort? I went up anyway and emerged in an odd room. I’d never seen anything quite like it. The ceiling was lined with rows of typewriters, neatly arranged. Monumental, out-of-date office machines hung upside down. Here and there and now and then one or two typed away for a time and then stopped. The beat was kept (was that the point?) by a blind man’s stick, white and hanging loosely down. The ribbon spewed out from one machine (had something gone wrong? could it be fixed?) onto the bare gallery floor. There was no real reason to bother with something like this, but I was intrigued and stayed on, attending to the erratic noise and trying to connect it to the movements that were going on. It took time. I never succeeded in getting it quite right.

Turning, I saw another room, companion to the first. This time the ceiling was bare, but the floor was covered for no apparent reason with row upon row of empty wineglasses – four thousand of them, Horn has noted – carefully set in place. The rims and bowls were glistening, reflecting the available light. Were they meant to contrast with the dull, black metal of the suspended typewriters next door? Perhaps seeing them this way, as still lifes grown to the size of a room, comes from looking at photographs of them after the fact. But there and then something moved ever so slightly. From the midst of many glasses certain ones struck their neighbors to make a distinctive, dull clink. The movement and the sound brough the objects to life. As in the first room, this put one in the mood for some attentive looking, the essential museum mood, one might say. The intermittent chatter of tapping keys and now, in addition, the occasional chatter of clinking glasses continued. Otherwise isolated objects or beings had been brought together and began to perform some odd ritual of their own. It was a clever construct, but also a melancholy one. 

I love Alpers’s description of the two installations. I love that she doesn’t strain to extract a meaning from them. She asks questions, and that’s enough. The pleasure of looking is the point (“happy because I was enjoyably involved in looking”). 

Susan Tallman, in her absorbing “The Occupation of Looking” (The New York Review of Books, December 19, 2024), a review of Is Art History?, praises Alpers’s “habits of slow looking.” She says, “It’s fun to watch her question her own responses, take things apart, look again.” The title of Tallman’s piece perfectly encapsulates Alpers’s approach.

Who Should Succeed Schjeldahl?

Peter Schjeldahl (Photo by Alex Remnick)

Peter Schjeldahl is irreplaceable. Nevertheless, The New Yorker needs to have an art critic. Who are some of the possibilities? I see Hilton Als had an “Art World” piece in last week’s issue. But I'm not sure he’s the right guy for the job. He's too caught up in identity politics. I’d like to see someone in the position whose values are governed more by pleasure than anything else. And I’d like to see someone who writes with an unmistakable, idiosyncratic, formally coherent personal style. Here are some candidates I’d consider if I were picking the magazine’s new art critic: 

1. David Salle 

2. Wayne Koestenbaum

3. Gini Alhadeff

4. Susan Tallman

5. Johanna Fateman

The best living art writer is T. J. Clark. But his thinking might be a shade too metaphysical for the New Yorker job. The perfect choice is Salle: see his brilliant series of art pieces for The New York Review of Books. 

In Praise of Texture: Philip Guston and Frank Auerbach

Philip Guston, Ride (1969)

For me, one of the most enjoyable art reviews of 2021 (so far) is Susan Tallman’s “Philip Guston’s Discomfort Zone” (The New York Review of Books, January 14, 2021). I’m not a fan of Guston’s cartoon imagery. His potato-head creatures and convertible-riding Klansmen do nothing for me. But what I do like is Tallman’s description of it. For example:

So how is it that Philip Guston, dead these forty years, is still pushing our buttons? Until a few months ago, he seemed to conform to the anticipated arc—early show of talent, challenging departure from status quo, posthumous popularity. An eminent Abstract Expressionist, he had flummoxed the art world in 1970 with a late-career tack into figuration, nudging paint into the shapes of bottles and bricks and comical, conical white hoods with oversized hands and the creepy softness of the Pillsbury Doughboy. Between lovely painterly passages, the patched and dowdy hoods smoked cigars, drove around town, worked at easels, and beat themselves up, in both senses. 

Note that “lovely painterly passages.” To me, that’s the key to enjoying Guston’s late work. My first exposure to his crazy Klansmen was the cover of Sanford Schwartz’s great 1990 essay collection Artists and Writers. It shows a close-up detail of Guston’s Untitled (Two Hooded Figures in a Car). What grabbed me wasn’t the bizarre imagery; it was the rich, thick texture of the paint. In one of the book’s essays, “Polk’s Dots, or, A Generation Comes Into Focus,” Schwartz compares Guston’s paint strokes to butter: “These marks – they’re the size of pats of butter, and have a buttery texture.” Yes, they do. That “buttery” description has stayed with me down through the years, and influenced my personal aesthetic. I love the buttery texture of thickly applied paint. I love the work of painters who paint this way. 

I thought of Schwartz’s “buttery” description when I read his recent “A Painter’s Performances” (The New York Review of Books, March 11, 2021), a marvelous review of an exhibition of Frank Auerbach’s “head” paintings. Like Guston’s Klansmen, these Auerbach images aren't to my taste. Schwartz describes them as “mangled,” and that seems exactly right. In a delightful passage, he says, 

They are pictures in which Auerbach, looking at people straight on, from the side, or from below, continually outdoes himself in delectable color choices and displays of seemingly impromptu, brilliantly zigzaggy brushwork—displays that can leave a head resembling a piece of hacked wood, a wad of chewing gum, bodies wrestling, or an abstract shape recalling a bird’s nest.

Frank Auerbach, Head of J.Y.M. (1978)

Auerbach’s heads, especially the early ones, e.g., Head of J.Y.M. (1978), are thickly painted. “Thick and luscious” is how Schwartz describes them. That’s the quality I relish. My eyes devour them, not as strange imagery, but as delicious texture.