Barbara Kasten, Studio Construct 69, 2008, Archival pigment print.

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino

Barbara Kasten, Construct LB/5, 1982. Polaroid.

Of course, eventually the great Modernists did succeed in raising Photography’s status to that of the highest of high art, where it is, today, with its own little gallery down the museum halls, just like they always wanted.

But today, many people are still unaware of some of the costs that came with this great success, this so called “separate department” of Art. For, possibly unlike any other medium, to achieve this unique status, Photography had to be conventionalized. It had to be institutionalized – to perhaps to a greater degree than any other medium. Certain things had to be in, others, out. The medium had to have some particular rules, some conventions, some cliches that necessitated and always somehow justified that separate gallery. And so of course there was always that inherent danger that if the medium ever starting looking or acting a little bit “too much” like those bigger brothers, that it threatened its own funding and livelihood. An almost willful ignorance happily developed.

And so, fine art Photography, still to this day, relies on this false premise that every medium has its “own” discrete agenda, its “own” personal aesthetics. As a result, a kind of incestuous quality spawned in the medium, wherein it sought to isolate itself from other mediums and influences. Photography increasingly referenced only itself, and only its own history, seemingly oblivious to the wider world out there.

This was very humorously brought home to me at a recent panel discussion for the AIPAD show at Hunter College in New York on the history of Color Photography, where much of the discussion referenced the big “discovery” of color starting out with the seminal color work of photographers like William Eggleston in the 1960′s and 70′s. But Ms. Kasten sort of ruined this happy little narrative, by suggesting that unlike other photographers on the panel, to her, that’s not when she “discovered” color. Color was already “there,” she said, in fact, it was always there. She just wasn’t thinking only like a photographer, assuming black and white was the default, or only, tradition.

Think of someone like director Quentin Tarantino, and all the endless cinephile “movie and TV only” pop culture references in his films, and you will get a vibe for this kind of incestuous overtone I describe, one that lionizes particular influences, but eschews others. Even to this day, 100 years later, Pictorialism and so called ‘painterly’ concerns are still marginalized, all those great Modernist photographers having finally succeeded in championing their more Purist notions of the photographic print and what it should “do” – and not do.

Of course, someday Photography may just have to come to terms with all of this, and much like with the real Brown vs. Board of Education in the civil rights movement, realize what it may have to give up in its precious isolation to gain in a wider and more integrated synthesis with all of the Arts.

Barbara Kasten, Studio Construct 125, 2011, Archival pigment print.

Regardless, it is with a unique pleasure we consider the work of Barbara Kasten, who does not seem at all to be constrained by any of these limiting concerns. Quite the contrary, her influences are many and diverse, including Lazló Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus, Constructivism, Robert Irwin and James Turrell to name just a few. And probably not by accident, unlike many a photography student today, she came to photography indirectly, trained initially as a painter in the late 1950′s, experimenting with sculpture and soft material in the 60′s, eventually turning to the two dimensional photograph only by the 70′s.

And this is where her sophistication is apparent. Balancing menace and elegance, Kasten synthesizes sculpture, painting and architecture to create new forms. Unlike many others, photography is material to her; she uses real space, rather than just, say, moving elements on paper, or working cameraless in the darkroom in the tradition of say the conventional photogram. Rather, she builds what she likes to call “Constructs” in her studio out of a variety of objects – Plexiglas panels, spheres, mirrors, pyramids, columns, paper, and then photographs them in light and shade.

Barbara Kasten, IV-B, 1980. Cibachrome.

Kasten’s images have weight and depth, sharp edges that hover above and hurtle down. Her work has the push and pull of a painting, but along with the complicated environment that only the light and shadow of the photographic can provide. As Estelle Jussim wrote: “They are theatre, sculpture, painting, light play–all masquerading as photographs.”

Her medium is photography, but it is not conventionally conceived.  Often they have a Freudian quality to them. It is hard to ignore all those dangerous, sharp edges, those pointy glass shards, and not imagine some kind of knife, some kind of weapon, penetrations.

Barbara Kasten, Construct III-C, 1980. Polaroid Print.

Barbara Kasten is represented by Bortolami Gallery in New York, Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica and Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. Her website is www.barbarakasten.net

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Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2008. Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen.

Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2006. Inkjet on canvas.

An old saying goes:

If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck . . .  well then . . .  it might just be a DUCK.

Today, we live in a postmedium age. A hybrid age. There are no more easy categories or rote definitions to live up to. Perhaps more than ever before, we are confronted by very strange, hybrid works of art. Works of unidentifiable mediums. And we do not know what to call them.

Many artworks nowadays look, act and feel like paintings, and are  certainly easily mistaken for such, even very close up. But they are technically not paintings at all.

Case in point is the work of artist Wade Guyton. His ‘paintings’ are in fact prints on linen canvas, made with an Epson printer.

The accidents and mishaps that occur in his printer, as he folds, drags, squashes and intentionally jams the canvas through the printer result in a fascinating series of mis-registrations, streaks, and degradations of chance and accident.

It is not Guyton – but rather his machine – that causes these pattern overruns, glitches and aberrations that repeat throughout his canvas. In true Warholian tradition, Guyton claims he is similarly too “lazy” to actually paint, much as Warhol once claimed he too would rather be a machine.

Installation of Wade Guyton’s ‘OS’ at The Whitney Museum of Art, October 2012 – January 2013.

WORDS BY:  John D’Agostino

Wade Guyton, Untitled,
2008. Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen.

It is high time to call for a re-framing of just what painting is in the 21st century, and what is really all about. Painting is not about paint. Let me say that again: painting is not about paint, nor does it have to be made with paint.

Whether or not a painting is actually made with paint is perhaps the least interesting thing about it. And artists have been painting without paint for centuries now, from Francesco di Giorgio’s Studiolo from the Ducal Palace at The Metropolitan Museum (using shades of wood) to Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Favrile glass, which is perhaps the ultimate examplar, because the few sections of his stained glass windows that are actually painted over (such as faces or hands) are much less effective compared to the flowing use of layers of glass to suggest everything else.

I hope we can now move past these exhausted ideologies and old world categories. As professor Lance Winn and others have called for, it is time to discuss what Mr. Guyton’s paintings actually mean, and whether their study and reflection is worthwhile or not. As Marshall McLuhan once likened, as one medium becomes re-mediated and hybridized into the next, sometimes the new medium may actually fulfill the promises of the old.

Wade Guyton is represented by Petzel Gallery in NY and Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris. Wade Guyton OS exhibited at The Whitney Museum in January 2013.

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-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.

Death & renewal are integral parts of a fascinating creative process. In a cycle of making, new styles are Re/Mixed from the old: appropriated, cannibalized & re-mediated into hybrids and new forms.

A favorite pastime of modernity is The Grave Dance: a seductive rhythm of destruction whereby the demode & traditional movement is buried, and a new style, celebrated. Sometimes the new medium fulfills the promises of the old, in uncanny ways. Sometimes it disappoints. Either way, the old is dead. Long live the new.

And yet, despite the demise of our dead styles, they continue to haunt. Ancestral spirits are insidious; the old forms live on as ghosts. In an era of perpetual invention, perhaps the greatest of all traditions is our legacy of the haunted mechanisms of innovation that challenge and re-articulate our past, present & future.

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Re/Mix! Innovators, Appropriators & Copyright Criminals A New Course by John D’Agostino
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Cornell Remixes Bronzino: Joseph Cornell, Medici Princess, 1952-54,  Angelo Bronzino, Portrait of Medici Girl, 1542.			Oft-times an overlooked & misunderstood tradition, the art of sampling historical source material into new works of art and music is a rewarding, sophisticated and ingenious practice rife with departures, ruptures & contradictory possibilities.
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Joseph Cornell, Medici Boy, 1943. Wood box construction using elements from Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy, ca. 1500.			Raw material for artists to re-combine can be found literally anywhere, from archaic media, vinyl records, and trash, to photographs or finished works like painting. Challenging, subverting, co-opting, even re-inventing mediums, the Re-Mix in assemblage art, collage, Hip Hop music, photography and more is a tour de force of creative practice in the 21st century, encompassing an entire spectrum of originality (or lack thereof), from one-dimensional Appropriators, to Hackers, cover artists and mashups, to entirely new, emergent digital artforms.Featured artists include: Joseph Cornell, Romare Bearden, Yves Klein, Vik Muniz, Thomas Ruff, John Stezaker, Louis Comfort Tiffany, E.J. Bellocq, Dr. Lakra, Idris Khan, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, Wangechi Mutu, Marcel Duchamp and Kehinde Wiley, among many others.
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			Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962. Acrylic on canvas, using an original publicity still of Marilyn Monroe from the film Niagara, 1953.
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Louis Comfort Tiffany, At the New Circus, ca. 1894. Favrile stained glass, using Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s watercolor At the Nouveau Cirque, 1892.			Re/Mix! will employ the art of sample-based Hip Hop as the quintessential paradigm for the visual artist. From the very first DJ’s of the South Bronx employing turntables and a mixer, sampling in Hip Hop music is the foundation of the genre. Much like their visual counterparts, its most innovative practitioners exemplify a selective, three-dimensional and highly sophisticated synthesis of old material into new, from producers like Prince Paul, DJ Premier and Da Beatminerz, to acts like De La Soul or Beastie Boys, to those that sample their own sounds, such as Portishead.
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Enrique Gomez de Molina, Rhinoplasty, 2010. Hybrid taxidermy sculpture, using jewel beetle wings, peacock feathers and buffalo horn.         John Stezaker, He II, 2008. Photo collage, using old film portraits.			Course Schedule Week 1: The Innovators Featured Artists: Joseph Cornell · Andy Warhol · Romare Bearden · Kurt Schwitters · Yves Klein · Laszlo Moholy-Nagy · Louis Comfort Tiffany · John Stezaker   Week 2: The Appropriators Featured Artists: Roy Lichtenstein · Marcel Broodthaers ·Sherrie Levine · Claes Oldenburg · Cindy Sherman · Vik Muniz · Jeff Koons · Banksy   Week 3: Copyright Criminals Featured Artists: Danger Mouse · Shepard Fairey · Da Beatminerz · Richard Prince ·Prince Paul · Hank Willis Thomas · Beastie Boys · Cory Arcangel   Week 4: The Bricoleurs Featured Artists: Jacques de La Villegle · Max Ernst · Wangechi Mutu · Conrad Marca-Relli · Robert Rauschenberg · Robert Heinecken · Marcel Duchamp · Dr. Lakra   Week 5: The Hackers Featured Artists: Alvin Langdon Coburn · Thomas Ruff · Adam Fuss · Walead Beshty · Lucas Samaras · Wade Guyton ·  Marco Breuer
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This course is currently in development for venues TBA 2013. For more information, please contact John D’Agostino.

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Skeleton & Flesh (2012)

New Works from Empire of Glass

John D’Agostino, Spring Torrents, 2012 (in progress). 4 panels, approx 10×20 feet.

John D’Agostino, The Hammer of Los, 2012 (in progress). 4 panels, approx 10×20 feet.

John D’Agostino, Summit & Flower, 2012 (in progress). Diptych: approx. 60×96″

Works currently in progress for 2012′s body of work include a number of new sizes, including diptych, triptych, square and more.

For more information on these new works, please contact the artist or visit:

www.EmpireofGlass.com

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WORDS BY:   John D’Agostino
WORKS:    www.EmpireofGlass.com
One of America’s most acclaimed artists, Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) embraced virtually every artistic medium, from stained glass windows, lamps and mosaics, to pottery, metalwork, interiors and enamels.
 

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Fish Panel, ca. 1906. Provenance: Vito D’Agostino

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Gould Landscape Window, 1910. Provenance: Miss Helen Gould, Vito D’Agostino.

Tiffany asked why so many of us made such little use of our eyes, and why we so obstinately refrained from using color in architecture, clothing and elsewhere, when nature so clearly indicated its mastership. He referred to this as the “sovereign importance of color” – and set out to rectify the situation in a relentless “quest for beauty.”

The elder son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of the famed Tiffany and Company jewelry store, the young Louis began his career as a painter, working under George Inness (1825–1894). Early notable designs of his included the redecoration of The White House for President Chester A. Arthur in 1881. At the World’s Fair in 1893 in Chicago, over a million visitors waited in line to see his ornate Byzantine Chapel, and at the Paris Universal 1900, Tiffany won the grand prize, a gold medal, and the Légion d’honneur. Internationally recognized as one of the greatest forces of Art Nouveau, Tiffany’s work would still fall completely out of fashion by the 1920’s.

Tiffany used the medium of glass to challenge the pre-eminence of painting. In glass, Tiffany found a medium of endless possibilities that expressed his love of light and color. He felt that no painting could capture its brilliance, at one point creating stained glass windows based on well known artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec to prove the point home. He could suggest a myriad of natural surfaces, from hard stone, primal magma and volcanic rock, to the sensuous, iridescent surfaces of winged creatures like butterflies, dragonflies and peacocks. Claiming a palette of some 5000 colors, Tiffany had an incredible array of different kinds of favrile glass to work with, from lava (volcanic) glass, to cypriote glass, to drapery glass and ripple glass, just to name a few.

Tiffany began experimenting with glass about 1875 in Brooklyn. He was inspired by ancient Roman, Greek and Egyptian glass, that, when dug up hundreds of years later, were imbued with an incredible iridescent quality, due to the ores and oxides of the earth seeping in. Frustrated with the limited palette of the glass of the time, he turned to making his own opalescent glass, with the colors fused inside in molten form. This was in stark contrast to the predominant method since the Middle Ages, which was the staining of colorless glass. Using a witch’s brew of secret recipes including metallic oxides, chromium, silver, gold and even uranium, Tiffany called his trademark glass favrile, after the Old English word fabrile (hand-wrought), a signification meant to reflect the hand-made quality of his glass. It cannot be duplicated even today. Quite simply, it is the finest glass ever made.

  “Infinite, endless labor makes the masterpiece. Color is to the eye as music is to the ear.”
-Louis Comfort Tiffany

This text first appeared as part of the paper The Strength to Dream: How Remnants of the Past Illustrate a Legacy of the Representation of Vision by John D’Agostino, published in ArtForum’s Art&Education Papers Archive, 2010.

View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

An eccentric, autocratic perfectionist, Tiffany was notorious for walking down the production lines of Tiffany Studios with his cane, smashing anything he found to be unacceptable. Stories exist of craftsman actually scurrying to hide works from him in the fear that he would destroy them. “Mother Nature is the best designer” he said, and he set out to summon up the kingdom of nature, in all its glory. Using sophisticated abstract forms derived from nature as the material for his Art Nouveau motifs, historians like Robert Koch would later dub him the grandfather of Abstract Expressionism, a narrative confirmed by my father, artist John E. D’Agostino (born 1941), whose original inspiration for the abstract was not any of the expected originators of the movement, but Tiffany himself.

While Tiffany’s work would suffer from the vagaries of taste and fashion, the uniqueness of his oeuvre today is unquestionable. Perhaps the lowest moment was in 1936, when salvage dealers were smashing Tiffany’s celebrated lamps against the curbs, just so they could melt down the intricate bronze and lead frames holding the glass for scrap metal. For the artists of Art Nouveau, the lotus, a motif Tiffany would use again and again, appropriately, symbolized rebirth. For art lovers like my grandfather Vito D’Agostino, it was just a matter of time. Tiffany’s reputation would plummet from international renown to obscurity and disfavor, but only to rise yet even stronger once again.    •

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