Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Swiss-American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank is now 94, which means he has been in the midst what he calls a natural disaster old age for at least fifteen years. Yet when he was 80, as Gerald Fox trailed him for Foxs 2005 documentary Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank, which recently screened at the Film Forum after he had belatedly approved its theatrical release, Frank seemed an artist whose age and experience only made him a more formidable personality. Rich as it is lean at 85 minutes, the movie foregoes any systematic critical appraisal of Franks oeuvre. But it elicits a full measure of his unchecked candor and salty existential wisdom, suffused with a dourness that sometimes seems to border on misanthropy but in the end ramifies as powerfully human. Chronicling the same qualities in an older Frank, if not quite as sharply, is Laura Israels documentary Dont Blink Robert Frank (2015).
The book is still available.
As Jasper Johns had scraped the putative majesty off the Stars-and-Stripes in his painting Flag (195455), Frank, in his equally influential black-and-white photo collection The Americans (195859), presented its subjects unvarnished, suggesting disillusionment, obduracy, pessimism, and racism. Initially derided as condescending and anti-American, in time this work came to be seen as grimly oracular. Now, in the Trump epoch, it may have acquired even greater profundity. At the time, the collection reified the beats uneasy affinity for the downtrodden. In 1959, Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction to the first American edition of the book reproducing the pictures. The same year, Frank and Alfred Leslie co-directed the short experimental film Pull My Daisy, a sardonic dollop of social disruption that Kerouac adapted from his play Beat Generation and loosely narrated, featuring Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso as well as Alice Neel and Larry Rivers.
Natalie Merchant, in her luminously nuanced 1987 song Hey Jack Kerouac, elegiacally asked him when you were the brightest star, who were the shadows? Frank was surely among the longer ones. His social and artistic kindredness with the beat crowd was natural and unforced. Clellon Holmes the so-called quiet beat wrote that what distinguished them was the will to believe even in the face of an inability to do so in conventional terms. Frank seems to credit this basic idea in a deadpan reflection: Im not happy about anything, but Im not afraid of anything. Although his immediate purpose is to advance the notion that imperfection and its possibilities are key to his work, the sentiment also captures his and many artists restive quest for some kind of independent truth.
The circumstances of Franks life havent made that quarry any less elusive. He lost his daughter to a plane crash when she was 20 years old, and his troubled son died at age 43. Regret and sorrow are etched on his face, and the film includes a remarkable mea culpa about his performance as a parent. But in his cantankerous equanimity, he seeks no pity, decries bitterness, and declines to mitigate his pain with the customary salves of faith, material comfort, and celebrity. Over the years, he and his wife, the artist June Leaf, have spent more and more of their time in an austere cabin on Nova Scotias forbidding Cape Breton Island in lieu of their Bowery loft in part because the neighborhood has simply become too nice and complacent. The Yuppies, they have a right to live, too, he says. I just dont want to live amongst them. Cocksucker Blues, the film the Rolling Stones commissioned him to make about them, saw no contemporaneous release in theaters; Jagger found it unflattering, to say the least.
Robert Frank and June Leaf on Cape Breton Island
Leaf is the constant in Franks life, yet she herself acknowledges, with frankness on a par with his, that we do everything together and apart. Frank remains alone and relentless. Perhaps that makes him the quintessential artist.
Contributed by by Margaret McCann / The theme of nocturnal interiors in Kyle Dunn’s solo...
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Latest post, link in profile / Peter Halley: On the cusp / Contributed by Sharon Butler / Peter Halley’s catalogue raisonné needs to be updated. This month, a group of his paintings from 1980 and 1981 are on display in a surprising and revelatory two-gallery collaboration between Craig Starr on the Upper East Side and Karma in the East Village. Most of the paintings have rarely been shown, a few never, and I was delighted to see them, however belatedly. Link in profile
Image: Little Spanish Prison, 1981. Acrylic and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. On view at Craig Starr Gallery.
Latest post, link in profile / Donna Dennis’ extraordinary invitation / Contributed by Iris Cushing / Donna Dennis is an artist of transition and transformation. Her architectural installations – which she pioneered in the 1960s and has continued to develop – often take the shape of transitory sites: subway stations, hotels, tourist cabins, and, in the case of her show “Ship/Dock/Three Houses and a Night Sky” at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, a loading dock. Like much of Dennis’ work, this installation draws on her experience and observation of vernacular spaces. Link in profile
Joshua Nierodzinski / HOW IT STARTED, HOW IT’S GOING / On view at @contextspacebk through June 11 / Artist talk and brunch on Sat, June 3, 11am -1 pm
"Context is pleased to announce the opening of HOW IT STARTED, HOW IT’S GOING, the first solo exhibition in New York City by artist Joshua Nierodzinski. Curated as a retrospective, the presentation spans a decade exploring the forensic imagination through drawings on microscopic slides, videos, and multi-layered photosensitive painting. It is accompanied by a publication with essays by the artist and Sam O’Hana, a performance and research-led practitioner in critical and lyrical writing."
Joshua Nierodzinski (b.1982) is an artist who merges painting and forensic photography to address personal and national histories. He is a co-founder of HEKLER, a transnational artist-run platform that fosters the critical and experimental examination of hospitality and conflict. Selected awards include the National Endowment for the Arts Grant, an artist-in-residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, and the Wassaic Artist Residency. Joshua is a recent AIM Bronx Museum Fellow and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Context Art Space 948 Third Ave., 2nd Floor, Brooklyn, NY Wednesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm
I saw Alicia Feng’s haunting and beautiful graphite drawings at Sunnyside Arts the other day when I popped in to buy a tube of paint. Director Ed Kim tells me that she pens well known graphic novels under a different name.
Latest post, link in profile / Chakaia Booker’s lyrical muscle / Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Making deeper sense of some abstract art past its initial visual impact can require extended consideration. Not so much Chakaia Booker’s sculpture, now on view in her solo show “Public Opinion” at David Nolan Gallery. Composed predominantly of exactingly configured pieces of black rubber tires along with wood and metal, the work immediately grips you like a confident advocate, calm and insistent. Link in profile
Jim Condron has put together a lovable show of crazy sculptures he made using things sourced from other artists and writers. One piece includes a pair of pink crocs — Grace Hartigan’s last painting shoes — and I was reminded of a Rachel Harrison piece I saw this winter @glenstonemuseum . Kind of heartbreaking that Hartigan’s shoes don’t have more paint on them. Swipe for images
Jim Condron: Collected Things Sculptures from the Collected Items of Artists, Writers and Thinkers On view through June 17 @artcake_nyc (but closed for Memorial Day Weekend)
On the UES yesterday I stopped in to see Andrea Marie Breiling’s solo “Swallowtail” at @alminerech. In the press release the artist says that the paintings are like the swallowtail butterflies in that the closer you get to the work, the more the surface begins to reveal its details, but honestly the details don’t really seem important, overwhelmed as they are by the brash color, the mesmerizing circular action of the mark making, and the mural-sized scale. Natural wonder doesn’t stand a chance next to Breiling’s industrial strength vision, but maybe that’s the point. Love the illusion of depth and the sense of light. On view through June 10.
Latest post, link in profile / Ethel Schwabacher: Canon-adjacent? / Contributed by David Carrier / Revisionist arguments about who should be counted among the artistic elite, whether they be old masters or modernists, provide essential stimulus in the art world. They proceed in an established manner. Some reasonably influential figure contends that a significant artist has been unjustly excluded from a particular art canon. Commentaries are published and shows organized making the case for supplementing it. The recent amendments to the predominantly white male Abstract Expressionist elite have proven especially tricky, as issues of gender and race enter the picture. Does Alma Thomas belong? Norman Lewis? What about Ethel Schwabacher? With “Woman in Nature (Paintings from the 1950s)”, Berry and Campbell argue energetically, though not entirely convincingly, that she deserves a place. Link in profile
Spread across two floors at Magenta Plains, Jennifer Bolande’s solo, “Persistence of Vision” is as compelling as it is enigmatic. Downstairs, Bolande captures images of fragmented scenes and objects (perhaps from dusty road trips in an old muscle car?), a series of moments that manifest deeper meaning. The work upstairs focuses on the handmade. Rachel Kushner, are you out there? Through June 17.