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Anish Kapoor’s Dance With Illusion

Dr. Gerry Coulter

Scale (from the very small to the very large), colour (especially vivid reds), and form (mysterious passageways), are vital to Anish Kapoor’s dance with illusion. His gigantic works challenge and overwhelm us as bodily presences and his smaller delicate works draw us into their mysterious points of disappearance. Many of his stronger works of the past quarter century disappear out of the space they occupy pointing us toward a place we cannot (physically) follow. If these disappearances have a destination it is as a gesture towards the infinite, the unknowable, the eternal which we can ever only grasp in thought for an instant. more...

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Form, Function, and Context: Frank Gehry

Dr. Gerry Coulter

Frank Gehry is the most important, imaginative, and obsessed architect since Louis I. Kahn. Many of Gehry’s buildings have pushed our understanding of what architecture can be to the limit. In a world where we pass by thousands of buildings noticing only a few, Gehry’s work frequently seizes our attention. The architect and his associates produce breathtaking exteriors which capture a good deal of public, critical and media attention. However, we must look beyond form when judging the work of an architect to a building’s functionality (does it work for what it was designed for?), and its contribution to its context. more...

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Photography By Other Means: Gerhard Richter’s Challenge to the Real

Dr. Gerry Coulter

What has Gerhard Richter (77), perhaps the greatest living painter, been telling us about photography? Richter has long mistrusted the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses. He has told several interviewers over the past forty years that he finds our encounter with reality to be “imperfect and circumscribed” (see, for example, “Interview with Peter Sager” [1972] 1993:73). Further, he does not believe that a photograph provides us with a picture of reality any more than a painting does – both media are merely imperfect tools used to make images which are a substitute for reality. more...

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Light Art or Art-Lite?

Dr. Gerry Coulter

The “real” world hides behind appearances which conspire to combat and root out meaning. Appearances so often play on light and the fact that the human eye is only partially equipped for the universe in which we live – a universe in which about ninety-six percent of matter and energy remain invisible to us. We are reminded of these fundamental aspects of existence at many junctures. As Baudrillard noted in The Vital Illusion, because of our distance from it (light years), we see the light of a star for many centuries after the star itself is dead (2000:71). Indeed, the four percent of the universe we know as “reality” is the result of the amputation of all the anti-matter and energy which we can only speculate about in astrophysics. more...

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Jean Baudrillard’s Andy Warhol Survives Euro Pop

Dr. Gerry Coulter

“There are various solutions, and I find Warhol’s position particularly interesting… Warhol interests me because he develops a media-oriented, mechanical strategy. It’s consistent with the strategy of the system, but faster than the system itself. It doesn’t dispute the system, but it pushes it to the point of absurdity, by overdoing its transparency” (Baudrillard in Genosko, 2001:148). Among the more fascinating art exhibitions to take place in Europe in 2008 was the Europop show at the Kunsthaus in Zürich. The show, which was more...

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Louis I. Kahn – The Timeless Art of Light and Form

Dr. Gerry Coulter

Only a year out of architecture school Kahn designed six enormous buildings for Philadelphia’s 1926 Exhibition marking the sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence. With these temporary structures Kahn began a life long love affair with monumentalism (the six buildings totaled 579,000 square meters), and the ephemeral. Thirty-five years after his passing this paper points to his extraordinary importance to architecture in the 21st century and beyond. (...) Everything is a ruin in process and a ruin is a melancholy marker of the passage of time in both directions. Kahn’s life was wrapped by a form of contented melancholy which found its way into his buildings as he came to wrap ruins around them. He gave us a singular view of the world and a thoroughly unique approach to the problem of architecture in time. more...

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Review Essay: The Photography Book And the Horizon of the Post Photographic

Dr. Gerry Coulter

This essay engages with ten recent publications on photography. These books are aimed at both a scholarly audience and those who think seriously about the image in contemporary society. My approach is to view each book as a snapshot of the state of photography and its theorization / presentation at the dawning of the post-photographic era. The following ten sections, each of which assesses a different book (on photography’s history, the photographer’s voice, a collection of twentieth century images, a curator’s eye, two photographer’s looking at their own work, photographic icons, a century of colour photography, contemporary photography, and the present state of photography theory), cast a wary eye upon writing about the digital and photography’s object. more...

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Kees van Dongen and the Power of Seduction

Dr. Gerry Coulter

In Kees van Dongen’s Portrait of A Woman we are met by the confident and self assured gaze of a sitter who shares the stage with the painter. Unlike many nude female models strewn across art’s history she is fully clothed and in charge of the artist who is working for her. She is seductive in the more powerful sense of the term – the sense that is not often used today – in that she presents a challenge to anyone attempting to construct her as a sex object, an art object, an object of liberation – or any kind of object at all. She sits for her portrait as would any confident and powerful man. She allows van Dongen to allude to her sexuality only with a fragment of her shoulder over more...

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Overcoming the Epistemological Break:

Francis Bacon and Jean Baudrillard and the Intersections of Art and Theory

Dr. Gerry Coulter

The painting of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is of importance to contemporary thought because it shares with contemporary theory important insights concerning the real. Bacon understood, as did thinkers like Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), that we never know the real, merely the appearances behind which it hides. rt, for Bacon, was about feeling and sensing until an appearance could be rendered which stands in for the real. According to this view, the simulation – the painting – is understood as more real than what we see. It is these characteristics of Bacon’s work more...

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Ruined America: The Photographs of Camilo José Vergara

Dr. Gerry Coulter

Camilo José Vergara uses photography to preserve decay. Four of his books of photographs are of ruins: The New American Ghetto; American Ruins; The Twin Towers Remembered; and Subway Memories. Vergara avoids so called areas of “gentrification” preferring to focus his lens on places like Camden (New Jersey), West Pullman (Chicago), Gary (Indiana), and the skyscraper graveyard of Detroit’s Grand Circus Park. Looking at Vergara’s photographs reminds me of watching the opening scenes of Jim Jarmusch’s film Stranger Than Paradise. more...

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One Among Several – The Traditional Gaze Seduced:

Toward A More Complex Understanding of Eros in Modernism

Dr. Gerry Coulter

The exhibition Eros in Modern Art can be read in a number of ways. A straight-forward content analysis would reveal that the vast majority of art works on display (around 93%) were made by men. Among these works one could also make a strong case that the presence of works such as Renoir’s Elongated Nude, Renoir’s Flying figure or Van Dongen’s Young Girl are classic examples of the traditional male/patriarchal gaze of Western art as it exerted its influence on modern artists. It might even be possible to make a feminist inspired case that a significant number of the works on display are products of that gaze. more...

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Seizing The Object By The Throat

The Anti-Photography Of Jeff Wall

Dr. Gerry Coulter

Canadian Jeff Wall’s work is among the most interesting to land on the international art world in the past quarter century. Wall considers himself a photographer and his work photography. Everyone writing about him in the art world, and curating his works in galleries and museums, recognizes him as a photographer. In 2002 when he won the very prestigious Hassleblad Foundation International Award it was for “photography”. Indeed, many of his images are considered to be icons of contemporary photography. While Wall does use a camera to record the images that become the transparencies spread over more...

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Andy Warhol: Living And Dieing With The Radical Liquidation of Art

The Diaries, 20 Years After

Dr. Gerry Coulter

Andy Warhol, who died twenty years ago on February 22, 1987 at age 58, kept a diary for the last decade of his life. The final entry was made five days before the gall-bladder surgery from which he would not recover. It was published two year’s later with an introduction by its editor and Andy’s long time friend, Pat Hackett (who transcribed his almost daily entries over the telephone). Andy’s diaries contain the private details of his thoughts and experiences – the ones he wanted us to have after his death. A well managed and edited diary can be an excellent source of publicity in the after-life – and this one is. more...

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Futurism's Ambivalent Present

Dr. Gerry Coulter

During the summer of 2009 (June ñ September) the Tate Modern in London partially reenacted the first Futurist exhibition of 1909. Attendance was acceptable but the critical response tended toward ìwhy bother?î. The Tate show included 18 of the 35 canvas on display in 1909 and many other painted after that first Futurist show. Why has so much ambivalence been stirred by this exhibition? more...

art agenda

‘Please… just make it go away!’ – New York vs. Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon: The Centenary Exhibition at the MET

Dr. Gerry Coulter

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective (66 paintings and 65 objects from his studio) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (MET) seeks to reevaluate the artist’s work based on new interpretations and archival materials that have emerged since his death in 1992. The exhibition was organized by Gary Tinterow of the MET (along with Chris Stephens and Matthew Gale of the Tate Britain). The main point of the show is to demonstrate that Bacon did not lose his force and vitality as a painter after the 1960’s (he lived until 1992). The show, which succeeds in this goal, has already appeared at the Tate Britain, London, and the Prado in Madrid. more...

art agenda

Exhibition Preview – Van Dongen in Barcelona

Dr. Gerry Coulter

The Musée Picasso in Barcelona is hosting a major exhibition of the works of the painter Kees Van Dongen from June 10-September 28, 2009. This traveling show has already appeared in Monaco in 2008 and Montreal in the Winter of 2009. The catalogue (edited by Nathalie Bondil and Jena-Michel Bouhours) is of exceptional quality and is the best recent publication on Van Dongen and his work. The show (as it has appeared in Monaco and Montreal) presents Van Dongen as a master of line and colour while stressing the results of the importance the artist gave to his own instincts over established theory (“I am like a cow” said Van Dongen: “I look. I paint the way I see” (Bondil et. al., 2008:1). more...