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live, but allow millions to enjoy long, paintings, for their own part, may be some of
productive and creative lives. That a straight, the slowest, insofar as one can see at every
and I presume healthy, white male who has made point along the edge of the artist’s pours the
a fortune selling such ideas to other wealthy way that the paint leeches into the canvas and
straight white men would make such a comment softens that cutting edge where mark gives way
using anti-retrovirals – taken in the main by to unprimed canvas. Dalet Aleph in particular,
homosexuals and coloured people – is, to this more than 7 Bronze from the same year, transforms
gay man, disgustingly offensive. the thinnest veil of paint into that slowest
of materials: weathered metal. The simplicity
of Louis’s gesture reminds us of the myriad
failures that must attend the making of such
paintings: that for each work that makes it to
the gallery wall, there must have been dozens
that didn’t work. Call it painting as gamble.
The problem is that this gamble was being made
nearly 50 years ago, and it’s not quite clear
whether (2) PAT STeIr’s new monumental canvases
at Cheim & read renew it or simply rehash it.
Most of Steir’s canvases cross something like
Louis’s enlistment of gravity with Barnett
Newman’s zips. The palette is primarily
Newman’s too, though the Newman of The Stations
of the Cross (1958–66). What Steir has done,
however, is to bring speed back into the
equation with her signature ‘waterfalls’ of
paint. This is most evident in About the Black
I (all work 2007), where the sheet of silver-
white paint drawn over the right side of the
canvas has splashed aggressively across the
canvas’s primarily black ground. Other works,
such as White, Black and Dusk, echo the
tripartite structure of Newman’s Who’s Afraid
of Red, Yellow and Blue (1966–7), while Steir’s
The Dark, an absolutely gargantuan field of
graphite grey and black pours, is bisected by
two thin double-zips that recall the red, and
rehearse the structure (though with a larger
horizontal expanse) of Newman’s Onement I
(1948).
Only a few of Newman’s paintings ever reached
the size that Steir offers here. His were
What is sick is a medical system in which formal studies that kept an eye towards how a
corporations profit off people’s pain. Of viewer perceives, and reconciles, that very
course, Hirst’s stainless steel and glass looks specific and particular confrontation with
decidedly corporate in this – oh my – steel- painting. Steir’s work is not so specific;
and-glass lobby. Indeed, the little shock and it’s all confrontation. But whereas one expects
shiver his dead flesh and dissection tables that Steir would like that confrontation to
deliver is really no different from the little resemble an encounter with a force of nature
frisson delivered by the snippets of blood and (eg, waterfalls, torrential rains or, for that
the whir of the coroner’s saw on American matter, the legacy of Newman himself), the
television serials like CSI – Crime Scene result is more spectacular than sublime.
Investigation.
It’s a different, more literal kind of echo
Then we have his shark, The Physical that (3) BJOrN MeLHuS created at roebling Hall,
Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone titled If You See Something Say Something (the
Living (1991), installed at the Metropolitan title itself is a triumph: the direction having
Museum with three paintings meant to establish been cribbed from public-service placards
a historical context: a copy of John Singleton recently plastered across New York City at the
Copley’s Watson and the Shark (c. 1778), which behest of the Police Department and meant to
pictures an attack on the comely Watson as he remind the populace of its civic duty to remain
swims in Havana Harbour; Winslow Homer’s The vigilant against such terrorist threats as
Gulf Stream (1899), in which a muscular black unmanned – ie, lost – luggage and handbags, or
sailor sits stoically on the deck of his small the occasional ornery Sikh taxi driver). Melhus
boat, its mast snapped, as sharks rise filled – literally filled – the gallery’s two
menacingly from the waves; and Francis Bacon’s main and many interstitial spaces with monitors
Reviews Marathon.indd 62 7/1/08 16:46:37
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