New Parkett with Robert Frank,Wade Guyton, Christopher Wool and more
Parkett’s Vol. 83 continues its exploration of leading contemporary artists with a New York issue, featuring three artists of three generations who largely work in black and white: Christopher Wool, Wade Guyton, and Robert Frank.
Additional texts feature Paul Chan on Paul Sharits, Max Wechsler on Félix Vallotton, Thomas Eaton on Kenneth Anger, Burkhard Meltzer on Susan Philipsz, and a text by Victor Tupitsyn. The insert is by Kerstin Brätsch. The spine is by Paulina Olowska.
New York painter Christopher Wool‘s work has attitude. Says Richard Flood: “Wool hasn’t left much of the American angst and anger out of his art. The terse staccato of his language—rushing between noir wise guys, Burma Shave teasers, Punk rants, Lenny Bruce riffs, and Zen smack downs—is a mad imploded sampler of rage, denial, and brutal pragmatism.” Jutta Koether writes about Wool’s “persistence” in creating such cool—”adding the effect of uncertainty to painting” all the while expressing his devotion to the medium itself. A feeling about painting that lies further beneath the surface. A third text is by Fionn Meade. Liz Kotz explores the role of the book in Wool and Guyton’s work. For his Parkett edition, Wool has used his vocabulary of splotches, squiggles, slashes, drips, and washes, to produce a silkscreen print with the year 2008 boldly stamped across its surface— a surprising reminder that even the date can serve as just another dirty, rubbed out mark. Or not?
So intimate is Scott Rothkopf‘s writing on Wade Guyton that one feels let in on an intellectual exchange between artist and critic, amidst an old-fashion New York School (think Frank O’Hara) studio visit. The tone is both refreshing and nostalgic, but Rothkopf has the capacity to step back and articulate the crux of Guyton’s latest ink-jet paintings in his unique bulls-eye prose. “This is a fine line to walk,” says Rothkopf. There is “a danger of lampooning a mode of making and beholding that has by now been subjected to four decades of assiduous critique.” Other texts are by Daniel Birnbaum, and Suzanne Cotter. The Guyton edition is a rectangular panel of plywood digitally printed black, as though it were a floor section removed from a recent Guyton exhibition. A chance for a viewer to live under the artist’s feet and inside his head.
As Jack Kerouac wrote in the introduction to the first American version of Robert Frank‘s The Americans, “After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.” Outstanding writing on Frank didn’t stop there. In this issue of Parkett the next generation Beat, Eileen Myles, claims: “Pull My Daisy refers to a g-string being dropped away, but the emotional underpinnings of this film make it more like a red flag being waved at a bull.” Myles’ language reveals that Frank’s era of Bohemian play casting great skepticism on American values, is still alive and well, even as the Bowery goes up in condos. There are also texts by Pamela M. Lee and Tacita Dean. The Photographic print he has done just for Parkett groups two Polaroid images of a decoy like swan, each facing the opposite direction.
For more details on the new Parkett, its content and artist editions, as well as for subscriptions and back issues, please go to www.parkettart.com.
