I lucked out with Elaine Reichek.  She was in town for the unveiling of her facade project for the Gardner Museum.  It’s taken from the correspondence between Mrs. G. and Henry James.  David and his crew had just finished installing the piece when I met up with Elaine for a talk in the Living Room.  Elaine was the first artist to have a residency at the Gardner Museum and she produced the award winning MADAM I’M ADAM CD rom project there.  I still use the piece with my students. It gives another kind of vision to Mrs. G’s house and sort of foretells the augmented reality phase that is happening now.

Elaine is one of my favorite artists.  I first heard of her when one of my professors showed her work in class.  It was White Brushstroke 1 from the exhibition AT HOME AND IN THE WORLD.  In my education, it may have been the first time that I saw a white artist directly and confidently address their position of whiteness.  I was kind of stunned by the way she just turned all these things that were in the air at that time (appropriation, feminism, craft, text, history, erasure, race, and whiteness) on their heads with a cross stitch.  I remember going to the MFA Bookstore and looking for all the texts I could find about her.

In 2004, I was working as Dean at Skowhegan and Elaine was one of the resident faculty.  We became very close that summer and we talked a great deal not just about art, but about life, loss and the importance of community.

It was rainy when we started talking, but it cleared up.  Elaine and I talk about a lot.  We discuss her move to Harlem, gentrification, whiteness, maintaining a career, loss, love, food, galleries, and a bunch of other stuff, if you can believe it.  We went way over time, but it was worth it.  I love Elaine a great deal.  At this time in my own studio practice when things are so unstable and fraught, it was good to sit down with a friend who knows how to keep the work moving forward.

Andrea Fraser

1. PAINT THINGS: Beyond the Stretcher at deCordova (Full disclosure: I was in this show.)
2. Andrea Fraser: Andrea Fraser: Men on the Line, KPFK, 1972 at ICA/Boston (Full disclosure: I bought Andrea a bicycle while she was an artist-in-residence when I worked at Skowhegan.  Also, one of my heroes, Gregg Bordowitz, did the Q and A with her after the performance and I gave him my number.  I totally would have slept with him that night, but he was kind of tired.  After all, he had just watched this amazing performance by Andrea Fraser, for god’s sake.)
3. Matt Siegle at Anthony Greaney (Full disclosure: I cried when I heard this space closed.)
4. Andrew Mowbray: Another Utopia at LaMontagne (Full disclosure: I knew this was going to be good, but it even overwhelmed my expectations of how good it was going to be.  I should also add that I have held Andy and Cristi’s smart and beautiful daughter.)
5. Sophie Calle: Last Seen at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Full disclosure: Mike Mittelman and I had dinner with Sophie Calle when we were in grad school.  Ms. Calle had no interest in me, but I am pretty sure she had a great affection for Mr. Mittelman.)
6. Richard Avedon: The Family at the Addison Gallery of American Art (Full disclosure: I gasped out loud in the gallery when I got to the photograph of Andrew Young.  He’s so gorgeous.)
7. Mary Reid Kelley at ICA/Boston (Full disclosure: I met Mary, and her spouse Patrick during the install and they were lovely.  I also met Mary’s parents when the show came down and they were absolutely adorable.)
8. Ridley Howard: Fields and Stripes at MFA Boston (Full disclosure:  I didn’t know Ridley, but after I saw his show for the third time I sent him a note on Facebook and discovered we know lots of people in common, including the amazing painter Frank Meuschke.)
9. the origin of the world /\ the force of the source \/ the cause of the vigor at Samsøn (Full disclosure: Samsøn represents me, and this show made me an even greater friend of the vagina.  Kristin Stoltmann’s work was sublime.)
10. Steve Locke: there is no one left to blame at ICA/Boston (Full disclosure: I was in this show.)

Susanna Coffey, Takenaga’s Division , 2010
oil on panel, 15 x 12 inches

There hasn’t been a Susanna Coffey show in Boston in a long time. It’s been long overdue.  She continues to be one of my favorite artists since she changed my life in a studio visit in graduate school.  Her last solo show at Alpha Gallery was in 2004.  Her work has really changed in the intervening years.  It’s really incredible to see an artist of this caliber and consistency move into new territory with such verve.  These are paintings that challenge and evoke instead of represent.

For most of the time I’ve known her work, Coffey has set up a contest, a meeting, an encounter in the studio.  The artist and the mirror were the consistent elements in the work.  The work that came out of that confrontation was a record of time and explored the elasticity of the flesh, the fluidity of identity and the impossibility of freezing the likeness.  The paintings were a sum total of observations, they were the history of looking expressed on the surface of the support.  This is the thing that so many people do not understand about paintings and especially those paintings that contain something recognizable: that the painting contains the history of time and touch.  Every painting is a performance of the artist in the crucible of experience and in Coffey’s case, that crucible is the encounter with the self.  In the midst of that encounter she was able to find a painterly equivalent to what she experienced in the mirror.  Her mastery of color, tonal intervals, and manipulation of all of the properties of paint made her work a series of fascinations to experience. She is truly a painter’s painter.

The notion of the self portrait expands in her work.  The work is less about recording what is seen.  It takes on the placement of the subject in act of a human experience, especially in later works when she began to change the orientation of the support to mimic the proportions of the computer screen.  This deeply chilling series of paintings, with the artist placing herself in front of images of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had less to do with Cindy Sherman’s “I’m-everyone-and-no-one” ranging across personae and more to do with the particular political moment of an artist trying to come to terms with what was being done in her name.

The show at Alpha is called Apophenia, which is the tendency to see something where there is nothing.  It is related to seeing faces in random arrangements of rock formations or animals in the clouds.  The paintings in the show mark a return to the traditional proportion of the portrait format, which communicates the notion that you are looking for a head or a body.  The show is split into sections which expand and explore this idea in various ways.  In the first section, you see what feels like a deep engagement in certain modes of abstract impressionism related to Milton Resnick but, and this is the thing that sets Coffey far beyond most painters, you are deeply aware of a physical presence in each picture.  The paintings seems to vibrate at differing frequencies that reveal and conceal themselves to you.  Takenaga’s Division, a nod to the artist’s friend the brilliant Barbara Takenaga seems to quote impressionist landscape painting before it becomes an active churning mass that keeps pulsing between figuration, landscape, and non-objective painting.  It contains in painted matter and placement the feeling of the “war paintings” without the obviousness of the subject matter.  The artist is no longer separate from reality.

This is an exciting time in this body of work.  Coffey took on space in the previous work in a radical and exciting way.  She could make the mirror invisible in her paintings; there was the sense that the paintings began at her nose and kept going behind her into these completely realized organizations of painterly space.  These spaces carried light, energy, history, landscape, whatever the artist needed or “saw” in the mirror.

Susanna Coffey, Blanche, 2011, 15 x 11 inches, oil on panel

The difference now is that Coffey is painting a new kind of space, the rich psychological space between her in the mirror.  She is painting the interference, the attitudes, the obfuscations between the understanding of the self.  This new work makes manifest the difficulty in realizing the self and instead of a hackneyed angst about the unknown, Coffey is able to express some delight in the difficulty of realizing the self.  There is a painterly exuberance and deeper material record in the work, the history of the mark making is clearer and more raw.  Enormous changes are made in these paintings and they are left bare.  And still, every picture bristles with a human surge of energy, despite the metaphoric collapse of the possibility of representation.

To complicate the exhibition, there are some paintings of masks (Yammy is a personal favorite) that should be objects, but actually start to feel more than human. These paintings and paintings of a Buddha statue owned by the late, great Carl Plansky round out the exhibition.  We look for humanity in objects, in representations, Coffey is saying. The clarity of approach with the paintings of objects just makes their poetic implications clearer, especially when seen with paintings of the artist merging and emerging from the dense activity of the painted surfaces.  The ability to look outward is contrasted with the courage to look inward.

I have to say, I saw some of this work in Coffey’s studio before the show went up and I can attest to the radical changes that some of the paintings went through.  Headstand in particular is a painting that is very different that the version I saw in the studio, demonstrating her willingness to eradicate any simple reading of the work. It is really thrilling to see an artist have everything up for grabs in the work, to really engage in the process of painting and in that process discover a new realization of space.  It is an affirmation that painting is not magic, it is a deep engagement in performative labor on an object that holds every decision.  Because Coffey demonstrates the courage to follow those decisions where they lead she has created a show of paintings that truly feel like apparitions.

In addition to the treat of having the show, I’m so fortunate that the gallery is having an exhibition of photographs by Francesca Woodman. This is the first time the work has been seen in South America. It is a major event and the number of people, collectors, and artists who have come in just for a look has been electric.

Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silverprint, 13.3 x 13.3 cm. © George and Betty Woodman, courtesy George and Betty Woodman

(I’ve provided a link to the SFMOMA Woodman retrospective. Reproductions, online and printed, almost always misrepresent the size of the prints and their relationship to frames and matting. I’ve included an installation picture for a better idea of the scale.)

The show officially opens tomorrow but there has been a steady stream of people anxious for a look at the photos. Their excitement has rekindled mine. I’ve seen this work for a long time, but the installation here is quite compelling. Mendes Wood’s gallery is a white cube but the ceiling has pointed rafters that that add a sense of place to the studied “neutrality” of the white box, as if an attic loft was exposed. It looks a bit like a reclaimed chapel. They gallerists have also chosen frames that have a hint of red wood coloring for the 20+ prints in the show. This tiny pulse of color animates the pictures, which is good. There have been too many sepulchral presentations of Woodman and in my opinion. This exhibition shows a young woman changing before our eyes, in the act of finding and becoming herself.

The show is pretty chronological. There are representative images from most of the bodies of work (unfortunately, none of Woodman’s exquisite cyanotypes are here) and there are some of the canonical images. Far and away my favorites are the photos where the body of the artist is used to expose and explain space and spaces. These pictures to me have always seemed like a fever dream, palpable and hallucinogenic. And like those dreams one tries to make sense of them to no avail. I’m less interested in why Woodman does what she does and more interested in the fact that she does it. When she crawls or floats or blends or reshapes her body she posits a world without boundaries of materiality. Is she crawling into that cabinet or turning into it? Is she kneeling on the mirror of floating out of it? In a pre-Photoshop world, she makes us ask “How did she do that?” I am sure that there are sophisticated technical reasons for the way the photos look (and Woodman is a master of them), but that isn’t the real “how” of my question. And figuring out techniques is not what keeps me staring at the photos. What I am asking is, in truth, how did she become lighter than air? How did she become a shadow?

Her craft is in service to a vision that feels very contemporary. In a world where gender is fluid, boundaries are permeable, and borders are contested, it’s exciting to see a young artist exploring and exposing those limits with her own body.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN
Mendes Wood
Rua da Consolação, 3358, Jardins, Sao Paulo, Brazil
June 23 – July 21, 2012

William Cordova at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts by Steve Locke.

artcore journal is an edited online contemporary art journal published biannually. The journal seeks to establish a broad range of responses to contemporary art and curatorial practice from varied spatial perspectives. artcore journal presents a broad range of informed written texts, art works and curatorial initiatives. Each issue welcomes creative and critical responses to a theme as a way of establishing an intertextual network postulating on ideas concerning space in contemporary art discourse.