As the World Grinds, Pulp Ladle, dArt Burger, and The Bunny Show. Citing the work of Andre Ethier, Ben Marshall, Ginette Legare, Saeed Mohamed, James Cooper, Steve Rockwell, and Katharine T. Carter.
The 2011 Making Minced Meat Out of dArt Magazine exhibition at De Luca Fine Art in Toronto introduced the dArt Burger to the city. Saeed Mohamed served it at his restaurant. Co-producer Ben Marshall insisted we install an actual meat grinder in the show. Gallery attendees were served the edible burgers, as the wall mounted print shards were available for visual ingestion. James Cooper’s film on the “grinding” of dArt magazine content may be accessed by clicking Dart Onion, and for his film on the making of the dArt Burger click here.
The image in Ginette Legaré’s Pulp Ladle (originally Scoop from the 1998 Feeding Disorder series) was transferred from the Fall 1998 edition dArt onto the dArt magazine pulp panel. Legaré’s constructions comprise of reconfigured found objects, out which meaning is teased as distilled language. Her recent “Supply Chains” exhibition at Birch Contemporary speaks to a time when links to the network of things necessary or desirable to our lives may unexpectedly show strain. Andre Ethier’s Atlas portrays the globe-bearing Titan in a state of perpetual stress – a punishment levied by Zeus after defeat in battle.
The Bunny Show image was created for Katharine T. Carter & Associates, a public relations and marketing firm for artists. It’s a view of the museum interior visualized as a rabbit artist might see it – a full retrospective with ample carrots.
Dead Idiot, Penck’s Passage, Richter Scale, and Card Players. Citing the work of Paul Pretzer, Mamma Andersson, Kurt Schwitters, A.R. Penck, Hannah Hoch, Gerhard Richter, Otto Dix, and Julian Schnabel.
A reading of the Curated Content #2 group of images may require the passage over something that Maurice Blanchot calls the “empty deep.” The Richter Scale image in the group had been the cover for the Fall 2002 edition of dArt magazine, featuring author Bruce Bauman’s review of Gerhard Richter’s exhibition at the MoMA in New York. Bauman conceded that seeing the retrospective forced him to reevaluate why he wrote about art. Bauman’s full article here.
In his search for, what cannot be put into words, Bauman arrives at what he calls, “the necessity of art: the search for that space in each individual for the longing for the lost god, for meaning, for beauty, humanity – the quest for truth which is our soul. In falling into that empty deep we can truly confront that terribleness of human history, the horror and little cruelties that live within us all.”
Paul Pretzer, Dead Idiot, oil on wood, 17.1 x 15 inches. Courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery
A tiny antagonist buzzes over the skull of Paul Pretzer’s Dead Idiot. The painting was part of Mortality: A Survey of Contemporary Death Art. Curated by Donald Kuspit, and assisted by Robert Curcio, the exhibition was to be held at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2020, but was terminated due to Covid-19. Since the exhibition catalog had already been produced, the show’s virtual life was extended as the 2021 dArt cover feature, in the sense that the Curated Content project had also breathed life into it. If Pretzer’s Dead Idiot is a focus on mortality as an individual struggle, the Otto Dix Card Players (1920) in panel four exemplify its residual collective trauma. The black card with Julian Schnabel’s portrait of a scarred Andy Warhol, deals the irony of someone who survived an assassination attempt, only to fall victim to a scalpel in the hospital.
A.R. Penck’s stick figure with outstretched arms embodies survival, literally here a trial by fire and tightrope in his 1963 oil Passage. The work was part of Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures (article by Emese Hajagos) and addresses the wider sociopolitical impacts of war, whether hot or cold.
Steve Rockwell, Good Gordo, Casual Observer, In the Black, andHard Edge, 2024. Citing the work of Steve Rockwell, Hills Snyder, Lorser Feitelson (1963 painting), and Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder” (with Lee Remick).Hills Snyder, Casual Observer/Causal Observer, 2010, Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, Texas, installation view
Curated Content #5 is a four panel image sentence that clusters pictures into paragraphs. As we read, a story may unfold. Dog observes a periscope rising out of the sea that breaks into light from something hidden – the “submarine.” Although Hills Snyder employed its image to advertise his 2010 exhibition at Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio, Texas, the original periscope image was created byAndrea Danti for Shutterstock.com. Snyder’s employment of the periscope becomes a key that breaks the seal to his container of objects and experiences – now accessible to even the casual viewer. To get the “full” picture, however, further observation is necessary. A documentation of the work that went into mounting Snyder’s elaborate installation can be accessed by clicking Casual Observer.
Hills Snyder, Casual Observer/Causal Observer, 2010, Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, Texas, installation view
An attentive Gordo in the first panel mimes the periscope, having been obedient to his master’s voice (Stuart Regen) in posing for my photograph – a captured moment that merited the cover of the premier edition of dArt magazine in January 1998. By sheer coincidence, the dog’s front paws in the Good Gordo image cover a crack in the concrete floor, echoing the one in the Snyder submarine photo. In that respect, as the dArt genesis account unfolds, Gordo’s paw bruises the wriggling serpent crack on the floor of the Regen Projects gallery.
The third panel of a woman contemplating a black rectangle is derived from dArt‘s 1998 second edition and was provided ACME gallery in Los Angeles to accompany More Shifts in the LA Gallery Landscape, an article by Michael Darling. Two years earlier ACME had consented to take part in my Storage installation project by storing a 32 by 32 inch acrylic on panel painting showing my hand holding a black card. The project served as the visual component for the book work Meditations on Space, An Artist’s Odyssey through Art Galleries in Europe and North America, published in 1996. My earlier visit to ACME in Santa Monica on January 3, 1996 had taken a geometric bent, “I walked in a straight line from the door to the back of the gallery where someone was installing work. He pointed me towards the desk corner. I made a 40 degree turn and walked over to speak to Randy Sommer, and then a 70 degree turn for the door. That completed the triangle.”
Left: Steve Rockwell, Storage Project, 1996, ACME gallery, Los Angeles, installation view. Right: In the Black, 2024, oil and mixed media on dArt magazine page, 8.5 x 7 inches
The fourth panel, Hard Edge features Lorser Feitelson’s 1963 Untitled painting, managing a further echo, this time, of the red facade of Snyder’s installation exterior. If a connection were to be be made between the peephole in Snyder’s Casual Observer/Causal Observer to ones in the Spanish door of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an intriguing possibility is introduced – a murder of the mythic art kind. Lorser Feitelson’s red lozenge shape in Hard Edge is interrupted in its right corner by a film still crop of Lee Remick testifying in Otto Preminger’s courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Murder.
Historically, artist Lorser Feitelson has a tie to the emergence of “hard edge painting.” He was featured in the 1999 dArt magazine article Testing the Fabric of the New Color Field by Michael Duncan. Duncan had been critical of this group of primarily Los Angeles-based artists writing, “For me a lack of ambition and conviction is the problem with the most hyped members of the so-called New Color Field movement.” Duncan preferred works of several older LA artists, “whose explosive and inventive use of color and abstract design provide quirky and fruitful contexts for the works of the younger experimenters.” A dip into the trove of art world narratives about Paris, New York, and Los Angeles from a century ago, should not disappoint those truly interested. Simply click the Lorser Feitelson Interviews for a brouse.
dArt magazine is pleased to introduce TWINNING, the application of a game structure to its Playing Card feature. When presented with cards bearing images from dArt back issues cropped to playing card size, a participant is asked to pair up any two from cards presented. While the choice on the surface may be no more profound than “liking the combination,” something deeper may have been at the root of the picks. Even if this is not the case, the resultant pairing of images affords the chance to answer questions that the art itself may be posing. This had certainly been true for writer Bruce Bauman, who in his The Empty Deep article about Gehard Richter said of the exhibition that it “forced me to reevaluate why I write about art.”
Cropped details of Gerhard Richter’s 1982 oil on canvas, Two Candles (Zwei Kerzen), and on the right Deiter Mammel’s Saddy. Collage produced 2021 by Steve Rockwell on dArt International paper over pine frame, 8.5″ x 10″Karin Mamma Anderson (left) and Philip Taaffe were “twinned” by dArt contributor Gae Savannah. The Anderson image was cropped from the Emese Krunák-Hajagos article When Darkness Falls in the Fall 2016 edition of dArt. The Philip Taaffe image came from the same dArt edition and was part of an article by Christopher Hart Chambers, Abstract But Not.The above eight playing cards-sized images were cropped from dArt back issues. From left to right: Karin Mamma Anderson, Deiter Mammel, Alberto Giacometti, Kurt Schwitters, Philip Taaffe, Joe Goode, bunny and carrots from a Katharine Carter and Associates ad, and Gerhard Richter.
This TWINNING of images was inspired by a recent visit to the home of collector and former dArt associate, Roy Bernardi, when presented with eight of my playing card works mounted on dArt International paper. Two had stood out as ones that he preferred: Richter’s Two Candles and Saddy, an acrylic on canvas painting by Deiter Mammel, cropped from the dArt advertisement of his 2016 HOT exhibition at Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto.
Every copy of the coming edition of dArt International magazine will be unique. The projected signed limited edition will feature dArt‘s “Playing Cards,” hand cut from back issues and tipped into a reproduced image of a dArt International paper mat.
Images from past dArt magazines trimmed to playing card size.A printed image of the work of Julian Schnabel cut to playing card dimensions by Steve Rockwell from an article on the artist that appeared in the Fall 2010 edition of dArt (#27).
The Artwork that Led to the Publication of a Magazine
by Steve Rockwell
Steve Rockwell, Pick a Number between 1 and 99 (detail), 1987, ink on printed bond paper, 42.5 inches x 12 feet 10 inches
I had dropped out of the art scene already in 1972. When I came up with the idea for Pick a Number Between 1 and 99 in 1987, my contact with people I had known from art school and the early studio days had all but ceased. To quote Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, professionally I was essentially “…a complete unknown.” Distanced from my past efforts, my future presented a blank slate. The situation was at once liberating, yet tinged by a sense of urgency.
