Barkley L. Hendricks

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Mr. Cool

Trevor Schoonmaker, of the Nasher Museum at Duke University, organized Birth of the Cool, a retrospective of Barkley L. Henricks’s paintings. The exhibition will travel to the Studio Museum in Harlem. I got a chance to check out the catalogue, at The Project, where Hendricks is having show, Thank you, Mr. John.

Here are some pics of Thank you, Mr. John:

Barkley L. Hendricks Barkley L. Hendricks Barkley L. Hendricks Barkley L. Hendricks Barkley L. Hendricks Barkley L. Hendricks Barkley L. Hendricks

on Rauschenberg

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Rauschenberg

I am a big fan of Rauschenberg’s, fuck that, i love the guy. He sits high in my pantheon, (it’s a multi-tiered dodecagonal space).

Here are some kind words from Jerry Saltz.

AMERICAN INVENTOR by Jerry Saltz


Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many esthetic openings for so many artists. Jasper Johns, his sometime lover, said, “Rauschenberg was the man who in this century invented the most since Picasso.” His output always bordered on the mad and ecstatic; his art could be theatrical, wan, redundant or just cruddy-looking. In fact, everything he made, good or bad — and many think his late work is junk — has an edge of wit, optical nerve and invention.Sometimes those qualities could be almost invisible, as in his 1953 Erased de Kooning Drawing, which is exactly what the title says. In this page of faint smudges, Rauschenberg stumbled onto kryptonite. He’d rocked the boat of Abstract Expressionism and set out toward the more populist shores of art. (It’s touching and telling that de Kooning gave the drawing to Rauschenberg, knowing what the young artist intended.) This ritualistic killing, however aggressive or loving, gives you a sense of how desperate Rauschenberg and his generation were. They wanted to move on from high-minded heroism to something more vernacular. Rauschenberg seemed to make it all possible.

A year later, saying he “had literally run out of things to paint on,” Rauschenberg invented a new form, the combine. Not quite painting, not quite sculpture, it was for him like discovering fire. He began to use everything from bedding to doors to parachutes. One combine, Monogram, features a stuffed goat encircled by a tire atop a horizontal painting. Rauschenberg is a mischievous Satyr grazing on art history, or the goat is a gargoyle protecting the art. Either way, the title suggests that Rauschenberg was leaving his mark.

That mark has lasted. Large swaths of the current Whitney Biennial owe him a huge debt. Yet as young artists are still expanding on the idea of the combine, by the late 50s Rauschenberg had tired of it, and he went on to another new technique: using a solvent to transfer images from one surface to another. He used this low-tech, ethereal process to make his set of luminous illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. Here, Dante and Virgil are athletes out of Sports Illustrated; Olympic weight lifters stand in for giants in the eighth circle of Hell; astronauts are the sinners. It is one of the most visually literate works ever made, by one of the most articulate artists who ever lived.

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, “the ability to conceive failure as progress.” Most of all, I love him for his fecundity and fearlessness.


Rauschenberg

title [edit me /]

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I really enjoy the titles of well-titled artworks. Through the use of titles one can be literary, art historical, museological and fun. It is hard. But it is rewarding to an art audience and it enriches the art discourse (artist-artwork-audience).

Cooper titles well. Below are the titles from his current show, Seven Years Bad Luck, at Snitzer gallery ( pictures are in my previous post).

Fredric Snitzer Gallery
Artist: COOPER
Show Title: Seven Years Bad Luck
(free standing sculpture located in the very back of the trailer)
Black Lungs: Ever notice how all artists are super-sensitive, temperamental,
selfish crybabies, and it only gets worse as they get older and continually more
bitter. The long dark tea time of the soul right before death and then your taxes-
now, imagine a world with two Elvis?s, twin brother performers. Best to die young
and famous. In her hand, a faded Polaroid of her white Corvette totaled beyond
repair.
Materials: wood, paper, found objects, ink, duralar, paint, stainless steel, plasterboard,
masking tape, galvanized metal bucket, plastic, resin, charcoal, distillant,
quadraurethane, electric pump.
2008

(wall piece located just outside of Mr.Snitzer?s office)
Eye surgery for the attempt of re-construction. (Eyes will be grown in jars and
trays and stored in generator backed-up refrigerators, not like in the movies, but
in fluorescent lit, formica-covered multi-plex office condos converted into
profitable organ production start-ups. It will feel like the nineties.)
Materials: wood, paper, ink, duralar, paint, stainless steel, plasterboard, masking tape,
galvanized metal bucket, plastic, charcoal, distillant, monourethane.
2008

(wall mounted sculpture fountain located just inside the trailer, across from the door)
First our garbage will become our fuel, then with all the smoke and fumes and
enough time, our waste will become suns. (Trapping light invites all sorts of
intriguing questions, for instance, if you light a candle in a room lined with perfect
mirrors [mirrors that return nearly 95 percent or more of the light that contacts the
reflective surface], would the room stay illuminated even after the flame is
extinguished.) But first, let?s mine the cemeteries for fresh things to sell.
Materials: wood, paper, found objects, ink, duralar, paint, stainless steel, plasterboard,
masking tape, galvanized metal bucket, plastic, charcoal, distillant, quadraurethane,
electric pump.
2008

(free standing fountain sculpture located in the middle of the trailer)
GETOUTOFHERE! (then) BOOM! Waves of mutilation follow, the truth is set free
all at once, enlightenment for everyone simultaneously, the world de-materializes
becoming speeding light, everyone and everything is everywhere at once. Floating
now, awake in pure information, thoughts can instantly become form, any
psychical thing becomes possible just from thinking it. Mankind becomes gods,
the universe is complete, all matter available for any purpose instantaneously.
And just like with any sitcom, the real humor lies in the set up, waiting patiently
like a hunter who sits motionless as the sun rises over a smoky field of wet grass
mixed with broken pavement.
Materials: wood, paper, found objects, ink, duralar, paint, stainless steel, plasterboard,
masking tape, galvanized metal bucket, plastic, charcoal, distillant, quadraurethane,
electric pump.
2008

(fountain sculpture located just outside of Mr.Snitzer?s office)
Battlefield horror from the war of northern aggression, slave rape, abu ghraib
torture, grassy knolls, rich girl bank robberies and “pig” finger-written in blood on
mansion walls, slow spiked garrote death, a bucket with all of Friday night?s vomit
spilled across every city street collected, restaurant dumpsters, dead drug addicts
in the morgue?s walk-in refrigerator, lies between lovers, profitable deception,
death-row lunch trays sitting soiled in a broken industrial dish-washer or a
speeding pickup slamming into a pregnant dog on a backcountry road.
Materials: wood, paper, found objects, ink, duralar, paint, stainless steel, plasterboard,
masking tape, galvanized metal bucket, plastic, charcoal, distillant, quadraurethane,
electric pump.
2008

(leaning wall sculpture located in the trailer)
Mr. Stardust himself:
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he has not got much of a bark.
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
When the show was over, as he walked through the last curtain into the hall,
he thought to himself that awful joke his father would tell him,
“Ugly girls work harder.”
Materials: wood, paper, found objects, ink, duralar, paint, stainless steel, plasterboard,
masking tape, galvanized metal bucket, plastic, charcoal, distillant, monourethane.
2008