What's up for two more days..

Piri' Miri Muli' readers who have not set out to DAG Modern for the Avanash Chandra retrospective after my Sept 20 notice are here advised that it closes this Wednesday evening.  Philip Rawson's observation in his 1971 Art of Tantra seems descriptive of Chandra's tantric phase in London:  "Tantra was never concerned with imitating an external world, and so its figures are to some degree stereotypes, puppets stimulating by their visual inadequacy a vigorous reinterpretation in the imagination of the mediator."  Like Chandra, Sohan Qadri who's, last I looked, featured in Sundaram Tagore's 82nd and Madison window, developed his Tantric painting in Europe.

Georg Feuerstein notes "Hindu Tantra.. was introduced to the Western World through the writings of Sir John Woodroffe.. in 1913" (Tantra 1999 xi) after recounting "..within the field of Hinduism, Tantra gradually fell into disrepute..  During the Victorian colonization of India, puritanism drove Tantric practitioners underground. Today, Tantra survives mainly in the conservative (samaya) molds of th the Shri-Vidya tradition of South India and the Buddhist tradition of Tibet, though both heritages also have their more radical practitioners who understandably prefer to stay out of the limelight".. Feuerstein's Yoga Tradition from the same year recounts "opposition in conventional Hindu and Buddhist circles.. Today Tantra is held in low esteem in India."

Rawson's earlier book strikes a similar note: "(Sir John Woodroffe, Calcutta Chief Justice and early translator of tantra) "was writing for a double audience: there were the Europeans deeply infected with Victorian prudery; and then there were the English-speaking Indians who were mostly under the influence of their caste-prejudices, ashamed and violently critical of elements in their own culture, and hence anxious to seem even more puritan than their Western rulers..  (Woodroffe) was standing out against a vocal alliance between an Indian caste élite and Western missionaries who were aiming to get Tantra outlawed.."

It is hard to reconstruct what prevailing attitudes predated British colonization, but Ajit Mookerjee and Madhu Khana's 1977 The Tantric Way suggests "Tantra.. grew out of the mainstream of Indian thought, yet in the course of time it received its nourishment from its own sources, which were not only radically different from the parent doctrine but often heretical and directly opposed to it. In this way tantra developed largely outside the establishment, and in the course of a dialectical process acquired its own outlook. The tantric approach is anti-ascetic, anti-speculative and entirely without conventional perfectionist clichés." (14)

Tantric art in exile inevitably finds itself in a reverse bind: the curiosity and sensationalism directed at its sensuality. "We could compare the state of Tantra in the West with that of Yoga, with which it is related. Like Tantra, the physical side of Yoga is emphasized.. even though those represent a small part of classical Yoga, whose main concern is meditation" (Frawley 21)  After making his way to tantrism by representing urban architecture, his earliest subject, as sex organs (above), Chandra's saṃsāra content focuses increasingly on the natural world during the years Pop Art was pre-eminant, moving from figures outside social contexts to the uninhabited landscape.

Rawson wrote about ancient Tantra painting "the objective colored surface was never meant to challenge comparison with any sensuously derived image of external reality. It was meant to stimulate radiant inner icons.. to produce a higher key or grade of objectivity than any transient reflection on the retina of the eye, a consistent world of the imagination against which visual phenomena seem grey and pale." (21)  If that reminds one of Duchamp's statement that his art "depended on something other than the retina," Octavio Paz wrote a year before Rawson's book ".. in both cases (Duchamp's Large Glass and 'the Tantric imagery of Bengal represent(ing) Kali') we are present at the representation of a circular operation that unveils the phenomenal reality of the world.. and simultaneously denies it all true reality." (65)  Chandra's paintings of grouped figures actually resemble Duchamp's 'Fauvist' phase of 1910-11 before he encountered Cubism and Picabia, inspired, by Duchamp's reportage "Obviously it's Matisse. Yes, it was him at the beginning."  Chandra features a Joy of Spring..

 

De Chirico, featured prominently at Helly Nahmad until Dec 23 and in the Surrealist Landscape show next door til Dec 18 (both unsurprisingly Piri' Miri Muli' recommended), called Matisse a "pseudo-painter" but Riopelle, at Acquavella til Dec 11, countered "the greatest is still Matisse, the only painter to have explored all possible techniques.. Luckily for the abstractionists, Matisse did no abstracts: he would have demolished everyone."

"On view through December 23^rd, Enrico Baj (64 East 77^th Street) offers the first American survey of Baj’s early paintings since his exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1971."

The show in the gallery's three floors features the landscapes, generals, 'heroines,' and furniture phases of Baj's work of the years' preceding Breton's '63 essay:

'It is, indeed, the child within each one of us which is wounded the most atrociously these days. The fact that today it is not simply the child's life but the child's essential nature which is threatened is a monstrous scandal, and one that has affected Baj so deeply that he has felt obliged to launch a frontal attack..

'The stimulus which endows Baj's work with its extraordinary vitality owes is vigor to the fact that he is in control, in perfect harmony with the implicit contradictions, of a device set to sound an alarm and yet, at the same time, to spread joy..

'With regard to fire, he suggests that it is composed of "an infinity of tiny invisible bodies," some of which are round and some pyramidal, which explains why "the flame behaves differently, according to the type and sign of the angles made between the pyramid and the sphere".. As for sight, it "occurs when the outer coats of the eye, which have openings in them similar to those in glass, send out the fire-dust known as sight-rays and is stopped by some opaque matter which makes it rebound back to the home."..

'A quite recent period in Baj's work has singled out from this brutish regiment several incarnations of the 'general is full dress uniform'.. a mountain of importance about capable of giving birth to an intellectual mouse, nevertheless constitutes a menacing survival, particularly from the moment when he sets himself up as being an expert on 'psychological warfare' and in this capacity feeds his tiny rodent on Clausewitz and Mae Tse Tung.

'The general's female companion obviously presents a rather subtler moving target.. the attributes of femininity grant a partial immunity to this heroine of the knockabout farce.'

What's up another week

Magritte, Souvinir de voyage

Will Ryman's new sculpture Classroom, in which each student is made of a different natural resource, occupies the gallery in front of his The Situation Room, based on the photograph of Obama and his advisors watching the presumed raid on bin Laden's compound, made of crushed black coal (515 w27, til Oct 17).  The two rooms together offer a base and superstructure snapshot of the culture surrounding it, as defined by Marx in 1859: "The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life." Ryman "sketched out the scene" of The Situation Room "trying different colors before settling on black coal, both as a symbol of prized natural resources that have led to so many wars, and for its ability to redact the identity of the faces, as though they were censored material. From a cold-storage room, he pulled out studies where he had tested different grains of crushed coal, both glinting and dirtlike. The coal dusting over the figures evoked the lost city of Pompeii, where ancient life was buried in ash, frozen mid-motion." I'm predictably reminded of the "stone" phase of Magritte, figures petrified in his paintings beginning at the outbreak of WW2 and more so in the 50s, concurrent with Ernst's petrified Europe After the Rain series.

Theophanes the Greek, 15C

The Magritte influence is more clearly seen on the second floor of Metro Pictures (519 w24), where a few new Jim Shaw paintings* include a painting in which the stigmata of Jesus is apparently inflicted by several of what René called "the locomotive (charging out of the chimney).. This metamorphosis is called "La Durée poignardée (Time Transfixed)," (below) a metamorphosis compressing, in Shaw's case, the image of the crucifixion, more prominent in Western painting, and the transfiguration, emphasized in Eastern Orthodox iconography, into "a single glance."  Shaw visited Magritte's petrification motif in his "Red Rock," Magritte's "Castle on the Pyranees" with faces of pop culture painted on, as Noëllie Roussel paraphrases "Jim Shaw has often referred to Magritte as a symptom of a culture in which reproductions and their spin-offs so saturate our mental and imaginary worlds that art eventually becomes part of our way of seeing reality." This joins a few other new paintings and a wall of older, amusing parodies of folk art, a room which seems to be a well-guarded secret on the internet as the staff conjectures it will be up another two weeks. 

You may wonder, how does Jimmy get away with art history references?  I'll let Riopelle, who has what unsurprisingly I consider the best show in town** at Acquavella (18 e79, til Dec 11), take this: "Picasso? No, he's a mass of references. A reference himself. Artaud yes, Picasso no."

Jean Paul Riopelle, Les Picandeaux, 1967

Up another week at BravinLee (526 West 26th Street #211) is Elektra KB's "Accidental Pursuit of the Stateless," in which the Papess of the Theocratic Republic of Gaia expresses her solidarity with migrants though a video of three costumed T.R.O.G. natives attempting to assimilate into German culture, filmed during her residency in Berlin.  An embroidery of hers from her last show quite stood out at Spring/Break this year, and there is more here in that format as well as collages, a bed, and various other media.

* coinciding with his retrospective at the New Museum through Jan 10
** along with the larger CoBrA show, up til Oct 17.

N. Ramani 1934-2015

........

Pics from Pope's Visit

Managed to score a Non-Conferring Individual pass for the Philadelphia Conference of Families and got close up -

Theological discussion

Digs my date, totally ignores me

The line outside..

..goes on and on..

What's up

Ray Johnson at Feigen (34 East 69th) has been held over for another two weeks, including versions of his Rimbaud cover altered by 1971 readers of American Arts and his portrait of Max Ernst inside Ray's own head (right).  They also have a couple Matta works on paper out and one by Tanguy.  One thing I gathered from the documentary is we both drink the same tea.

Shows just opening I saw around there:

Concurrent with Ft. Lauderdale keeping 120 works of theirs by Asger Jorn and the Hell-Horse of the WW2 Danish underground up til February, Blum and Poe follow up last fall's Karl Appel show with a three floor overview of CoBrA with a delightful Jorn selection of their own, til Oct 17 (19 e 66th).  A room is devoted to the sculptures of Shinkichi Tajiri, subject of a new monograph, who emigrated to Amsterdam after detention in Arizona during WW2 and being wounded in Italy, as well as photographs of temporary sculptures and his short cinematic evocation of early 60s Dutch ganja.

Jonier Marín's performance works, mostly from the early 70s, include his posting the work "incomunicable" upside down on Bogota buildings, photographing it behind passers by, and turning the photo upside down, 35 e67 4th fl. til Oct 31.

Sander, Three Peasants

August Sander photographs of Weimar era folk looking very much their respective professions, including the severe mug of Raoul Hausmann (Deborah Bell, 16 e71 4th fl. til Oct 31)

Two floors of Gego's wire sculptures and experiments with line (Levy 909 Madison til Oct 31)

Robert Morris' epoxied felt shrouds emptied of the figure reference Goya's dunces and other runway poses, (pdf) 18 E 77 til Nov 14

DAG Modern's first retrospective features Avanash Chandra, who drew inspiration from Swinging London's interest in tantra in the early 60s to move from townscapes to erotic 'humanscapes' to return to the tropical landscape, 41 e57 suite 708 til Dec 5.

The Brassaï photographs (right) featured in Henry Miller's 1956 Quiet Days in Clichy, mostly taken in the 30s, in the order of their appearance in the book, 41 e57 suite 1406 til Oct 24.

When I came to the fourth floor at 24 w57h, I recalled reading that Marian Goodman's show was up but was faked out, thinking that the show was in installation.  The walls were curtained off , the floor, like Pierre Huyghe's Met roof, was unfinished, a man in traditional African dress stood in the back of the gallery. I went to Stux and getting back on the elevator, confirmed that it was Goodman's floor. I returned and the man in African dress told me I could look at this room and the other one, following me into the other one to tell me I could take photographs of Adrián Villar Rojas' Oxymandias-like replica of Michelangelo's David on the floor, with the curtains and other small items comprising a time image, at which time I told him I didn't have a camera. (til Oct 10)

Marlborough surveys sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz's career, 40 West 57th til Oct 17

Mike Kelley's (511 West 18th Street, til Oct 24) urithane resin and mixed media sculptures of the cityscapes resulting when "Superman ultimately wrestles Kandor away from Brainiac and hides it in his Fortress of Solitude, sustaining its citizens with tanks of Kryptonic atmosphere. As Kelley once explained, Kandor functions for Superman as ‘a perpetual reminder of his inability to escape the past, and his alienated relationship to his present world.’" (Update 10/5 - huge and well presented, stuff that wasn't in the retrospectives)

Kandor 10B (Exploded Fortress of Solitude), 2011

Dana Schutz (456 W 18th Street til Oct 24) She seems to have moved to more everyday subject matter when she moved to Petzel as opposed to the more varied, at times history themed finale at Feuer; this one adds some stylistic wrinkles. (edited 10/5 after seeing the show)

Wolfgang Tillmans, Gordon Matta-Clark, Isa Genzken, and Dan Flavin at 19th/20th Zwirner til Oct 24th.

Sarah Sze (521 West 21st Street til Oct 17) adds sound, painting, and sattelites to her fall garden.

What's up

Closing this weekend is Sunaram Tagore's display of two large canvases by Sohan Qadri, who claims to have beaten Magritte in chess during the painting of "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," at its 1100 Madison outpost of to go with a generous sampling of his different phases at DAG Modern (41 East 57 Street, Suite 708, til Sept 12), an artist often pigeonholed by Indian critics as a tantric spiritualist. Moving pemanently to Copenhagen in the 70s where he was one of the founders of the Christiania squat may account for his omission from After Midnight, itself up til Sept 13.

A Hindu master living on his family's farm in the Punjab asked Sohan at a young age "to inscribe yantras (geometric designs used as meditation tools) on his mud walls." In his book on Mallarmé, Thomas Williams cites the "Ses purs ongles très haut…" sonnet to illustrate his contention "the pure poem is the one that exists solely on the yantric level." "The yantra, etymologically an 'instrument for giving the mind control,' is an image or geometric design used in certain systems of yoga to aid the mind in its movement out of time and space and into the absolute.. The yantric function of the poem exists on a non-discursive level. It emerges quite mysteriously from the sounds, rhythms, images which together make the whole work. On a discursive level, a poem may make statements about the absolute; on the yantric level, which, mistaken for statement about, may even seem nonsensical, it opens a way into the absolute.. The success of a poem as yantra is felt rather than understood.. The meaning of a yantric poem is one that the poet or the reader 'recognizes by sensation.'"  "The aspiration of the being towards the Universal with the object of attaining an inward illumination" (Guénon) "a concentrated visualization and intimate inner experience of the polar play and logic-shattering paradox of eternity and time." (Heinrich Zimmer)

Of "Ses purs ongles très haut…" Badiou suggests "The nymph would also have been totally done away with in the mirror were it not for the appearance of the reflection of a costellation.." (54) Williams: "The mirror is pure openness to Being.. In it is reflected the Macrocosmic order itself.. In this instant the finite and the infinite, the mirror and the heavens, the poet and the universe, have become One."(56) Qadri's progressive Sikh parents insisted he bounce around between Sikh, Hindu, and Sufi masters growing up, of which the Sufi "practiced this tantric meditation all his life and gave me this mirror which I carry everywhere. It's not narcissism, it's the exact opposite: it's transcending your self." "You start with the mantra, then you go beyond it; when you have this mirror, you start with the body, then go beyond body. Painting does the same: it's a mirror, but if you get stuck in the mirror and start interpreting-"this is good," "that's bad"-then you lose the painting, it does not seep into your system."



Qadri's maxim "Only emptiness, I feel, should communicate with the emptiness of the canvas" seems a rather strict application of the Prajñāpāramitā Sutra, which says "Emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness; Whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form." Qadri says "the flow of Shakti (prana or life energy), is the cause as well as the effect of all creation, including its beginning, its continuity, and its dissolution" - Shakti is represented in tantric art in both abstraction (the triangle pointing down in a yantra) and figuratively (emracing Shiva "which is static" (Qadri, seeking as he says a serene response to Shakti)). This approach to abstraction calls to mind Tàpies' (below) wish "to start again from scratch" in the 50s "I read a great deal about Eastern philosophies.. this destruction in quantitative terms led to a qualitative transformation. Destruction was succeeded by stasis and calm."