James Kalm is performing urban recon when he discovers “New World” an exhibition by one of the outspoken advocates of the “Pictures Generation”, Thomas Lawson. These recent paintings demonstrate the distance Lawson’s practice has progressed from the norms of the early 1980s.

Rauschenberg

A personal appreciation on the occasion of Robert Rauschenberg's death

I was born in 1951, a clean slate, the same year Robert Rauschenberg accomplished his famous series of white interactive paintings. It seems to me he has been inter-filling my mind in ever since; though we never met.

I was trying to remember how I first became aware of his work: but of course it was through the mechanically reproduced. As a freshman at
Hinsdale High School I purchased a copy of Calvin Tomkins’s book "Ahead of the Game" (I still own it! – the cover incorporates "L.H.O.O.Q." by Marcel
Duchamp), in which Rauschenberg was introduced to me via Duchamp, John Cage and Jean Tinguely. I think I had been prepared to become devoted to his combination-permutation sensibility because I had been highly excited, as a 10 year old boy, by the Dada collages I had discovered in the Max Ernst exhibition I saw the summer of 1961 at the Art Institute of Chicago.

PRESENT samples different models and modes of perception and distance, evoking presence in the sense of “reentry” into the fugitive "now" – the critical pivot of point of view, of locality and physical or geographic location, the limits of territory, the infinity of movement.

With so little painting hung at the Whitney, it would have been a more radical gesture, and not really that much of a stretch, for the curators to have gone for broke and selected none at all. Examining what was finally chosen and how it is presented within the show might prove instructive, and not just on the changing status of painting in the 21st century, but also regarding the assertion and abdication of curatorial will.

In the current Biennial, painting seems to be handled with kid gloves, approached like a "viral" entity, quarantined from the primary form of the exhibition (installation), or else treated as installation art in its own right by being sequestered into individual, private rooms. Is this to protect other media from the "infection" of painting? or is it a belated effort to isolate and hopefully rekindle the creative spark of the medium, to counteract the "death of painting" that has been proclaimed so frequently over the last thirty years?

Tribes Gallery
285 E. 3rd Street #2
(between ave C and D)
NY NY 10009
212-674-3778
info@tribes.org
http://www.tribes.org

Tribes Gallery is proud to present

-Back to the Beginning and Begin Again…

new works by Dianne Bowen
and
Next to Me - Works on Paper
by Stephanie Colonna

Opening reception:

Thursday, September 20th, 2007.

6 – 9pm

img_assist|nid=1501|title=Bingyi opening reception|desc=The artists and UB fauclty members Bingyi and Tyrone Georgiou at the opening reception of The Dawns Here Are Quiet at UB Art Galleries from 4/19/07-5/19/07. photo: D.Steckler|link=none|align=left|width=0|height=0]BINGYI: THE DAWNS HERE ARE QUIET