The FLAG Art Foundation

The FLAG Art Foundation is a non-profit exhibition space for contemporary art in New York . Visit our website for more information.

[theflagartfoundation]

Though two figures are depicted in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s The Flavor and the Intent, 2015, their bodies are intertwined in such a manner that it’s nearly impossible to distinguish which body is which, save for the hair on their two separate heads,  joined together in a kiss. While Ojih Odutola believesdrawing is composed of “marks that are made to delineate and create singularities within an image”[1] , this piece pushes the boundaries of mark making where a psychedelic, mosaic pattern wavers throughout the two figures, unifying them. By  utilizing a grisaille color palette, Ojih Odutola demonstrates the various textures, tones, and shades that can be created with just pencil and marker. Rather than focusing on the contours and precise linework that is traditionally associated with drawing, she suggests alternative visual cues such us the layering of tones and spatial recognition to help viewers navigate, and also get lost within, the work.

This spotlight on the ‘otherness’ of The Flavor of Intentspans deeper than just the piece’s formal qualities. By avoiding exactness of both color and form, Ojih Odutola  both removes and speaks to the context of race and skin color. The variances of tone demonstrate that there is no one exact definition of ‘blackness.’ Without the direct association of color, Ojih Odutola explains, “you can move into places you never thought you could go or, at least, those places you never considered, which, ironically, leads you back to race, begging the question of why we have such limited perceptions in the first place.”[2]

-S.C.

Image:Toyin Ojih Odutola, The Flavor of Intent, 2015, Marker and pencil on paper, 57 ¾ x 41 15/16 inches

Text: [1] Emory Lopiccolo, “Toyin Ojih Odutola’s “Of Context and Without” at Jack Shainman,” on whitewall.art,  2016. https://www.whitewall.art/art/toyin-ojih-odutolas-of-context-and-without-at-jack-shainman

[2] Emory Lopiccolo, “Toyin Ojih Odutola’s “Of Context and Without” at Jack Shainman,” on whitewall.art,  2016. https://www.whitewall.art/art/toyin-ojih-odutolas-of-context-and-without-at-jack-shainman

Flavor of Intent, 2015 is included in Drawn Together Again at The FLAG Art Foundation from February 23-May 18, 2019.

[theflagartfoundation]

“Ingres transposed the theme of the mythological nude, whose long tradition went back to the Renaissance, to an imaginary Orient. This work, his most famous nude, was commissioned by Caroline Murat, Napoleon’s sister and the queen of Naples. Here, Ingres painted a nude with long, sinuous lines bearing little resemblance to anatomical reality, but rendered the details and texture of the fabrics with sharp precision. This work drew fierce criticism when it was displayed at the Salon of 1819.” [1]

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“In the late 70s Pettibone also made Photorealist combine paintings, basing the juxtapositions of favored images on visual or conceptual rhymes. The shapely body of Clay Regazzoni’s Ferrari, for example, proves a seductive counterpoint to Ingre’s Grande Odalisque. Images of goblets, teapots, Playboy nudes, old master paintings, necktie patterns, Picasso drawings, and Duchamp readymades are united, inserted, and sometimes overlapped, all fodder for combine compositions.” [2]

Image:

Richard Pettibone. Ingres, ‘Grand Odalisque’, 1814; and Clay Regazzoni’s Ferrari after Winning the U.S. Grand Prix at Long Beach California, 1976, 1976, oil on canvas. 7 7/8 x 12 1/8 inches.

Text: [1] Carol Ockman, “A Woman’s Pleasure: The Grande Odalisque”, in Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies. Retracing the Serpentine Line, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 33-65., https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/une-odalisque.  

[2] Michael Duncan, “A Snow Shovel is Nice: The Works of Richard Pettibone,” in Ian Berry and Michael Duncan, Richard Pettibone: A Retrospective, Skidmore, New York: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2005, 8.

Ingres, ‘Grand Odalisque’, 1814; and Clay Regazzoni’s Ferrari after Winning the U.S. Grand Prix at Long Beach California, 1976 is included in Richard Pettibone: Endless Variation at The FLAG Art Foundation from October 27, 2018-January 19, 2019.

[theflagartfoundation]

MATCHBOX WITH A FLY IN IT

Shadow box Music box Pill box A box which contains a puzzle A box with tiny drawers, Navigation box Jewelry box Sailor’s box Butterfly box Box stuffed with souvenirs of a sea voyage Magic prison An empty box

[1]

_

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) could not draw, paint, or sculpt, and yet is considered one of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century. From the late 1920s until his death in 1972, Cornell roamed the streets of New York City—a city he would never venture far from—scouring its used bookstores, flea markets, and junk shops. “My work was a natural outcome of my love for the city,” he said. One day in 1931 he saw some compasses in one shop window and some boxes in the next, and it occurred to him to put them together. The range of found items in his L’Égypte de Mlle Cléo de Mérode cours élémentaire d’histoire naturelle, constructed in 1940, includes the following: Doll’s forearm, loose red sand, wood ball, German coin, several glass and mirror fragments, 12 cork-stopped bottles, cutout sphinx head, yellow filaments, 2 intertwined paper spirals, cut-out of Cléo de Mérode’s head, cutout of camels and men, loose yellow sand, 6 pearl beads, glass tube with residue of dried green liquid, crumpled tulle, rhinestones, pearl beads, sequins, metal chain, metal and glass fragments, threaded needle, red wood disc, bone and frosted glass fragments, blue celluloid, clear glass crystals, rock specimen, 7 balls, plastic rose petals, three miniature tin spoons for a doll house. [2]

-- Image: Top: Box construction. 11.9 x 27.1 x 18.4 cm (closed). The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman Photo The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman. Photography: Quicksilver Photographers, LLC. © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015.

Text: [1] Poem from Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy. New York: New York Review Books, 1992. [2] Passage from Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy. New York: New York Review Books, 1992.

[theflagartfoundation]

The origins of Ellsworth Kelly’s Rivers series can be traced to the time he spent in Paris between 1948-54, where he first began exploring the effects of light and shadow on the surface of water. Kelly’s earliest ‘river’ works, Light Reflected on Water, 1950, and Seine, 1951, set the tone for his continued use of geometric abstraction as a means of capturing, reinterpreting, and distilling the most essential components of the natural phenomena he saw in the world.

Created more than 50 years later, Kelly’s Rivers series (2002-05) marks the culmination of this career-long fascination: “The River and River II, each printed on paper and mounted on aluminum panels bolted a few inches off the wall; The River (State), which is printed on paper alone and traditionally framed; and the States of the River—each of the eight lithographic plates used for the series printed individually and given the name of a major world river. In the Rivers series, Kelly, remarkably, merged the large scale of his paintings, the sculptural concerns of his reliefs, an interest in gestural surfaces, the techniques and poetics of chance, and his profound and abiding relationship to nature.”1

__

Image: Top: Ellsworth Kelly. Light Reflected on Water, 1950. Ink on paper. Bottom: Ellsworth Kelly. The Mississippi: States of the River, 2005.  Lithograph

Text: [1] Website. Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Ellsworth Kelly Prints. 2013.

[theflagartfoundation]

“Ellsworth visited and revisited Belle-Île throughout his life. The last and only time I accompanied him was in 2005 when he was very much involved with [Claude] Monet’s paintings of the region, which he had seen in the catalogue raisonné. We went to Belle-Île so he could draw the same rock formation that Monet captured there in 1886. In the hotel where we were staying, there was a book that featured all the artists who had painted on Belle-Île and there was a painting by [Henri] Matisse. It turned out that Ellsworth has chosen one of the exact spots—the same cropping of the space between the rocks that Matisse painted in 1905. Ellsworth was dumbfounded.”

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 Located off France’s north west coast, Belle-Île is the largest of Breton Islands.  Populated by 5,000 year-round residents, the secluded island’s quaint villages and dramatic coastline have long-served as a haven for those looking to escape city life. It was here, in 1886, that Claude Monet began his planned tour of Brittany; a tour left incomplete as a two-week stay in the village of Kervilahouen turned into a two-month residency. Enraptured by the ever-changing weather and the island’s natural beauty, Monet made 39 paintings over ten weeks on the Côte Sauvage. He explained in a letter to artist Gustave Caillebotte that, “[…]I am in a wonderfully wild region, with terrifying rocks and a sea of unbelievable colours; I am truly thrilled, even though it is difficult, because I had got used to painting the Channel, and I knew how to go about it, but the Atlantic Ocean is quite different.” (1)

Also visiting the island in 1886, Australian impressionist painter John Peter Russell encountered Monet painting en plein air atop a coastal cliff.  Russell was so inspired by Monet’s seascapes that he decided to set up his very own studio on Belle-Île.  Completed in 1888, his home and workspace (named Le Chateau de l’Anglais by the locals) served as host to a rotating cast of artists for the next twenty years.  Notable guests included Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse, the latter of whom spent two summers as a pupil of Russell’s learning color theory and capturing the same landscapes that inspired Monet before him.  

 -- 

Image: Left: Henri Matisse. Rochers à Belle-Ile, 1897, oil on canvas. 28.8 x 23.5 inches. Middle: Ellsworth Kelly. Port Coton, Belle-Ile, 2005, graphite on paper. 24.5 x 19.5 inches. Right: Claude Monet. Les Rochers de Belle-Ile, la Côte Sauvage, 1886, oil on canvas. 25.5 x 32 inches. 

Text: Top: Shear, Jack “In Conversation with Jack Shear” Interview with The FLAG Art Foundation. January 2018 Bottom: FLAG [1] Letter from Monet to Gustave Caillebotte 1886. From the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.

Ellsworth Kelly’s Port Coton, Belle-Ile, 2005 is included in Ellsworth Kelly: Black & White Works, on view at The FLAG Art Foundation February 23 – May 19, 2018.

[theflagartfoundation]

I found myself at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, walking around a giant van Gogh retrospective. After what felt like an eternity of innumerable self-portraits, lost in the infinite angst-oozing chasms that were Vincent’s eyes, I said, “Hey, I want to do that too!” I could not just do a picture of me looking sad painted in a funny style; it simply wouldn’t be the same any more. It wasn’t until I put the problem in the context of the Logos that it clicked. What is a self-portrait, anyway? How much do van Gogh’s self-portraits actually tell us about him? And what exactly constitutes our notion of identity? We wake up in the morning and select our individuality from a finite catalogue of ready-made possibilities: this sporty but economical five-seater comes in six variations of earth tone with hatchback optional; that “relaxed fit” comes with either “button fly” or “zipper front”; which alpine-mood-dripping advertising campaign for bottled water pulls your chain correctly? Maybe somewhere in this circumscribed liberty of obvious, eccentric, contradictory, and choiceless choices we can pinpoint an individual. “Yes, I am a macrobiotic birdseed-swallowing disciple of the Marlboro Man, I like my liquor ‘rot gut’ and my TV highbrow, I wear American yokel underwear in icy Bauhaus furniture and I drive a crappy French car. Who am I?” I certainly believe these logo self-portraits go as far in locating and describing an identity as the van Gogh’s at the Met, but one has to ask, “What about the passion?” [1]

Image: Top: Ashley Bickerton. Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles), 1987-88, synthetic polymer paint, bronze powder and lacquer on wood, anodized aluminum, rubber, plastic, fomica, leather, chrome-plated steel and canvas. 89 x 69 x 15 ¾ in.

Image: Bottom: Vincent van Gogh. Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (obverse: The Potato Peeler), 1887, oil on canvas. 16 x 12 ½ in.

[1] A quote by Ashley Bickerton from Ashley Bickerton, published in 2011 by Other Criteria, London

Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles) is included in Ashley Bickerton’s first U.S. survey on view at the FLAG Art Foundation September 23-December 16, 2017.

[theflagartfoundation]

"You often times use this sort of obscure starting point and you just build and build and build from there. And this was very very very loosely based on Jeff’s Three Ball Equilibrium tank. It’s a family I often do families. Families keep reoccurring through the work. And this is just how three individuals—the father, the mother, and the daughter—all equilibrate themselves as actual living biomass in an unfriendly natural macrocosm… Their busy balancing themselves. Their balancing their biomass, their skeletons, their psyches in an unfriendly natural macrocosm. They all have their way of doing it. Roger met Sally and begot Laxmi. And Laxmi is clearly not Laxmi. She has no attachment to what inspired Mom to name her Laxmi. She has a whole load of other needs. But it’s basically equilibrium.” [1]

Image: Top: Ashley Bickerton, The Vlaminkos, 1998, acrylic, oil and pencil, and photographs on wood. Bottom: Jeff Koons, Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Two Dr J Silver Series, Spalding NBA Tip-off), glass, steel, pneumatic feet, rubber basketballs and water. © Tate Modern

Text: [1] A quote by Ashley Bickerton from Artist-led Walkthrough, Thursday, September 28, 2017.

The Vlaminkos is included in Ashley Bickerton’s first U.S. survey on view at FLAG Art Foundation September 23- December 16, 2017.

[theflagartfoundation]

“If you trace back the DNA in the maternally inherited mitochondria within our cells, all humans have a theoretical common ancestor. This woman, known as “mitochondrial Eve”, lived between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago in southern Africa. She was not the first human, but every other female lineage eventually had no female offspring, failing to pass on their mitochondrial DNA. As a result, all humans today can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to her.”

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“Recently I’ve become obsessed with the idea of mitochondrial DNA, which is passed solely from mothers to their kin. In recent years, scientists have isolated a single probable individual in east Africa, who died about a hundred thousand years ago, as the mother of every human being alive. I think after the Toba eruption in Sumatra, the Earth’s human population was reduced to about two thousand individuals. She was one of these—the mother figure and, for me, the atheist Madonna. So she, as channeled through de Kooning’s women with a stop at Chuck Close, is one of the big influences in my new work.”   

 Images: Left: Mitochondria in hepatocyte cells in the liver, shown in yellow, from NYtimes Bsip/UIF Getty Image. Right: m-DNA_eve 1, 2013. Oil and acrylic on digital print on wood. 88 1/2 x 74 1/2 x 5 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. 

Text: First: Quote from “Found: Closest link to Eve, our universal ancestor,” from NewsScientist. 8/10/2014. Second: Quote from Ashley Bickerton as told to Lauren O’Neill Butler in “Ashley Bickerton” published in Artforum 500 Words on 9/10/2013.

m-DNA_eve 1, 2013, is included in Ashley Bickerton’s first U.S. survey on view at FLAG Art Foundation September 23- December 16, 2017.

[theflagartfoundation]

…and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. [1]

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Tomorrow Is the Question!, subtitled The New Music of Ornette Coleman!, was the second album by American jazz musician Ornette Coleman, released in 1959 by the Contemporary Label. This release would be Coleman's last album for the label before embarking on a highly-successful multi-album series for Atlantic Records later on in 1959.

Revered for its lack of piano, Coleman’s intentions for Tomorrow Is the Question! was to create space for soloists on the album to roam freely around the tune and rhythm. Coleman’s enthusiasm for the improvisation in harmony and jazz is present and apparent through this release.

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s large-scale wall piece, untitled 2017 (tomorrow is the question, january 21, 2017), 2017, reiterates the tenacity of the Coleman’s phrase, painted atop headlines and articles printed in The New York Times – the majority of which relate to the inauguration of 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump. Displaying the pages of the “paper of record” unfolded, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s bold question addresses the emotions, fears, and uncertainty felt throughout the world.

With its very literal title, Ornette Coleman’s Tomorrow Is the Question! and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s untitled 2017(tomorrow is the question, january 21, 2017), 2017, both investigate the anxieties and hopes that are found through the endless possibilities of the unknown future.

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Image: Top: Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2017 (tomorrow is the question, january 21, 2017), 2017. Acrylic and newspaper on linen 89 1/4 × 73 1/4 in 226.7 × 186.1 cm. Bottom: Ornette Coleman album cover of Tomorrow Is the Question!

Text: [1] Excerpt from Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters to a Young Poet," originally published in 1929.

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s untitled 2017 (tomorrow is the question, january 21, 2017), 2017, is included in The Times, on view at The Flag Art Foundation June 1 – August 11, 2017.

JZ

[theflagartfoundation]

“‘Time in the Box’: Young Rikers Inmates, Still in Isolation’ appeared in the New York Times on July 8, 2016. The title alone would have been sufficient inspiration for us with its reference to time, boxes and Rikers. Upon further reading our hearts began to break. The article dives into the quest to close solitary confinement on Rikers Island for people under 22 and interviews several who are still “in the box”. Their stories moved us and motivated us to become more ambitious in our existing work with Rikers inmates.

Our work at Rikers Island Correctional Facility—the second largest jail complex in America with an average daily population of 10,000 inmates, began in 2012. Our project works directly with A Road Not Taken, a program that identifies inmates with substance abuse concerns, centering on reaching those affected, including female and male inmates of racial and ethnic minorities and low socioeconomic status, and those with mental illness. Initially, a typical visit would involve us talking with inmates while making scrolls out of textiles brought in, and using those scrolls to fill one or two boxes. That collaborative work would be titled by the inmates and the project would end. The Times article highlighted for us the need to reach deeper, resulting in the ambitious transition to increase the project and build a landscape composed of 24 boxes that would be filled by the inmates over the course of nearly a year, truly engaging the inmates in being a part of something greater and turning the idea of “ Time in the Box ” on its head. As a result, we worked with 185 inmates in three different houses and created the work Invincible.”

Image: Top: William and Steven Ladd. Invincible, 2017. Archival board, fiber, rubber bands, ink. 60 5⁄8 x 40 3⁄4 x 3 inches. Courtesy of the artists Bottom: Installation view of The Times at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2017. Photography by Steven Probert.

Text: Excerpt from William and Steven Ladd’s proposal submitted to the open call request for The FLAG Art Foundation exhibition The Times.

William and Steven Ladd. Invincible, 2017 is included in The Times on view at The FLAG Art Foundation June 1 - August 11, 2017.

RD

[theflagartfoundation]

PERMISSION STRUCTURES: The now-famous term comes, as far as I can tell, from a 2008 profile of David Axelrod in the New Republic, where Jason Zengerle quoted Ken Snyder, a Democratic consultant and Axelrod protege, on his mentor’s approach. “David felt there almost had to be a permission structure set up for certain white voters to consider a black candidate.” The “permission structure” relied heavily on “third-party authentication,” which is to say, endorsements from respected figures or institutions that the targeted voters admired.  If you think back to the 2008 campaign, you can see Axelrod slowly building this permission structure around Obama. Right before Super Tuesday, Axelrod rolled out the endorsements of Ted and Caroline Kennedy. Right before the election, he rolled out Colin Powell. The timing and nature of the endorsements were meant to make an African American candidate with an international upbringing and the name Barack Hussein Obama into someone that Ohio steelworkers could feel comfortable voting for. If Ted Kennedy and Colin Powell can back this guy, so can you.  The point of Obama's whole "permission structure" riff was to persuade the media to stop blaming him for Republican intransigence and begin blaming Republicans for Republican intransigence. But talking about "permission structures" sounds academic and passive — it's definitely not what LBJ would have done — and so it just gave the media a new reason to blame the president for Republican intransigence.  The basic idea of this phrase, it seems, is as follows: A doesn’t trust B to do some activity X because A fears that B does not have A’s best interests at heart in the “realm” of X.  “I cannot force Republicans to embrace … common-sense solutions,” Obama said at the press conference, referring specifically to budget gridlock. “I can urge them to. I can put pressure on them. I can rally the American people around those common-sense solutions. But ultimately, they, themselves, are going to have to say, we want to do the right thing. And I think there are members certainly in the Senate right now, and I suspect members in the House as well, who understand that deep down. But they’re worried about their politics. It’s tough. Their base thinks that compromise with me is somehow a betrayal. They’re worried about primaries. And I understand all that. And we’re going to try to do everything we can to create a permission structure for them to be able to do what’s going to be best for the country. But it’s going to take some time.”  -- Image: Rebecca Ward. permission structure, 2016. Travertine marble, Carrara marble, cast plaster, 15 ½ x 4 ½ x 6 ½ inches. Image courtesy the artist. Texts: Excerpts from the following: “So about that ‘permission structure’…” by Ezra Kelin. Published by The Washington Post, May 3, 2013. For Full Text: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/03/so-about-that-permission-structure/?utm_term=.f317e2921866 and “Obama’s ‘Permission Structure’ And His Last, Best Chance For A Budget ‘Grand Bargain’ by Brian Beutler. Published by TPM DC, May 3, 2013. For Full Text: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/obama-s-permission-structure-and-his-last-best-chance-for-a-budget-grand-bargain -- Rebecca Ward. permission structure, 2017 is included in Rebecca Ward on view at The FLAG Art Foundation June 1 - August 11, 2017.

JZ

[theflagartfoundation]

My paintings are invitations to look somewhere else. And they have been for a long time. Like the new piece is like how not to throw your newspaper away because that’s where it is and if you are conscientious at all, the information there, in one newspaper, no matter where you pick it up will blow your head. If you pay $15,000 for something you are not going to wrap the garbage in it, right? I don’t know who buys newspapers but I know how they don’t read them and take them seriously. And it’s the best book in the world. [1]

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Image: Top:  Robert Rauschenberg. Rebus, 1955.  Oil, synthetic polymer paint, pencil, crayon, pastel, cut-and-pasted printed and painted papers, and fabric on canvas mounted and stapled to fabric, three panels.  8’ x 10’ 11 1/8″ .  © 2017 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Bottom: Yuken Teruya. Minding My Own Business (The New York Times, March 18, 2015), 2015. Paper, wire, and glue. 2 ½ x 12 ½ x 12 ½ inches. 

Text: [1] A quote by Robert Rauschenberg from Painters Painting, a 1973 documentary directed by Emile de Antonio.

Yuken Teruya’s Minding My Own Business (The New York Times, March 18, 2015), 2015. is included in The Times on view at The FLAG Art Foundation June 1 - August 11, 2017.

RD

[theflagartfoundation]

Soldiers, from the height of these pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you. [1] -- …some were appointed to draw stones from the stone-quarries in the Arabian mountains to the Nile, and others he ordered to receive the stones after they had been carried over the river in boats, and to draw them to those which are called the Libyan mountains; and they worked by a hundred thousand men at a time, for each three months continually. Of this oppression there passed ten years while the causeway was made by which they drew the stones, which causeway they built, and it is a work not much less, as it appears to me, than the pyramid; for the length of it is five furlongs and the breadth ten fathoms and the height, where it is highest, eight fathoms, and it is made of stone smoothed and with figures carved upon it. For this, they said, the ten years were spent, and for the underground chambers on the hill upon which the pyramids stand, which he caused to be made as sepulchral chambers for himself in an island, having conducted thither a channel from the Nile. For the making of the pyramid itself there passed a period of twenty years; and the pyramid is square, each side measuring eight hundred feet, and the height of it is the same. It is built of stone smoothed and fitted together in the most perfect manner, not one of the stones being less than thirty feet in length. [2]

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Image: Top: Richter, Gerhard. Large Pyramid, 1966. Oil on canvas, 198 x 246 cm. Collection of the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, Belgium. Bottom: Small Pyramid, 1964. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 cm.  

Text: [1] A quote by Napoleon Bonaparte given to his soldiers at the decisive Battle of the Pyramids (Battle of Embabeh), during the French invasion of Egypt in 1798-99. [2] Herodotus. “The History Of Herodotus.”  Volume 1 (of 2), translated by G. C. Macaulay, 2008.

JR

[theflagartfoundation]

Emily Nathan: Your work is marked by its bold, vibrant colors and its almost graphic aesthetic: simple arrangements of simple shapes. How did your style develop? Etel Adnan: For me, painting is color. Shape has to be there, of course, because where the color stops, it makes a shape. That’s unavoidable. But the purpose of art-making, for me, is a certain hunger for color. Once the color comes out of the tube, it’s at its most beautiful. So this love for color keeps me painting. I often work with a palette knife, and that determines a bit what I can do. The tool you use, of course, both limits and helps you—if you use a brush or a palette knife, you will have different results. It’s like in music: If you play the violin or the flute, you won’t get the same sound, even if you’re the same musician. It’s the same with words; they limit you, but how can you write poetry without them? --

Image: Top: Etel Adnan. Untitled, 1993. Oil on canvas, 29 x 29 inches. Bottom: Etel Adnan, Untitled, undated. Oil on canvas, 9 x 11 3/4 inches. 

Text: Nathan, Emily. “Etel Adnan on Exhibiting with Gerhard Richter and the Politics of Landscape Painting.” Artnet news. January 18, 2017. Etel Adnan. Untitled, undated is included in the exhibition Etel Adnan | Gerhard Richter, on view at The FLAG Art Foundation January 19 - May 13, 2017.

JR

[theflagartfoundation]

Even in making objects, as soon as you start to get the feeling that some form of craft is coming into place, you realize that everything is wrong. Because craft is really just a fetish. It is wasted energy. It's about the object, some space which has nothing to do with the human. – Jeff Koons, 2009 [1]

I realized that being original was almost impossible, so I tried using what was already available as source material for my own work.  By doing this I think I also created something original and certainly something very different to what I was re-presenting. I always think that art is about ideas, and surely the idea of an original and a copy of an original are two very different things.  – Jonathan Monk, 2009 [2]

To make any copy is to preform a shadow dance where the artist mimics and mirrors their subject.  – Cynthia Daignault, 2017 [3]

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Images: Top: Jeff Koons, Rabbit, 1986. Middle: Jonathan Monk, Deflated Sculpture, 2009. Bottom:  Cynthia Daignault’s Jonathan Monk, 2016.

Text: [1] Excerpt from Anthony Haden-Guests interview with Jeff Koons in the daily beast. Read full interview here. [2] Jonathan Monk quoted in Casey Kaplan’s press release for his 2009 exhibition The Inflated Deflated. Read full press release here. [3] Excerpt from The FLAG Art Foundation press materials for Cynthia Daignault There is nothing I could say that I haven’t thought before. 

Cynthia Daignault. Jonathan Monk, 2016 is included in There is nothing I could say that I haven’t thought before on view at FLAG January 19 - May 13, 2017. For more information, click here.

RD

[theflagartfoundation]

MoMA, 2017, is a depiction of the 30 most iconic paintings in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as collected and sourced by Daignault from catalogues, magazines, top-ten lists, websites, and social media. Installed in a grid, the work is a portrait of an institution, not only distilling its permanent collection to color and content, but revealing an overwhelmingly historical bias toward male painters – there are no women represented here. Beyond the objective, the short and poetic texts on each of the individual paintings relay the subjective interiority of one artist's experience of these works. MoMA, 2017, highlights the tension between Daignault’s experience as a female painter and the history and present of the medium. [1] 

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Images: Top: Edward Ruscha. OOF 1962 (reworked 1963). Oil on canvas.  71 1/2 x 67 inches. Collection Museum of Modern Art. Bottom: One [of thirty] canvases that comprise Cynthia Daignault’s MoMA, 2017.

Text: [1] Excerpt from The FLAG Art Foundation press materials for Cynthia Daignault There is nothing I could say that I haven’t thought before.

Cynthia Daignault. MOMA, 2017 is included in There is nothing I could say that I haven’t thought before on view at FLAG January 19 - May 13, 2017. For more information, click here.

RD

[theflagartfoundation]

One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society. [1]

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Images: Top: Elmgreen & Dragset. Powerless Structures, Fig. 19, 1998. Calvin Klein underwear, Levi’s 501 jeans. Dimensions variable.  Photo by Steven Probert. Bottom: Elmgreen & Dragset Powerless Structures, Fig. 122, 2001. MDF, wood, paint, door handles, hinges. 7.1 feet x 38 1/2 inches x 19 3/4 inches \ 217,5 x 133,5 cm. Unique.

Text: [1] Quote from Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978

Elmgreen & Dragset. Powerless Structures,, Fig. 19, 1998 is included in Elmgreen & Dragset: Changing Subjects on view at The FLAG Art Foundation October 1 - December 17, 2016.

RD