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Craigie Horsfield – Slow Time and the Present

My Art Guide Press Release for "Slow Time and the Present" June, 2012

Craigie Horsfield new exhibition Slow Time and the Present conceives of different ideas and perceptions of history as not being the thing of the past, separated from our experience, but as the expression of a profound present, a deep present which we together engender. The exhibition traces a complex array of notions of relation and conversation that recur in Horsfield’s work, of the negotiation and the understanding of the individual and the community, of “slow time” and of the present, and of the nature of consciousness and the material world.

For the exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, Horsfield has created two large-scale works, using recently developed technology that transfers contemporary imagery into the historical medium of fresco and, on this occasion he has been working together with Andre Van Wassenhove for the preparation of data drawing from digital image material collected over a period of five years spent in Italy. The two new works Processione dei Gigli, Via Cocozza, Nola. June 2008 (2012) and At 99 Posse concert. Via Gianturco, Naples. February 2010 (2012), are the result of a collaboration with the artist Adam Lowe and his artists’ collective Factum Arte Madrid who are at the forefront of 3D facsimile production. These works are based on stills from films Horsfield made at “Festa dei Gigli” in Nola (Italy), and stills from a film made at a concert of the Italian group “99 Posse” in Naples.

The exhibition also includes three new tapestries conceived by Horsfield with his long time collaborators Marcos Luduena-Segre, and Roland and Christian Dekeukelaere at Flanders Tapestries in Belgium, The Arciconfraternity of Santa Monica, Chiesa SS. Annunziata. Sorrento, April 2010 (2012) and Above the Bay of Naples from Via Partenope, Naples, September 2008 (2012). The last tapestry, Broadway, 14th day, 18 minutes after dusk. New York, September 2001 (2012) has as its subject the site of Ground Zero shortly after September 11.

#Craigie Horsfield

Street Hustlers, in All Their Glamour and Grit

The New York Times by Ken Johnson June, 2012

In Paris in the mid-1950s the Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm (1918-2002) gravitated to the red-light district around the Place Blanche, where he was drawn to a subculture of cross-dressing young men, many of whom worked as prostitutes to earn enough money for sex-change operations. The stocky, middle-aged photographer with a beard and military haircut hung out with them for more than a decade and photographed them on the street at night and in bars and hotel rooms with a coolly affectionate eye. In 1983, Strömholm’s noirish black-and-white pictures of his sexually ambiguous subjects were published in a volume that has since become a classic of book-length photographic essays, and it helped establish him as an eminence of post-World War IIphotography. “Les Amies de Place Blanche” at the International Center of Photography takes its title from that tome and presents 40 of the more than 140 pictures that appeared in it. An expanded edition of the hard-to-find first edition — with new essays, letters, contact sheets and autobiographic reminiscences — has recently been published. It is a fascinating time capsule.

#Christer Strömholm

Opening: Craigie Horsfield at Kunsthalle Basel, June 9th

Craigie Horsfield: Slow Time and the Present June 10 - August 26, 2012 Kunsthalle Basel Opening: Saturday, June 9, 7pm Introduction by Adam Szymczyk, Director of Kunsthalle Basel

Guided tours through the exhibition: Each Sunday at 3pm Further events of the education department: Thu, 21.06., 16.08. and 23.08., 1pm: Art break - a short guided tour for lunch Sun, 16.06., 3pm: Guided tour in English Sun, 19.06., 3pm: I Spy with My Little Eye! - Guided tour for children

The exhibition is generously supported by LUMA Foundation. With the support of Stanley Thomas Johnson Stiftung. Steinenberg 7 - CH-4051 Basel Tel +41 61 206 99 00 - Fax +41 61 206 99 [email protected]://www.kunsthallebasel.ch Opening hours: Tue/Wed/Fri 11am-6pm · Thu 11am-8.30pm · Sat/Sun 11am-5pm Admission: CHF 10.-/6.- incl. S AM Swiss Architecture Museum

#Craigie Horsfield

Six Questions for Mira Schor About Text and Image

Hyperallergic by Hrag Vartanian May, 2012

Painter, author and critic Mira Schor’s current show at Marvelli Gallery delves into the world of language. The works on linen and paper chart a world where the individual appears in a form of stasis, holding a book or laptop, looking at things — windows, paintings, screens — and generating rectangles (and the occasional oval) which seem to speak, label, think and even dream.

All the works are rather small — the drawings are often larger than the paintings — and they appear to meditate on the state of the artist and intellectual, both labels that fittingly describe Schor.

The show is titled Voice and Speech, but there’s an erie silence to these works. The artist’s hand is alway present and the paint is often treated like ink, flowing with a dark contrast across washes of paint, defining space and and giving each rectangle it’s own character.

What fascinated me about the show was her drive to collide language with imagery to create something new. Her cursive text tells a story but so do her characters. It’s a word of solitary contemplation, with words, with pictures, all coming together and making something new.

#Mira Schor

NEWT NO MORE

The New Yorker by Elissa Curtis April, 2012

For half a century, Larry Fink has captured unguarded moments in often highly orchestrated events: a wayward glance amid a star-studded Hollywood party; the quiet contemplation before a grand debut; the brush of a hand or nervous fidgeting under a tablecloth. And so in January, we commissioned Fink to cover Newt Gingrich’s run for the Republican Presidential nomination, and sent him to Florida to join Gingrich as he stumped across the state. Though Fink’s politics could not have been more divergent from those of the subject he was hired to cover, he put aside his ideological differences to cover the campaign as he saw it: in the gestures, the off-moments, and the relationships between the candidate and his supporters. “I am a merry maker just seeking to play within the midst of the energy of world events,” Fink told me.

As Gingrich prepares to bow out of the race, we take a look back at his campaign through this legendary photographer’s eye.

#Larry Fink

Mira Schor: 'Voice and Speech'

The New York Times by Roberta Smith April, 2012

Mira Schor’s small, sharp, quirky paintings have been thorns in the side of the medium for more than three decades now. Sparely cartoonish in style, at least partly feminist in intent and always linguistically inclined, they can evoke the elliptical eyeglass paintings of Michael Hurson and the prankish, word-punning early paintings of Neil Jenney that were grouped, in the long-ago 1970s, in a short-lived trend called New Image Painting.

Ms. Schor’s latest efforts are among her best yet. Abjuring largeness and portentous brushwork as before, these works tackle more directly the immense subject of creativity itself and diagram it in ways both pointedly humorous and expansive.

Their main character is a seemingly female stick figure whose rectilinear head could symbolize a blank canvas, page, screen or thought balloon. She appears against robustly worked monochromes of white, yellow or green that are equipped with occasional doors and windows, and imply rooms, studios or gardens of one’s own, available for private cultivation. The single red painting, a lightly hallucinatory work titled “The Song of the Cardinal,” suggests nature as a source of inspiration.

#Mira Schor

Mira Schor: ‘Voice and Speech’

Artforum by Britany Salsbury April, 2012

Since the late 1970s, Mira Schor has integrated text into works that interrogate the formal and theoretical concerns of artistic production. Her current show could be a summation of this long-term project, as the paintings and drawings on view metaphorically depict transitions from thought to action, and from process to product. In many of the works, figures are seen reclining in space as if caught in reverie. Often the figure holds a book, which underscores the scholarly, meditative nature of the moment captured. Rendered in loosely drawn layers of lines, these barely-there surrogates for the artist are situated between words—such as VOICE and SPEECH, as well as THE SELF, THE WORK, and THE WORLD—in interconnected shapes suggesting the thought process.

The feminist concerns that so critically inform Schor’s output manifest most clearly in a small group of paintings that transfer the exhibition’s overarching theme of interiority to a broader social space and reinforce a connection between the personal and the political. The Dreams of All of Us (all works cited, 2012) shows a sleeping figure surrounded by the words of the title. In this instance, a fusion of individual and community implies the possibility of enacting social transformation, and this bond reinforces the importance of collectivity and empowerment within Schor’s practice. The work is hung alongside three others of identical size and similar composition; these four pieces, taken together, can be seen as a sequential progression into and out of darkness that culminates with the final yellow work, This Is the Future. In this work, the shapes that held words in the first painting have become incandescent and illuminate the awakened figure who now reads a book while assuming the reclining position featured in other paintings. The sequence resembles a summation of the political concerns in Schor’s oeuvre, namely the individual as an ideal site for the germination of resistance.

#Mira Schor

27 Questions for Artist and Critic Mira Schor

Artinfo by Chloe Wyma April, 2012

Name: Mira Schor Age: 61 Occupation: Artist and writer City/Neighborhood: New York — recently returned to childhood home on Upper West Side.

What project are you working on now?

I want to follow up on some ideas that came up in the last series of paintings I finished this winter for my current show at Marvelli Gallery, “The Dreams of All of Us” series. The last one is an intense cadmium yellow light and I called it “This Is the Future.” I was thinking of the Occupy movement and chose to give the series (which follows a collective dreaming sleeper through the darkest night) an optimistic outcome, but the title also refers to the immediate future of my work: I want to use more intense color. I have a show planned for CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles next year and I think it would be great to have vibrant, intense hues for that show, but I also may end up following the path of darkness, so I can’t be sure where the work will go. Mainly I just want to re-immerse myself in the rhythm of working. I also hope to get back to writing for my blog, “A Year of Positive Thinking,” which I had to put on hold while I prepared for the show while also teaching.

This is your first solo show in New York in some time. How has your work developed since your “Book/s of Pages” in 2010?

“Book/s of Pages” included big digital prints made from very hi-res scans of the small notebook drawings that are an important part of my process. It’s all part of my quest for one of the holy grails of painting, how to bring the freedom, spontaneity, and investigative spirit of drawing into the sculptural materiality of paint.

Many of the paintings feature a little stick figure reading or sleeping. Who is this figure and what does she or he represent?

The figure is a sketchily drawn avatar of myself, wearing glasses because at this point my reading glasses are so much an organic part of my head that I sometimes forget to take them off when I turn out the light at night. Interesting that you ask “he or she” because the figure is indeed barely gendered, even barely embodied: when I formulated an agenda for my work when I was in my early twenties, it was to bring the experience of living inside a female body — with a mind — into high art in as intact a form as possible. I’m so glad I was so prescient in adding “with a mind,” because once woman moves past nubile youthfulness, her body is of no interest to representation and maybe even to herself, so I assured myself a lifetime of possibilities. My avatar is a thinking person walking around, sleeping, reading, looking. She is a scholar, an ancient philosopher, and an eight-year old girl vividly perceiving the world’s beauties and its terrors.

#Mira Schor

Email: a note to Mira Schor

Two Coats of Paint by Sharon Butler April, 2012

Inspired by Raphael Rubenstein's approach to the Artseen section of The Brooklyn Rail, EMAIL is a new section featuring short posts based on notes written to other artists.

Hi Mira,

I stopped by your show on Saturday and particularly love the white painting on the wall near the office: esp. the relative chalkiness of the paint, the visible decision-making around the feet, and the whoosh of..whatever that is (!) going through the windows. The tension between text and image as well as the small scale successfully address the urge to make work that's personal, political and conceptual (all at once) that you talked about during your lecture at American University. Sometimes words, especially for writer-artists, are so important to the process, they can't be eliminated--even in a medium as visual as painting. But, interestingly, I find the pieces with faint or no text the most compelling...and yet, they need to be seen alongside the text-ier ones for the lightness (and absence) to be as powerful. That thin, yellow-y tracing paper is a perfect choice for the ink studies in the backroom--the flimsiness is intriguing...and lovely. Congratulations on a fine show. But perhaps I should be posting this to the blog...?

Anyway, please tell your students I enjoyed visiting their studios on Friday--thanks for the invitation. I will print and sign the PDF and put it in the mail today or tomorrow.

All best,

Sharon

#Mira Schor

Mira Schor Reclaims Voice, Speech and Writing for Painting

The Huffington Post by Roger Denson April, 2012

There seems to be something structurally incongruent if not absurdly wrong with an analogy between painting and the human voice, even more so between painting and speech. Comparing an instrument of sound and the collective faculty for shared, spoken language with a manipulation of visual, formal components built up into graphic signs is apt to be riddled with unbridgeable voids of difference. And yet Mira Schor, a prominent New York critic-painter for the past three decades, has made an alleged correspondence of voice, speech and painting the thematic center and motivating ethos for her latest series of paintings, all of which she has compiled under the coyly taunting title, Voice and Speech.

#Mira Schor

Night Dark Night

Culture Catch by Bradley Rubenstein April, 2012

Mira Schor: Voice and Speech Marvelli Gallery Through April 28, 2012

From the Muses of Helicon, let us begin our singing, that haunt Helicon's great and lofty mountain, and dance on soft feet around the altar of the mighty son of Kronos. This from Hesiod's Theogony. "Night bore hateful Doom and dark Fate and Death, She bore Sleep, and she bore the Tribe of Dreams...."

"We live as we dream," wrote Joseph Conrad, "alone." Mira Schor's recent exhibition at Marvelli, Voice and Speech, makes a compelling argument against Conrad's existentialist notions with paintings that are interrogations of thinking, speaking, writing and, of course, the act of painting.

In this exhibition of recent paintings, Schor explores the concepts of "voice" and "speech" in contemporary politics and art theory, inspired by an idea put forward in Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau's theme is that there exists a knowledge that precedes theory and which retains "voice" even when "speech" attempts to subsume it. It is the knowledge that causes the city dweller to inscribe living patterns of usage onto the fixed grid of the planned city; it's the knowledge of the folkloric, of craft. He writes, "In turn, 'the voice' will also insinuate itself into the text as a mark or a trace, an effect of a metonymy of the body...a transitory figure, an indiscreet ghost, a 'pagan' or 'wild' reminiscence in the scriptural economy, a disturbing sound from a different tradition, and a pre-text for interminable interpretive productions."

#Mira Schor

The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Won't Want to Miss

Art in America by AiA staff March, 2012

Craigie Horsfield at Marvelli, through Mar. 24

Making their New York debut, Craigie Horsfield's recent mural-size tapestries are as astonishing technically as they are intellectually evocative. Playing with notions of the audience and how it views a work of art, these circus images are made of countless strands of wool fiber in a textile factory in Belgium under the artist's supervision. The lush black-and-white surfaces of these pieces correspond to the dense black surfaces Horsfield achieves in his large photos, a selection of which are on view in a side gallery.

#Craigie Horsfield

Craigie Horsfield on the Process of Tapestry Making

The British artist Craigie Horsfield photographs people, places and objects around him, his wife, friends, fragments of interiors and street scenes. The themes and style are simple, classic and timeless. The texture of the pictures are sensual and charcoal black. Currently some of his photographs are being produced as tapestries by traditional weavers in the Flanders region. As of October 8, they are in a solo exhibition at the Muhka. CobraTV takes a look at this delicate and painstaking process.

Mira Schor on Recipe Art

Mira Schor is a painter and writer living in New York City. Her honors include awards in painting from the Guggenheim and Pollock-Krasner Foundations, and the 1999 College Art Associations Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism. She teaches in the MFA Program of the Fine Arts Department at Parsons The New School for Design.

Schor is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists Writings, Theory, and Criticism (both from Duke University Press) and of M/E/A/N/I/N/G. Plus her new book, A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life.

#Mira Schor

Mira Schor - 500 Words

Artforum as told to Lauren O'Neill-Butler May, 2010

Recognized for her contributions to painting theory and to feminist art history, the painter and writer Mira Schor has a new book available from Duke University Press. Here she discusses A Decade of Negative Thinking and her new blog, A Year of Positive Thinking.

AM I A NEGATIVE THINKER, AS THE TITLE OF MY BOOK SUGGESTS? I don’t think so, although it may seem that way because I speak out when I suspect that other people are just drinking the Kool-Aid. It’s necessary to dig beneath press-release culture, and not just take the promotional sound bite as gospel and let it go viral into art discourse. So I decided to give myself the test or the experiment of A Year of Positive Thinking. There are so many things that I love in art, film, art history, and political history, which help me to be an artist; I really want to share that part of my experience.

I’ve been doing a lot on Facebook, posting links to things I think are beautiful, funny, moving, inspiring, while venting on various political issues that make me angry. The blog will be a battle between the two sides of my personality, maybe like Cassandra and Pollyanna. Cassandra tells truths no one wants to hear. But it’s good to keep in mind that Pollyanna actually does the same thing: She’s not at all the sweet, cloying kind of character we think of when we use the name in a disparaging way; instead she’s more like a realistic, grounded character in a Kurosawa movie, albeit via Disney—she confronts with a generous curiosity the repressed private griefs of the inhabitants of the little town she has come to live in, as an orphan.

#Mira Schor

MIRA SCHOR at CB1

Art in America by Constance Mallinson April, 2011

LOS ANGELES Mira Schor once described her use of handwriting as something that “would allow me to paint paint.” In “Paintings from the Nineties to Now,” a small survey that ranged from her signature word and punctuation pieces to recent cartoonish narratives, Schor revealed what “painting paint” involves. In her 2009 book A Decade of Negative Thinking, Schor—a writer as well as a painter—prescribed a “modest painting” that emerges not from supersized career goals or a desire for mastery but from the sheer enjoyment of the medium, with its attendant rigors and ambitions. Her own practice aspires to the small, intimate and personal.

Schor’s word paintings are characterized by linguistic playfulness and elasticity. A complex synergy arises from the conjunction of language and abstract gesture. Allusions to variously hued skin, voluptuous folds and juicy orifices merge with the words and punctuation marks—loaded, humorous and poetic by turn. War Frieze IX (1992), a multipart, 10-foot-long section from a 200-foot-long work concerning the Gulf War, demonstrates Schor’s early fusion of words and paint, as well as the importance to her of feminism, which has informed her practice into the present. Issuing from a breast on one end and a phallus attached to an ear on the other, a red liquid stream outlined in squiggly pubic hairs spells out the word “undue” in cursive. The pink, impastoed, fleshlike ground bears the word like a tattoo. In the Gulf War context, “undue” could describe excessive force; but, given Schor’s predilection for double entendres, it also implies “undo,” as milk morphs into blood, the nurturing breast undone (presumably) by the weaponlike phallus. In Sign (2005), the title word is interlaced with Cézannesque swatches of green, beige and yellow paint. Schor’s art-historical roots are manifested in the work’s references to cubistic landscape, graphic design and, in the overall composition, a languorous Matisselike nude.

#Mira Schor

Four Artists Featured in Arts Colloquia Series

College of Arts and Sciences at American University By Steven Dawson February, 2012

Vincent Van Gogh had his canvas; Auguste Rodin had his bronze; Diego Rivera had his wall. Many of history’s most famous artists are known for their use of one medium through which they create their art. But sometimes an artist chooses to share a certain idea or story through multiple mediums. This thought is the foundation for American University’s Spring Arts Colloquia Series, Broadly Speaking: Working Across Disciplines.

This series of talks will bring four artists to AU whose work is not limited to one discipline. They express their ideas and passions in a way that allows the viewer to focus on the concept of the art rather than the medium.

One such artist is Mira Schor, who will speak at 6:00 p.m. in the Abramson Family Recital Hall in the Katzen Arts Center on February 7. Schor, who teaches in the MFA program at Parsons The New School for Design, is a political artist whose work includes painting, drawing, and writing. Her artistic style is based on language. “I’m very interested in bringing actual handwriting into the painting, mixing the two languages, art and speech,” says Schor. Some of her work has a cartoon-like quality to it. One series of paintings depicts a figure, which Schor considers an avatar of herself, carrying a book. The figure confronts different words in the paintings, which serve as an exploration of issues in the world. “They are cartoons about art and cartoons about life,” Schor says.

#Mira Schor

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