Augustus Goertz

Artist Q&A with Augustus Goertz

Augustus Goertz was born in 1948 and raised together with two sisters in an artistic/bohemian household by artist parents, Esther Meyer Goertz, and August Goertz, in Greenwich Village, New York City. He received his education at LaGuardia High School in NYC, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, and earned his BFA in Viusal Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, CA, where he studied with Bruce Nauman, Jay Defeo, and Wally Hedrick.

“Blue Blood Force Field II”, mixed media on canvas, 16 x 14 in | 41 x 36 cm, 2021

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

Either a nameless cave painter or that productive bad boy of all time Pablo Picasso.

How did you become a professional artist?

Among my very first memories are those of making art. Both my parents were artists. My father was a painter and my mother did mostly woodcuts. I grew up playing with their materials and never stopped.

What are the influences and inspirations in your work?

Jay Defeo said to me, “You are already an artist. Why are you in art school?” Bruce Nauman said to me, “You are the best sculptor who is actually a painter.” Roy Lichtenstein said to me in his kitchen, “You always have to go over everything yourself, if you want it done right.” Tom Akawie, who taught me spray painting, is also a major influence in my work.

How is your work different than everything else out there?

I think my work is very philosophical. In my view, art is philosophy made manifest. Conceptually, I have a lifelong interest in our place in the universe. The big perspective. Because of this, I developed an interest in the ramifications of quantum theory. Another interest has … Click here to read more

What is an Art Connoisseur?

To find out whether you are a connoisseur, let’s start with a definition, shall we? According to the dictionary, a connoisseur is “someone who understands the details, technique, or principles of an art and is competent to act as a critical judge.” A secondary definition specifies “one who enjoys with discrimination and appreciation of subtleties.”

Is it sufficient simply to appreciate art to be considered a connoisseur? Not according to the dictionary, alas. Even in the second definition, one is called not just to “appreciate” but to “discriminate”, detecting various subtleties to do so. Love just does not suffice: intelligence is a necessary determinant, as least according to Webster’s.

Before I continue refining this definition, let me introduce myself. I am an artist and also an author. In my latest book, “The Joy of Art: How to Look at, Appreciate, and Talk About Art” I set out to give readers a tool kit they can use to gain a better understanding of art that includes a working art vocabulary, general, and specific criteria in evaluating any work of visual art, some answers to basic questions and conundrums, and lots of comparisons of works in a variety of genres.

My plan was to arm readers, who I imagined already to be art lovers (why else would they be reading?) with that “appreciation of subtleties” the dictionary calls for. I did not specify that my aim was to make readers into connoisseurs, but perhaps, in the end, that’s exactly what I accomplished. Readers presumably already had the love–all they needed to become connoisseurs were those fine distinctions and the language to describe them.

What does a wine connoisseur have that the average wine drinker does not? They can probably distinguish the type of grapes used, maybe even the vintage, can surely tell a Pinot from … Click here to read more

Willie Cole

The Future of Art: Willie Cole, a contemporary artist creating unique work and positive change.

Willie Cole has been making innovative work with unique iconography for over half a century, but talking to him, he sounds like a friendly, smart colleague or neighbor next store. Perhaps that’s why his work is so accessible and inspirational.

The artist, who lives in Mine Hill, NJ, has been the subject of shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998), Bronx Museum of the Arts (2001), and Miami Art Museum (2001). These institutions, some of the biggest in the world, along with private collectors from New York to Los Angeles, see something provocative in his work.

When Art Review City caught up with him, the artist invited us to a visit his home studio where he was finishing the works for the collective exhibition “There’s There There,” curated by renowned American artist Rashid Johnson at blue-chip gallery Hauser and Wirth’s Southampton location. This show invites visitors to reflect upon the pleasures and complex histories of the shapes, movements, and objects that permeate the everyday, and Cole’s ironing board works are clearly the stars of the show.

Installation view, ‘There’s There There’, Hauser & Wirth Southampton, 2021. © Hauser & Wirth. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

The artist has spent a lifetime working to look at thing differently than most artists. He is most concerned with recycling, green energy, and living a healthy and spiritual life to live at one with Mother Earth. He spent many of his early days in a pew at Sunday School, and later studied Buddhism in high school and college, but today he says he is a “no-frills nature worshipper” which explains a lot about him as a man and as an artist. “Nature, no matter what you call it, is powerful, and it deserves to be admired … Click here to read more

Geoffrey Dorfman

Artist Q&A with Geoffrey Dorfman

In a time when the centrality of painting has been questioned and abstraction appears to have exhausted its possibilities, Dorfman maintains his commitment to oil and brush on canvas. For him, the Abstract Expressionists were a starting point, not an ending point.

Dorfman’s approach is not goal-oriented movement toward some idea or vision. Rather, it is an identification with with the properties of paint, understanding what it can do, and from there to the painting. For Dorfman, the edges of the painting are very important, and his works tend to move out beyond the canvas. At the same time, he puts small “stop signs” in his works, so as the eye pauses and contemplates before it continues on and outward. His strokes tend to “flutter,” in a way similar to the Impressionists, further generating movement and at the same time, anchoring the eye in the moment.

“Zoroaster”, oil on canvas, 42 x 46 in | 107 x 117 cm, 2020. Courtesy of Lawrence Fine Art.

How did you become a professional artist?

Most artists are ex-art students or teachers. They’re still practicing the lessons they learned or else they get diverted into something peripheral, but call it art anyway. I myself didn’t know any different. I had been working summers in the movies as an electrician. I had an ‘in’ through my mother’s brother. In the late 1960’s I worked on several commercials and a few features, including Midnight Cowboy. (I and one other guy lit the set for Sylvia Miles’ bedroom.) Anyway, in 1971 there were openings in the scenic design union. You had to take a test and there was a $2,000 entrance fee. My uncle, who always drove a new Cadillac El Dorado, told my parents he’d front the money and … Click here to read more

“From the Viewpoint of MAKING”

The current exhibition at WhiteBox, “From the Viewpoint of ‘Making,’” curated by Masa Hosojima, includes the work of five Japanese sound artists: Kenichi Kanazawa, Ken Ikeda, Rie Nakajima, Takahiro Kawaguchi, and Hosojima. The exhibition has also included collaborative panel discussions, and multimedia performances of music, dance, and poetry, during its month-long run. These discussions and performances have included the following artists: Elliott Sharp, Matt Sullivan, Beatrice Antonie Martino, Maho Ogawa, and Juan Puntes; poets Anthony Haden-Guest and Jesus Papoleto; as well as the following contributing scholars: Tom Cohen, Reiko Tomii, and organizer, Kyoko Sato.

In a conversation about, “Making,” Hosojima said, “The point of contact is what making is to me…to make, play, and exhibit.” This point of contact is also evident in Kenichi Kanazawa’s work, “What is Making?” (2021), a 19-minute video, commissioned by Hosojima. We see his hand holding the rubber mallet, the mallet hitting the steel circular disk, and sand moving on the steel disk. The vibrating disk acts as a platform for various geometric pattern formations. Kanazawa studies cymatics. He states, “…it is a visual demonstration of the power of sound to create order out of chaos. Sounds starts to move in geometric form.”

Kenichi Kanazawa, “What is Making?”, video, 19 minutes, 2021.
Courtesy of WhiteBox.

The actual geometric visual patterns that are formed by the vibrations are a mystery. In Kanazawa’a video and sound work, he has no control over the geometric patterns that are formed. In this way, “What is Making” has ”no sense of mission,” as Hosojima defined making. Instead, Kanazawa plays, generates, and lets it flow.

Hosojima aims to reevaluate Happenings in the 1950s and 1960s in how he sees “making.” As he and I walked around the exhibition together, I thought of Yoko Ono’s early happening in the 1960s. … Click here to read more

Aurora Robson

Lily Kostrzewa speaks with Aurora Robson

Aurora Robson is a multi-media artist known predominantly for her meditative work intercepting the plastic waste stream. Her practice is about subjugating negativity and shifting trajectories. Her work is a formal meditation on recurring nightmares she had as a child which she hybridizes with forms found in nature. Robson was born in Toronto in 1972 and grew up in Hawaii. She lived and worked in New York City for over two decades during which time she studied art history and visual arts at Columbia University. Recently, Robson moved to the Hudson Valley to raise her two daughters with her husband Marshall Coles.

Installation view of *Remnant Romance Environmental Works: Idelle Weber and Aurora Robson*.
Courtesy of Hollis Taggart.

Because of my personal interest in female artists, I took the opportunity to interview the environmental artist Aurora Robson regarding her recent two-person exhibition at Hollis Taggart Gallery with her collaborator the late environmental realistic painter Idelle Weber (1932-2020). Aurora Robson uses mostly plastic waste debris as her main medium to create her artworks. For her, plastic waste materials’ effect on the environment is of crucial concern. This concern is evidenced by her powerful and often colorful artistic representations.

As a recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts grant, she worked at Penn State University to develop an exhibition with plastic waste debris. Her work there solidified in her what I call the four Rs – reduce, reuse, recycle, and rethink.

One might wonder what plastic waste debris has to do with fine art. Well, as it almost always happens, artistic representations are a most powerful form of education. For me, Aurora’s Creations are impactful yet attractive.

As I talked with her, I started with her making process. She first explained that color was important … Click here to read more

David Carbone

Artist Q&A with David Carbone

David Carbone, Professor Emeritus of Painting and Drawing in the Department of Art and Art History, University at Albany, SUNY, received his B.F.A. at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University. He also spent a summer in Maine at the Skowhegan School, and later, earned his M.F.A. at Brooklyn College. He has studied with T. Lux Feininger, Henry Schwartz, Jan Cox, Barnet Rubinstein, Gabriel Laderman, Lee Bontecou, Jacob Lawrence, Jimmy Ernst, Carl Holty, Harry Holtzman, Joseph Groell, Philip Pearlstein, Alfred Russell, and Sylvia Stone. Carbone has had seven one-person exhibitions including shows at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Zoe Gallery, Boston, David Brown Gallery, Provincetown, and Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco. He is a painter, critic, and curator living in New York City. He has shown his work across the country and written for various print and online publications.

“Neither Out Far Nor In Deep”, oil on canvas, 42 x 70 in | 102 x 178 cm, 2021

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

Really, is there anything duller than an artist talking about their love of a famous artist—we all know too well: Leonardo, Piero, or Vermeer! Yes, they are all worthy. Perhaps, having a favorite artist may even be dangerous? Often, it points to a limited experience of art or worse to a limited capacity to respond to the varieties of human experience. For me, much of the value of a life in art is found in a conversation between works of art. Art, even when it is buoyant and joyous, is a matter of contemplation and meditation; I always look toward what is hidden in plain sight.

How did you become a professional artist?

Did I have a choice? Not that my parents wanted me to become an artist; it isn’t an easy career by any … Click here to read more

“Ken Cro-Ken: The Conduct of Paint”

Art and Nature: A Collaboration

It is late one night, and you are out in nature, far away from the city, with your eye pressed up to the lens of a telescope. Distant planets and galaxies appear to be within the reach of your arm. But what would it look like, if the vastness of the universe were encapsulated in the palm of your hand? The answer lies in Ken Cro-Ken’s macro/micro paintings. These mini paintings, which are no larger than the palm of your hand, are nestled within larger paintings, offering alternative perspectives of the same slice of the multiverse. In his own words: “It is for the viewer to determine whether it is a microscope zooming-in for a closer look or a telescope that reveals the greater body from a distance. Which painting is the macro and which is the micro?” Cro-Ken’s playful relationship with the macro and micro forces of Nature is evident in all of his work – whether painting, sculpture, or video.

The work of Ken Cro-Ken, self-ascribed ecosystem painter and environmentalist videographer, is currently on view at PS109 El Barrio’s Artspace in New York City, presented by WhiteBox in collaboration with 2B&2C. The one-man show, entitled Ken Cro-Ken: The Conduct of Paint invites the viewer into conversation with Nature, through exuberant improvisational paintings that simultaneously capture the great expanse of the universe and the delicate intricacies of time in motion.

Working at the intersection of the microscopic and macroscopic, Cro-Ken considered himself a conduit for Nature’s expressivity, co-creating in concert with seasonal and elemental forces. Cro-Ken used chemical catalysts – what he called “Speed Elements” – to set his paintings in motion, and to reveal the invisible “push-pull” forces of Nature. These durational paint experiments were conducted in a … Click here to read more

Taney Roniger “Other Rivers”

Capturing a moment that will never occur again

In her first virtual solo exhibition taking place at Robert Berry Gallery from February 11^th– March 14th, 2021, New York-based artist Taney Roniger has created large-scale charcoal on paper drawings that are recreations of tiny gestural drawings that she had made in under a minute. These monumental re-creations take up to a hundred hours to create per work.

The original process of creating spontaneous gestures is all about capturing a moment that will never occur again. They are expressions of unconscious impulses, both internal and external. The laborious recreating the spontaneous is a way to preserve a specific moment of time. She understands that there is a bit of humor in the process, but it’s not about that. It’s about capturing the energy and uniqueness of an instant that is typically lost forever. Similar to her early work where the process of creating was depicted on the canvas by creating patterns and sequences of pin prick holes added to an ornately surfaced media. In those works, the specific process of creation is readily apparent to the viewer, whereas in these new drawings, one only sees the accumulation of time spent marking charcoal on paper.

Installation view of Taney Roniger “Other Rivers”. Courtesy of Robert Berry Gallery.

Other Rivers refers to Heraclitus’s dictum that you never step in the same river twice, as the river is always changing, and so are you. It refers to the fact that the artist is trying to recreate something that cannot be re-created–a particular moment in time–so it’s not the same river but rather another. The charcoal drawings might be thought of as odes to that moment that will never reoccur, and also that the viewer is not the same person they were when they first … Click here to read more