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Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Alan Rath and Duane Michals at Carl Solway Gallery
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Ben Patterson Remembered
BEN PATTERSON
1934-2016
We are deeply saddened by the passing of our friend Ben
Patterson, American musician, artist, and founding member of the Fluxus
international art movement. In 1960, Patterson moved to Cologne, Germany, where
he became active in the radical contemporary music scene, performing in
festivals in Cologne, Paris, Venice, and elsewhere. During this pre-Fluxus
period Patterson created and performed some of his early seminal works: Paper
Piece (1960), Lemons (1961), and Variations for Double Bass (1961).
Late in 1961, Patterson moved to Paris, where he collaborated with Robert
Filliou (Puzzle-Poems), and published his Method and Processes, an
artist’s book comprising loose-leaf pages bound in a folder. Patterson
joined George Maciunas in Wiesbaden to organize the historic 1962 Fluxus
International Festival, and continued to be a major presence at Fluxus events
until the early 1970s, when he retired to pursue ordinary life in New York
City.
Although he remained outside the art world for more than 17
years, Patterson resurfaced for such events as the 20th Anniversary Fluxus
Festival in Wiesbaden in 1982. In 1988, Patterson came out of retirement with
his exhibition titled Ordinary Life, at the Emily Harvey Gallery, New
York. In 1992, he returned to Germany to establish a headquarters for his work
and travel. Patterson’s work has been featured in many recent Fluxus
exhibitions and performances throughout Europe, Russia, Asia, and the Americas.
In 1996, he inaugurated the Public Entrance to his Museum of the Subconscious
at Mt. 13th Month in Namibia, Africa. The traveling retrospective exhibition Benjamin
Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us was organized in 2012 by the
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. In the summer of 2015, Ben Patterson
was included in the group exhibition
By this River, Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati. The photos below are
installation shots of Ben’s pieces from this show. Included is an image of Ben
performing Pond with the Weston Art Gallery Docentitos.
"It is possible that my interest in rivers could be
traced back to my birthplace—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the ‘Three Rivers City,’
and that I have always lived near a major river: the Hudson in New York, the
Seine in Paris, and the Rhine in Cologne, and now Wiesbaden.”
—
Ben
Patterson in Notes to the Los Angeles River Concrete Poems, exhibition
at the Solway Jones Gallery, Los Angeles, California, 2006
Ben Patterson, performing Pond with the Weston Art Gallery Docentitos,
By this River, Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, summer 2015
Ben Patterson handing out wind-up frogs to Weston Art Gallery Docentitos for performance, summer, 2015
Ben Patterson, Flying Bass, 2015 and Los Angeles River Concrete Poems, 2006/2015, installation shot, By this River, Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, summer 2015
Ben Patterson, Flying Bass, 2015, vintage double bass, LEDs, wood, oil paint, inkjet print on vinyl and nylon, an aluminum, 36 x 134 x 88 inches, By this River, Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, summer 2015
Ben Patterson, Los Angeles River Concrete Poem, 2006/2015, laminated digital photographs, text, cast concrete, wooden support, pump, reservoir, water, amplifier, 2 microphones, 3 plastic palm trees, overall dimensions variable, By this River, Weston Art Gallery, summer 2015
Fluxus Artist Ben Patterson Dies at 82
Carl Solway Gallery mourns the loss of Ben Patterson. The gallery published two editions with the artist and included him in numerous exhibitions over the years. In 2015, Michael Solway included Patterson in By This River, an exhibition he curated for the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati. Below is an obituary from ARTnews.
ARTnews
The leading source of art coverage since 1902.
BEN PATTERSON, CORNERSTONE OF FLUXUS AND EXPERIMENTAL ART,
DIES AT 82
Ben Patterson, the artist, composer, and double bassist who
played with classical orchestras, helped found the Fluxus movement, took a
nearly 20-year break from performance to live what he termed “ordinary life,”
and returned to art-making as an assemblage artist, died on Saturday at his
home in Wiesbaden, Germany, according to friends and collaborators. He was 82.
In the early 1960s, Patterson was among a small group of
outré artists, including La Monte Young, John Cage, and Yoko Ono, who pushed
music and performance to profound, radical extremes. His 1960 Paper Piece
called for audience members to fold, rip, and wave paper through the air. The
score for his Lick Piece (1964) read simply, “Cover shapely female with whipped
cream / lick / … topping of chopped nuts and cherries is optional.” “He was
writing scores that were Fluxus-like, before Fluxus,” the artist Geoffrey Hendricks
told me today.
One his most infamous and most photogenic pieces, Variations
for Double-Bass (1962), called for a solo performer to “agitate strings” of the
instrument with a comb and corrugated cardboard, and balance it upside-down on
its scroll while rubbing a rubber object against its strings. A typed version
of the score for that work is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
in New York as part of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection.
Asked about the impetus for those early radical works years
later, Patterson told an interviewer, “There was a great protest, let’s say,
against the materialism of the art market and buying and selling and so forth
was not what we, as young idealists who wanted to change the world, thought was
the purpose of art—it was to change the way people think, or to open their
thinking.”
Benjamin Patterson was born in Pittsburgh in 1934, and
graduated from the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, in 1956 with a degree
in music. Like many his brethren in the Fluxus and experimental music movements
of the 1960s, his interest in ostensibly simple, vanguard composition betrayed
his talent in traditional techniques. He was a virtuosic double bassist but
could not find a job in the United States because he was black, and so he
played with various orchestral groups in Canada, including the Halifax Symphony
Orchestra and the Ottawa Philharmonic Orchestra (as principal bassist).
It was in Halifax that he fell in with people involved with
the government-funded electronic music center, which eventually led to a letter
of introduction to Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom he met one evening after a
performance in Germany in 1960. Patterson was rather put off by the maestro’s
notorious haughtiness, but the next evening had the chance to catch a show with
John Cage and David Tudor performing. “I was quite, let’s say, astonished,” he
recalled later, adding, “I thought to myself, this is what I had had in the
back of my mind as to how music could be made but never thought that anyone
would take it seriously or that I could even produce it. So here it was.” After
the concert, he introduced himself to Cage, who asked him, “Would you like to
perform with us tomorrow night?” He did.
Patterson quickly fell in with the new-music crowd and went
on to perform throughout Europe in the coming years, helping George Maciunas
stage the first Fluxus International Festival, in 1962, in Wiesbaden, Germany.
But around 1970 Patterson stopped regularly performing and releasing new work,
instead working as a reference librarian (he had obtained a master’s in library
science from Columbia University in 1967), a concert manager (forming his own
company, Ben Patterson Ltd.), and in other arts-related positions.
This Duchampian departure from the art scene was, in fact,
motivated by practical concerns, Patterson told Interview magazine in 2013.
“Family was coming along, and papa needed to earn money,” he said. “If any
Fluxus works were being sold at that point, it was for a penny or dollar per
piece, so there was not much money to be made. I maintained my interest and
followed what was going on, and from time to time would create small pieces,
but it wasn’t a full-time occupation. Eventually [my] children grew up,
finished university, and then it was possible to devote 100 percent of my time
to artwork again.” He is survived by three children, Ennis, Barbro, and Tobias,
and two grandchildren.
Around 1987, he did indeed return to art, creating witty
assemblages out of found objects, performing, and staging participatory
artworks. (In the 1960s he had also made visual art, like what he called
“puzzle poems,” collages that could be pieced together by participants.) In
2010 the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston staged a retrospective of his work,
“Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of Flux/Us,” which traveled to the
Studio Museum in Harlem and the Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden. That
show was “long overdue,” Hendricks said, adding, “My gut feeling is that Ben’s
contribution to the whole movement is greater than is recognized, and I suspect
there’s a touch of racism in all of that.”
Once he returned to making art full time, Patterson worked
intensely, frequently staging performances and shows around the world. “I say
artists are like old cowboys; they die with their boots on,” Patterson said in
that Interview piece. “I hope to continue until the last day. I certainly have
no intentions to sit on the sofa and watch television for 10 hours a day.”
Explaining his work, he said later in the article, “What I try to do is open
people’s minds, ears, and eyes, not necessarily with shock technique, but with
surprises and unexpected things so they become more aware and sensitive to the
world around them.”
Discussing his Fluxus days, Patterson emphasized in another
interview that he and his compatriots made work that resisted commodification.
“It was something you experienced, and that was it,” he said. “You couldn’t
take it away.”
Copyright 2016, Art Media ARTNEWS, llc. 110 Greene Street,
2nd Fl., New York, N.Y. 10012. All rights reserved.
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Hildur Asgeirsdottir Jonsson's Exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery Reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2016/06/artseen/louisa-matthiacuteasoacuteottirhildur-aacutesgeirsdoacutettir-jonsson
Louisa Matthíasdóttir/Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jonsson
Louisa Matthíasdóttir/Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jonsson
TIBOR DE NAGY GALLERY | MAY 5 – JUNE 17, 2016
Iceland has been
punching well above its weight in the cultural arena for the last twenty years.
With a population the size of Santa Ana, California, it has produced more than
its fair share of musicians, and artists, including the odd alt-pop diva. Tibor
de Nagy’s pairing of two artists from Iceland shows the country’s impact on
their sensibilities. At first blush, they seem quite different. Louisa
Matthíasdóttir (1917 – 2000), two generations older than Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir
Jonsson (b. 1963), made representational paintings whose geometric severity
borders on Cubism. Jonsson, an abstract fabric artist, bases her fluid, organic
forms on photographs of nature in her native country. Both artists, however
share a taste for vibrant hues and strong, simplified forms. What’s more, each,
in her own way, pays tribute to Iceland’s unique natural beauty—its mountains,
surreal volcanic outcroppings, and treeless vistas.I
Matthíasdóttir’s
career began in Iceland in the ’30s, where she established herself as a member
of its avant-garde scene. In the 1940s she moved to New York and studied with
Hans Hoffmann; she influenced fellow Hoffmann students (Jane Freilicher, Larry
Rivers, Robert de Niro, Sr., and others) to revive representational painting
from a perspective informed by Hoffmann’s theories on abstract art. In
Matthíasdóttir’s case, she expressed her synthesis of abstraction and
representation by dividing the picture plane into discrete sections of color,
as if she were creating a map.
In the current
exhibition, there are fifteen paintings from her mature period between the
1970s and 1990s. They are all paintings of Iceland, where she regularly
returned with her husband, the painter Leland Bell. Her surfaces, switching
freely between thick and thin passages, show a quick, decisive hand with little
evidence of pentimenti or erasures. The subjects alternate between scenes of
sheep grazing in the countryside, views of Reykjavik, and small seaside
villages. Her compositions work best where her abstract and representational
tendencies are in almost perfect balance. Icelandic Village (1991) shows a number of small buildings pitched at odd angles
by the ocean-side; Matthíasdóttir creates a strong effect in the way she
combines their shapes. The procession of brightly colored polygons, axes just
slightly off-kilter, makes for a jazzy polyrhythmic dance in the foreground.
She offsets all of this activity with the gently curving shoreline, and then
above that the flat horizon line of the ocean, which creates a foil for all the
energetic goings-on below. Reykjavik Harbor (1987) succeeds in much the same way: Matthíasdóttir makes a
nice contrast between the densely packed angular buildings in the foreground
and the graceful horseshoe of the seawall that seems to float above the city in
the distance. Mountain and Sheep (1989) has lyrical color passages of mountain peaks looming in
the distance, but it lacks the expressive tension of compression and expansion
in the two previous paintings.
Louisa
Matthíasdóttir, Reykjavik Harbor, 1987. Oil on canvas. 19 × 27 inches. Courtesy Tibor de
Nagy Gallery.
Jonsson’s fabrics
in this show are the same size as Matthíasdóttir’s easel paintings.
Unfortunately, the gallery could not include one of her larger works, which
make a great visual impact. She creates the shimmering images in her silk textiles
through a process similar to ikats. She organizes the warp (vertical) threads
on a loom, detaches them, and paints her image. After painting the threads, she
reattaches them to the loom and weaves in the weft (horizontal thread) to
create her fabric. In the process of weaving into the reattached warp, the
painted threads run ever so slightly off register, which accounts for the
shimmer. As the titles in this exhibit suggest, Jonsson based most of the
images on her close-up photographs of lichen formations. Yet the images
themselves have an indeterminate scale: they could also be aerial photographs
of islands off a seacoast. Lichen 2 (2016) has a rich palette of saffron-yellow patches on a
saturated burgundy-red background, a color pairing that occurs throughout this
series. Jonsson offsets the intensity in Lichen 2 and other pieces with light touches of other dyes, which
emphasizes their fluidity. Jonsson’s ability to work wet dyes into wet gives
her fabrics a painterly appeal that ikats lack, as they depend on resists to
create their patterns.
Hildur
Ásgeirsdóttir Jonsson, Lichen 2, 2016. Silk and dyes. 27 × 28
inches. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
One thread that
runs through both artists’ work is a strange, otherworldly beauty, which aptly
describes Iceland’s rural scenery. In Matthíasdóttir’s work, the influence of
that scenery is more obvious, as her paintings actually depict it. On a subtler
level, the sharp contrasts that she brings to her color and shapes also convey
the bleak, seductive rigor of the landscape. Like Matthíasdóttir, Jonsson
returns to Iceland every year for thematic inspiration. Apparently, she also
returns to reconnect with the land itself. There, everything, including the
very earth, which is located as it is on a tectonic boundary, is in a perpetual
state of becoming, flowing from one form to another. Flow also appears in
Matthíasdóttir’s work, where her compositions seem to follow a powerful lateral
pull created by the mountains, sea, and even the buildings on the landscape.
This is another thread, the pull of the Iceland’s natural world, at times
austere, at others times stunning, that weaves its way through the work of these
highly accomplished artists, binding them to their native land.
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