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modern art: folly for advertisers?
20010413 nytimes:
Steve DiBenedetto
Baumgartner
Steve DiBenedetto makes splendidly gnarly, infernally incandescent paintings. The six medium- size, semiabstract canvases in this excellent show may be appreciated purely as rich essays in painterly improvisation.
Brushing, troweling, scraping, scumbling and gouging, the artist creates topographies of nonstop tactile and chromatic intrigue. Areas of thick, striated impasto border on sections of translucent color; patterns of woven or braided lines incised into the paint are irradiated by crepuscular light. In places, fine doodling looks like the work of an obsessive madman, while other areas suggest a formalist experimentalism like that of Terry Winters or Thomas Nozkowski.
Emerging to varying degrees of visibility are Ferris wheels, helicopters and octopuses. A Jungian analyst might view these round, spoked images as mandala-form archetypes of wholeness and unity. The first two, however, are manmade, mechanical objects — emblems of rational, Apollonian order wrested from the Dionysian depths where the octopus lives. The last, a sinuous, luxuriantly painted beast, clings to a web of brown lines against a background like hot, yellow sunlight in "Psychoptor." In "The Greedy Hippie," mudslides of murky doodling engulf from above and below a luminous, rainbow- hued Ferris wheel.
The id and the intellect, then: the octopus gives Mr. DiBenedetto's painting its sensuous, instinctual flow; the Ferris wheel its playful formal wit.
KEN JOHNSON
Our friend Ruth Root has a show opening tonight at Andrew Kreps gallery 518 West 20th Street.
La revue art-language
"
Art & Language Press a été fondé à Coventry en
Angleterre, en novembre 1968 par Terry Atkinson,
David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin et Harold Hurrell.
Le premier numéro de la revue est auto publié en mai
1969. Il comprend la participation de Sol Lewitt, Dan
Graham et Lawrence Weiner.
De 1969 à 1985 : la revue est composée de cinq volumes
chacun de 4 numéros sauf pour le dernier (trois) . Une
nouvelle série d'art-language est publiée depuis 1994.
La revue fonde l'identité d'Art & language par de là les
conflits individuels.
Elle rend compte d'un principe initial et initié pendant
environ 25 ans, l'autocritique. Il en découle
rétrospectivement une logique de déploiement.
Le champ référentiel est la philosophie analytique.
La relation entre l'art et la théorie. Qu'est ce qu'un objet
théorique ? qu'est ce qu'une méta théorie ? Qu'est ce
qu'une pratique de second type ?.
"
Robert Smithson
The Gates of Paradise by David Daniels
UBU
[more good concrete+sound poetry tips from k.goldsmith]