brice marden at moma (is it so wrong to like this work - i think not.)
then again.
ive had a chance to reconsider after listening to BM on LL. not too much there there. the network pieces are paintings of made up scholars stones. oy vey.
I like a lot of the early waxy monochrome dipytchs, and even a few of the zen brush things (Cold Mountain series), but that's about it. He needs his Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe back.
I used to feel like he went way downhill but with more distance the career looks more of-a-piece, and I’m better disposed towards the newer stuff. I guess I’ve come to feel that way about a lot of artists as I’ve aged, the flip side being that I don’t care as deeply about most of them as I once did. But Marden was overvalued at the beginning and is now maligned (in certain cirdles.) Gilbert-Rolfe made fun of Marden’s devotion to Dylan, but that didn’t interfere with his critical appreciation. Charlie Finch’s snarky Page-6-as-art-criticism may be fun but it would be a sin to let that sway you from pursuing an inclination to like the work. JGR may have blown Marden out of proportion, but at least he represents criticism that starts with really looking at the work and seeing how far that can take you. In the late 70s Jeremy described the art landscape as “the foothills of Minimalism” and said the problem for abstract art was to find a way to re-complicate itself that was not merely a matter of filling-in the empty spaces. In the end, maybe that’s all that really happened. It’s hard to believe how important Marden once seemed (though Finch’s resentment is enduring testimony) but art moved in other directions, and what they used to call “advanced art” looks awfully traditional nowadays. Marden fulfills that tradition in a remarkably complete way, traversing in a single body of work the dialectic that was already established in early modernism between plane and fracture. Marden’s passage from monochrome to network relies on the same equivalence that existed between Matisse’s “flat” color planes and Cubism’s relativistic reticulum, or between Newman’s endless red space and Pollock’s equally infinite divisions. Even if that’s the only mystery abstract painting has to guard, it’s a noble one, and should be propagated.
|
- bill 10-27-2006 4:03 pm
then again.
ive had a chance to reconsider after listening to BM on LL. not too much there there. the network pieces are paintings of made up scholars stones. oy vey.
- bill 10-31-2006 5:32 pm [add a comment]
I like a lot of the early waxy monochrome dipytchs, and even a few of the zen brush things (Cold Mountain series), but that's about it. He needs his Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe back.
- tom moody 10-31-2006 5:58 pm [add a comment]
I used to feel like he went way downhill but with more distance the career looks more of-a-piece, and I’m better disposed towards the newer stuff. I guess I’ve come to feel that way about a lot of artists as I’ve aged, the flip side being that I don’t care as deeply about most of them as I once did. But Marden was overvalued at the beginning and is now maligned (in certain cirdles.) Gilbert-Rolfe made fun of Marden’s devotion to Dylan, but that didn’t interfere with his critical appreciation. Charlie Finch’s snarky Page-6-as-art-criticism may be fun but it would be a sin to let that sway you from pursuing an inclination to like the work. JGR may have blown Marden out of proportion, but at least he represents criticism that starts with really looking at the work and seeing how far that can take you. In the late 70s Jeremy described the art landscape as “the foothills of Minimalism” and said the problem for abstract art was to find a way to re-complicate itself that was not merely a matter of filling-in the empty spaces. In the end, maybe that’s all that really happened. It’s hard to believe how important Marden once seemed (though Finch’s resentment is enduring testimony) but art moved in other directions, and what they used to call “advanced art” looks awfully traditional nowadays. Marden fulfills that tradition in a remarkably complete way, traversing in a single body of work the dialectic that was already established in early modernism between plane and fracture. Marden’s passage from monochrome to network relies on the same equivalence that existed between Matisse’s “flat” color planes and Cubism’s relativistic reticulum, or between Newman’s endless red space and Pollock’s equally infinite divisions. Even if that’s the only mystery abstract painting has to guard, it’s a noble one, and should be propagated.
- alex 11-01-2006 6:12 pm [add a comment]