Miller Updegraff

Miller Updegraff

Michael Benevento

Through May 1, 2010

(Reposted from Artslant.com)

A critical shortcoming of mine is to be so overwhelmed by what things look like and what they remind me of, that I forget what they are. What’s worse, is that I burden younger artists, who are just trying to get their toe in the door of this impossibly silly but important artworld, with the weight of those that came before them – I perhaps unfairly went after Steven Bankhead at Circus because he couldn’t live up to his Barnett Newman references in a clear manner; I unleashed the mastery of Jasper Johns on Dan Bayless at Francois Ghebaly. Another part of me, however, thinks that this is exactly what I should be doing, that we are after all, aiming for mastery and further depth, that we all should be aiming at history. The poet Donald Hall tells his students in workshops simply this, “Try to be as good a poet as George Herbert.” I guess I am of the same school. I wish I was as good a critic as Randall Jarrell. I’ll keep working at it and tell you how it goes.

So when I look at Miller Updegraff’s work at Michael Benevento, I absolutely have to think of Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans, and Johannes Kars. In other words, the new image painters of Germany using washing, fading images to speak of a tortured history they have difficulty (and rightly so) staring right in the face. For painters like Richter, Tuymans, and Kars, history is such a place that, on one hand, cannot be grasped in totality and, on another hand, loses its effect if rendered too overtly. To stare unfettered at war, torture, murder, and death is like staring at pornography, and one of painting’s chief virtues is that it can displace the unholy directness of photography. The bluntness of the gratuitous looking deadens exactly the part of a person that needs to be developed to cope with trauma and horrible history. This is the prayer of these painters.

Updegraff too shows history in a fog, barely visible on unprimed canvas and bled through with medium and washes. Updegraff’s pictures flicker in and out of view. However, Updegraff shows the history of America and the masculine spaces of the early 20th century – the heavy set, cigar-laced aristocratic perches of Evelyn Waugh and the blood-stained boxing rings of George Bellows. Some of Updegraff’s paintings appear like police snapshots of the underworld, others show secret parties like Weegee's voyeuristic snaps, but all come across as takes on photographs. I currently have no doubt that like Tuymans, Richter, and Kars, Updegraff is comfortable putting paintings up against photography as a manager and interpreter of history.

And it would be easy to feel slightly insecure about the weight of our own American history in the face of what the Germans have to cope with in their work. It would be even easier to write Updegraff’s work off as having the mere fantasy of depth, of aping off the styles of more distinguished and embedded masters. However, I hesitate to go so far. While Updegraff can be accused of generalizing masculinity and reducing it down to a series of historical tropes and clichés, his manner of presentation is on to something. It certainly is valid to stare into dark hidden spaces of the past and to watch them appear as incomplete specters in front of us. It is enjoyable and productive to stare into those distant places.

Work of this nature has a lot to live up, however. It takes mastery on the level of a Karin Mamma Andersson to muse on the particular traumas of Sweden, a Cormac McCarthy or Don Delillo to revive the blood soaked origins and structure of the United States, a Ritcher or a W.G. Sebald to process the complexity of Germany. I would love to see Updegraff go deeper, focus on the masculine as a compulsion and legacy whose fat fingers still soils us today. I would love for the proceedings to be more studied, focused, less evocative of other masters and more personal. I’d love to say an Updegraff looks like an Updegraff. He’ll get there -- there is much talent here.

Sean Duffy in Art Review

Sean Duffy: Can't Stop it

Susanne Vielmetter Gallery

Closed December 19, 2009

In the March 2010 issue of ArtReview, I invite you to read my piece on Sean Duffy's last show at Susanne Vielmetter. This is a link to the article online. Thanks for reading.

Rachel Foullon

Rachel Fouloun: An Accounting

ltd los angeles

Through May 7th

(Reposted from ArtSlant.com)

Rachel Foullon thinks about rural spaces: the dank packed dust of a barn tack room, horse harnesses and halters hanging from the ramshackle hooks, the dark hole of a hay loft. This rural poetry has haunted poets and thinkers for centuries, some idealizing those spaces and making them the symbol of lost innocence, others finding them quaint and beautiful.

Foullon has another take on the countryside and rural, namely as the platform and backbone of economies. Whereas someone like Dan Graham noticed how the site specific interventions of minimalism meant little without some thinking about bureaucracy and about how government, zoning, capitalism, and other forms of order can impact a space, Foullon might say all those concerns start even earlier — in a barn and on a farm. A sculptural space instead might be thought of through the futures market: how gold, wheat, corn, maize, cotton, and cattle impact global life.

I find this premise fascinating and current, a platform from which a multiplicity of implications can spiral outwards. For instance, when the Obama Administration released its budget, one victim of the cuts were what they administration called “wealthy farmers.” This is another way of talking about subsidies. “We can’t afford it,” became the mantra. But the backlash, in this case, was justified. Cut cotton subsidies, for instance, and the market for cotton swings to East Africa and bottom-line farmers will cut their cotton production and thus jobs. The bottom-line consumer will go wherever it finds the cheapest cotton and therefore Africa. The cuts affect an entire chain of the economy. From another viewpoint, one could argue that cutting subsidies to big farms is justified, shifting the market to small organic farms and taking money out of the hands of the wealthy, shifting it around a bit. To look at it a third way, if Africa is stimulated, then that might be a humanitarian mission, bringing parts of Africa out of starvation and above the global poverty line.Who are Americans to subdue Africa using money it doesn’t have? The issue is complicated.

And what does any of this have to do with Foullon’s work? Well, I would argue a great deal. If we are to take the format of her presentation seriously, then we need to think about how rural life can extend all the way into an art gallery. She has made so many curious decisions that demand an aggressive reading. For example, the ceiling heights and the placements of walls and joints affect the placement of her wall hangings. There's a sense of determinism like that found in early Frank Stella and a Donald Judd-like precision in how the cedar beams and barn slats are fabricated (I should say, politely, that most barns these days are metal and wooden slats belong only to the past). The cloths that Foullon dyes are employed and left sagging like Robert Morris or Richard Serra felt hangings. There is a sense, in other words, of order here, whether eternal or zoned, it pervades the gallery.

But this order is tempered with rough-hewn memorial details that collect. Those same cloths have the menstrual connotations of Louise Bourgeois, they are stained and organic like a Eva Hesse, full of feminine labial lips and curves. I, innocently, thought of the Depression-era photos of Walker Evans and the fetish-like description of rural gear of James Agee. Ultimately however, I got to the fluid current of these proceedings: the rural to Foullon exists in an earth mother-ish manner as much as it does as an element of an economy.

The accounting, for Foullon, is both about numbers and an accounting in general, an accounting for how things are. Thus those stalks of corn in the dirt in Iowa, birthed by the earth mother and tempered and arranged by our hands, extend widely to the economy and as far as Africa, or even further, into the remote, distant, and disconnected confines of the art gallery.

I’ve over-read Foullon’s work. I freely admit it.

When you go to the show, it will take generous leaps of imagination to make it to these thoughts. Most will see just a few lightly varnished constructivist designs with some sagging cloth, an unremarkable curved fence accented with a folded studio drop cloth with vaginal overtones. Things will look slightly minimalist, distant, and a bit weird. But, that said, my over-reading is my dream for this work, and even perhaps, Foullon’s intention for it.