Anthony Easton's Top Ten Aesthetic Events 2008 (we have to start with Anthony)
1) Paragon: New Abstract Art from the Albright Knox (U of T:Scarborough Campus) Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976 (Jewish Musuem of New York)
SUE WILLIAMS Blue Foot, Red Shoe 1997
I like to think of this as a before and after, the show at the Jewish Museum about the triumph of Representative over Abstract, and the Knox show about how abstraction still eats pure aesthetics like a zombie eats brains. (plus, both made a concerted effort to include women including Anne Truitt, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell at the Jewish museum, and Sue Williams, Karin Davie, Mariko Mori, and others at the Knox show)
2) Kenneth Noland
Via Ember 1968
My favourite living painter, and this year I saw a dozen examples of his best work, not only a couple at the usual places in Edmonton, but 4 at the Abstract show at the Jewish Museum, one of his chevron stained paintings next to NE Thing's velvet ribbon riff on it at the AGO, and the joyous, cosmically humming 20 foot long stripe painting from 1967 to 1970. Can we please have a decent retrospective , please?
3) Cloverfield
Still from Cloverfield, JJ Abrams
The first movie of the millennia that actually understands the new lo-fi aesthetics of terror.
4) Lee Friedlander SF:MoMA
Lee Friedlander Mount Rushmore 1969
Extensive survey, made me more aware of how artless and how sophisticated that artlessness was, the casual over crowded frames, the lack of one focus point, and the oblique angles all contained in these exquisitely printed 8x10 silver gelatins.
5) Dustin The Turkey, Ireland's Eurovision for 2008.
The reducto-ad-absurdum of self constructed, highly ironic, meta-contextual pisstaking.
6) Courbet Hunting Scene, 186?, Met
I missed the big Courbet retrospective, sadly, but this painting was so dark and brooding that the mood made you realize the pile up of dead animals in the lower right corner. About ownership, and possession, violence, and the thantos/eros link, plus painted with the usual precision.
7) Chardin The Governess, 1739, at the National Gallery, Ottawa
Its like one of those games that you play to keep from being bored when you are a child—how many variations of gray and brown can you find in this canvas (for the record I found more then 20)
8) Sir Joshua Reynolds Selina, Lady Skipworth at the Frick
Because it seems to be one beginning of a impressionistic, emotionally relevant project, because I have a thing for the high class and bored, bored, because the grey on grey tones, with the dress, and the silver hair and the sallow skin, all of these are formal, I kept looking at it, and it shocked me how much it stayed with me. I like being reminded to look at something I previously dismissed.
9) Alison Schulink's Landscape of Niagara Falls, and Portrait of a Monkey, Mike Weiss, New York
I know this list is so painting heavy, which must mean something, and it is already hyper conventional, with a bunch of museum shows and the like, and these two ugly on purpose, good bad paintings, have nothing really new to say, and I cannot exactly say why I like them, the paint handling is good, the colours are garish enough to be interesting, I have not found a painting of either Niagara Falls or monkies I hated, they are ballsy, and not schmaltzy, and have an energy missing in other painters of her generation, etc etc, but at the end of the day, how they confound me, how I still think of them as something I like, and something I am confused by liking, is worthy of having them on the list.
10) Mad Men
Because every good girl has got to love a psychopath.
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