4/16/2007

Josh Smith

45 comments:

Painter said...

Josh Smith @
Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th Street
NYC

traderguy said...

Great show - shades of A.R. Penck and Per Kirkeby with a touch of Howard Hodgkin. Abstraction rules!

nat said...

This is like, streamers and balloon animals at a wine tasting.

Anonymous said...

was looking at these a few weeks ago online... a little on the muddy slow churn side, drawing color with the what-ever-is-used to move one bit into the next ... definitely works: an interesting engine.
This, Stephan Fritsch, is a little cleaner, different, looser, though structurally, on the button... a little cleaner...
A point of entry for both might be the intersecting of a personal language, a body, structure, the reading of ...the language itself, if that makes sense... one thing can't be separated from the other.

zipthwung said...

This is not a good painting. Maybe its a good show. Me, I think I'd rather go see zz top.

One of the elements that defuses this keg of bat guano is the use of white. I bet Josh smith barely knows what the difference between flake and titanium white is. Thats cool, but here it comes off as lazy and dare I say slacker gen x nihilism.

Fuck that.

or a movie

Dumbpainter said...

Naples Yellow Hue.

Sometimes using white in painting doesn't make light.

This painting is like a still born Boston University art student afraid of speaking up to the bosses.

TACKAD said...

Josh excites me to the max. are all his works top grade - no. but he really does do some great stuff though. i'm just blown away that he's got the rocks to use his name as sole content and structure. anxious to see how far he can take this. will this style become mature like allen maddox's X's ??

zipthwung said...

Josh uses his name? Where are the letters?

Alana said...

he has these other paintings where he paints "josh smith".

zipthwung said...

Thanks alana, I was being "ironic" - which these paintings aren't, by definition.

I dint grow up with TV, but I do enjoy fast cutting. I don't understand why slower "contemplative" works are serious art and faster works aren't.

Is it because the fast cut priviledge the exterior/ extroverted? I don't find that - in fact anyone who is a fan of noise music knows that information overload is the height of introversion.

Is it because older people prefer slower work? I know plenty of old people who can't stand slow video, prefering the four second rule of painting.

It seems to me (without scientific evidence) that this is a matter of taste. And the taste is for self indulgent slow paced art film.

What is the function of slow vs fast? Is it anti-media in the sense that mainstream culture is fast and therefore one must make slow work? That sounds disempowering if noble in a marxist sort of anticapitalist way.

Recently I was looking at some video by the top design/post production companies in NY, and they approach art, though their punchlines are weak and the subversion is so subtle as to be an insiders in joke coded to insignificance, if at all.

Then there is the corporate logo deal.
here

Just a few thoughts.

youth--less said...

and their follow up hit "I'd like my daughter in law to look at it first".

"Mostly we talked about Anderson Cooper"--that's a good punchline.

I'd like to like this painting, but i dont. Maybe if I look at it for a while...

youth--less said...

I went to the LA site to check the show out. These are some of the best intentionally bad paintings ive ever seen. Its like Spinal Tap.

zipthwung said...

bonus track:

(untitled)"too edgy, tone it down"

is carnage entertainment? You bet.

Anonymous said...

I looked at KJ's vid of the opening of Dana S. Dana was my favorite 'bad' figurative artist because the works were visually compelling, though so throwaway of the rules of paint that at times I would wonder what was getting in there, to make the work think, or me dig into the painting, happy to throw away meaning. I always felt that history has meaning and a painting holds history or its shift> But when a painting holds the meaning of history then I'd rather read a book.
I don't know if Josh Smith is going about it the same way trying to push what goes on underneath the rehearsals, before the grueling hours spent on Finesse: It's finesse that works the thing right[?]-;
Josh is painting up some history. We've been there. But 'happy enough' this time, it's not so much painting a position in history, adding nods and winks to its uprightness and steady: This is not the schtick. Nor do Josh's things read cathartic, or about some kind of abstraction, nor about faith, though there is something quite honest -- working just a tad under that... to keep things raw.
Because "we know", and this is the achievement, the rest is not how [we know] but why[?] And that remains the mystery>

Dana has cleaned up her mark-making, and moved closer to the real thing -- expansing and off registering layers and washes, ... and what I could see from the vid foot, the work continues to be unsettling, but in the dana-has-been-engulfed-by-the-art-world sort of way. Is this the historical way? Compare the [s]mothering smooth of Dana's image up at ZF's site mona with the above;) Hmmm...

I think this season is working out to be the conceptually edgy one, visually hard (wouldn't that be good), and moving out of the put-put land of mini golf. Or is it that my legs don't support and I need a machine to scoot about[?]... or is that just a dream. Slap Slap. Slap it up!
Phew, I can still move my self!

youth--less said...

Like a cross between Frank Stella and Caroll Dunham.

Kill me now...

TACKAD said...

i can't wait to go to NYC and see this show - see these up close and personal. It's bright and fresh - abstract-lite. and it still gives me a huge kick that instead of signing the painting when it's done, the painting IS his signature - josh smith.
just too cool . . . . .

no-where-man said...

painting your name is very primal.. i dig it... hey painter - if you ever want to do a Podcast about the Artworld - even just audio drop me a line, i know how to now and plan on it when i get back. All the tech is seemless now thats about to be out - photoshop does video and FCP is just insane with 3D...

raw is good

flesheater99 said...
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flesheater99 said...
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flesheater99 said...

dammit...how do you nrrds hyperlink up in this piece??

zipthwung said...

all html tags have an opening and closing tag

<>ahref="index.htm"e>Index<>/a
some examples are:

strong
Em

right click and view source or if you have the firefox browser you can use the web developer plug-in - it rocks!!!!

zipthwung said...

andreas hoffer

must be part of this marketing binge, no?

I hate imported zeitgeist.

Martin said...

i saw this show, and wish that i'd read something about his work beforehand, or maybe looked at whatever text they had at the gallery.

now i've read a little bit and realize that i didn't "get" the show. i didn't hate it - although some of the paintings were really really bad - but i left undecided... at least knowing i wasn't getting something.

i'm still undecided.

anyways, was it determined that he is doing the thing with his name in these paintings... or is it something else?

painter - i'm glad you're back... the one time a year i go to nyc and see these shows, and painter is on vacation!

zipthwung said...

shoot em in the toodles

flesheater99 said...
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youth--less said...

not a granny yet

zipthwung said...
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zipthwung said...
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zipthwung said...

guns

flesheater99 said...
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flesheater99 said...
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Anonymous said...

What's interesting about Josh here, and you wont read it in some gallery blurb, is that he's playing the devil's advocate: He believes but forces us/himself into a corner of non-belief as the starting point. This has interesting consequences and repercussions when you look at the paintings. You start with a number of beliefs that are portrayed as disbelief; templets of the belief/disbelief kind painted in. By implementing the opposing trajectories at the same time instead of getting this fatigue where one direction keeps slowing down the other with a bad connection, the song you upload first will win out, though when both songs have been successfully uploaded, does it matter which one was first? No there is equal choice. So we have two songs and with that you get for free the third song in your head. So what you have is a conceptual ploy utilizing a visual strategy that comes up something else.
There is another area of study that deals with that, too.

youth--less said...

Is the 3rd song in your head a good painting? Could be. I'll have to paint it.

zipthwung said...

Yaow!!!

Max said...

Thanks for posting about Kalm James' video of the Dana Schutz opening... that is a really interesting show, I'll be excited to see the thoughts on it here.

I'm in the video from 9:07 to 9:15, gracing the distant background with a baseball cap! My 15 minutes just got 8 seconds shorter I think....

as for JS... will have to go see the show, but all the previous stuff I have seen him do, mostly sculptural, I have liked quite a lot.

zipthwung said...

how come James so Kalm?

cuz hes close to the edge!

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...
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flesheater99 said...
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flesheater99 said...

"http://www.artnet.com/artwork/424955910/1119/markus-lupertz-tent-9--dithyrambic.html----I can't figure out this goddam hyperlink shit to save my skin. fuck it. it ain't THAT important anyway. Alls I'm tryn to say is that this Josh person should try checking out the following(if he hasn't already)"...........Markus Lupertz. Tents. 1965.

00...now I'm going to get my cooties shot.

youth--less said...

Thanks fleasheater. Really liking those Marcus paintings. This one is gorgeous.

Thing is, the Josh Smith is working more in the way that ConPho indicated. Concept of bad painting/resistance. It's a little 9th grade for me, as a strategy.

The Marcus paintings are more than that. He makes a bad painting and a good painting in one.

poppy said...

I'm not particularly impressed with this painting,..and not because its a 10 minute painting,..I think I'd like to see more 10 minute paintings by more people...

youth--less said...

The other thing is, I know Josh Smith is into joshsmithjoshsmithjoshsmithjoshsmith
joshsmithjoshsmithjoshsmithjoshsmith
joshsmithjoshsmithjoshsmithjoshsmith
vs.
JACKSON POLLOCK!!!
but I think that's just a moot point. If it ever was an issue. To me, it's not. Clement Greenberg's fault?

poppy said...

yeah probably in part,
I'd rather just paint a shitload of self portraits..even though i dig the whole free flowing spirit, free wheelin attitude that paint can be..This would be tres cool done by somebody who could paint better...But its a thing first..too bad.

youth--less said...

speaking of guns...Painter has a great photo of Joseph Deutch over on Papparazzi. Is he that cute in person?