i love looking at these threads.

elijah burgher

!!!

oh man i was gonna start a sandbox art thread here about someone in particular but can’t remember who now

but thanks to pacific standard time i’ve been thinking about:

jack goldstein

llyn foulkes

susan mogul

patssi valdez

peter mays

llyn foulkes:

elijah’s a cool dude, his work has transformed utterly in the last few years.

he has a tumblr where he posts about coil and naked photos of himself w/ aa bronson

yeah he seems to be pretty into that. His paintings really have become pretty interesting—he seems to have dug into early american abstraction and mystical geometry to have created something else. Some of this newer stuff strikes me as a dialogue with Hartley in particular.

yeah! there’s a lineage through lawren harris and forrest bess i think, or i think of hilma klint, diagrams, incantations an american pritivist logic rerouted through something that takes account of sexuality. i mean the overt references to magick, a kind of radical faery aesthetic. craft, wicca. something kindof deviant going on.

that’s pretty much it. Reminds me, Lawren Harris, as well as alot of other canadians are Visual Artists I Have Been Thinking About

J.E.H. MacDonald, for instance

I mean

i think the whole group of seven aesthetic is teetering on the edge of being so hot right now

haha my bf and i have bought a bunch of GO7 prints at the sunday flea market since this summer, including:

lawren harris is the obvious one, because of how he channels all that frontiersman mysticism into something so overtly peyote-soaked but i feel like the hipster kinkade appreciation of recent years gives this kind of stuff a look in (also a lot of it is legitimately kickass and obv i don’t really want to conflate it with kincade but you know what i mean right?)

i mean the format tends to be very similar to maureen gallace who i fucking love also though again

wow great find. (Xposts) I remember discovering the GO7 when investigating Peter Doig, who has tried to downplay their obvious influence on his work over the years.

Along with them the whole strain of fin de siecle symbolist landscape painting has been especially captivating for me over the last few years.

hah the doig connection makes perfect sense but i never would have made it

also judith if you liek Gallace I should try and dig up the piece I wrote about her for the incredibly obscure Chicago art journal BAT —Elijah edited it actually.

i think you actually sent that to me in the ancient past on legit ilx

that is if you are who i think you are?

woah we have been travelling under assumed names for a long long time then I guess.

not that I am who I think I am anyway

lawren harris is the obvious one, because of how he channels all that frontiersman mysticism into something so overtly peyote-soaked but i feel like the hipster kinkade appreciation of recent years gives this kind of stuff a look in (also a lot of it is legitimately kickass and obv i don’t really want to conflate it with kincade but you know what i mean right?)

i thinnnnnk? i dont really know enough abt painting to ‘get’ this stuff tho, i mean the maureen gallace stuff i gis’d looked p fantastic and my fave GO7 print we have is:

but im not sure where that appreciation really comes from & the movements that are shaping this stuff? idk

those are sweet—when you say print, what do you mean? Are they edition lithographs, or something else?

yeah theyre ‘heritage edition’ lithographs. some of them are signed and # and some arent. i think the most weve paid for any one was $55 for a lawren harris

nice find, really cool stuff.

For the first time in however long I’m actually thinking about more than, like, 2 artists.

Right now I am writing on:

Francis Alys

Mona Hatoum

wait, I think I am still thinking about only 2 artists.

Though, re: original post, I think I might write something about Santiago Sierra this Spring.

john chamberlain has passed:

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/finch/john-chamberlain-obituary-12-21-11.asp

Alys is so hacky

YOU’RE so hacky

you’re so haacke

if you guys who are into the group of seven stuff are in new york you should go look at the “luminous modernism” show at the american scandinavian foundation—it revisits this big show of scandinavian art that toured america in 1912 and was a big influence on those dudes (and was a big deal in the US until the armory show rolled around a few moths later)

do you know offhand how long its showing?

i am literally sitting next to one of its administrators on a bus

february 11

the times called it “a gem of a centennial celebration”

well you can tell them i will attend just under the wire

i will! (it is my girlfriend)

thanks for the tip! I won’t make it but perhaps there’s an attendant catalogue? No doubt that show was huge—there’s a bit in a book on the G7 with one of them describing taking the road trip to go see that show—I think it was in Buffalo— with (maybe) MacDonald waxing rapturously upon return. Anyway, sounds like one of many great shows right now (the Pacific Standard Time suite is drawing my attention the greatest).

As a Canadian and an art student (hence as someone who has been bombarded with Go7 since long before I expressed any interest in art), your collective enthusiasm for them is just so foreign to me.

i hadn’t even heard about them until recently

interesting perspective edb. I hadn’t any idea about them at all, no one in any school, teacher or student, had ever mentioned them, nor had I encountered them in any museum or gallery.

lol I’d never heard of them till my gf was working on this exhibition

as I said it was reading about doig maybe 6 or 7 yrs that tipped me off abt them, but that was only in passing. Looks like their moment has returned?

edb we have to read this really good essay abt alys for one of my classes you should read it. i mean i have some problems with him but this kindof articulates them better than i could

Oooh what it it?

those prints look kinda like backgrounds from cartoons

like you could just photoshop in Yogi Bear or something

what are you trying to say?

Ha, Go7 does have a bit of a hanna barberra aesthetic to it. (And yeah, in canada they’re seen as a major cultural treasure, such that pretty much everyone learns about them.)

Also, I could really use critical insight on Alys because right now my biggest criticism of his work is that he looks a lot like Billy Baldwin (that only started as a criticism because at first I thought he looked like stephen baldwin, which I found off-putting. GIS suggests he’s the spitting image of billy though, and as someone who enjoyed the 75% of backdraft I saw on tv last year, I can accept that.)

xp—what are you trying to say?

Group of Seven is def hot right now (at least in borderline trendy-art canada)

As a Canadian and an art student (hence as someone who has been bombarded with Go7 since long before I expressed any interest in art), your collective enthusiasm for them is just so foreign to me.

― edb, Thursday, December 22, 2011 12:22 AM (13 hours ago)

lol yeah canadians are always “lol what? about the go7”

oh also the francis alys piece i read was called the 1:1 map by eyal weizmann. the 1:1 map is an idea that’s been coming up for me a lot and weirdly he doesn’t mention borges or lewis carroll in it but it is a p good essay. it was in one of my course readers but if you can’t find it i could maybe scan it for you over christmas its really short

Ha! I read that a few days ago: it was by and large the best text on Alys I’ve read, and the only one that brings up interesting problems (albeit within the very specific context of that specific Green line work—but that’s exactly what I’m writing on, and those are problems I’m going to address anyways). I’m kind of curious (since I only recently figured out who you are) about the Eyal Weizman presence at Goldsmiths—between one UCL professor who’s a total stan of his, and classmates that did their BA at Goldsmiths, he’s suddenly become kind of ubiquitous for me.

Also, re: this thread. I’ve been thinking about Alighiero and Boetti over the last few days.

woah i’m tight with Elijah, he’s a lovely guy. his show at my friend margaret’s gallery is great, up til january!!!

for some reason, i think it’s because i got a postcard, but i’ve been thinking about Imogen Cunningham. weird, i know.

yeah i’m auditing a class he originally outlined but its now given by one of his phd students with eyal kindof dropping in from time to time but i have to read this for another class i’m taking which is all bout “mapping” and “counter-cartographies”. i think its just that he’s been writing consistently about these things for quite a while and now they’re ultra hip topics.

guys i’ve never heard of any of these people

how do i get myself into this loop of visual artist

I’m still trying to figure that out myself.

Watch the Art21 Series? It’s not incredibly entertaining, but very informative in this respect.

i think just like go to shows, read magazines/blogs its like anything.

so what mags/blogs do y’all usually read? i just recently discovered this excellent LA-based art blog: http://www.eastofborneo.org/

i also read art fag city, hyperallergic and modern art notes on the regular. they each kinda cover different areas tho (AFC is largely about NYC galleries, HA is international in scope and does a lot of coverage of street/graffiti/political art, MAN mostly covers US museums). triple canopy’s art coverage is usually pretty good too. and yeah can’t go wrong w/ reading yr local mags for gallery/museum reviews

i used to have an artforum subscription but it’s exhausting to flip through all those gallery ads

I can’t stand Artforum; none of it makes any sense to me. judy what blogs do you read?

i read greg.org and twocoatsofpaint i like artforum compared to a lot of the big magazines. i mean its like fairly content free but good writing does pop up and they cover everything thats big. also reading schjeldahl in the new yorker or the new york times art feed. there’s an irish one called showerofkunst and i always keep an eye on contemporaryartdaily for tipoffs of things I might not have heard someone else talking about (also regularly checking all the websites for the bigger london galleries and i mean this all sounds like a full time job but its just idle browsing for me to check this stuff)

art fag city is so rubbish though, just endless streams of content and i added paddy johnson on facebook for some reason idk but its just like also she posts really dumb stuff and has really shallow opinions and seems to know a weirdly small amount about well art

i tend to like the frivolous gossipy stuff on her site the best, plus the IMG MGMT series where she has guest artists contribute posts is typically quality

oh yeah contemporaryartdaily has terrific photo documentation of shows

its just really the best “oh yeah this is on” blog by far

I’ve been trying to find an art magazine that’s a middleground between Juxtapoz (yawn-inducing street art) and Artforum (yawn-inducing contemporary art for rich people). No luck so far.

My bf really likes Bomb. What’s that like?

i don’t keep up with new art nearly as much as i should. i can’t look at contemporary art daily too much because it sometimes feels too sterile and repetitive. art fag city is mostly good for IMG MGMT, but i think paddy johnson is also one of the only art writers who pays much attention to internet art/new media stuff, aside from like the writers for rhizome. i knew about greg.org before and i have no idea why i haven’t been reading it.

idk what bomb is like but they have some pretty great archived interviews on their website. stephen westfall who is a seriously great painter has done a little bit of writing for them, the one he does with nan goldin is p hilair

I think one of the things with these blogs—i.e. why I read them for a week, then forget to check them for over two months—is that a lot of it is kind of gossip for those already engaged, or at least doesn’t offer much by way of entry for those who aren’t. I’m guessing what’s being asked for ways to stay engaged, which I’ve found much more by virtue of going to galleries than anything else. Though as I said, Art21 will give a good overview of many individual artists (but not art issues), and I think most of it is available on their website anyways.

idk what bomb is like but they have some pretty great archived interviews on their website.

yeah this, i would subscribe to bomb if i lived in north america, the interviews are always v thoughtful & its archives are amazing (off topic but there’s a bell hooks one about academic language that is crucial). idk what it’s like as an arts journal but it’s a v good publication.

always love joe strasser. can never find good representations of his work online, but we have perhaps six of his originals in the house.

not these ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ tho.

Wait is the one with Goldin the one where she was totally bitchy and contradicted herself and just looked like a total ass?

yeah its p lol

I dig Greg.org but I dont really “get” art

helen frankenthaler died!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/arts/helen-frankenthaler-abstract-painter-dies-at-83.html

helen frankenthaler was still alive!

well not anymore i guess

up until this morning she was, at least

then after that, not

i always liked her paintings, they reminded me of late 70s singer-songwriter album covers

i always think of this fgt quote, even if it is p unfair the way he singles her out

“ All art and all cultural production is political. I’ll just give you an example. When you raise the question of political or art, people immediately jump and say, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, those are political artists. Then who are the non-political artists, as if that was possible at this point in history? Let’s look at abstraction, and let’s consider the most successful of those political artists, Helen Frankenthaler. Why are they the most successful political artists, even more than Kosuth, much more than Hans Haacke, much more than Nancy and Leon or Barbara Kruger? Because they don’t look political! And as we know it’s all about looking natural, it’s all about being the normative aspect of whatever segment of culture we’re dealing with, of life. That’s where someone like Frankenthaler is the most politically successful artist when it comes to the political agenda that those works entail, because she serves a very clear agenda of the Right.”

eh

yeah lol the 80s i guess

i wonder how many words have been written about frankenthaler and “femininity”

In re the group-of-seven aesthetic, reminds me a little of a young painter I saw recently in a group show, Lauren Warner. Really liked her stuff

i wonder how many words have been written about frankenthaler and “femininity”

― max max max max, Tuesday, December 27, 2011 4:55 PM (28 seconds ago)

i imagine this is at least in part what he is referring to.

This one is gorgeous:

indeed xp

That FGT quote always confused me because I’ve never known how Helen Frankenthaler is a political artist, or whether he’s referring to post-war abstract painting in general.

That said, I feel like 75% of the time when I hear about artists passing away, my reaction is the appropriate variation of “helen frankenthaler was still alive!”

there’s some good stuff in this slideshow

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/754706/modern-painters-presents-100-artists-to-watch-part-3-of-5