SanArt

Jonathan Jones | The peculiar delights of mannerist art

Jonathan Jones — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:06:33 +0000

For some it's an ugly, unspiritual perversion of Renaissance art. But mannerism's eccentric poetry has a rightful place in history

They called it "the manner". The manner was precious, artificial, convoluted, a bit pretentious, often dry, always unnatural. It was everything that good, healthy, humane art is not supposed to be. And often, it was fascinating.

In art criticism, indeed in daily life, to call something "mannered" is conventionally a negative remark. A mannered individual, a mannered style of address ... but when it comes to a mannered or, to use the term that modern art historians evolved from the 16th-century Italian "maniera", mannerist art, things are not so simple.

Mannerism is one of the most insidious, engaging styles in European history. It appeared quite suddenly in early 16th-century Florence and Rome just as the Renaissance was reaching a climax. In many ways it seems a perversion, a decadence, of Renaissance art. To compare an arch-mannerist concoction of a painting such as Bronzino's Venus and Cupid with, say, Botticelli's much earlier Birth of Venus (to juxtapose two ways of seeing Venus) is to see how ornate, how opulent and how much less spiritual art became in 16th-century Florence.

Yet, in my forthcoming book The Lost Battles, I demonstrate how this new style was born out of the geniuses of Leonardo and Michelangelo – it was the afterglow of their imaginations. As afterglows go, it is a fine one. There's an eccentric figurative and chromatic genius to the art of Jacopo Pontormo, an icy brilliance to that of Bronzino, and in the works of El Greco and Tintoretto, the art of mannerism achieves sublime poetry.

The 16th-century art writer – and mannerist – Giorgio Vasari gave a perfect definition of this style's originality in his discussion of Michelangelo's architectural works at San Lorenzo in Florence. In the interiors he built there, argued Vasari, Michelangelo did not follow the classical rule book but took complete "licence". These are poetic spaces, melancholy architectural self-portraits. Mannered masterpieces.

If mannerism is a detour in the history of art, then it is a detour that leads you down a winding alley to a palace of peculiar delights.

Jonathan Jones

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The Eternal Reoccurrence of Everything @ workspace2601

tryharder — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:01:00 +0000

pics:tryharder

The Eternal Reoccurrence of Everything
curated by Sonja Gerdes

Cristian Andersen
Kerstin Brätsch
Hansjoerg Dobliar
Cayetano Ferrer
Sonja Gerdes
Surya Gied
Lucia Glass
Sayre Gomez
Gregor Hildebrandt
Olaf Holzapfel
Ellen Kenney
Johannes Kullen
Stefan Lenhart
Josh Mannis
Patrick Fabian Panetta
Arnd Seibert
Benedikt Terwiel
Johannes Weiß
Alexander Wolff
Bobbi Woods
Markus Zimmermann

Sonja Gerdes is an artist from Berlin, living in LA since June 2009

March 6th – March 27th

workspace 2601

Sofi Zezmer: Remote Control / Mike Weiss Gallery, New York

contact@vernissage.tv (VernissageTV) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:10:08 +0000

Until April 3, 2010, Mike Weiss Gallery in New York presents Remote Control, a multimedia installation including sculpture, photography and drawing by artist Sofi Zezmer. It’s the artist’s third solo exhibition at Mike Weiss Gallery. Work her work, she uses fragments of manmade, mostly synthetic materials. Sofi Zezmer constructs her works by a gradual additive process [...]

International Visiting Artist Program

Rhizome.org Announcements — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:19:44 +0000

The Visiting Artist Programme at the Drawing Room invites emerging/experienced artists to apply for one, two, or three-week residencies between July 1 and September 30, 2010. Artists will be provided accommodation, workspace and will have opportunity to show work.

The DR provides time and space for individuals and groups to create new works, research innovative ideas, and experiment with different techniques and modes of production.

Online application only. Deadline: May 15, 2010. There is no application fee. Established and emerging artists of all disciplines are encouraged to apply. Please indicate on application if applying as a team. All application material and correspondence should be sent to the Drawing Room HU via email: drhu45@gmail.com. There is a cost to attend the residency. Please see for more information: http://www.drhu2.webs.com/vapapplication.htm

‘What in the World?’ at the Penn Museum, Print Invitational at Little Berlin, ‘Dead Flowers’ at Vox Populi

andrea kirsh — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:29:29 +0000

For the past couple decades ever more museums have invited artists into their store rooms to curate exhibitions: in an early example, the RISD Museum invited Andy Warhol; MoMA asked Chuck Close and Scott Burden; and Fred Wilson has made a career of the practice. The results have almost always been interesting. Artists, of course, [...]

New Paintings by John DiPaolo

Rhizome.org Announcements — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:14:26 +0000

Dolby Chadwick Gallery presents New Paintings by John DiPaolo, on view from April 1 through May 29, 2010. Non-representational in style, the surfaces of DiPaolo’s canvases articulate a dramatic and varied physical topography. Areas of richly colored, densely applied paints are expertly counterbalanced by the enveloping strokes of blended, more muted hues; the relationships between the resultant forms produce an animated buoyancy that presages the stirring of something new. The arresting addition of silver enamel serves to further anchor and enhance DiPaolo’s compositional structures. The visceral experiences elicited by these dynamic yet meditative compositions will undoubtedly remain with viewers long after they stop looking.

Originally a realist, DiPaolo abandoned representational painting early on to embrace abstraction and the multivalent, expressive power of paint. In order to unearth and articulate the spirit of his medium, DiPaolo works and reworks layers of paint and enamel using a palette knife. With such painstaking attention to tactile quality, balance and color density, the materiality of the paint emerges as the artist’s revered subject matter.

John DiPaolo was born in New York in 1946. He earned a B.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute in 1974 followed by a M.A. in 1977 from San Francisco State University. Along with numerous private and corporate collections, DiPaolo’s work is also in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art where he is currently showing “Big Abstract,” 2002, a 12’ x 10’ painting that is the centerpiece of an exhibition entitled “Juicy Paint.” This will be DiPaolo’s sixth solo show at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.

Pathways To Housing

Wooster Collective — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:46:37 +0000

Christo and Jeanne-Claude (and a tribute to Nathan Jordan)

Nicjor79 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:20:00 +0000

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Surrounded Islands. 1980-1983, 6.5 million square feet of pink woven polypropylene fabric and eleven islands in Biscayne Bay.

With my lack of posting for three months, some of you might have the notion that I have died. No– but my brother has. Earlier this year Nathan Jordan passed away two months before his twenty-eighth birthday.

He was my best friend as well as my brother, and being only two years younger than me we grew up together. I was probably closer to him than anyone else alive. His death (along with other stressful events that I have experienced as of late) has driven me into a deep depression recently, hence the lack of new blog entries. But that will change soon.

Nathan is in a better place now, and that's all that really matters; rather than mope around about how much you miss the dead, it's far less self-defeating to celebrate the memories you have of them. So I'll briefly discuss Nathan's merits as an art critic.

He had an introspective mind, he liked art a lot, and he was about ten times the smart ass I will ever be. When I took my first art history class, we discussed the work above, Christo's Surrounded Islands. I later told my brother about it. "Yeah, there was this guy who wrapped a bunch of islands off the coast of Miami in pink fabric just so he could take aerial photos of them." Laughing, his reply was, "Are you serious?! What an idiot!"

Now, when I write I try to make myself sound smart, like I really know what I'm talking about, even when I don't. But it's amazing how my little brother was able to sum up in three words what it often takes me ten paragraphs to say. But there are a few other facets to the wrapping of these islands.

These are indeed eleven islands in Biscayne Bay, situated between Miami, North Miami, the Village of Miami Shores and Miami Beach. (Those are four distinct municipalities.) And these islands are not so much wrapped as they are covered– the fabric you see here extends two hundred feet from each shore. There was a lot of work involved in making each fabric covering fit its island perfectly, as well as picking up forty tons of debris from the islands, consulting engineers, builders, and scientists, and, of course, obtaining the necessary permits. They needed the permission of the governor, the county commission, the Department of Environmental Regulation, and the United States Army. It's really no wonder that this work took nearly four years to complete. Financing was taken care of through the sale of preliminary drawings and lithographs of the islands, and the sale of aerial photographs afterwards proved very profitable.

Christo, who was born in Bulgaria, and Jeanne-Claude, a Frenchwoman who passed away last November at the age of 74, were a married couple who redefined site-specific art by wrapping islands and large landmarks throughout the world with huge amounts of polyester fabric. Here are some of their other works:

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Wrapped Pont-Neuf. 1985, 430,000 square feet of sand-colored polyamide fabric and one four hundred year old bridge.

It took nine years for the duo to convince Jacques Chirac, the then mayor of Paris, to let them wrap the city's oldest bridge. But he finally conceded, and one month later it was covered in gauzy diaphanous cloth. Three million people visited it in the two weeks that it was wrapped.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Wrapped Reichstag. 1994, over a million square feet of fireproof polypropylene fabric, nine miles of rope, and one German Parliament building.

This work obviously took a lot of convincing. There was a letter writing campaign to each of the 662 members of the Bundestag, followed by a heated 70 minute debate that allowed the project to commence. The wrapping took only a week in this case, and the building was wrapped for two; but in those two weeks the work received five million visitors.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were hippies, so they did everything they could to ensure that the environmental impact of their works was minimized. A whole team of biologists oversaw the creation of Surrounded Islands in order to protect the mammals, birds and fish who lived there. But I'm just going to say what everybody else is thinking: What do you do with six and a half million square feet of pink polyester after it's worn out its original use?

If Christo and Jeanne-Claude tried to assign any sort of deep-rooted philosophical meaning to these works, it would be extremely ridiculous. But they didn't. They contended that the purpose of their art was no thing more than to create joy by creating new ways of seeing familiar landscapes. Which in my opinion is kinda neat. So sorry, Nathan. I think you were wrong on this one.

HTML Color Codes – Reviewed…

Rhizome.org Announcements — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:28:32 +0000

Reviewed by Susan Ballard.

Curated by Carolyn Kane for Rhizome.org September, 2009.

The HTML Color Codes exhibition features a selection of internet based artwork that address the topic of digital color. The central question that the exhibition poses is whether or not artists working with the internet are in fact limited to a "ready-made" color palette, a premise that many artists working with film, photography, and mass produced, standardized paint sets have assumed. The rationale for this question stems from theories of perception that argue that color is a not ready-made object found in a paint set or machine, but rather it is an experience that results from a complex process of light interacting with the retina and human nervous system.

Dr. Susan Ballard is a writer, curator, musician and artist who spends her time writing, thinking and teaching about contemporary digital and time-based installation art, sound and noise. Her current research investigates the contribution of artists to contemporary notions of utopia and the political and cultural implications of a materialist reading of media cultures in antipodean environments. Su is the Principal Lecturer in Electronic Arts at the Dunedin School of Art, in New Zealand. Her book The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader was published in 2008. She is a founding trustee of ADA (http://www.aotearoadigitalarts.org) New Zealand's digital artists network. She tends to blog here: http://housesparrow.blogspot.com

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Postcards from Gowanus

Rhizome.org Announcements — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:27:40 +0000

Postcards from Gowanus is a creative research program exploring a multitude of approaches to mapping Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood.

An exhibit and radio narrowcast will occur at Cabinet’s gallery space March 17-19, with a closing reception and performances on Friday, March 19 from 6-9pm.

Postcards from Gowanus features work by:
• Bianca Ahmadi – Eyes on Gowanus
• Patrick Carey – Bricks and Paint and Water and Metal
• Penny Duff – Sounding the Infra-ordinary: Gowanus
• Kasia Gladki – The Many Scapes of the Gowanus
• Juan David Gonzalez-Monroy – The Dead Whale: Message from the afterlife.
• Gabrielle Herbst and Allie Tyspin – Architecture as Baggage on the Body
• Amir Husak – Gowanus Unheard
• Maria Papadomanolaki – Sounds in-between
• Heidi Prenevost and David Smith – Double Helix
• Sterling Basement – Songs of the Gowanus
• Bryan Zimmerman – “The Slate Was Her Parlor”

Friday night performances by:
• Juan David Gonzalez-Monroy
• Sterling Basement
• Gabrielle Herbst + Maria Papadomanolaki

Sib Radio Gowanus includes audio work from: A.G, another electronic musician, Knut Aufferman, Giancarlo Bracchi, Myroslav Bytz & Nick Heling, Peter Cusack, dergar, Exportion, Jonny Farrow, Gabrielle Herbst, Amir Husak, Lina Lapelyte, Last Days, Leaf Loft, manekinekod, Sally Ann McIntyre, Todd Merrell, murmer, Naono, near the parenthesis, Oneohtrix Point Never, Dimitris Papadatos, Maria Papadomanolaki, Heidi Prenevost & David Smith, Sawako, Janek Schaeffer, Jeremy D. Slater, Solo Andata, Sterling Basement, Sublamp, Mark Templeton, Myke Dodge Weiskopf, Mark Peter Wright, Bryan Zimmerman.

The program is collaboratively organized by Penny Duff (exhibit), Gabrielle Herbst (performances), and Maria Papadomanolaki (radio) as part of Cabinet's Intern Initiative Program and is sponsored in part by free103point9.

Cabinet is located at 300 Nevins Street between Union and Sackett Streets in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 12–6pm, and by appointment.

For more information about the program, please visit: http://postcardsfromgowanus.blogspot.com

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org
http://www.free103point9.org