C100 Review: New York round-up

Top: Milton Resnick: A.S.2, 1959, oil on canvas, 203.2 x 208.3 cm; © Milton Resnic; courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York. Bottom: Milton Resnick: F.L.W., 1960; oil on canvas, 109.2 x 246.4 cm; © Milton Resnic; courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York

 

New York: Milton Resnick, Whitney Biennial, Gerhard Richter, Tapestry in the Renaissance

With only four days to do the New York galleries I did what every smart Irish art person does. I went to Anna O'Sullivan of the Robert Miller gallery in Chelsea to have my card marked. Anna, NCAD graduate and friend to NCAD students and other strangers to the virtual world of Big Apple Art, was installing a mini retrospective of paintings by Milton Resnick. 80 years old, he appeared at the opening, all rabbinical wisdom and sixteen year old eyes, attracting to his show women and men from the '40s, '50s, who had done the hard yards for American art when it was neither profitable, etc., etc. Cedar Bar days and radical politics. Resnick had gone forward from where Philip Guston had decided to finish with abstraction and he made you believe there was still true gold in them thar, thought-to-be- mined-out, hills, if you just kept digging. The modernist idea of integrity as, essentially, a penetration in depth made manifest one more time by this fine painter's energy and belief which surfaced glimpses and flashes of hard won value from the prospecting and panning of adumbrate paint.

The 'take your breath away' show is at the Metropolitan Museum. If you only have a few days to see the shows, see Tapestry in the Renaissance last, because it makes everything else in town seem somehow unresolved. (But then that's how the Renaissance makes you feel anyway.) Every square inch of these amazing tapestries is interesting, maybe because every square inch took months to do and the time taken tells. This is an MTV world with lots of information, but humane this time, coming at you, just 'blowing you away', except it's still there when you look deeper, continuing to be amazing, not just for seven or eight seconds, but for ages. Still moving.

These are giant tapestries - you see an entire world from a time when 'seeing-the-whole-world' was thought possible. Just looking could occupy a lot of your time and the more it does this, the more you get to feel at one with the artisans who constructed these marvels across all those centuries. I had always thought of tapestry as decoration. And that's what it was. Powerful people used these cloths to warm the stone walls of their domains. Think how powerful you would have to be to believe you could register against such backdrops!

I have to move on, but get yourself the catalogue of this exhibition for Christmas. A mega tome of information which, when you have finished it, makes you just want to know even more.

Mary Lucier: Polaroid Image Series: Shigeko, c. 1970 (detail: fourth generation), multiple photographic and slide projection, courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art

 

What to say about the Whitney Biennial? Well it's like a big tapestry of contemporary art practice. (See why it's important to do the Met last; your metaphors get stitched up.) And it will take time because so much of it is time based; film, video, sound and digital works that don't have names yet, but have patents pending (Ken Jacobs 'Flo Rounds a Corner') and if you miss its 3 p.m. screening you must come back tomorrow. But it's worth seeing as Jacobs, by managing to lift his wife's walking figure from the 'ground' she occupies, is finding in film something of Cézanne's febrile space in paint. Much of the video work on show - most of it high-end digital manipulation - is like moving painting. Slow, reeeally slow, pans and tracking shots shift the image sideways, making me feel that I, as much as the image, was being manipulated. This is fine if you feel you are in honest hands but, if not, you feel used; the mild fascism of the moving image. (The ethics of painting v video. Discuss.)

I enjoyed my two days at the Whitney and if I had to pick one work that stayed with me it would be Christian Jankowski's The Holy Artwork. The Harvest Fellowship Church is the setting. The preacher, Peter Spencer, invites Janowski to come forward to make an art work. Janowski starts shooting video then he collapses at Spenser's feet. Spenser delivers a sermon on the holiness of art which includes, as art, the video we are watching and how we might see it as holy. Spencer does an amazing job, linking, among other metaphysical connections, the Trinity to creativity, video to the Christ's breath and, well, you'd want to be there. What seems, at first, to be a cheap-shot at revivalist religion becomes subsumed by Spenser into an art work to which he ascribes human, social and spiritual qualities. It's hard to say what it is. It's contemporary America yet somehow medieval in its certainties, the power of its beliefs, its world view, its hierarchies, its myths, its sermonies and choirs; it's like, yes, that tapestry Summer at the Met.

Simone Forti, Striding Crawling, 1977, multiples hologram, Plexiglass support, polymer protective covering, candle, clay dish, 3 bricks; courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art

I was keen to see the Gerhard Richter retrospective because his career was something of a blur to me; snatches of landscape, pop art, abstract painting and Baader-Meinhoff images featured in many magazines but I could never get a handle on him. Well, his show at the MoMA is everything you need. Blur is still the operative word - he is the master of blur - and to his great credit and talent he eludes 'handles'. He is a great painter; his aerial black and white cityscapes are knockouts. (He stopped doing these and went on to the 'idea-of- painting' paintings which was a mistake, except I can't get them out of my mind,) He can do an amazing thing with the moving image; trap it in paint, soften by smearing so that an image meets you half way and you have to supply the balance. Democratic.

Highlights of visit. Beds, Bathrooms and Beyond and the mish Supermarket. Two megastores; installations of abundance; three dimensional tapestries of choice. Metropolitan in fact.

Noel Sheridan is an artist and Director of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Milton Resnick, Robert Miller Gallery, April/May 2002
Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, March-May 2002
Gerhard Richter, Forty Years of Painting, Museum of Modern Art, February-May 2002
Tapestry in the Renaissance, Metropolitan Museum of Art, March-June 2002

Christian Jankowski: The Holy Artwork, 2001, Featuring Pastor Peter Spencer, Harvest Fellowship Church, San Antonio, Texas, DVD projection, sound, 16 mins 30 secs; collection of the artist; courtesy Maccarone Inc., New York and Klosterfelde, Berlin, originally commissioned by ArtPace, a Foundation for Contemporary Art, Texas; photo courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art

Ken Jacobs: Flo Rounds a Corner, 1999, Digital video, colour, silent, 6 mins; still courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art