Polly Apfelbaum. Ed. Bennett Simpson

Polly Apfelbaum. Ed. Bennett Simpson. Phildelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. 2003.
ISBN 0884541037
UoA Fine Arts Library 759 A641

"Interview with Polly Apfelbaum by Claudia Gould" (11-9)
\\\\titling of work\\\
"Daisy Chain", "A Pocket Full of Posies", "Peggy Lee and the Dalmatians" contrast with "Ice", "Bones", "Reckless"... etc. contrast in the aesthetic qualities: initial pop/bang/explosion of colour followed by the sense of minute accumulation, accretion, form layered upon form...
(((Pop is never innocent)))
My work is never explicitly narrative, so the titles are always indirect - sometimes they refer to the process, but they are often simply meant to be evocative - I think Duchamp said that titles were like another colour in the work. (11) Using film titles as colour references, etc.

\\\creating entertainments\\\
(((music is very evocative and emotional, but never literal)))
The difference between music and "entertainments" is, for Apfelbaum, that the emotional content is very literal in entertainments whereas in music it's "less intellectual and more intuitive, but at the same time it's very precise. (14)

\\\influenced by taste in film and music\\\
(((my taste is very eclectic)))
I think there's an analogy with what I do - taking little pieces and rearranging them.... I am drawn to the quirky and not always popular.. Many of the pieces work from very explicit rules, or systems, but often - in fact just about always - the system is invisible. I guess I like that kind of tension, between the intuitive and the formal, or the emotional and the controlled. (15-7)

\\\the power of colour and form\\\
(((there's no pure abstraction)))
there is always some reference outside - a connection to place, to memory or to popular culture... By keeping the content indirect, I try to leave space for viewers, so they can bring their own experience to the work. The idea is to make the work rich enough, dense enough, or complex enough so that there is always something unexpected that may come out of that experience. (17)

"Having It All: Polly Apfelbaum at ICA by Ingrid Schaffner" (21-43)
\\\a contrarian\\\
Polly Apfelbaum believes you can have it all and she is determined to realise the possibility through her art ... "Every single painting has 100 more paintings in it, his [Matisse's] million decisions and indecisions are the picture ... Apfelbaum's art appears free of anxiety and stress. But like Matisse's, it is based on a similar desire to embody the irresolute, especially the immateriality of colour ... Her work involves the activities and occupies the space of sculpture, but makes a contentious bid for painting, sculpture, and installation to occur all at once, and to be experienced simultaneously ... Apfelbaum's art has sparked talk about issues of appropriation and abstraction, the legacies of minimalism and feminism, and, most recently, the powerful pleasures to be had in surrendering to design and bringing in architecture. (21)
We can have it all: colour, drawing, structure, formlessness, systems, chaos, thinking, doing, painting, sculpture, geometry, mess. These things don't necessarily cancel each other out. Indeed, polarising them simplifies complexities, which are not only challenging to consider, but pleasurable to embrace. (40)

\\\colour\\\
Sculpture is about form, not colour, which belongs to the precinct of painting. In an essay called "Colour and Sculpture: A Capricious Affair," art historian Frances Colpitt elaborated: "The rejection of colour in sculpture stems from the Western predilection for purity. From Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) to Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), theorists have demanded that each art form be true to its essential nature, with the implications that colour belongs to painting and is superfluous in sculpture." (26- Frances Colpitt, "Colour and Sculpture: A Capricious Affair," Chromaform: Colour in Sculpture, University of Texas at Antonio Art Gallery, 1998, 7.)
Since the Italian Renaissance, artists, philosophers, and critics have argued over the supremacy of drawing (disegno) versus colour (colore). It was a mind/body debate, as well as a moral and class issue: akin to writing, line was the intellect, with all the privileges due enlightenment. Beyond words, colour was sensual, immoral, tricky, dumb. (Anybody can enjoy it.) (40)
"Yes, colour grounds the value of art in the bodily social relationship between the beholder and the object, not in the shadow realm of the disembodied idea. Think about it!" -- Libby Lumpkin, "Vive la résistance: Polly Apfelbaum's Vanitás of Painting," Reckless, Helsinki: Kiasma, Studio K, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998, 13. (40)

\\\Feminism & Abjection\\\
The art market, along with the economy, had crashed, taking mainstream heroes like George Baselitz, Sandro Chia, Julian Schnabel and David Salle down with it. The culture wars called for artists (especially female, gay, and non-white artists) to champion difference and to degrade the canon with critical bodies and subversive politics -- or at least confuse it with hybrid practices and shape-shifting works of art. (26)
Slinky and cheap, textured and tactile, crushed velvet treated with Sennelier dye, a French brand available in 104 colours that she [Apfelbaum] pours directed out of the bottle, has been her main material since 1992 ... Apfelbaum had been distilling throughout her transition from readymade or found sculpture. The mark of the hand is now signified by the stain of the dye and by the gesture of arranging pieces of fabric on the floor. (29)

\\\stain\\\
In Apfelbaum's work, the stain isn't simply repulsive or taboo. It's smart, sensual, and full of feeling. Apfelbaum calls this sculpture "a beautiful mess." It operates equally as a critical and as a constructive object. (30)

\\\the question of rules\\\
Gilles Deleuze: "Folding -- unfolding no longer simply means tension -- release, contraction --dilation, but enveloping -- developing, involution, evolution." Instead of a system of oppositions and ruptures, Deleuze imagines one composed from continuities, which he elaborates elsewhere as elastic, affirming, flowing, and horizontal. (43)


"Polly Apfelbaum: 'I wanted the work to be... as sexy and hallucinogenic as possible.' by Irving Sandler" (49-53)
"I am interested not so much in attempting to invent new categories but in operating promiscuously and improperly -- poaching -- within fields seemingly already well defined." Her aim, as she said, was to "twist" these categories "into a different form." -- Polly Apfelbaum, "Statement for Chain, Vol. 2, one page typescript. (49)
Daisy Chain (1989): composed of found objects, simply juxtaposed, significantly titled, and exemplary of the post-Duchampian practices that were prevalent throughout the 1980s. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's readymades and Andy Warhol's remades at a time when appropriation art was everywhere in the art world.
Ashley Bickerton, Sherrie Levine, & Haim Steinbach: appropriating newly-minted objects to make art that critiqued commodity culture.
Ann Hanilton, David Hammons, Donald Lipski, & Nancy Shaver: transposing things patinated by human touch and time, to convey cultural memory and a sense of loss. [with which Apfelbaum's use of the found object allied] (21)
Colour is notably absent from Apfelbaum's take on this work. Daisy Chain copies the printed set of shapes and their configuration in the form of raw wooden elements, laid out in rows upon the floor.
Pink Dalmatians (1992): She began to control her marks. "The pieces are dyed and cut out, then set on the floor, ordered and arranged to make more forms. The assemblage of pieces mobs through the space like an organic growth... Much of the work consists in directing its flow, organising and looking for new organisations in the liquid movements of fabric and stain." -- Polly Apfelbaum, "The Night," in Polly Apfelbaum, San Francisco: Walter/McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, 1997. (50)
Shaping each velvet swatch by hand is critical. With Matisse's cut-outs as a precedent, Apfelbaum said, "Cutting is drawing, almost." Scissoring into dyed fabric enabled her to draw directly into colour. (50) Decoration and handicraft materials and techniques are historically identified with women's work, which feminists rightly considered art ... Apfelbaum views her artistic enterprise as a quest for beauty. After all, the purpose of decoration is visual pleasure .. It is commonly thought that art that is pleasurable is or has to be mindless. Not so in the case of Apfelbaum's floor reliefs. In providing a conceptual component, she bridges pleasure and cerebration. As Wesley Gibson observed: "Here, beauty is intelligence, and intelligence is beauty." -- Wesley Gibson, "Reviews: Polly Apfelbaum," New Art Examiner, March 2001, 54. (51)
Apfelbaum's abstraction signifies her concern with "high" art. At the same time, she looks for inspiration to popular culture, notably in her material ... The diversity of interpretations that Apfelbaum's work evokes is such that at the same time you are reminded of "high" abstract art and popular culture, you are put in mind of lily pads, landscapes seen from on high, and other natural phenomena... her work is open to myriad readings. -- David Pagel, "A Supersaturated Return to the Spirit of the Punk Era," Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2002, Sec. F, 26. (51)
The underlying content of Apfelbaum's work is the tension between the structured and the unstructured. Her aim, as she sees it, is to compose an initial order, then to welcome disorder - or the unknown - and finally to order it. (52)


"Let's Twist Again by Tim Griffin" (59-60)
Bones (2000): The tubes are totemic, with their basic forms and serial layout; at the same time, they are completely, even uncomfortably ordinary, resembling so many rolled-up rugs on the ground. Embedded in their repetitions is the implication of manufactured items, but the pieces are obviously handmade, richly marked with the artist's trademark mottled patterns of coloured dye. This signature aspect draws the pieces away from the context of minimalist sculpture toward painting, taking potential artistic references off the floor and onto the wall. Evoking the formal purity of, say, Helen Frankenthaler's staining technique, whereby she allowed her paints to seep into canvas, these traces of the artist's hand invite closer inspection ... The majority of the piece is, in fact, wrapped up and completely out of view, enfolded within the layers of would fabric. Bones shows and withholds at once. (59)
Apfelbaum produces work in which two basic factions - whether medium, art history or popular culture - are at odds yet bound together inextricably, so that, as in Bones, the implications wind continuously outward and inward ... her works often have consisted of coloured strips and spots organised into patterns on the floor, invoking Jackson Pollock. But Apfelbaum has rendered Pollock's performative mode into a motif. The drip remains in place, but now registers as flat fabrics saturated with dye; and what was once the gestural trace of the creative subject is now organised according to a formal system set up by the artist. Indeed, any sense of "action" is displaced from artist to the viewer who must navigate the space shaped by the individual works. In this vein, Apfelbaum further closes the gap between painting and sculptural space, as the act of looking becomes more resolutely corporeal, more physical. (59-60)


The Color of My Fate (1989-1990)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_1_92/ai_112131277/pg_2 http://citybeat.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A90962
http://citybeat.com/2003-12-10/art.shtml http://www.irhine.com/index.jsp?page=home_cac012504 http://contemporaryartscenter.org/exhibitions/apfelbaum

Donald Judd: Sculpture Prints Furniture

Judd Donald - Sculpture Prints Furniture

Donald Judd Sculpture, Prints, Furniture. Centro Cultural de Belém, 1997.
60's Abstract Expressionism in the United States
Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl André, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt --> Minimal art

Greenberg v.s. Judd
Judd's "specific objects": simple geometric forms purged of any traces of illusionism, metaphor, gesture of anthropomorphic references. His object's engagement with both the wall, floor and ceiling broke the traditional association of the wall with painting and theatre, and his rigorous engagement with scale, symmetry, volume and architectural space linked his art strongly with architecture. (5)
Judd's work subverted traditional notions of artistic creativity, which involved hierarchical relations between different elements. Instead, he used concepts such as gestalt, unity and indivisibility to realise his specific objects, each of which was conceived as a whole, with its own clearly-defined scale. With these primary structures, developed in repetitions of unitary, identical and symmetrical elements, Judd created a new lexicon. (5)

purity & forms
open & closed volumes
plain or coloured plywood, Plexiglas or metal.
space, scale & material.
painting & architecture

Judd, Donald. "Selected Writings". Donald Judd Sculpture, Prints, Furniture. Centro Cultural de Belém, 1997. 11-21

"Jean Arp". Arts, September 1963
part & whole relationship
example of Arp's sculpture: One of the most interesting aspects of Arp's sculpture [...] is that a good piece is a whole which has no parts. The protuberances can never clearly be considered other, smaller units; are not secondary units. This lack of distinct parts forces you to see the piece as a whole. The perception of wholeness dominates the impressions of its parts... (11) "Kenneth Noland", Arts. September 1963
& Norland's painting: Painting has to be as powerful as any kind of art; it can't claim a special identity, an existence for its own sake as a medium. If it does it will end up like lithography and etching. Painting now is not quite sufficient, although only in terms of plain power. It lacks the specificity and power of actual materials, actual colour, and actual space. (12)
"Specific Objects", Arts yearbook, 1965 The new three-dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school or style. The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement... (13)
In the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, Still and Newman, and more recently of Reinhardt and Noland, the rectangle is emphasized. The elements inside the rectangle are broad shapes and surface are only those which can occur plausibly within and on a rectangular plane [...] A painting is nearly and entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group of entities and references. (13)
Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors - which is riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art. The several limits of painting are no longer present. A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be... Obviously, anything in three dimensions can be any shape, regular or irregular, and can any have relation to the wall, floor, ceiling, room, rooms or exterior or none at all... (14)
Materials vary greatly and are simply materials -- Formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, Plexiglas, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific. Also, they are usually aggressive. There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material. Also, of course, the qualities of materials -- hard mass, soft mass, thickness of 1/32, 1/16, 1/8 inch, pliability, slickness, translucency, dullness -- have unobjective uses. (15) A painting isn't an image. The shapes, the unity, projection, order and color are specific, aggressive and powerful. (16)"

Don Judd: an interview with John Coplans
Originally published in Don Judd, Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, California, 1971
yea, kinda boring the interview. not much point made.

Review: Hal Foster
Originally published in ARTFORUM magazine, 1978
Rosalind Krauss wrote of a Robert Morris piece, 'the specific configuration of the work is not allowed to become a figure seen against the "ground" of the object's "real" structure'. (Artforum, November 1973) When a box is aligned with the wall, it may have more to do with the illusionism of painting: each box, like a canvas, is seen as a natural extension of our own visual field. (44) Sculpture that is Minimalist in origin must face the brand of "theatre" applied to Minimalism proper by Michael Fried (Artforum, Summer 1967). To Fried the Minimalist object is theatrical insofar as it imposes as a presence, a presence that provokes a situation between viewer and itself. This he spurned as not self-critical. (45) Not only does Minimalist sculpture have a physical presence, i.e. command a situation or theatre, it also speaks to a metaphysical presence, i.e. to a plenitude, not an "exhaustion", of gestalt, forms, ideas, etc. (46) Rosalind Krauss noted, Judd used forms that seemed given, forms that were somehow a priori. This was done in order to delimit (or disguise) intentionality, what she called "the intention-laden grammar of process", and the presence implicit therein. To Krauss the idea was to make meaning "a function of external space" as opposed to a function of internal space, that metaphorical realm where the operations of the constitutive mind occur. She saw the break with the 'Cartesianism' that was the ground of "Western illusionism". (47)

Donald Judd's Equivocal Objects Prudence Carlson
Originally published in ART IN AMERICA, Brant Publications Inc., January 1984.
As always, Judd's new boxes, whether single or arranged in series, are emphatically self-referential objects that wed form, material and content and that, as a consequence, "exist between mind and matter, detached from both and representing neither" (Noted in Lucy R. Lippard, "Cult of the Direct and the Difficult", Changing, New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1971, 116). hmm, pretty repetitive about Judd's practice. no need to note more i guess.

art photography in Germany today
26/3/2008 st paul st 15h

Barbara Honrath talked about German contemporary photography after 1945 in Museum collections in numerous cities spread out in Germany. Also put photography into traditional painting genres into "portraits", "landscape", "architecture", "interior", and "still life", and showed works by Thomas Struth, Jitka Hanzlová, Simone Nieweg, Beate Gütschow, Thomas Florschuetz, Heidi Specker, Candida Höfer, Beatrice Minda, Christopher Muller, Stephaine Senge, Frank Breuer, Wolfram Hahn, Joachim Brohm, Peter Piller, and Jörg Sasse. I personally found the photos of Peter Piller most interesting, especially "More Beautiful from Above (2004)". The housing says a lot about a culture and the mass influence, etc. blah. yea. good talk, good introduction. a bit tiring though.

http://www.goethe.de/ins/sg/pro/artphoto/index.htm

9h30 vendredi le 14 mars 2008 || rm103 Boris Dornbusch and Daniel Webby || I always say the contrary to what you say I always say the same as you


Collaboration
Starting point - Casten Holler video of twins saying "I always say the contrary to what you say" or "I always say the same as you" to each other.|| the visual starting point: the basketball court at the back of the mt st studio (Boris) || National sport of Croatia, and the loop/basketball has the same colours as the Croatian national colour. (interesting additional information) --> does it change the way we view/experience this work?

what's the relationship between Boris' and Daniel's work:
does it matter which is whose? || inside/outside || viewing out/ breaking in || the basketball as the detergent (??) || picture/painting: can be viewed as still image(s) and may have more room for narratives to come in || failure || what's the dialogue? || difference between artist-run spaces and dealer galleries? what's the subject? || medium of video? time, expression of time? || artists - critics - collectors, etc. || experience v.s. documentation

Do I understand any of the written text? How do the experiences differ between the 2 (or 1?) work? || the failed [dead] suicide bomber basketball in the end room looks as if was set up to tell a sad story, does the message on the phone says "mission accomplished" or "that's it, nothing more".. is the phone necessary if it was only tied to the ball for the recoding purpose? I don't think the phone took part in the process - the phone was not attached when the ball broke in the window; i even suspect if it was the very ball that did the breaking.. not convinced but a good story told. yea? like my first reaction to the collision of the twin towers: nah, it can't be true. pop a song in your head n have it repeat a 1000 times, you'd gradually grow to like it. tell the same story 100 times, no matter how unbelievable it is, people accept it being 'true'.. and vise-versa. || how we generate/pass on information in relation to the critical mass is h*ll-yeah a mass. || The video work gives a quite romantic feel, a lot softer than the real objects and it seems more open-ended.. i personally enjoy the repetitive action of shooting the ball into the loop, and since we don't see the people doing it, the basketball stand becomes a symbolised object.. like a goal... or... don't know, somehow your attention is fixed in the double frames against the grey background. camera angle looking down but projection level forced [me] looking up... seems educative. therefore we had a 2-hour session on it but nah, i said nothing.