Rust on the Brain
A friend told me about photographer and painter Charlotta Janssen, image above left, and I was most intrigued by her working methods. She paints from old photographs in in a color palette limited to black, white, aqua and grey iron. Once the piece is finished, she rusts it and the colors change and bleed into each other. Her next show is August 8 at Boltox Gallery on Shelter Island, if you happen to be in those parts.
Then I came across close up shots (image detail top, above Janssen’s Jones’ Family Car) from Richard Serra’s 2007 retrospective at MoMA that really captured the patina of the steel slabs he works with. To encourage oxidation, or rust, sprinklers are sometimes directed at the large slabs of steel he uses in his sculpture. Natural weathering of his outdoor installations creates the same effect, but it is one I’ve failed to notice when wandering amid his gigantic creations concerned with the space and form.
Rust is such an odd thing to work with, rather than protect works from, and it creates a really rich palette. I’m so intrigued by the idea of paint that rusts–anybody know anything about that? Or how else rust is used?
In & Out of Amsterdam at MoMA
Amsterdam in the 1970s functioned as a hub for Conceptual artists, MoMA’s thorough, enlightening new exhibition documents. Old exhibition posters lead you down the hall into rooms of slide projectors and photographs. For me, it drew connections between various familiar and unfamiliar artists. For example, this wall:
is not Sol Le Witt, but by Lawrence Weiner, or at least according to his directions. So which came first, the Weiner or the Sol?
All the art felt dated, and the exhibition felt like a collection of excavated fossils brought out for study at the Natural History Museum. Partly the concepts have been absorbed into mainstream contemporary art, so that a video of a chorus singing doesn’t have the same effect it once would have and Gilbert and George’s living art is remembered with nostalgia.
Personally, I found it hard to pay so much attention to artifacts that lacked real intellectual or visual interest. For all that I found certain pieces cool or neat, I never really felt engaged. That doesn’t diminish the scholarly and historical value of the exhibition, and it’s quite possible I’m not familiar enough with the material to get it, but I found it a challenging exhibition to really enjoy. Maybe any thorough exhibition of conceptual art is bound to be, in my case at least, in one ear–
Photograph of exhibition wall [ears mine].
–and out the other.