JIM rocks the HOUSE...R

To experience Jim Houser's work is manifold.

1. It is in the vein a graphic, "skater" style along the lines of Barry McGee, Phil Frost and Shepard Fairey. But it departs from these harder works into something more intimate, sweet and uncertain.

2. The honesty and candor in Houser's works is almost unsettling: completely unfussy, with strange simple language.

3. The medium is the message. In Houser's work, one comes to understand that the way of making and what is made are one and the same. The work is about life and life is about work in a manner more seamless and clear than with other artists. Houser's work is his own way of talking; constantly, restlessly, honestly, without theory or facade. There is no "other", the art and self are one...More of Houser's work HERE. and HERE.

In speaking about Jim Houser and the fusion of his interaction with life, and the art that records that interface, he asks us to know him. Some of you may already know Jim Houser and his work, and you may know that a huge part of his life has been his wife Rebecca Westcott, whose death in 2004 was a truly terrible tragedy. More on Rebecca Westcott HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE.

From the Jonathan Levine Gallery, NYC: "Jim Houser's paintings are the system by which he actively catalogs the images and noises which command his attention. His installations act to create a map of the contents of his head over the course of a particular period in time. His interests include: listening to the cadence of speech. science and science fiction. sickness and disease. plants and animals. sport. time travel. ghosts. the art of children. secrets. radio. codes and code breaking. words that sound beautiful and mean something terrible, words that sound horrible but mean something wonderful. codes and code breaking.

Jim resides in Philadelphia, with his best friend Brian, his dogs Stuckley and Ella, and his cat Birdy. He is a founding member of Space 1026, a Philadelphia-based artist colelctive. First organized in 1997, the artist-run collective focuses in silk-screening, printmaking, painting, audio/video production, graphic design and schedules month rating exhibitions. He has done graphic design work for toy machine, Designarium, and Nike. A book cataloging his life in the arts, called BABEL, was published in 2005 by Gingko Press. "

Ma Yanhong

Ma Yanhong is a Chinese artist who just graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 2002. While she has studied with two of China's forerunning "Realist" painters --- Yu Hong and Liu Xiaodong-- she nevertheless departs from their social realism into the world of tongue-in-cheek social commentary. Ma Yanhong's sexy portraits of her female friends mock the modernisn messaging that confronts the idea of the 'good woman' in Chinese society, sending traditional roles and expectations amuck. At the same time, Yanhong is sympathetic with her subjects: the freedoms of the new era in China are full of conflict, and the young women negotiating them, Ma Yanhong implies, are equally empowered and undone. More of her work HERE and HERE.

The Wrath of Everyman

David Rathman's current work is on view at Mary Goldman Gallery (LA) until Oct 13 2007. His new work features rock bands and the adolescent dream. In the years preceding, his work has featured football players, stock cars and boxers, and before that were the cowboys for which he became best known. Each world is depicted simply, with the sparse, unimpressed recording of a document. While the worlds appear very different at first consideration, they share an integral commonality: at once the archetype of the American fantasy of life at its best and most free, and at the same time, a barren collection of empty gestures.

Rathman's original cowboy work (2004) was the beginning of the exploration of the unconscious American archetype of freedom and virility. The emptiness to which our 'everyman' --whether a cowboy, teenage rocker, boxer or football player-- is condemned is clearly palpable. The clear graphic narrative, and cryptic, dark text work together, painting overlapping images of sad futility and confused, wasted efforts. That the cowboys stands as much for our national identity (in the US) as it does the individual heroic ideal of decades past is not coincidence. In subsequent generations, our national heroes did become sportsman, and rock stars. The very meaning of the American everyman lies both in its possibility and impossibility: that you could grow up to be this, but that you never will. The graphic novel quality of Rathman's work speaks to the children of past decades, whose belief in the good world that would come to pass has dried up in the silent, desert expanse of dreams deferred.

Sato Sato Sato Sato Sato Sato

The photography of Tokihiro Sato sits at the intersection of spirituality, science, and aesthetics. Not a bad view from there. Using a large-format camera with a neutral-density filter that permits long exposures on even the brightest days, he photographs himself moving through space, periodically flashing a tiny hand held mirror or penlight. He himself is not in one place long enough to register on film, but the light marks his journey. In the buddism tradition, his absence and presence are one.

That his presence/absence would be recorded as spots of light would have pleased Einstein. Without straying too far from our aesthetic ground, we can safely remark that contemporary physics is finding that, underneath it all, we are little bundles of light-emitting energy, blinking in the night. (In this regard, were there fewer of us, we could look to the rest of the galaxy the way stars look to us-- dots of light traveling for eons, a record of position once held, by a being who has since moved on.) That Sato has utilized a seemingly simple or low-tech way to explore this intersection of old-and-new beliefs is to his credit.

There is a refined qualilty to the aesthetic of Sato's images which seems distinctly Japanese. The concept of transience, embodied in wabi-sabi as in other Japanese aethetic practices, is much alive in Sato's work. The changes of time and position, and the indifference of nature to our plight, is the at the core of the exploration into our transient and metaphysical existence. Tokihiro Sato elegantly depicts with great tenderness our fragil, beating energy, fleeting against the backdrop of nature and our won onward-rolling civilization.

David Lynch on vacation

I can't get enough of Gina Magid's work right now. It is so Santa Cruz meets David Lynch. Very free and strange. The language and color are so delightful; and then as you get into the painting you find that the content is unsettling, and you realize you have been ambushed by the classic juxtaposition of language and narrative. More of her work HERE.

Kneel

The synthesis of paint and idea is freshly at work in the paintings of Elizabeth Neel (yes, we all know by now, she's the granddaughter of Alice). The paint becomes decay, violence, nature; instead of describing, it simply IS. The oneness is appealing. Equally appealing is the content-- exploration into our own violence, contamination of nature, decay and death. Deep, layered meaning, and the unselfconscious uniting of language and idea. More of her work HERE.

Power Stockholder

At a lecture recently, the speaker alleged that Jessica Stockholder's work is about power. To the pages of my (still unread) blog, I want to disagree. Stockholder's work, in my opinion, rests on three primary "ideas":

1. the idea of painting in space.

2. the idea that materials have their own associated meanings/resonations in the minds of each of us, and thus incorporating and manipulating materials evokes these mind meanings: and the mind struggling to synthesize these fragementary associations is performing its own art: creating a cubism of the mind.

3. the idea of art as manifest destiny.

I think that one of the myriad roles of art in our culture is that of a manifest destiny, a place to aspire to: Just as there were bible stories on fresco walls and decadent society women in 18th century painting, art has been a projection of our promised land, on an individual level and a societal level. Stockholder's art--large, enveloping, familiar yet strange, playful-- is a 3-dimensional fantasy world of the mind, embedded with the rustic materiality of our human experiences. It is the best possible future we could image for our minds.

For more on Jessica Stockholder and her work click HERE.

The Baker is In.

In addition to his name, I like the work of Baker Overstreet. He strange configurations of color and structure-- tribal, 80's-sci-fi, and Martin Ramirez-esque-- are both facile and surprisingly fresh. His work can feel both "outsider" and "insider" in alternating moments, which invigorates the narrative: enter viewer ambiguity. The true strength in color and scale hold the viewer, questioning, and the resultant experience is seductive and satisfying.

But don't just take my work for it, here's Roberta Smith:

BAKER OVERSTREET: NEW PAINTINGS Like Keegan McHargue and Devendra Banhart, this young artist has a penchant for tribal motifs, which he flattens into symmetrical compositions and renders with an outsider roughness. The works in his debut show evoke the imagery of the space-ship-obsessed, self-taught artist Ionel Talpazan, as well as Alfred Jensen and Forrest Bess. Their notion of the visionary is both self conscious and familiar, but they are painted with energetic dispatch and a sure sense of scale, color and wit that encourages you to stay tuned. Fredericks & Freiser, 536 West 24th Street, (212) 633-6555, through March 17. (Smith)

The Future is Now.

It's funny how our humanity, at least our Western, technology-driven culture, has maintained a dread of the very future we were creating even as we created it. Actually, the relationship is more of a wedge narrowing: Think of 2001 Space Odyssey (1968!) and Bladerunner (1982). Dramatic views of our potential damage to ourselves if we keep messing with these machines. In literature, A Brave New World (1932), 1984 (1949), and The Handmaid's Tale (1985) all focus more on the damage we could do to ourselves. What these great works all have in common is one thing: the future world portrayed seemed reassuringly far from reality.

Now, I think the future is here. Anyone see "Children of Men'? How frightening was in it's resemblance to our current state of affairs? The wedge is narrowing.

In this vein; check out the work of Christoph Morlinghaus HERE. These images are haunting in their beauty and in the real/unreal question: is this a set, a fake future world-- or is this a moment in our real world?...and if so, we are moving frighteningly forward in our prophecy.

how do you say...?

Painting is a language intended to be complex and layered with meaning. I believe that both the meaning and the paint itself act together. Think of this: beautiful form, color, line; in conjunction with meaning, content purpose. I am tired of quick, appearance-only, or content-only art.

Thus I am embarking on my quest to survey what is OUT THERE and note it for the future. I am looking for three criteria:

1. engagement with visual language.
2. exploration of specific and complex content. (Narrative, concept).
3. relation of visual language to content or narrative: reinforcing, contrasting, or expanding the the narrative through the language itself

In example:

Amy Sillman. You know her, you love her. Her work satisfies all the above criteria with freshness and immediacy. Actually, to me the narrative is often unclear-- but there is a specificity in her language which leads me in: I feel there is something in this world, something going on, and I look towards the use of language to unravel the content. And the specificity of her language is the first clue that the language embeds a content.

On the other end of the spectrum, consider the paintings of Emily Noelle Lambert. Her paintings are strongly narrative/ content driven. Some of her works are very powerful, particularly those with also have strong abstract form. Where she loses the internal structure of the painting is where they are weakened. But overall, her strange stories are a dream to be pulled into.