Dan Graham
at MOCA.... (took a stroll downtown yesterday.)
DG :"When I was 14, I read Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre, and a key section, which Jacques Lacan took for his mirror stage, is a child's first sense of himself in a primitive way. This involves seeing himself as other people see him, which is an important awareness of intersubjective gazes, and I often go back to that concept. When I had a gallery, I showed Sol LeWitt and other minimal artists, but as much as I like minimal art, I was more interested in intersubjectivity. In the modern city, when you look at a shopping arcade you see yourself superimposed on the mirror reflection of the thick glass on top of the product, and there are also mirrors inside as a kind of fragmented apathy. I am interested in the surface of the cities and social interaction inside cities, but my work is often in parks, and I am very much interested in suburbia."
interview taken from here..
Jean Fautrier
(currently at MOCA, in a "A Changing ratio: Painting and Sculpture from the Collection" Not familiar with his work and in person they have an intense quiet energy.)
One can, in fact, abandon oneself (not however without some second thoughts) to the call of that which is seen and keenly felt. The real is the springboard; it gives the impetus to everything that will ensue. There is nothing to do but let yourself go.
Jean Fautrier
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"Fautrier has a lot in common with Giacometti: he exaggerated his medium in a way that was at once parodistic and reverential, kitschy and archaic. During World War II, while Giacometti was whittling his sculpture down to match-box scale in Switzerland, Fautrier was in Paris, fattening up his painting by using plaster and gesso. He took impasto to extremes that alternately suggested stony, trilobite relief and cake icing.
By 1940 Fautrier was building out from these surfaces, achieving physical and critical mass with his ''Hostage'' series of 1942-45. Their round rough blobs of troweled plaster, accented with vague profiles and tints of color, and suggestive of disfigured faces, were said to be inspired by the sounds of French citizens being tortured and executed near Fautrier's clandestine studio outside Paris."
taken from NYT article here.
