Keith Edmier: The Fly, Farrah & Now An Exhibit At Bard College

Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett: Recasting Pygmalion

The most comprehensive exhibition to date of this celebrated American artist, Keith Edmier 1991–2007, is on view in the galleries of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, from Saturday, October 20, through Sunday, February 3, 2008.


above: keith edmier

A highlight of the exhibition is the CCS commission Bremen Towne, a full-scale recreation of Edmier’s childhood home. “Edmier’s work is always at the edge of the acceptable boundaries of artistic virtues and taste,” writes curator Tom Eccles, CCS Bard executive director, in the book that accompanies the exhibition.

Concurrently with Keith Edmier 1991–2007, the CCS Bard Hessel Museum presents, Exhibitionism: An Exhibition of Exhibitions of Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection.

This new installation of the Hessel Collection, curated by White Columns director Matthew Higgs, presents a series of exhibitions in each of the 16 galleries in the newly inaugurated Hessel Museum.

Below are images from Bard College's press release:



And below are pics and a review from the NY Times of this very exhibit:

From left, Artist Keith Edmier's "Beverly Edmier, 1967" (1998), "Sunflower" (1996), and "A Dozen Roses" (1998) are part of the exhibition at Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies.

"With a title like an epitaph, sculptures like wax museum effigies, and a full-scale 1970s ranch-house interior, as quiet as a chapel, at its center, this career retrospective of work by Mr. Edmier, an artist who has been exhibiting in New York since 1993 and who was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, is one of the more bizarre solo shows to come along in a while. In it, exacting craftsmanship has the chill of the mortician’s art. Period kitsch and personal recollection are inseparable. Memory is both a truth serum and embalming medium."
Read The Complete Review By Holland Cotter for the NY Times here.


Above: Keith building a replica of his childhood kitchen back in October, 2007

Above: the final installation as it appears in the show, jan. 2008

“Bremen Towne”
She stands like a guardian spirit near the front door of “Bremen Towne,” the full-scale reproduction of the interior of Mr. Edmier’s childhood home commissioned by Bard for the show. It looks like a tour de force of e-bay nostalgia shopping. But the artist, using family photographs and memories as cues, made or revamped almost everything in it — from kitchen appliances, to curtains, to a carved wood figure of a hooded monk that stands like a memento mori in the middle of the living room. Characteristically, in its reconstructed version, the monk is also a portrait of the artist’s father. Photo: Chris Kendall

Above: Installation view of “Bremen Towne” (2006-07), Photo: Chris Kendall

Mr. Edmier was born in Chicago in 1967 and grew up nearby in suburban Tinley Park. He was a formidable sculptor when he was barely into his teens, cooking up clay models for masks and prosthetic devices inspired by horror and monster films. During high school he made contact with special-effects makeup artists.

In 1985, Mr. Edmier moved to Los Angeles to work on films, among them David Cronenberg’s remake of “The Fly.” He also enrolled at California Institute of the Arts, where he had a formative immersion in the neo-conceptualist and appropriation art being grouped under the label of post-modernism. His stay there was short — a year — but it directed his career goals from popular film to art and prompted a relocation to New York City in 1990.


Above: “Beverly Edmier, 1967” (1998), Photo: Andy Keate

Above: detail of Beverly Edmier

The startling sculpture called “Beverly Edmier, 1967,” is another Madonna and Child image, one that takes Mr. Edmier even further back into his past. It’s a life-size figure, cast in translucent pink plastic, of his own pregnant mother carrying him as a fetus curled up in her transparent womb. Like much of Mr. Edmier’s art, it has many referential layers that connect it with larger histories.

Beverly’s seated pose echoes that of Abraham Lincoln, another Illinois resident, in the Lincoln Memorial. And she is dressed in a facsimile of the pink Chanel suit that Jacqueline Kennedy was wearing the day her husband was assassinated.

Keith's resin study for "Beverly" (below) was just auctioned off last month

Artist		Keith Edmier
Title		Beverly Edmier (study)
Year		1998 -
Medium		acrylic on resin
Size		14 x 6.8 x 9.1 in. / 35.6 x 17.2 x 23.2 cm.
Edition		2/6
Sale Of		Christie's South Kensington: Thursday, December 13, 2007 [Lot 33] Post War & Contemporary Art

Above: “Jill Peters” (1997), Keith Edmeir

“Jill Peters” (1997) is a full-length portrait of Mr. Edmier’s grade-school sweetheart as a virginal ghost of true loves past. Cast in snow-white polyvinyl, wearing white clothes and a luxuriant pale platinum wig, and smiling as she casts her eyes upward, she is a prepubescent idol with a Farrah Fawcett ’do, St. Jill of Perpetual Uplift. Humbert Humbert would have knelt at her Earth Shoes-clad feet. Photo: Lamay Photo

He's Friends With Farrah...


In 1977, a pinup poster of the actress in a bathing suit was a national best seller; the pre-adolescent Mr. Edmier had one on his bedroom wall. In 1998, he introduced himself to his childhood muse.


above: Farrah and Keith working on their mutual sculptures of one another.

Before she had had any thoughts of acting, Ms. Fawcett had been an art student, specializing in sculpture, at the University of Texas in Austin. Mr. Edmier invited her to return to her initial avocation and collaborate with him on a project. She accepted and, working together in a California studio, they made nude portraits of each other.


Above: Detail of Keith Edmier's piece of Farrah from a memorial in a sculptural group called “Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett, 2000.”

above: backside of Keith's sculpture of Farrah.


Above: And this is Farrah's sculpture of Keith from the same sculptural grouping,
Photo: Lamay Photo

A book has been published by Rizzoli on their collaboration, Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett: Recasting Pygmalion:

Keith Edmier and Farah Fawcett
Written by Dave Hickey
Pub Date: December 2002

Buy the book by clicking on the link below:

Artist		Keith Edmier
Title		The space between you and me (collab w/Farah Fawcett)
Year		2000 - 2001
Medium		color coupler print, mntd
Size		7.5 x 10.7 in. / 19 x 27.3 cm.
Edition		9/50
Misc.		Signed
Sale Of		Phillips, de Pury & Company New York: Saturday, April 8, 2006 [Lot 260] Saturday @ Phillips - Contemporary Art, 20-21st Century Design Art, Photographs, Jewelry

Read Rachel Taylor's profile of Mr. Edmier for Contemporary Magazine here.

“Keith Edmier 1991-2007” remains at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N. Y., (845) 758-7598, through Feb. 3.

Mr. Rogers Neighborhood On LSD: The paintings of Amy Bennett

I inadvertently stumbled upon Amy Bennett's work the other day and boy, am I glad I did. Now a new fan, I'd love to share with you this woman's unique take on suburban landscapes.


Above: Dig, Amy Bennett 2007, oil

Below are some images of Amy Bennett's work. Done in oils, her works have a surreal and almost photographic quality, until one looks closer and sees both the darker narrative and the craft.

What looks like a set of dollhouse furniture is actually an oil painting telling a story of what at first glance looks like Mr. Rogers neighborhood, but upon closer inspection is a revealing glimpse of the human condition.

Below is both the artist's statement as well as an interview which will give you far more insight into Amy's work than my amateur observations.

While Amy also paints interiors, I am far more fond of her aerial paintings and her 'dollhouse' bisected homes which is what I've opted to share with you here.


Above: Property Line by Amy Bennett


Above: Losing It


Above: Paying Respects


Above:name unknown


Above: Everything Passes


Above: I Am Begging You


Above: Send Us A Signal by Amy Bennett

AMY BENNETT - ARTISTS' STATEMENT:
In 2002 I began a series of aerial view paintings of apartments. Inspired by short stories, and game boards, I created floor plans to relate the dramas of residences in close proximity. As reference for each painting, I made model apartments from foam core, and furnished them with dollhouse miniatures. Over the past year, I have incorporated perspective and worked from a more normative point of view. My current series of paintings depict one family living in a modest home, isolated in a wooded landscape. I am working with common themes such as transition, coming of age, domestic responsibilities, and loss. I am interested in the awkwardness of a group of people trying to coexist and relate to one another, the fragility of relationships, and the uncertainty and anxiety of growing up. In the same way that we develop our concept of home, I have created these images, through memory, personal experience and imagination.

For this series, I designed, constructed and decorated a 1:12 scale wooden model with a removable roof and walls. Building the model prompts me to imagine the character of individual family members, as well as their relationships to each other in search of what it means to live in this house. My imagination fills the house with history, memories of significant events or moments, traditions, and daily rituals. I think: this is the room the sun floods every morning; this is the spot where the platter was thrown to the floor; this room used to be for sewing, but now there is a crib. While adjusting my model for each painting, I am considering the narrative role of order versus disarray, and the potential to make the condition of the house and arrangement of objects describe the occupants as well as consequences of incident. The model becomes a stage on which to develop the psychological implications of belonging to a particular family, with all of its dramas, struggles and familiar routines. Rather than illustrating these moments specifically, I attempt to invoke the feelings they elicit. I am exploring how distance between characters in compartmentalized spaces can create tension or a sense of tenderness, doubt, humor, or isolation.

One of my challenges is to invite the viewer to form his or her own connection and narrative. By removing a wall or ceiling, the viewer is privileged to explore a fictitious family’s private life, a home that is simultaneously cozy and unsettling. The house becomes a fishbowl, whereby the viewer may empathize with the occupants’ seemingly mundane existence.


Above: Throwing Fits


Above: Exposure


Above: Hail

Below is an interview with Amy Bennett by Jenny Ziomek for NY Arts Magazine:

Amy Bennett is a Brooklyn-based artist who builds dollhouse-sized models of neighborhoods to stir up her imagination and to begin to create intricate and detailed stories of the families within it. Her paintings are striking, allowing the viewer to take a look into compelling and often dark homes, and reflect an extremely well-polished craft.

Jenny Ziomek: Describe the process of your work from conception to execution.

Amy Bennett: At the moment, my primary interest is in the cumulative storytelling effect of my paintings, in creating a group of narratives that may overlap and intersect to give a sense of history to a fictional place. So, I begin with determining the setting. My current series is set in a rural/suburban, New England influenced neighborhood. There are a couple of big farmhouses, but the rest of the houses are more varied and appear to have developed on the subdivided land of the farmhouses. I made a seven-foot square model to paint from, complete with a dozen or so houses, cars, trees, fences and even telephone wires. The streetlights and houses light up.
I started making the neighborhood by collecting some model railroading materials, assembling house kits and making a couple of garages, and lots of trees. I laid out the houses on a big sheet of paper on the floor. I traced the layout onto the paper and transferred it to the landscape that I had sculpted out of Styrofoam. The model required quite a bit of time to assemble, but it also gave me time to really think about the dynamics of the neighborhood. As I created each property, I considered who lived there and developed rough character sketches for the residents. I jotted down some of the stuff I came up with, but other residences were unforgettable because they were based on people I've known or houses I've been in. One house might be based on my grandparent's last home, while another might be what I imagine their house was like when they were raising a family (so they're neighbors with younger versions of themselves), while another house might be loosely based on a family I read about in either a newspaper or a book. Regardless of where the initial inspiration comes from, the houses and occupants all become fictionalized so that I'm free to invent.
Each painting usually begins with a feeling or moment, and could belong to a sequence of images. I'll then try to set up my model in a way that best gets my idea across. Playing around with the model is key to helping me develop narratives and images. Often, the model surprises me with something better than the scene I initially imagined. Also, lighting usually plays a key role in achieving the right mood. I usually document this play with my digital camera and then look through all the different things I tried, to see which arrangement and which lighting works best. Afterward, I set up the model accordingly. On average, I spend about a month working on a painting. Once it's finished, I brush on layers of polymerized oil, sand it and a final coat creates a glass-like surface.


Above: Misgivings

Above: Salute To Water Bodies

JZ: Your work is rich in narrative content, how do you construct this narrative?

AB: Reading, paying attention to the news, listening to music and my own experiences all trigger images, and then I think, what happens next? What prompted this? How does this effect another character? While this is happening, what else is going on—in the next room, across the street? Then I have this narrative that I can try to depict through my model. I just have to be flexible enough to let my model influence the narrative, too.

JZ: I find it interesting that you construct three-dimensional worlds and then present them in a two-dimensional painting. Have you ever presented the two side-by-side? Have you ever used photography, either as a tool during your process or as a final product?

AB: I displayed my model house alongside the series of paintings I made from it at my first solo show in Chicago at the Linda Warren Gallery. I hoped it would give some insight into my process, but I think it was misinterpreted as an installation, as an artwork in itself. I think of the model as a still life. I also consider photography as a means to an end. I use it as a kind of sketching tool in exploring different arrangements, compositions and vantage points. Painting from the model is very slow and meditative, and I think it suits the quiet content of my work much better than photographing it. Plus, the challenge of translating the three-dimensional to the two-dimensional is one that I thoroughly enjoy.

JZ: You say in your artist statement that some of your work is inspired by the “uncertainty and anxiety of growing up.” What was your personal experience of growing up, and how does this play into your work?

AB: I grew up in Maine. My parents were public school teachers and I am a classic middle child, with two sisters. My personal experience definitely does inspire many images, but I'm a very private person and always feel compelled to fictionalize, alter or distort my experiences before I'm comfortable enough to use them in my work. In fact, just by transferring my experience onto the model, it becomes changed, more interesting and, somehow, less embarrassing.

JZ: How do you come up with your titles, and how do they play into the paintings?

AB: Often, the title comes right at the beginning, along with the initial idea for the painting. But, sometimes it's more difficult to pair an image with words. The paintings are specific scenes, but they are open to different interpretations, so I try to use titles that don't direct the read too much.

JZ: Many of your titles are about waiting: for example, Waiting, Waiting For You to Come Home and Hours Passing Slowly. Why have you chosen this as a theme in your artwork?

AB: I frequently depict dramatic situations, but I also find many mundane scenarios to be interesting and true. A lot of time is spent waiting, whether it's for a bus or the right person or for something else to happen. I think a lot of my paintings have that feeling, of being on the brink.

JZ: There is a definite theme of "home" in your paintings. Why is this a chosen topic of focus? Do you take any of your own experiences of home, either growing up or as an adult, and project them into your artwork?

AB: I have been setting my paintings in the home because it is where people let their guard down. Their public persona is shed in the privacy of their homes. Maybe it’s because I live in New York City, where our private space is so limited. I'm most interested in when the private becomes accidentally public and is exposed across lawns or overheard through walls.

JZ: Why have you chosen to render homes as plastic-looking and dollhouse-like?

AB: My narratives are fiction and are set in a fake world. The house/model becomes a stage on which to explore a psychological or emotional experience and the way people try to relate to one another. I'd like to emphasize realism and faithfulness to this kind of experience over the way things look. I am not documenting the reality of a specific place, but creating a place that the imagination can project itself onto. That's just what a dollhouse is for.

JZ: The perspective in your paintings (which is generally a bird’s eye view, if not outside of the home at a great distance) makes us, as viewers, feel separate from and almost voyeuristic towards the scenes that we are looking onto. Why have you chosen such a perspective?

AB: A bird's eye or distant view is like an omniscient narrator where the viewer/reader is privileged to more information than a more limited perspective would provide. By zooming out a bit, so that more of a scene is revealed, you get the sense that what you're seeing is just a small part of larger puzzle. By seeing the proximity of one home to another with an awareness of the various dramas and events that each has experienced, the viewer is invited to discover narrative connections and to empathize with the characters.

JZ: Where and when can we see your upcoming shows/events?

AB: I just had a show in LA at Richard Heller Gallery in January 2007. I'm currently working on a show for this September at Galleri Magnus Karlsson in Stockholm. My work can be seen online at www.amybennett.com.
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At present, Amy has a solo show in Stockholm:

BURIED
Solo Exhibition
August 30 - September 30, 2007

Galleri Magnus Karlsson
Fredsgatan 12
S-111 52 Stockholm
Sweden
+46 [0] 8 660 43 53
www.gallerimagnuskarlsson.com
info@gallerimagnuskarlsson.com

here are a few pieces in that show:




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You can also find Amy's Work at the following galleries:

Richard Heller Gallery

Linda Warren Gallery

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Not to be missed are two other wonderful painters who have their own unique style of painting suburbia:

Rick Monzon and his dreamy surreal suburbia

Danny Heller's Nightscapes of LosAngeles

Light & Loneliness: Edward Hopper's Work

Personally, I have always respected Edward Hopper. His masterful handling of light as well as his poignant subject matter and capturing of intimate moments has made me a lifetime fan.

Below is an art review of his retrospective at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.



Above: Cape Cod Morning by Edward Hopper

ART Review (NY Times)
By HOLLAND COTTER


BOSTON, April 30 — A certain slant of light was Edward Hopper’s thing. And he made it our thing, hard-wired it into our American brains: white late-morning light scraping across a storefront; twilight, plangent with heat and regret, settling over a city; slabs of late-night lamplight chilling the walls of Lonely Hearts Hotels everywhere.


Above: 11am by Edward Hopper


Hopper once said that, as an artist, the only thing he ever aspired to do was to paint “sunlight on the side of a house,” and that, in essence, is all he did. Is this an accomplishment weighty enough to support an “American master” title? Sometimes, yes; often, no, at least on the evidence of “Edward Hopper,” an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts here.


above: Hopper's Hotel Window

The show is billed as a retrospective, but it isn’t. Significant pieces of Hopper’s output are missing: the paintings done in Paris from 1906 to 1910; all but a few of his many drawings; and most of what he produced as a commercial illustrator in the long years before he became a star.

To some of us, Hopper was an illustrator from first to last, a just-O.K. brush technician, limited in his themes. His main gift was for narrative paintings with graphic punch and quasi-Modernist additives: Manet touches, de Chirico props. And like any shrewd storyteller, he knew the value of suspense. Reveal just so much of a plot — no more. Mystery keeps an audience hanging on.

Unfortunately, there’s not much suspense or mystery in this show, which travels to Washington and Chicago. Museums are risk-free zones these days, spooning up boilerplates of what audiences are expected to like. On the whole, “Edward Hopper” fills that bill too well. Still, it gets off to a strong start and comes to a striking close.



Above: Hopper's Ryder House


It opens with a single oil painting, “Hodgkin’s House,” done in 1928 when the 40-something Hopper, his career finally on a roll, was summering in Gloucester, Mass. In the picture, late (or very early) sunlight hits one side of a white clapboard house, leaving the rest of it in shadow.

There are no figures; none are needed. Illumination and architecture engage in an expressive exchange. The house, with its two high-arched windows, seems to greet the light with shy consternation, like a prim Victorian Danae startled by a shower of gold.

This is the Hopper Effect: the impression of everyday life touched with secular sanctity. And the show’s first gallery gives a good idea of how he developed it. In a 1908 painting of a locomotive stalled in a field, he suppresses anecdotal detail to make a prosaic scene inscrutably monumental, even a little sinister.

In the coarsely brushed “Summer Interior” (1909), the first of a long series of pictures of women in bedrooms, he introduces narrative ambiguity: is the seminude woman crouched by the bed hurt, embarrassed, at rest? And he turns light into an object: a sourceless rectangle of it sits on the floor like a Donald Judd box.


Above: Summer Interior


Light is inseparable from architecture in a 1913 stage set of a picture called “New York Corner, or Corner Saloon.” The mood they generate is the main character on that stage. All these elements would be combined in famous later paintings like “Nighthawks” (1942) — the show enshrines that one in a room labeled “Icons” — but the mechanics were in place three decades earlier.

After giving the initial impression of a restless artist who resisted settling into a groove, who might have gone this way or that, comes a long interruption in the form of galleries devoted to a lot of Gloucester watercolors and others done in Ogunquit, Me., through the 1920s.


Solitary souls, vacant spaces: Edward Hopper’s “Summertime” (1943).

The show seems to argue that in these pictures of sun-bleached lighthouses and village rooftops Hopper was trying to come to grips with depicting light. In fact, he had already done so a decade earlier in Paris. Anyway, the New England pictures are far from experimental. They’re blandly virtuosic tourist-brochure illustration, Chamber of Commerce Modernism.

Maybe watercolor was too easy for Hopper — he was good at it — and maybe the 1920s artist-colony summers were too relaxing. He needed resistance, and in the awkwardness of oil painting, the grit of the city, and the Great Depression, he got it. In the 1930s the work toughens up and turns strange.

In the country he tended to paint houses as if they were public monuments, from a respectful distance. In the city no distances are respected. Hopper’s eye is everywhere. He peeps through apartment windows, catches people undressed, depressed, lost in thought, just plain lost. He looks over shoulders, down women’s dresses.


Above: Hopper's House At Dusk

If Hopper’s rural work can be too simple, his city scenes can be fussily overcomplicated, illustrational in a different way. But when the balance is right, they’re great. In “House at Dusk” (1935), a woman silhouetted by light stares from a top-floor apartment window, unaware of the darkening park and glorious afterglow sky behind the building. She sees nothing; we see it all, from a God’s-eye view.

We’re back to light. If art reflects the sensibility of a time and a culture, it also creates that sensibility. Hopper’s light gave Depression-era Americans, and many others thereafter, a glamorous, even heroic image of themselves as solitary and tragic, persevering, deservedly nostalgic. Some people think he invented this, but he didn’t. American landscape painters were there before him.


Above: City Sunlight

Hopper grew up in Nyack, N.Y., just up the Hudson from Manhattan. From the bedroom window of his childhood home he had a panoramic view of the river. And in essential ways he is direct heir to the 19th-century Hudson River School tradition, particularly the elegiac work of Thomas Cole.

As the nation’s first “official” artist, Cole was probably expected to create Romantic images of a brave and optimistic New World at its dawning. What he actually painted was a vision of a golden age of innocence already past. His art is far less about hope than about fear: fear of change, fear of the future, fear of the unknown, fear of the brash, crass, will-do America bumping and screeching around him.

Hopper’s art is not so different. Technically, he is a Modernist, but without a drop of Modernism’s utopian rationality, confidence and breadth. He didn’t make a dystopian art, either, one that stakes out an alternative position, as Warhol would do. He went with anxiety and longing, and made them feel-good entertaining, like Hollywood films, which he both influenced and was influenced by.

Often his most ambitious paintings feel Hollywood-fake, overproduced, overwritten. The renowned “Second Story Sunlight” (1960) does. With its Thelma Ritter mother, sunbathing ingénue and light-touched roof peaks, it is a silly, stagy, symbolic affair. You have a sense that the plot, if there is one, isn’t worth wondering about.


Above: Hopper's Second Story Sunlight


It’s when Hopper lets light take over, assume the leading role, that the late paintings work. It does so again in “Morning Sun” (1952), in which a woman — Hopper’s wife, Jo, his principal model — sits in profile, in a pink slip, on a bed, staring out a window as light hits her pinched cheeks and raw-red hands.


Solitary souls, vacant spaces: Edward Hopper’s “Morning Sun”.

You can take the picture as just another piece of Hopper shtick, with soundstage spots, an actor in place, and a director shouting for silence on the set as a scene called “Sadness” starts. Or you can take all that out and just leave light breaking the world into squares and rectangles, dark and bright, exposing it, hiding it, before moving on.


“Sun in an Empty Room” (1963) is among works by that artist covering a quarter-century, opening Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

This is the essence, the only drama, of “Sun in an Empty Room,” the last painting in the show. Done in 1963, four years before Hopper’s death, it is what it says: an image of contained space. There’s a window; the trees outside it look wind-whipped, but you can’t hear the wind. Inside is all blank walls and wheat-and-honey-colored sunlight, the two things Hopper loved best and felt comfortable with. He doesn’t strain for a story here, or a sentiment, or skill, or completion, which all but the best of his art tries too hard for. Maybe that’s why this is the least gimmicky painting in “Edward Hopper,” and the only happy one, and the most lucid.

“Edward Hopper” opens on Sunday and runs through Aug. 19 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue; mfa.org. The exhibition travels to the National Gallery of Art in Washington (Sept. 16 through Jan. 21, 2008) and the Art Institute of Chicago (Feb. 16 through May 11, 2008).


Permalink to Ny Times Article

“Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making”

Art Review | 'Comic Abstraction'
Visions That Flaunt Cartoon Pedigrees By Roberta Smith
(reprinted from the NY Times with some additional images)

The trouble with too many museum theme shows is that they begin with a viable idea and, through lack of institutional commitment, curatorial imagination or old-fashioned connoisseurship, fail to fulfill their promise.

This untitled 1990 painting below by Michel Majerus is among the works in MoMA's new exhibition:


So it is with “Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making,” a sometimes perky but inoffensive and ultimately dispiriting exhibition of recent artistic endeavor at the Museum of Modern Art. Organized by Roxana Marcoci, curator of the department of photography, it brings together nearly 30 works in drawing, painting, sculpture, video and installation made over the last 16 years by 13 artists who borrow one way or another from comic strips, cartoons and animation.

The motor behind this show is a big idea: the lively and essential contamination of abstract art by popular culture that began with the Surrealists but has greatly expanded during the last 30 years. It could be argued that most new abstract art since the late 1970s has had comic aspects. After all, ironic self-awareness is one way that abstraction has dealt with the resurgence of representation and the splintering of the modernist trajectory.

A wall text outside the show’s first gallery lies in wait. It announces that the works on hand use the conventions of comics “not to withdraw from reality but to address perplexing questions about war and global conflicts, the loss of innocence and racial stereotyping.”


But in the end the works here are mostly cute, neat and perfectly pleasant, implying a view of contemporary art as mildly titillating but basically toothless entertainment. Thankfully there are some exceptions. For example, “Crazy Conductor,” a 1993 drawing on chalkboard by Gary Simmons, conveys the nasty racial caricature implicit in many animated cartoons. (Mr. Simmons’s 1996 “boom,” however, is simply a big, beautiful explosion — too close to its source, merely lifted without comment.)



Four paintings by Ellen Gallagher skewer Minimalism in general and Agnes Martin in particular with expanses of bug eyes and blubbery lips. At once gorgeous and barbed, these works are the most sustained and substantial efforts here, but their motifs are most potent in the smallest and earliest canvas; the others are elegant dilutions.



Sue Williams’s all-over paintings look similarly benign from a distance. Draw near, and you discover that her attenuated Pollock-like patterns roil with suggestions of body parts, bodily fluids and sexual couplings. Whether this payoff compensates for the emaciated effect of the work as a whole is debatable; it certainly lacks the punch of Ms. Williams’s nonabstract, savagely comical early feminist paintings, one of which appears in the catalog.

But otherwise too much here operates in some kind of vacuum, far from the madding crowd of ambition, recent art history, life or a deep engagement with the primary vehicle of visual experience, which is form. In little of it can you sense the force of a first-rate, profoundly engaged, here-for-the-duration artistic sensibility. This is because too many of the selections are early, sometimes promising work that never amounted to much, or are transitional, anomalous, derivative or tangential to the show’s theme.

In the case of Inka Essenhigh, Arturo Herrera and Julie Mehretu you have early works of limited promise that has so far not been fulfilled. In the case of Franz West and Polly Apfelbaum you have works that are charmingly whimsical but irrelevant to the show’s focus. Mr. West’s four small plaster and iron sculptures, called adaptives, are available for handling. Fun. “Blossom,” Ms. Apfelbaum’s stained-velvet Process Art floor piece, is named for one of the superheroic cartoon Powerpuff Girls and can therefore be construed as feminist. So what?



Like Ms. Gallagher, Philippe Parreno excerpts and repeats, but uncompellingly. His helium-filled Mylar “Speech Bubbles” from 1997 hover overhead, a dour, derivative meld of Claes Oldenburg and Yayoi Kusama plus Andy Warhol’s silver pillows. The caption rationalizes: They were once used as signs by protesters who wrote slogans on them.



Speech balloons also figure in Rivane Neuenschwander’s altered comic book pages, where they are blanked out with white (or occasionally blue) and the rest of the panels are bright monochrome colors. They provide some welcome if relatively pure visual intensity, regardless of what the label says about the cultural significance of the comics used. They might be better bigger, but then that would invite comparisons with Roy Lichtenstein, early Warhol and John Wesley.



Which is the problem with the efforts of Michel Majerus, a German artist who died in a plane crash at the age of 35 in 2002, especially if you factor in early Peter Saul and Albert Oehlen. A series of small canvases from 1996 have their comic moments, the best being a strange cross between an eye and an explosion. But the painterly fragments of images, words and letters of “Eggsplosion,” from 2006, could have been made in the 1950s or early ’60s. Best known for large, scrappy painted installations, Mr. Majerus clearly had talent, but not the time to find himself.



The megastar Takashi Murakami is represented by two paintings that feel like excerpts of his own work. “Cream” and “Milk” (seen below) are sparse, mural-size cartoon renderings of flung liquids that function best as backdrops to anime-inspired male and female figures that are present only in the catalog. Their markedly unabstract bodies are shown expelling the liquids implied by the paintings’ titles.


More comic installation than comic abstraction, Juan Muñoz’s “Waiting for Jerry” consists of the soundtrack of a “Tom and Jerry” animated cartoon: a cacophony of inferred chases, sneaks, skids, crashes, plops and general hysteria. Emanating from a lighted mouse hole cut in the old-fashioned molding of a small, dark room, it echoes throughout the show. The work is a refreshing anomaly, given the usual heavy-handed humanism of Mr. Muñoz’s figurative sculpture, but notice what engages you. I’ll bet it’s the appropriated soundtrack. Wonderfully complex, it bounces back and forth between descriptive and abstract, and represents the kind of concentrated thought and work that is missing from too much of this show.



“Comic Abstraction” would have benefited from more space, nerve and historical awareness. The catalog establishes no context for the origins of the comic in art, which gained speed with Pop Art. Also worth mentioning if not including in the show itself are artists like Mr. Oehlen and Carroll Dunham, both of whom are younger than Mr. West.

Especially pertinent is Mr. Dunham, whose automatist, Disneyesque excursions into the hormonal sublime, made in the 1980s and early ’90s, may be our moment’s richest, most disturbing, most perplexingly real works of comic abstraction. The efforts of several artists in this exhibition are nearly unimaginable without Mr. Dunham’s precedent.

Below is an example of Carroll Dunham's work:


Other artists whose work would have vitalized this show include Lucy McKenzie, Pipilotti Rist, Amy Sillman, Gary Hume, Josh Smith, Thomas Nozkowski, Chris Ofili, Monique Prieto, Joanne Greenbaum and, finally, Udomsak Krisanamis, whose work from the mid-’90s has a stand-alone power, even if it has yet to develop.

Beyond the big solo retrospectives that MoMA handles with expert aplomb, too many of the museum’s recent exhibitions have a veneer of political piousness that limits and shortchanges everything: art, artists, the public and the institution itself. In MoMA’s efforts to go beyond a formalist, linear view of modernism, the museum often seems to confuse sincere political intent with genuine, groundbreaking artistic quality.

No wonder it ends up showing shallow, label-dependent art rather than work that offers deeper, more contradictory encounters. Art becomes a kind of one-liner. The viewer looks a little, reads a label, says “I get it” and shuffles on. If you are new to art, you don’t know what you are missing. If you aren’t, you feel had.

“Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making” continues through June 11 at the Museum of Modern Art, (212) 708-9400.