Santa Fe’s Monthly
m a
g
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of and for the Arts • November 2012
WHO IS ROSALIND KRAUSS?
AND WHY DOES SHE MATTER?
C L A S S I C N AT I V E A M E R I C A N A RT
53 OL D SANTA F E TRAIL
| UPSTAIRS ON THE PL AZ A | SAN TA F E, NE W ME XICO | 505.982 .8478 | SHIPROCKSAN TAF E .COM
C O N T E N T S
5
letters
10
universe of
14
art forum:
17
studio visits:
19
food for thought:
25
one bottle:
23
dining guide:
27
art openings
28
out
32
previews:
35
national spotlight:
37
feature:
40
critical reflections:
51
green planet:
53
architectural details:
54
writings:
&
artist Sondra Goodwin The Doll and the Monster, by Guy Pène du Bois Michael Sharber and Connie Schaekel The Honeybee
The 2009 Chartron et Trebuchet Chassagne-Montrachet “Les Embazées,” by Joshua Baer The Compound and La Boca
about
Remix: Then & Now at Hills Gallery and Zachariah Rieke at Wade Wilson Art War/Photography: Photographs of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Who is Rosalind Krauss and Why Does She Matter? by Diane Armitage
Cause & Effect at Chiaroscuro; Chaos to Complexity at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts; Dancing with the Dark at UNM Art Museum; Dust in the Machine at the Center for Contemporary Arts; Ecumene at Santa Fe Community College; Eddie Dominguez at the Roswell Museum; Chris Felver at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art; ISEA2012 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness at 516 Arts (Alb.); Kenneth Noland at Yares Art Projects; and Walking at the Edge of Water at the Lensic Center for the Performing Arts Jim Hightower, photograph by Jennifer Esperanza On the Wire, image by Guy Cross
“How to Appreciate Art” by Erik Campbell
Jean-Paul Goude is a legend in international magazine and advertising circles. Goude does it all—graphic design, art direction, illustration, choreography, photography, and film. Goude’s films illustrate his taste for exoticism, music, dance, and fairy tales. Although he was the art director of Esquire for ten years, he is best known to the general public for his professional and romantic relationship with his longtime muse—singer, model, and pop icon Grace Jones. Jean-Paul Goude (Thames & Hudson, $49.95) is a visual delight—it is loaded with drawings, sketches, storyboards, and photographs. Leafing through this book, which contains over five hundred color images, there seems to be no end to Goude’s knack for coming up with fresh and scintillating imagery.
letters
magazine VOLUME XX, NUMBER V
WINNER 1994 Best Consumer Tabloid SELECTED 1997 Top-5 Best Consumer Tabloids SELECTED 2005 & 2006 Top-5 Best Consumer Tabloids P u b l i s h e r / C r e at i v e D i r e c t o r Guy Cross P u b l i s h e r / F o o d Ed i t o r Judith Cross Art Director Chris Myers C o p y Ed i t o r Edgar Scully P r o o fR e a d e r S James Rodewald Kenji Barrett s t a ff p h o t o g r a p h e r s Anne Staveley Lydia Gonzales Preview / Calendar editor Elizabeth Harball WEB M EISTER
Jason Rodriguez facebook Chief Laura Shields Contributors
R. Allen, Diane Armitage, Joshua Baer, Davis Brimberg, Erik Campbell, Jon Carver, Kathryn M Davis, Victor DiSuvero, Jennifer Esperanza, Marina La Palma, Iris McLister, Richard Tobin, Susan Wider, and Nancy Zastudil C o VER
Photograph of Rosalind Krauss by Ann Gabbart
See Feature on Page
37
ADVertising Sales
THE magazine: 505-424-7641 Lindy Madley: 505-577-4471 Judy Bell: 505-819-9357 Distribution
Jimmy Montoya: 470-0258 (mobile) THE magazine is a periodi cal published 10x a year by THE magazine Inc., 320-A Aztec Street,, Santa Fe, NM 87501. Coporate address: 44 Bishop Lamy Road Lamy, NM 87540. Phone: (505)-424-7641. Email address: themagazinesf@gmail.com. Website address: themagazineonline.com. All materials copyright 2012 by THE magazine. All rights reserved by THE magazine. Reproduction of contents is prohibited without written permission from THE magazine. THE magazine is not responsible for the loss of any unsolicited materials. THE magazine is not responsible or liable for any misspellings, incorrect iformation in its captions, calendar, or other listings. Opinions expressed do not necessarily represent the views or policies of THE magazine, its owners, or any of its, employees, members, interns, volunteers, agents, or distribution venues. Bylined articles a represent the views of their authors. Letters to the editor are welcome. Letters may be edited for style and libel, and are subject to condensation. THE magazine accepts advertisements from advertisers believed to be of good reputation, but cannot guarantee the authenticity of objects and/or services advertised. HE magazine is not responsible for any claims made by its advertisers; for copyright infringement by its advertisers .and is not responsible or liable for errors in any advertisement. november
2012
Two percent of the world’s population are orphaned children—abandoned by their parents, deprived of parental care. “Orphans Of The World” is a project created by Tess Yong in 2011 after she traveled to Myanmar and Nepal. There she encountered an overwhelming number of orphaned children who were living on the streets or in severe living conditions. Amid these bleak circumstances, Tess came across children with bright smiles on their face—smiles that inspired her to want to be of service to them. In 2011, she raised enough money to school, feed, and board fifteen Tibetan and Nepalese children for a year. The goal in 2012 is to feed, educate, and board one hundred and fifty refugee children, as well as assisting orphanages in Myanmar and Nepal. To raise money for this cause, a group of dancers and musicians, ages twelve to seventyfive, will present a performance—Sacred Sensuous Dance—on Saturday, November 10, at 7:30 pm at the Scottish Rite Masonic Theatre, 436 Paseo de Peralta. There will be a silent auction—art, gift certificates, jewelry, and food and drink (courtesy of Cloud Cliff Bakery, Old Dairy Mills, and Whole Foods). Tickets: $25. Students/Seniors: $18. Lensic: 984-1234 or www.ticketssantafe.org. This event is for the children—be there, they need your love and support. www.orphansoftheworld.com
TO THE EDITOR: Your October issue sported a marvelous cover and article on long-forgotten French photographer Guy Bourdin. I have always been a fan of Bourdin’s surrealistic takes on fashion and beauty in French Vogue. Seeing a sampler of his photography in your magazine once again reminded me of what a fantastic body of photographs he produced in a time of so many other great fashion photographers—Helmut Newton, David Bailey, Clive Arrowsmith, Richard Avedon, Bob Richardson, and Hiro. Thank you THE. —Bernadette Prevot, Los Angeles, via email TO THE EDITOR: I am writing to express my appreciation for Ms. Armitage’s critical reflection on the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. While I do agree that it is allegorical, mythic, and epic, I do not agree that it is “post-racial.” I don’t think there is such a thing in present day America. This is a movie of place and race. It would not be the same movie if the protagonists were white or some other ethnicity or race. It’s a celebration of black culture and survival...and, it is inclusive of the interracial relationships which are very much a part of the South whether overt or covert. Many of my acquaintances condemned what they saw as child abuse. This is an unfortunate reading, situated in our over-psychological Santa Fe culture. Wink, the father, clearly loves his daughter and is trying the best he can to prepare
her and himself for his impending death and for her survival in a community of extreme poverty that is certainly a result of racism and racist practices. Nevertheless, without romanticizing the characters in the movie, the story is testimony to human integrity, human resilience, and the possible “fitting together” of the “broken pieces.” —Ellen J. Shabshai Fox, Santa Fe, via email TO THE EDITOR: Many thanks for the excellent review of our show Three Visions of Northern New Mexico by Susan Wider in your October issue. Her descriptions of the three artists—painter Reg Loving, sculptor Tim Prothero, and photographer Steven A. Jackson—were interesting and very accurate. I appreciate a reviewer who spends time looking at the show and comes to her own conclusions. —Ann Hosfeld, New Concept Gallery, via email TO THE EDITOR: THE magazine is such a beautiful magazine. The Roger Salloch article in the May issue about Château La Coste in France was perfect story telling. We were happy to read it and to show it to those who might have been reluctant to visit Château La Coste. Enough said. —Kimiko Yoshida & Jean-Michel Ribette, Paris, via email THE magazine welcomes your letters. Letters may be edited for space or clarity. Email: themagazinesf@gmail.com
THE magazine | 5
T H R O U G H D E C E M B E R 15, 2 012 | U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W M E X I C O A R T M U S E U M | A L B U Q U E R Q U E
DANCING WITH THE DARK: JOAN SNYDER PRINTS 1963 – 2010
UNIVERSIT Y OF NE W MEXICO ART MUSEUM | AL BUQUERQUE www.unm.edu/~artmuse 505.277.4001 Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 10 – 4 Closed Sunday & Monday Joan Snyder, Madrigal X from 33 Madrigals, 2001, monoprint (color lithograph, monotype, and color woodcut). Collection of the artist. © Joan Snyder. Photo by Peter Jacobs. Daniel Reeves, Video still from Avatamsaka, 2012, Video projection on 72 inch glass disc, 2:40:49 loop. Courtesy of the artist. This event is part of ISEA 2012 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness. www.isea2012.org
TH E T RA N S F O R M AT I V E S U R FAC E
M A X C O L E | BEYOND NOVEMBER 30 - DECEMBER 30, 2012 R E C E P T I O N F O R T H E A R T I S T N O V E M B E R 3 0 , 5 - 7 P. M .
CHARLOTTE
JACKSON
FINE
ART
554 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 Te l 5 0 5 . 9 8 9 . 8 6 8 8 | w w w. c h a r l o t t e j a c k s o n . c o m
In partnership with ISEA2012: Machine Wilderness
October 26 - November 30 Weird Science Aaron Rothman Kamila Wozniakowska Pinar Yoldas Marina Zurkow
Anne Farrell Philip Galanter Haein Kang Hugh Livingston Josh Lopez-Binder
Richard Levy Gallery • Albuquerque • www.levygallery.com • 505.766.9888
Michael Petry David Kapp
JOSHUA D’S WALL AND RECENT WORKS
WEST/EAST — LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK
Paintings
Glass Installations October 26 through November 23 ARTIST RECEPTION:
Friday, October 26, 5–7 pm Artist will be present
October 26 through November 23 ARTIST RECEPTION:
Friday, October 26, 5–7 pm Artist will be present
435 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe, NM 87501 505 982-8111 zanebennettgallery.com Tues–Sat 10–5 or by appointment Railyard Arts District Walk last Friday of every month
ZANEBENNETT CONTEMPORARY
ART
WES MILLS TO TEASE A HUMMINGBIRD NEW DRAWINGS THROUGH DECEMBER 8, 2012
JAMES KELLY CONTEMPORARY PLEASE VISIT US IN THE NEW SPACE WITHIN THE SAME BUILDING AT 550 SOUTH GUADALUPE STREET IN THE RAILYARD 505.989.1601 / JAMESKELLY.COM UNTITLED 2011, GRAPHITE ON PAPER,10 X 10 INCHES, PAPER
When she was only four years old,
Sondra Goodwin became a vegetarian. At sixteen, she was given her first camera. At
twenty-one,
she
began
to
grow and eat her own vegetables. In growing and eating her vegetables, she realized that she was killing things, but soon accepted the arrangement we humans have with our planet Earth—life and death in the garden. Goodwin’s work is a memento mori— “Remember your mortality.”
UNIVERSE OF
My Farm IN THE MOUNTAINS My studio lies on a path between my garden and kitchen. One day as I walked to the kitchen with my arms full of vegetables, I thought them too beautiful to be consumed. So I arranged them on my scanner and created images and posted them on Facebook. People loved them and I was encouraged by a curator to start making high-resolution images. Now that I was making art, I asked myself, what the hell was I doing? I had an identity crisis. My other work had always dealt with the body and sexuality, and these scanned images were such that even my mother could approve of them. I then realized that it’s all about the physical shape in the world. Flowers are plants’ sexual organs. Their fruits are the product of plant sex, in some cases even interspecies sex—and how much kinkier can one really get? In art as in life, there are no rules, no laws, and no regulations. Vegetables are the bridge between our creations in the world and the natural world. They came from nature, but through centuries of selection and breeding we’ve formed them to fit our needs. I am the documentarian—the vegetables are the evidence of these two worlds meeting. I grow them, I record them, and then I consume them. We have not invented their species, only their variety.
The Human Body—Sex, Nudity, G-Rated Having always worked with the body as imagery, I have come to think of the vegetables as nature’s body and, finally, I can make sexual imagery that is “G-rated.” I say, show your children the pretty flowers; point out their sexual organs, or their offspring, vegetables, which are so sensual and beautiful. For me, all life revolves around just that—it is life, death, and the continuation of a lust for all life, and all that it entails. Life is about the living of life, and so I surround myself with lots of life, growing all of my own crops and therefore most of my own food in my garden.
Process Sometimes I see something, and I immediately see it. Sometimes I see something in my mind’s eye, yet it does not translate into the physical, three-dimensional world. There is not just one way of seeing a thing, as from one side it can look completely different than seen from another side. As I gather ingredients for my dinner in the garden, I see beauty. I assemble and compose the vegetables and cuttings on the scanner, making different versions. Staying up until midnight before I have finished playing with my food sure gives the term “starving artist” a whole new meaning. As I am preparing dinner, the peels and insides of the vegetables become compositions on the cutting board. I return to the studio to make drawings on the scanner. My images are not complex, they are about the simple uniqueness and beauty of nature, of which we after all are a part, and hopefully we will learn to appreciate and cherish it again—and maybe that’s enough. D
Photograph by Dana Waldon
november
2012
THE magazine | 11
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Monday - Friday 10 - 4 Saturday 11 - 3
ART FORUM
THE magazine asked a clinical psychologist and two people who love art to share their take on this 1914 painting—The Doll and the Monster—by Guy Pène du Bois. They were shown only the image—they were not told the title, medium, or name of the artist.
We’re both free. Free to think
Guy Pène du Bois focused on the beau
for ourselves now and then.
monde, the social stratum preoccupied
Free to spend time with each other.
by status, money, and fashion. He often
I imagine,
portrayed men in evening dress pursuing younger women. He depicted women
As I stare at these lily white lives,
with great sensitivity, paying careful
captured at this time of their lives,
attention to their clothes. The dress of the threatened young woman is the
Sadness and anger fill this painting. This
Ah lily white, lily white, lily white...
remaining forever.
appears to be a wealthy couple on their
Up, right. Up, tight.
Just like any time. Did it last?
visual focus of this painting—her face
way to or from a formal affair. The work is
Sophisticate, Early Urbanite. Subject
That is all that I want to know.
hides emotions; the man’s face is blank.
dated 1914, the start of World War I. One
to the painterly eye. Dear wallflower
Maybe the seeds were sown that night
He is literally an empty suit, animated
imagines whether this couple represents
may you bring me delight. New
So long ago.
only by his avarice. This man is, indeed,
the warring countries. Their relationship
sexuality expressing itself.
monstrous. —R. Allen, photographer, Pecos
looks like that of abuser and abused. What are they arguing about? Psychologically,
American tailored era - Excited innocence.
deep relationship issues smolder beneath
What did it lead to?
the surface of tonight’s fight. He is
Who did it lead to?
crowding her and she is recoiling. Her
When were we: now or then?
hand reaches the wall for support while
Have another drink wallflower.
his hand, in contrast, is in the “tough guy”
Drink up then, her.
pre-fist position. He aggressively stares at
Tell me later what you think.
—The Editors, THE magazine
her. Head jutting forward, he leans towards her in anger. He casts a long shadow over
I don’t care what you think.
her left arm while she casts a shadow on
Wallflower. Say yes to me.
the wall. There is also much irony in this
We’re both free. Free to think
work. Beautiful clothing and hairstyles
for ourselves now and then.
contrast sharply with ugly moods. We
Free to spend time with each other.
see a couple who are physically close,
I imagine,
yet emotionally distant. The artist paints the figures’ psychological states as their
As I stare at these lily white lives,
Large quick paint strokes behind the man
captured at this time of our lives,
echo his anger, whereas soft quiet strokes
remaining forever.
appearing next to the woman mirror her
Just like any time. Did it last?
sadness. This piece is rife with emotional
That is all that I want to know.
disconnection. We see the disillusionment
Maybe the seeds were sown that night
and sense of entrapment occurring in a
So long ago. Ah lily white, lily white, lily white...
dysfunctional relationship.
Up, right. Up, tight.
—David
Brimberg,
Ph.D.
Clinical
Psychologist, Santa Fe
Sophisticate, Early Urbanite. Subject to the painterly eye. Dear wallflower may you bring me delight. New sexuality expressing itself.
Overbearing ~ yes, he owns her or will have her ~ no matter what ~ she is
American tailored era - Excited innocence.
owned ~ does not know how to respond
What did it lead to?
~ the moment ~ her fate ~ how did she
Who did it lead to?
get here ~ where is she? are they going?
When were we: now or then?
~ this next instant or forever? a curse
Have another drink wallflower.
manifested or a reproach? ~ nothing clear
Drink up then, her.
except the lack of anything pleasant ~ why
Tell me later what you think.
do humans behave so badly? questions unanswered ~ reverberating ~
I don’t care what you think.
—Victor DiSuvero, poet, Santa Fe
Wallflower. Say yes to me.
14 | THE magazine
november
2012
HILL’S GALLERY REMIX: THEN+NOW TWO MONTHS ONLY! VORTEX REVOLVING GALLERY
HELEN BECK JOHN CONNELL DORIS CROSS MEGAN HILL JIM HILL SOLOMON HILL CARL JOHANSEN JEAN PROMUTICO
DAVID KIMBALL ANDERSON BRUCE LOWNEY JOHN TINKER
PHOtOgrAPHY COMPEtitiOn i n c e l e b r at i o n o F g eorgia o’K e e FFe ’ s 1 2 5t h bi r t h day
theme: Flowers Submit your images today & spread the word! The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is excited to invite photographers, both amateur and professional, to submit their favorite images of flowers. Be recognized for your talents and win prizes, including publication in the Museum’s next issue of O’Keeffe Magazine, exhibition on the Museum’s website, cash awards, and more.
THROUGH 11/13
UNM ROOTS: CERAMICS PHOTOGRAPHY SCULPTURE OPENS 11/16, 5–7 PM
217 Galisteo Street | 989.2779 | www.hillsgalleryremix.com pane l oF Ju rors Adults (21 Years of Age and Older): Jennifer Schlesinger-Hanson, director, Verve Gallery of Photography Joyce Tenneson, photographer Norman Vanamee, editor-in-chief, Garden Design Magazine
Student Contest Judge (18 - 21 Years of Age): Jackie M, director of education and public programs Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Student Contest Judge (Below 18 Years of Age): Mary Anne Redding, chair, photography department Santa Fe University of Art and Design
e nte r now! Deadline: Enter Early and Save! Thursday, November 15, 2012 (Georgia’s Birthday) Final Entry Deadline: Wednesday, December 19, 2012
awa rds All winning images will be published in the spring issue of O’Keeffe Magazine and on the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum web site (beginning February 1, 2013 – March 1, 2013).
Handle With Care National invitational exhibit of 300 cups
– AND –
SELECTIONS FROM THE
HAZEL GREENBERG COLLECTION NOVEMBER 2 – DECEMBER 8
Opening Reception: Friday, November 2, 5 - 7 pm
SANTA FE CLAY
1st Place Award: $500 + Santa Fe Photographic Workshop Intensive, Annie Leibovitz signed edition of her new book Pilgrimage, signed edition of Roxana Robinson’s biography, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, and a select item from the O’Keeffe Museum gift shop. 2nd Place Award: $300 + Artwork from Heidi Loewen, Annie Leibovitz signed edition of her new book Pilgrimage, signed edition of Roxana Robinson’s biography, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, and a select item from the O’Keeffe Museum gift shop. 3rd Place Award: $200 + Annie Leibovitz signed edition of her new book Pilgrimage, signed edition of Roxana Robinson’s biography, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, and a select item from the O’Keeffe Museum gift shop. Student Awards: $100 + Annie Leibovitz signed edition of her new book Pilgrimage, signed edition of Roxana Robinson’s biography, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, and a select item from the O’Keeffe Museum gift shop. Honorable Mention: 20 will be chosen; posted to Museum website only.
CONTEMPORARY CERAMICS
545 Camino de la Familia, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 505.984.1122 www.santafeclay.com
For more inFormation and For contest rules, please visit our website at:
w w w. o K m p h o t o c o m p e t i t i o n . o r g
Question of Power
The impact of the use of coal on communities across America
Leich Lathrop Gallery Holiday Show & Sale
Photo: Carlan Tapp
Fundraising Event: Photography Exhibition, Silent Auction, Live Music, and Food. Friday, November 9, from 5 to 8 pm. Phil Space, 1410 Second Street, Santa Fe. Suggested donation of $15 at the door will help support the work of Question of Power. www.questionofpower.org
Laurie Alpert: prints, books Aaron Bass: prints Rosemary Breehl: handcrafted gift cards Donna Dodson: sculpture, paintings Eason Eige: paintings Adele Frances: paper jewelry C.A. Klimek: paintings, prints Chuck Lathrop: paintings, prints, sculpture Stephanie Lerma: mixed media Andy Moerlein: prints Krittika Ramanujan: prints Stephanie Roberts-Camello: paintings Carol Sanchez: prints, boxes & books Janet Yagoda Shagam: prints Harriette Tsosie: mixed media
November 2 –December 31 Reception: Friday, November 2, 5:30 to 7:30 pm. 323 Romero St. NW, Albuquerque, NM 87104 phone: 505-243-3059 leichlathropgallery.blogspot.com
studio visits
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” Two artists respond to thomas Merton’s Statement. My parents asked me if I was attending any church services. I answered that when I need “to find myself” I go outside to be in nature and then I know again I belong. It doesn’t take many minutes in nature before I pick up a rock, leaf or stick from the ground. My thoughts become: How can this object hold this shape? How did it form? How can my human mind bring attention to this object and share it with others? I work with natural objects: grass, seeds, willow, driftwood, stones, shells, bones, and such. I usually work outside, so when I am creating, life’s deadlines and obligations leave the forefront of my mind and I become present in the now. A single focus and I am lost in myself.
—Connie Schaekel Schaekel had an exhibition of her work at Delgado Street Contemporary in May, 2012.
The artist is able to travel where no man has gone before, beyond normal reality— beyond the expected. Losing oneself in that journey, opening new thought processes and a new visual language may be my favorite part of the artistic method. I often gain considerable insight about the person I am and can be. Beyond this, when viewing the artwork of others I respect, a similar transformative feeling can be manifested.
—Michael Sharber In 2012, Sharber participated in the New Mexico Showcase at 516 ARTS, Albuquerque, Chautauqua National Juried Exhibition at Eastern Kentucky University, and After Dark at Greg Moon Gallery, Taos. msharberstudios.com
Photographs by Anne Staveley
Photographs by Anne Staveley
november
2012
THE magazine | 17
theSpa
at encantado
terra at Encantado
a taste of the New Southwest
Home of the Healing Arts
The Spa at Encantado offers an innovative selection of spa and wellness services, honoring New Mexico’s indigenous healing traditions while paying tribute to Santa Fe’s established reputation for eclectic approaches to health and well being.
877.262.4666 • fourseasons.com/santafe • 198 state road 592, santa fe
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Inspired by Northern New Mexico and infused with local, organically sourced ingredients and the flavor of the Southwest, the menu blends a sense of balance, place and comfort to create a new twist on Contemporary American Cuisine.
877.262.4666 • fourseasons.com/santafe• 198 state road 592, santa fe
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
The Honeybee It’s been quite a year for honeybees. After reports that honeybee populations are in decline—probably due to a common agricultural insecticide—backyard apiaries have come into fashion. And it’s a good thing, too, because honeybees pollinate many of our favorite plants, such as apple trees, asparagus, strawberries, and alfalfa. Rooftop hives have popped up in New York City, Seattle, and everywhere in between. Unfortunately, this hasn’t turned out entirely well in some places. Due to a warm winter and a balmy spring in 2012, rogue honeybee swarms kept NYPD officer Anthony Planakis—a.k.a. “Tony Bees”—buzzing all summer. He’s had to deal with swarms of bees on fire hydrants, swarms outside a Chase bank, and swarms enveloping a station wagon with a family trapped inside. Working with bees and hives is about overcoming fear. The hive is love incarnate, and through the hive we can rediscover what it means to live in peace with insects, the landscape, and each other. D november
2012
THE magazine | 19
“...known for its creative, contemporary southwestern cuisine.” –Bon Appétit
Thanksgiving Dinner
lunch – monday thru saturday sunday brunch dinner nightly
Three-Course Prix Fixe ~ November 22 3–7pm Featuring Compound Classics & Seasonal Specialties
231 washington avenue - reservations 505 984 1788
gift certificates, menus & special events online www.santacafé.com
The Compound Restaurant: A Family Tradition Reservations 982.4353
653 Canyon Road
compoundrestaurant.com
A glass of Absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. Oscar Wilde
Small Batch Heirloom Spirits Hand Crafted in New Mexico at Rancho de Los Luceros Destilaría
BRIMSTONE ABSINTHE LIQUEUR
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ONE BOTTLE
One Bottle: T he 2009 C hartron et T rébuchet C hassagne -M ontrachet “L es E mbazées ” by Joshua Baer The moon is a woman, but there is a man in the moon. What’s he doing there? I decided to find out.
to her and made love to her. She liked it so much she decided to keep him forever. Two weeks later, when she went full, there he was, for all the world to see.”
My investigation started in Berkeley, California. In Berkeley, knowledge flows
The lady with the paintings of angels was a tough act to follow. Years went by
out of people’s minds the way water flows out of a spring. After following a tall, lanky,
before I resumed my investigation. In the meantime, my wife and I had two children,
marginally disheveled grey-haired man through a grove of Ginkgo trees, I caught up
a girl and a boy. When they were little, they looked like the angels in the lady’s paintings.
with him at the base of the Campanile and tapped him on the shoulder. “The moon is
My wife and I used to read to them. Goodnight Moon was one of their favorite books
a woman,” I said, “but there’s a man in the moon. What’s he doing there?”
but it never occurred to me to ask them about the man in the moon.
“Excuse me?”
After our children were born, we moved to Santa Fe so I could go to work in
“You’re a professor, aren’t you?”
the art business. After two years of working at a gallery, I decided to open my own
“Yes, I happen to be a professor. What business is that of yours?”
gallery. The day we opened, dozens of people came through the door. I met people
“I’m looking for the answer to the question.”
from all over the world. Many of them were fascinated with New Mexico, with the
“Which question?”
art business, and with human nature. It was intoxicating, just being open for business.
“The one about the man in the moon. Do you know what he’s doing there?” “I teach engineering,” said the professor. “Talk to a classics professor.” After Berkeley, my investigation took me to Tassajara Hot Springs in the Santa
One day, a young woman came in and put her résumé on my desk. Her résumé said she was “goal-oriented.” “What are your goals?” I said.
Lucia mountains east of Big Sur. At Tassajara I saw a Zen master. After following
“You’re really putting me on the spot.”
the roshi through a canyon lined with sycamore trees, I caught up with him and
“No, not really. I just want to know.”
tapped him on the shoulder. The roshi had sensational eyebrows, big brown eyes, and a shaved head. He was wearing a black robe over a pair of Levis. “The moon is a woman,” I said, “but there’s a man in the moon. What’s he doing there?” “Don’t tap people on the shoulder. Not around here.” “Why not?” “Because it might startle them. What are you doing here?” “Visiting. Sitting. Taking baths.” “And asking questions.” “Is there something wrong with asking questions?” “There could be. This is a monastery. Why did you ask me about the man in the moon?” “You’re an important guy. I thought you might know the answer. Do you?”
“Right now I’m working as a waitress. It’s good money, but I’m an artist. I’d rather be around art.” After I hired her, we talked about the moon being a woman and the man in the moon but I never asked the young woman if she knew what the man was doing there. One morning, after I got to work, I found a drawing on my desk. In the drawing, the moon was rising over the mountains, and there was a man’s face in the moon. Which brings us to the 2009 Chartron et Trébuchet Chassagne-Montrachet “Les Embazées.” In the glass, this wine is a clear, iconic gold. The bouquet makes you feel lucky—lucky to be alive and lucky to inhale the perfume of paradise while you’re alive. On the palate, the 2009 “Les Embazées” delivers a combination of patience and urgency. The combination makes you want to do great things
“There’s nothing to say.”
but also suggests that you have plenty of time. The finish is like
“That’s your answer? That’s the best you can do?”
a memory of all the people you’ve loved, rolled into one face,
“Right here, right now, there is nothing to say.”
one smile, one astonishing pair of eyes.
After Tassajara, my investigation took me to Santa Cruz,
After I tasted the 2009 “Les Embazées,” I told my wife that
California, where I met the woman who later became my wife.
the moon was a woman but that there was a man in the moon.
Before we got married, we became friends with a lady who made
Did she have any idea what he was doing there?
paintings of angels. The lady lived on a farm in the Santa Cruz
“Waiting to be born.”
Mountains, at the end of a private road that wound its way
“Why do you say that?”
up the side of a hill through a redwood forest. In the forest, it
“All of the little men I’ve ever known who were in the
was so dark you had to turn on your headlights but then the
moon were waiting to be born.”
road led you out of the forest and through a vineyard before
As much as I like my wife’s answer, my sense is that my
it brought you to the barn where the lady kept her paintings.
investigation is not over. Maybe I’m delusional. Maybe the
The lady seemed to be imbued with arcane wisdom. So,
answer is that there is no answer. If that turns out to be the
after a few visits, I said, “The moon is a woman, but there’s
case, I’ll be disappointed but at least I’ll know the truth. In the
a man in the moon. What’s he doing there?”
meantime, my goal is to finish what I started. D
“The man is her lover.” “He is?” “Of course he is. One night, during the dark of the moon, he came november
2012
One Bottle is dedicated to the appreciation of good wines and good times, one bottle at a time. The name “One Bottle” and the contents of this column are ©2012 by onebottle.com. For back issues, go to onebottle.com. Send comments or questions to jb@onebottle.com.
THE magazine | 21
dining guide
For Thanksgiving...think
The Compound 653 Canyon Road, Santa Fe Reservations: 982-4353
$ KEY
INEXPENSIVE
$
up to $14
MODERATE
$$
$15—$23
EXPENSIVE
$$$
VERY EXPENSIVE
$24—$33
$$$$
Prices are for one dinner entrée. If a restaurant serves only lunch, then a lunch entrée price is reflected. Alcoholic beverages, appetizers, and desserts are not included in these price keys. Call restaurants for hours.
$34 plus
EAT OUT OFTEN
...a guide to the very best restaurants in santa fe, albuquerque, taos, and surrounding areas... 315 Restaurant & Wine Bar 315 Old Santa Fe Trail. 986-9190. Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: French. Atmosphere: An inn in the French countryside. House specialties: Steak Frites, Seared Pork Tenderloin, and the Black Mussels are perfect. Comments: A beautiful new bar with generous martinis, a teriffic wine list, and a “can’t miss” bar menu. Winner of Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence. 317 Aztec 317 Aztec St. 820-0150 Breakfast/ Lunch. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Café and Juice Bar. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Breakfast: Eggs Benedict and the Hummus Bagel, are winners. Lunch: we love all of the salads and the Chilean Beef Emanadas. Comments: Wonderful juice bar and perfect smoothies. Andiamo! 322 Garfield St. 995-9595. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Start with the Steamed Mussels or the Roasted Beet Salad. For your main, choose the delicious Chicken Marsala or the Pork Tenderloin. Comments: Good wines, great pizzas. Anasazi Restaurant Inn of the Anasazi 113 Washington Ave. 988-3236 . Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Valet parking. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Contemporary American cuisine. Atmosphere: A classy room. House specialties: Blue Corn crustedSalmon with citrus jalapeno sauce, and the Beef Tenderloin. Comments: Attentive service. Aqua Santa 451 W. Alameda. 982-6297. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: EDwith Casual. House specialties: Start S LOWatercress. the Pan Fried Oysters with C a For your main, antthe perfect Wild King a SLentils Salmon with or the Long-Braised u q A Shepherd’s Lamb with Deep Fried Leeks. Comments: Good wine list, great soups, and amazing bread. Betterday Coffeeshop
905 W. Alameda St. Breakfast/Lunch Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Coffehouse fare. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Espressos, Lattes, Macchiatos, Italian Sodas, and Teas. Comments: Food menu changes daily. november
2012
Bobcat Bite 418 Old Las Vegas Hwy. 983-5319. Lunch/Dinner No alcohol. Patio. Cash. $$ Cuisine: As American as good old apple pie. Atmosphere: A low-slung building with eight seats at the counter and four tables. House specialties: The inch-and-a-half thick green chile cheeseburger is sensational. The secret? A decades-old, well-seasoned cast-iron grill. Go. Body Café 333 Cordova Rd. 986-0362. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Organic. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: In the morning, try the breakfast smoothie or the Green Chile Burrito. We love the Avocado and Cheese Wrap. Comments: Soups and salads are marvelous, as is the super-healthy Carrot Juice Alchemy. Cafe Cafe Italian Grill 500 Sandoval St. 466-1391. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: For lunch, the classic Caesar salad, the tasty specialty pizzas, or the grilled eggplant sandwich. For dinner, go for the perfectly grilled Swordfish Salmorglio. Comments: Friendly waitstaff. Café Fina 624 Old Las Vegas Highway. 466-3886. Breakfast/Lunch. Patio Cash/major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Contemporary comfort food. Atmosphere: Casual and bright. House specialties: Ricotta pancakes with fresh berries and maple syrup; chicken enchiladas; a perfect green-chile cheese burger. Comments: Organic andhousemade products are delicious. Café Pasqual’s 121 Don Gaspar Ave. 983-9340. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner/Sunday Brunch Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Multi-ethnic. Atmosphere: The café is adorned with lots of Mexican streamers and Indian maiden posters. House specialties: Hotcakes got a nod from Gourmet magazine. Huevos motuleños—a Yucatán breakfast—is one you’ll never forget. For lunch, try the Grilled Chicken Sandwich. Chopstix 238 N. Guadalupe St. 982-4353. Lunch/Dinner. Take-out. Patio. Major credit cards. $ Atmosphere: Casual. Cuisine: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. House specialties: Lemon Chicken, Korean barbequed beef, Kung Pau Chicken, and Broccoli and Beef. Comments: Combination plates available. Friendly owners.
Counter Culture 930 Baca St. 995-1105. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Cash. $$ Cuisine: All-American. Atmosphere: Informal. House specialties: Burritos Frittata, Sandwiches, Salads, and Grilled Salmon. Comments: Good selection of beers and wine.
1903 Central Ave., Los Alamos. 661-0303 Breakfast/Lunch/Diinner Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Tacos, burritos, burgers. frito pies, and combination plates. Comments: The best Carne Adovada Burrito (no beans) that we have ever had.
Cowgirl Hall of Fame 319 S. Guadalupe St. 982-2565. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: All-American. Atmosphere: Patio shaded by big cottonwoods. Great bar. House specialties: The smoked brisket and ribs are fantastic. Super buffalo burgers. Comments: Huge selection of beers— from Bud to the fancy stuff.
Geronimo 724 Canyon Rd. 982-1500. Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: We call it French/Asian fusion. Atmosphere: Elegant. House specialties: Start with the superb foie gras. Entrées we love include the Green Miso Sea Bass served with black truffle scallions, and the classic peppery Elk tenderloin.
Coyote Café 132 W. Water St. 983-1615. Dinner Full bar. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Southwestern with French and Asian influences. Atmosphere Bustling. House specialties: For your main course, go for the grilled Maine Lobster Tails or the grilled 24-ounce “Cowboy Cut” steak. Comments: Great bar and
good wines.
Downtown Subscription 376 Garcia St. 983-3085. Breakfast/Lunch No alcohol. Patio. Cash/ Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Standard coffee-house fare. Atmosphere: A large room with small tables inside and a nice patio outside where you can sit, read periodicals, and schmooze. Tons of magazine to peruse. House specialties: Espresso, cappuccino, and latte. El Faról 808 Canyon Rd. 983-9912. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Spanish. Atmosphere: Wood plank floors, thick adobe walls, and a postage-stamp-size dance floor for cheek-to-cheek dancing. House specialties: Tapas. Comments: Murals by Alfred Morang. El Mesón 213 Washington Ave. 983-6756. Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Spanish. Atmosphere: Spain could be just around the corner. Music nightly. House specialties: Tapas reign supreme, with classics like Manchego Cheese marinated in extra virgin olive oil. Go. El Parasol 833 Cerrillos Rd Santa Fe, 995-8015 30 Cities of Gold Rd., Pojoaque. 455-7185 603 Santa Cruz Rd., Española. 753-8852 298 Dinosaur Trail, Santa Fe. 995-8226
Il Piatto 95 W. Marcy St. 984-1091. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Bustling. House specialties: Our faves: the Arugula and Tomato Salad; the Lemon Rosemary Chicken; and the Pork Chop stuffed with mozzarella, pine nuts, and prosciutto. Comments: New on the menu: a perfect New York Strip Strip Steak at a way better price than the Bull Ring—and guess what— you don’t have to buy the potato. Jambo Cafe 2010 Cerrillios Rd. 473-1269. Lunch/Dinner Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: African and Caribbean inspired. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Jerk Chicken Sandwich and the Phillo stuffed with spinach, black olives, feta cheese, roasted red peppers, over organic greens. Comments: Chef Obo wins awards for his fabulous soups. Kohnami Restaurant 313 S. Guadalupe St. 984-2002. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine/Sake. Patio. Visa & Mastercard. $$ Cuisine: Japanese. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Miso soup; Soft Shell Crab; Dragon Roll; Chicken Katsu; noodle dishes; and Bento Box specials. Comments: The sushi is always perfect. Try the Ruiaku Sake. It is clear, smooth, and dry. Comments: New noodle menu. La Plancha de Eldorado 7 Caliente Road at La Tienda. 466-2060 Highway 285 / Vista Grande Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner/Sunday Brunch Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Salvadoran Grill. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: The Loroco Omelet, Pan-fried Plantains, and Salvadorian tamales. Comments: Sunday brunch.
Lan’s Vietnamese Cuisine 2430 Cerrillos Rd. 986-1636. Lunch/Dinner Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Vietnamese. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: The Pho Tai Hoi: vegetarian soup loaded with veggies. La Plazuela on the Plaza 100 E. San Francisco St. 989-3300. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full Bar. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: New Mexican and Continental. Atmosphere: Enclosed courtyard. House specialties: Start with the Classic Tortilla Soup or the Heirloom Tomato Salad with baked New Mexico goat cheese. For your entrée, try the Braised Lamb Shank,served with a spring gremolata, couscous, and vegetables. Comments: Seasonal menus. L egal T ender 151 Old Lamy Trail. 466-1650 Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$
Cuisine: New Mexican. Casual. Atmosphere: House specialties: Burgers, Pulled Pork, Lamy Cubano Sandwich, Braised Short Ribs, and the Wedge Salad. Comments: Huevos Rancheros, Belgian Waffles and a Special Drink Menu at Sunday Brunch. Kid friendly. M aria ’ s N ew M exican K itchen 555 W. Cordova Rd. 983-7929. Lunch/Dinner (Thursday-Sunday) Beer/wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$
Cuisine: American/New Mexican. Rough wooden Atmosphere: floors and hand-carved chairs set the historical tone. House specialties: Freshly made Tortillas and Green Chile Stew. Comments: Perfect margaritas. Mu Du Noodles 1494 Cerrillos Rd. 983-1411. Dinner/Sunday Brunch Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Pan-Asian. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Vietnamese Spring Rolls and Green Thai Curry, Comments: Mu Du is committed to organic products. New York Deli Guadalupe & Catron St. 982-8900. Breakfast/Lunch Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: New York deli. Atmosphere: Large open space. House specialties: Soups, Salads, Bagels, Hero Sandwiches, Pancakes, and over-the-top Gourmet Burgers. Comments: Deli platters to go. Nostrani Ristorante 304 Johnson St. 983-3800. Dinner Beer/Wine. Fragrance-free continued on page 25
THE magazine | 23
tomme a restaurant 229 galisteo street 820-2253
dinner: monday - saturday join us
joseph wrede, behind the line
BAR MENU A L L I T E M S $ 8 • 5 P L AT E S F OR $35 DUCK CONFIT & SPICY MUSTARD GREEN GALETTE crispy rice paper & soy honey GRILLED JUMBO SHRIMP zucchini coconut milk & basil stew CUP OF FRENCH ONION SOUP comté cheese & herb crouton PETITE NY STRIP STEAK pomme frites & green peppercorn sauce CRISPY CALAMARI lemon garlic aioli TRUFFLE CORN FLAN grilled eggplant & tomato sauce PETITE FISH & CHIPS sea bass & tater tots CHARCUTERIE PLATE CHEESE PLATE
executive chef louis moskow • dinner nightly 315 Old Santa Fe Trail • Reservations 505.986.9190 • www.315santafe.com
dining guide Pork, and New Mexican Enchilada Plates. Comments: Nice bar. Tia Sophia’s 210 W. San Francisco St. 983-9880. Breakfast/Lunch Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Traditional New Mexican. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Green Chile Stew, the traditional Breakfast Burrito stuffed with bacon, potatoes, chile, and cheese. Comments: The real deal.
Tapas, Wraps, Beer, and Wine @ Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Innovative regional dishes from Northern Italy. Atmosphere: Elegant. House specialties: Start with any salad. Entrées we love: the Veal Scallopini or the Roasted Trout with Leeks, Pepper, and Sage. Dessert: Go for the Mixed Berries with Lemon. Comments: Organic ingredients. Menu changes seasonally. Frommers rates Nostrani as one of the “Top 500 Restaurants in the World.” Please note: fragrance-free. Plaza Café Southside 3466 Zafarano Dr. 424-0755. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner 7 days Full bar. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: American and New Mexican. Atmosphere: Bright and light, colorful, and friendly. House specialties: For your breakfast go for the Huevos Rancheros or the Blue Corn Piñon Pancakes. Comments: Excellent Green Chile—good for allergies and colds. Rasa Juice Bar/Ayurveda 815 Early St. 989-1288 Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Organic juice bar. Atmosphere: Calm. House specialties: Smoothies, juices, teas, chai, cocoa, coffee, and espresso— made with organic ingredients. Juice: our favorite is the Shringara, made with beet, apple, pear, and ginger. Rio Chama Steakhouse 414 Old Santa Fe Trail. 955-0765. Brunch/Lunch/Dinner/Bar Menu. Full bar. Smoke-free dining rooms. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: All-American Atmosphere: Easygoing. House specialities: Steaks, Prime Ribs and Burgers. The Haystack fries rule Recommendations: Nice wine list and a good pour at the bar. Ristra 548 Agua Fria St. 982-8608. Dinner/Bar Menu Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Southwestern with a French flair. Atmosphere: Contemporary. House specialties: Mediterranean Mussels in chipotle and mint broth is superb, as is the Ahi Tuna Tartare. Comments: Nice wine list San Q 31 Burro Alley. 992-0304 Lunch/Dinner Sake/Wine Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Japanese Sushi and Tapas. Atmosphere: Large room with a Sushi bar. House specialties: Sushi, Vegetable Gyoza, Softshell Crab, Sashimi and Sushi Platters, and a variety of Japanese Tapas. Comments: Savvy sushi chef makes San Q the choice for those who love Japanese food. San Francisco Street Bar & Grill 50 E. San Francisco St. 982-2044. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: All-American. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: San november
2012
La Boca 72 West Marcy Street, Santa Fe • 982-3433
Francisco Street Burger, the Grilled Yellowfin Tuna Nicoise Salad, or the New York Strip. Comments: Sister restaurant located in the DeVargas Center. Santacafé 231 Washington Ave. 984-1788. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Contemporary Atmosphere: Southwestern. Minimal, subdued, and elegant. House specialties: The world- famous calamari never disappoints. Favorite entrées include the perfectly cooked grilled rack of lamb and the panseared salmon with olive oil crushed new potatoes and creamed sorrel. Comments: The daily pasta specials are generous and flavorful. Appetizers during cocktail hour rule. Santa Fe Bar & Grill 187 Paseo de Peralta. 982.3033. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American and New Mexican. Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: Cornmealcrusted Calamari, Rotisserie Chicken, or the Rosemary Baby Back Ribs. Comments: Easy on the wallet. Saveur 204 Montezuma St. 989-4200. Breakfast/Lunch Beer/Wine. Patio. Visa/Mastercard. $$ Cuisine: French meets American. Atmosphere: Casual. Buffet-style service for salad bar and soups. House specialties: Daily chef specials, gourmet and build-your-own sandwiches, wonderful soups, and an excellent salad bar. Comments: Organic coffees and super desserts. Family-run. Second Street Brewery 1814 Second St. 982-3030. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Simple pub grub and Atmosphere: brewery. Casual and friendly. House specialties: The beers are outstanding when paired with Beer-steamed Mussels, Calamari, Burgers, and Fish & Chips. Comments: Sister restaurant at 1607 Paseo de Peralta. Shibumi 26 Chapelle St. 428-0077. Dinner Fragrance-free Cash only. $$. Parking available Beer/wine/sake Cuisine: Japanese noodle house. Atmosphere: Tranquil and elegant. Table and counter service. House specialties: Start with the Gyoza—a spicy pork pot sticker—or the Otsumami Zensai (small plates of delicious chilled appetizers), or select from four hearty soups. Shibumi offers sake by the glass or bottle, as well as beer and champagne. Comments: Zen-like setting. Shohko Café 321 Johnson St. 982-9708.
Lunch/Dinner Sake/Beer. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Authentic Japanese Cuisine. Atmosphere: Sushi bar, table dining. House specialties: Softshell Crab Tempura, Sushi, and Bento Boxes. Comments: Friendly waitstaff, Station 430 S. Guadalupe. 988-2470 Breakfast/Lunch Patio Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Light fare and fine coffee and tea. Atmosphere: Friendly and casual. House specialties: For your breakfast choose the Ham and Cheese Croissant a Fresh Fruit Cup. Lunch fave is the Prosciutto, Mozzarella, Tomato sandwich Comments: Special espresso drinks. at El Gancho Old Las Vegas Hwy. 988-3333. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Major credit cards $$$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: Family restaurant House specialties: Aged steaks, lobster. Try the Pepper Steak with Dijon cream sauce. Comments: They know steak here.
Steaksmith
Table de Los Santos 210 Don Gaspar. 992-5863 Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Sunday Brunch Full Bar. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: New Mexican–inspired fare. Atmosphere: Large open room with high ceilings House specialties: Try the organic Chicken Paillard with vegetables—it is the best. For dessert, we love the organic Goat Milk Flan. Comments: Well-stocked bar. Teahouse 821 Canyon Rd. 992-0972. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner 7 days Beer/Wine. Fireplace. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Farm-to-fork. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: We love the Salmon Benedict with poached eggs, the quiche, the Gourmet Cheese Sandwich, and the Teaouse Mix salad. Comments. Teas from around the world. Terra at Four Seasons Encantado 198 State Rd. 592, Tesuque. 9889955. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Amercian with Southwest influences. Atmosphere: Elegant and sophisticated. House specialties: For dinner, start with the tempting Burrata Cheese, Heirloom Tomato, Asparagus, and Petite Greens appetizer or the perfect Tempura Soft Shell Crab with Avocado, Citrus, Radish, and Margarita Aioli. Follow with the delicious Pan-seared Alaskan Halibut with Baby Artichokes, Corn Purée, and Wild Arugula Salad, or the tender and flavorful Black Angus Beef Tenderloin with Summer Baby Vegetables and Truffle Fries. Comments: Local organic ingredients. A fine wine list. Top-noth service.
The Compound 653 Canyon Rd. 982-4353. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Contemporary. Atmosphere: 150-year-old adobe with white linen on the tables. House specialties: Jumbo Crab and Lobster Salad. The Chicken Schnitzel is always flawless. Desserts are sublime. Comments: Chef/owner Mark Kiffin, won the James Beard Foundation’s “Best Chef of the Southwest” award.
The Palace Restaurant & Saloon 142 W. Palace Avenue 428-0690 Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio Major credit cards $$$ Cuisine: Modern Italian Atmosphere: Victorian style merges with the Spanish Colonial aesthetic. House Specialties: For lunch: the “Smash Burger” or the Prime Rib French Dip. Dinner: Start with the Tuna Sashimi. For your main, go for the Scottish Salmon en Papillote poached in white wine, or the All-American Steak au Poivre. Comments: BBQ Oyters on Saturday. Chef Ryan Gabel is doing his stuff in the kitchen. The Pantry Restaurant 1820 Cerrillos Rd. 986-0022 Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New Mexican/American. Atmosphere: Bustling with counter service and extra-friendly service. House specialties: Breakfast rules here with their famous stuffed French Toast, Corned Beef Hash, and Huevos Rancheros. A hand-breaded Chicken Fried Steak rounds out the menu. Comments: The Pantry has been in the same location since 1948. The Pink Adobe 406 Old Santa Fe Trail. 983-7712. Lunch/ Dinner Full Bar Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: All American, Creole, and New Mexican. Atmosphere: Friendly and casual. House specialties: For lunch we love the Gypsy Stew or the Pink Adobe Club. For dinner, get the Steak Dunigan, with green chile and sauteed mushrooms, or the Fried Shrimp Louisianne. Comments: Cocktail hour in the Dragon Room is a Santa Fe tradition. The Shed 113½ E. Palace Ave. 982-9030. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: A local institution located just off the Plaza. House specialties: Order the red or green chile cheese enchiladas.Many folks say that they are the best tin Santa Fe. The Ranch House 2571 Cristos Road. 424-8900 Lunch/Dinner Full bar Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: BBQ and Grill. Atmosphere: Family and kid-friendly. House specialties: Josh’s Red Chile Baby Back Ribs, Smoked Brisket, Pulled
Tomme – A Restaurant 229 Galisteo St. 820-2253 Dinner Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Call it “chef-driven cuisine” Casual. Atmosphere: House specialties: Pan-Seared Foie Gras or Oysters on the Half Shell. For your main, we love the Pan Seared Rainbow Trout and the delicious the Duck a L’Orange Joseph Comments: Joseph Wrede is doing his stuff in the kitchen. Tree House Pastry Shop and Cafe DeVargasCenter. 474-5543. Breakfast/Lunch Monday-Saturday Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Cafe fare.. Atmosphere: Light, bright, and cozy. House specialties: Order the fresh Farmer’s Market Salad, or the Lunch Burrito, smothered in red chile. Yum. Tune-Up Café 1115 Hickox St. 983-7060. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: All World: American, Cuban, Salvadoran, Mexican, and, yes, New Mexican. Atmosphere: Down home. House specialties: Breakfast faves are the scrumptious Buttermilk Pancakes and the Tune-Up Breakfast. Comments: Super Fish Tacos and the El Salvadoran Pupusas are excellent. Comments: Now serving beer and wine.Yay! Vinaigrette 709 Don Cubero Alley. 820-9205. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: All organic—farm-to-tableto-fork. Atmosphere: Light, bright and cheerful. House specialties: All of the salads are totally amazing—as fresh as can be. We love the Nutty Pear-fessor salad and the Chop Chop Salad. Wonderful sauteed vegetables. Comments: Vinaigrette will be opening a “sister” restaurant in Albuquerque in November/ Whoo’s Donuts 851 Cerrillos Rd. 629-1678 6 am to 3 pm. Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Just donuts. Atmosphere: Very, very casual. House specialties: Using organic ingredients only. Comments: Organic coffee. Our fave donut is hard to pick—they’re all delicious! Zacatecas 3423 Central Ave., Alb. 505-255-8226. Lunch/Dinner Tequila/Mezcal/Beer/Wine Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Mexican, not New Mexican. Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: Try the Chicken Tinga Taco with Chicken and Chorizo or the Slow Cooked Pork Ribs with Tamarind Recado-Chipotle Sauce. Over sixtyfive brands of Tequila are offered. Comments: resonable prices and a savvy waitstaff. Zia Diner 326 S. Guadalupe St. 988-7008. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: All-American diner food. Atmosphere: Down home baby, down home. House specialties: The Chile Rellenos and Eggs is our breakfast choice. At lunch, we love the Southwestern Chicken Salad, the Meat Loaf, all the Burgers, and the crispy Fish and Chips (some say the best in Santa Fe) Comments: Great desserts. The bar at the Zia is place to be at cocktail hour.
THE magazine | 25
GALLERY
Railyard Art District
Gabriele Everetz, (A-)ChromaticStudyM-L, 2012, Acrylic On Canvas over wood, 36” x 36” x 1 3/4”
SANFORD WURMFELD
Sanford Wurmfeld, II-17#1B(+RO), 2005, Acrylic On Gesso Primed Cotton Canvas, 42” x 42”
November 9 – December 15, 2012 Artist Reception Friday, November 16, 5:00-7:00 PM
GABRIELE EVERTZ Optic Drive
Also featuring artwork by: MATTHEW KLUBER, JAY DAVIS AND PETER PLAGENS DavidrichardGallery.com 544 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284 | info@DavidRichardGallery.com
openings
november Artopenings THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1
Journey: group show. 5-7 pm.
Eggman and Walrus, 130 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 660-0048. Paint Forward: work by John Barker. 4-6 pm.
Harwood Art Center, 1114 7th St. NW, Alb. 505-242-6367. Prelude: group show and fundraiser. 6-8 pm.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2
A Gallery Santa Fe, 154 W. Marcy St. #104, Santa Fe. 603-7744. Watercolors and pastels by Heinz Emil Salloch. 5-7 pm.
Hispanic Arts Center at EXPO New Mexico, 300 San Pedro Dr. NE, Alb. 505260-9977. 21st Annual National Pastel Painting Exhibition and Small Works Show: hosted by the Pastel Society of New Mexico. 5-8 pm.
Axle Contemporary at the Santa Fe Railyard, Cerrillos Rd. and Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe.
Inpost Artspace at the Outpost Performance Space, 210 Yale Blvd. SE, Alb. 505-268-0044.
Palette Contemporary Art and Craft, 7400 Montgomery Blvd. NE, Alb. 505-855-7777. Green Pastures to Winter Wonderlands: paintings by Eyvind Earle. 5-8 pm. Santa Fe Clay, 545 Camino de la Familia, Santa Fe. 984-1122. Handle With Care: group show. Selections from the Hazel Greenberg Collection. 5-7 pm. Transcendence Design Contemporary Art, 1521 Upper Canyon Rd. Studio F, Santa Fe. 9840108. In the Space Between: paintings by Charlotte Cain. Sculpture by Michael Cain. 5-7 pm.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9
5 Gallery North, 1715 5th St. NW, Alb. 505977-9643. Wake: mixed-media photography by Billy Joe Miller. 6-9 pm. Adobe Gallery, 221 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 629-4051. The Storage Jars of Margaret Tafoya. 5-7 pm. Turquoise Trail Business Park, 41-A Bisbee Ct., Santa Fe. 466-2838. EX-EX VII: group show. 5-8 pm. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10
Rio Bravo Fine Art, 110 N. Broadway, Truth or Consequences. 575-894-0572. Transitions: work by Nolan Winkler. 6-9 pm. SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11
Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 983-1338. “New Directions”: artist talk by Jamey Stillings. 4 pm. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16
Hills Gallery, 217 Galisteo St., Santa Fe. 9892779. Remix:: hen and Now: group show of artists who showed at Hills Gallery from 1970 to 1981. See preview on page 32. 5-7 pm. Weyrich Gallery, 2935-D Louisiana Blvd. NE, Alb. 505-883-7410. Terasu—Illumination: 7th Annual Fall Arita Student Porcelain Show. 5-8:30 pm. Palette Contemporary Art and Craft, 7400 Montgomery Blvd. NE, Alb. 505-8557777. Through the Near Trees: paintings by Pam Conrad. 5-8 pm. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23
Manitou Galleries, 123 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 986-0440. Painters of Taos: group show. 5-7 pm. Landscape Dreams—A New Mexico Portrait: photographs by Craig Varjabedian. At William R. Talbot Fine Art, 129 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe. Reception and book signing: Friday, November 23, from 5 to 7 pm.
670-7612. Like a Drunken Midnight Choir: installation by Emilee Lord. 5-7 pm.
Mutations: multi-media work by Valerie Roybal. 5-8 pm.
Eggman and Walrus, 130 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 660-0048. Paint Forward: work by John Barker. 5-9 pm.
Manitou Galleries, 123 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 986-0440. Winter Group Show. 5-7:30 pm.
FreeStyle Gallery, 1114 Central Ave. SW, Alb. 505-779-7941. Creation/Migration: Stories of the
Marigold Arts, 424 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 9824142. The Liselotte Kahn Collection: exhibition and sale of international folk art collection. 5-7 pm.
Marigold Arts, 424 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 982-4142. Fractured Squares: tapestries by Donna Loraine Contractor. 5-7 pm.
Wade Wilson Art, 409 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 660-4393. Zachariah Rieke: new paintings by Rieke. See preview on page 32. 5-7 pm.
Silver Sun Gallery, 656 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 983-8743. Colors of Santa Fe: photographs by Yuko Hirao. 3-6 pm.
Weyrich Gallery, 2935-D Louisiana Blvd. NE, Alb. 505-883-7410. Terasu—Illumination: 7th Annual Fall Arita Student Porcelain Show. 5-8:30 pm.
William R. Talbot Fine Art, 129 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe. 982-1559. Landscape Dreams—A New Mexico Portrait: photographs by Craig Varjabedian. 5-7 pm. continued on page 30
november
2012
THE magazine | 27
HERE’S THE DEAL For artists without gallery representation in New Mexico. Full-page B&W ads for $600. Color $900. Reserve space for December/January “Best Books” issue by Thursday, November 15. 505-424-7641 themagazinesf@gmail.com
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openings
singer/songwriter Magos Herrera. Fri., Nov. 9, 7:30 pm. nhccnm.org
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24
Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art, 702-1/2 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 992-0711. The Lost Christmas Gift—Images and Artifacts: work by Andrew Beckam. 5-7 pm.
New Mexico School for the Arts at Cross of the Martyrs and Hillside Park, opposite 395 Kearney Ave., Santa Fe. 982-6124. All At Once: dance performance. Sat., Nov. 3, 4 pm; Sun., Nov. 4, 3 pm. nmschoolforthearts.org
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 25
Santa Fe Playhouse, 142 E. De Vargas St., Santa Fe. 986-1801. Catherine Donavon Sings the Patti Page Songbook: with the Bert Dalton Trio. Sat., Nov. 10, 7:30 pm; Sun., Nov. 11, 2 pm. starsneverfade.com
Las Placitas Presbyterian Church, 6 miles E. of I-25 on NM 165, Placitas. 867-8080. Placitas Artists Series: group show. 2-5:30 pm. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30
AVA/A Virtual Artspace, 316 Read St., Santa Fe. 795-8139. The Myth of Abstraction: virtual sculpture by Buchen/Goodwin. 5-8 pm.
Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, 435 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 982-8111. A Square Foot of Humor: group show. 5-7 pm. SPECIAL INTEREST
516 Arts, 516 Central Ave. SW, Alb. 505242-1445. ISEA2012 Albuquerque—Machine Wilderness: conference and exhibitions. Through Sun., Jan. 6. isea2012.org Albuquerque Museum, 2000 Mountain Rd. NW, Alb. 505-242-4600. Miniatures and More 2012: group show. Through Wed., Dec. 12. cabq.gov Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 982-1338. Dust in the Machine: group show. Through Sun., Nov. 25. Stitch Thought: installation by Tamara Wilson. Through Sun., Dec. 9. Lunafest: short films by, for, and about women. Sat., Nov. 3, 4 pm. Recitation: talk by Jesse Vogler. Thurs., Nov. 1, 7 pm. Conversation: talk with Jesse Vogler. Sat., Nov. 17, 4 pm. ccasantafe.org Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo St., Santa Fe. 603-5677. The Seed Bank: book release party for poet Gabe Gomez. Mon., Nov. 5, 6 pm. gabegomez.com David Richard Contemporary, 130 Lincoln Ave., Suite D, Santa Fe. 982-0318. Michio Takayama: Paintings and Works on Paper. Richard Faralla: Action Figures and Wall Sculptures. Abstract Expressionism: 1945-1965. to Nov. 17. Dixon Studio Tour, various locations in Dixon. 505-927-3432. Dixon Studio Tour 2012. Sat., Nov. 3 and Sun., Nov. 4, 9 am-5 pm. dixonarts.org
New work by Wes Mills on view through December 8 at James Kelly Contemporary, 550 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe.
St., Santa Fe. 603-0558. Recycle Santa Fe Art Festival. Fri., Nov. 2, 5-9 pm; Sat., Nov. 3, 9 am-5 pm; Sun., Nov. 4, 10 am-5 pm. recyclesantafe.org
Sunshine Theater, 120 Central Ave. SW, Alb. 505-886-1251. Collie Buddz with New Kingston and Los Rakas. Wed., Nov. 7, 8 pm. holdmyticket.com
Elizabeth Hahn, 227 E. Coronado Rd., Sanata Fe. 690--5166. Showing of new paintings in her new studio on Friday, Nov. 16, 6-9 pm.
Santa Fe Soul, 2905 Rodeo Park Dr. E. #3, Santa Fe. 603-5646. Medicine Song Ceremonial Circle: with Elizabeth Clearwater. Mon., Nov. 12, 2-4 pm. newmexicowomeninthearts.com
The Lodge, 750 N. St. Francis Dr., Santa Fe. 886-1251. Love, Loss and What I Wore: play by Nora and Delia Ephron. Sat., Nov. 10, 7:30 pm; Sun, Nov. 11, 3 pm. holdmyticket.com
Lannan Foundation at the Lensic, 211 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe. 988-1234. David Suzuki with Clayton Thomas-Müller. Wed., Nov. 7, 7 pm. Kevin Young with Colson Whitehead. Wed., Nov. 14, 7 pm. lannan.org
Seton Gallery, 133 Seton Village Rd., Santa Fe. 995-1860. The Eye of the Naturalist—Observation and Personal Transformation: drawings and paintings by Ernest Thompson Seton. Wed., Nov. 14 and Wed., Nov. 28. aloveoflearning.org
Warehouse 21, 1614 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 982-6124. Ciconia Ciconia: play by Elizabeth Wiseman. Wed., Oct. 31 through Sat., Nov. 3.
Metallo Gallery, 2856 State Hwy. 14, Madrid. 471-2457. Fête les Femmes: group show. Through Sat., Nov. 10. metallogallery.com
Turner Caroll Gallery, 725 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 986-9800. Contemporary Terrain: group show. Sun., Nov. 4 through Thurs., Jan. 20. turnercarroll.com
516 Arts, 516 Central Ave. SW., Alb. 505-2421445. Flatlanders and Surface Dwellers: group show. Deadline: Wed., Dec. 19. 516arts.org
Doña Ana Arts Council at Young Park, Las Cruces. 575-523-6403. 41st Annual Renaissance Art Faire. Sat., Nov. 3, 10 am-5 pm; Sun., Nov. 4, 10 am-4 pm. las-cruces-arts.org
New Mexico History Museum, 113 Lincoln Ave., Santa Fe. 476-5200. Red as a Lotus—Letters to a Dead Trappist: poetry reading by Lisa Gill. Sun., Nov. 4, 2 pm. museumofnewmexico.org Phil Space, 1410 2nd Street, Santa Fe. 6906255. Question of Power: photography exhibit and fundraising event. Fri., Nov. 9, 5-8 pm. questionofpower.org Richard Levy Gallery, 514 Central Ave. SW, Alb. 505-766-9888. Weird Science: group show. Through Fri., Nov. 30. levygallery.com
Yraceburu EarthWisdom Learning, 119 Mira Sol Dr., Santa Fe. EarthDream Unity: shamanism workshop. Tues., Nov. 13 and Wed., Nov. 14, 10 am-5 pm. yraceburu.org Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, 435 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 982-8111. West/ East—Los Angeles/New York: paintings by David Kapp. Joshua D’s Wall and Recent Works: glass installations by Michael Petry. Through Fri., Nov. 23. zanebennettgallery.com
CALL FOR ARTISTS
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 217 Johnson St., Santa Fe. 946-1000. Flowers: photography competition. Deadline: Wed., Dec. 19. okmphotocompetition.org MasterWorks of New Mexico, P.O. Box 3055, Alb. 505-260-9977. MasterWorks of New Mexico Spring Art Show. Deadline: masterworksnm.org December and January is a double issue. All calendar listings are due by Friday, November 16. Email to: themagazinesf@gmail.com
PERFORMING ARTS
Santa Fe Community College, 6401 Richards Ave., Santa Fe. 428-1776. 4th Annual Clay Club Ceramics Sale. Wed., Nov. 28 and Thurs., Nov. 29. Santa Fe Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy St., Santa Fe. 983-5220. 2012 SWAIA Winter Indian Market. Sat., Nov. 24, 10 am-6 pm; Sun., Nov. 25, 10 am-4 pm. santafeindianmarket.com Santa Fe Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy
Greer Garson Theatre at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, 1600 St. Michael’s Dr., Santa Fe. 988-1234. Count Dracula: play directed by Shepard Sobel. Fri., Nov. 30 to Sun., Dec. 2; Fri., Dec. 7 to Sun., Dec. 9. Fri. and Sat., 7 pm; Sun., 2 pm. ticketssantafe.org National Hispanic Cultural Center, 1701 4th St. SW, Alb. 505-724-4771. Latin Diva Series:
Ceramic work by Posey Bacopoulos
Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, 554 S. Guadalupe, St., Santa Fe. 989-8688. Beyond: new paintings by Max Cole. 5-7 pm.
Scottish Rite Masonic Theatre, 436 Paseo de Peralta. Sacred Sensuous Dance on Sat., Nov. 10, at 7:30 pm for a benefit for Orphans of the World. Silent auction: Tickets: 984-1234 or ticketssantafe. org. orphansoftheworld.com
Handle with Care—a national invitational exhibition of handled cups and mugs. Santa Fe Clay, 545 Camino de la Familia, Santa Fe. Reception: Friday, November 2, from 5 to 7 pm.
30 | THE magazine
november
2012
Zachariah Rieke Opening Reception Fr iday, November 2n d, 2012 5pm - 7pm on view through Wednesday, Januar y 2nd, 2013 image above: “Painting 8” acr ylic on canvas 64 x 81.5 inches, 2011
4 0 9 C a nyo n R o a d Santa Fe, NM 87501 ph: 505. 660. 4393 www.wadewilsonar t.com
previews Remix: Then & Now Hills Gallery, 217 Galisteo Street, Santa Fe. 98 November and December 2012 Reception: Friday, November 16, 5-7 pm. While New Mexico’s singular quality of light and landscape has attracted artists for over a century now, Santa Fe wasn’t always the high-end contemporary art market it is today. During the 1940s, Canyon Road was a workaday lane, lined with grocery stores, barber shops, and dry-cleaners. But over the next ten years, as artists like Agnes Sims and Andrea Bacigalupa began to make homes and studios on Canyon Road, they drew more and more art collectors to the area. One of the first galleries to put Santa Fe on the map was Hill’s Gallery, opened in 1970 by cofounders Megan and Jim Hill. Holding monthly exhibits until 1981, Hill’s Gallery was one of the first to welcome more experimental New Mexico artists at its location on San Francisco Street. By 1980, Art In America hailed the gallery as “the best place to see a broad sampling of good contemporary New Mexico work.” In its eleven-year history, Hill’s gallery hosted over a hundred and sixty-five artists, including painter Raymond Johnson, sculptor Charles Mattox, photographer Thomas Barrow, and ceramicist Betty Woodman. This November and December, those who are relatively new to Santa Fe will have a chance to revisit the early days of our city’s art market. An exhibition of art from the gallery’s golden years, selected by Megan Hill, will be on display, including work by Helen Beck, Jim Hill, John Connell, Jean Promutico, Megan Hill, and Doris Cross. Doris Cross, Emergence, mixed media, 46” x 18”, 1985
Zachariah Rieke Through Wednesday, January 2, 2013 Wade Wilson Art, 409 Canyon Road, Santa Fe. 660-4393. Reception: Friday, November 2, 5-7 pm. Two years ago, artist Zachariah Rieke told THE, “‘Meaning’ is not something that occupies me while I am working. My paintings are not about something—they are something.” Preoccupied by philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith”—an action taken with complete trust in the desired result, despite evidence to the contrary— Rieke allows fate to have a hand in the evolution of his work. His paintings are created by thinning gesso paint and washing it across a raw canvas, allowing it to spread in unpredictable, rough, organic-seeming movements. Rieke, who has been an artist for over forty years, has compared his work to cartography in that he is actively exploring the potentiality of his medium as he paints. There are echoes of sumi-e paintings in his monochromatic works, but Rieke’s paintings have an independent vitality that extends beyond the limits of representational art. Selected for the Acclaimed Artist Series of the New Mexico Arts in 2006, Rieke has also been featured in museum collections throughout New Mexico, and in collections worldwide. Zachariah Rieke, Painting 35, acrylic on canvas, 64” x 81½”, 2011
32 | THE magazine
november
2012
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Dying Infant Found by American Soldiers in Saipan, 1944 photograph by
W. Eugene Smith
Photographers who document war have become nearly as valuable as soldiers—without them we could only imagine the acts of heroism, the war crimes, and the terrible battles. Though their work is often controversial and dangerous, war photographers have risked their lives to inform the public since the Mexican-American War. Without them we would not have seen the screaming girl fleeing a napalm bomb in 1972, nor would we have seen the soldiers raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in 1945. This November, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will mount an exhibition of nearly five hundred war photographs chosen from a massive pool of images dating as far back as 1846. The photographs will be presented “according to the progression of war,” states the press release, “from the acts that instigate armed conflict, to the fight, to victory and defeat.” War/Photography: Photographs of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath will be on view from November 11, 2012 to February 3, 2013 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1001 Bissonnet Street, Houston, Texas. mfah.org D november
2012
THE magazine | 35
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Rosalind
f e at u r e
Krauss in the 21
st
Century:
Does she still matter? by
Diane Armitage
The “death of modernism” did not mean that the new abstract painters had any less admiration for modernist artists. What they opposed were the critical theories summed up [as] “reductivist modernism,” a compound of Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, and Yve-Alain Bois…. All of these writers made different arguments, but they seemed to share the belief that what defined the avant-garde was the struggle to uncover the essential qualities of art. The simplicity and clarity of the reductivist model gave it tremendous authority…. But it turned out this privileged position was actually a prison cell. —Pepe Karmel, from the essay “Still Conceptual After All These Years”
I was given the slender volume
Under Blue Cup, published in 2011 and written by the
well-known art historian and theorist Rosalind Krauss, and I was asked whether Rosalind Krauss still mattered. I said yes, even if her reputation were to rest on the contents of a single book. Not this new one, but Bachelors, published in 1999. Bachelors is still essential reading on the importance of nine single-minded women artists, but I’ll come back to this text later. The task at hand is to tackle Krauss’ most recent investigations and find their relevance to contemporary art in the twenty-first century. After reading Krauss’ new book, it became clear to me that this notoriously brainy and extremely influential writer, editor, cofounder of
bifurcating path in the road, and she sat there in disbelief while the many-headed
Krauss proceeds with her narrative about
beast of Postmodernism gave birth to varied incarnations of itself—incarnations that
suffering a brain aneurysm in 1999 and the
went spinning off and away from the French post-structuralists that Krauss had helped
challenges she met trying to regain her
to introduce into the lexicon of contemporary art theory. But Postmodernism wasn’t
short-term memory and the same fluid
going to stop in its tracks under the Freudian/Marxist sway of Jacques Derrida, Michel
use of language she previously enjoyed.
Foucault, and company. Krauss wrote in her acknowledgments page in Under Blue
Under Blue Cup becomes at once a
Cup, “Incited by over a decade of disgust at the spectacle of meretricious art called
simple stratagem for memory and verbal
installation, this book was made possible by fortuitous encounters with what I saw
association and a treatise on her ideas
as its strong alternatives…” and she goes on to list artists such as William Kentridge,
about the “aesthetic medium”—or as I
James Coleman, and Sophie Calle whose work she champions.
began to understand her thesis, the rather
After her dismay with installation art—also known as “relational aesthetics”—
Cover of Bachelors, MIT Press, 1999. Image:
is established at the beginning of the book,
Collection of Betty and George Woodm an.
Krauss appeared mired at the point where “reductivist modernism” met a
Francesca Woodman, New York, 1979-8 0
October magazine, and professor at Columbia University, seemed hopelessly stuck in the past century.
straight-laced scaffolding that surrounds continued on page 38
november
2012
THE magazine |37
Video stills, from A la rencontre de l’art contemporaine, Catherine David et la Documenta X.” Aired on Arte, August 20, 1997
the concept of truth to materials. Krauss’ idea of aesthetic medium can be seen
bound together in complex ways that continued to pose questions about what was
as “the specific support for a given practice [italics hers]—the recursive source
art, what was life, and how each was strengthened by a series of arranged marriages
of the object’s meaning.” And the authority of the physical support became, in
to the other. The union of the two could produce variations of form and content
the Greenbergian trajectory of opinions on Modernism, an absolute. It was as
conceivably without end, and were completely relevant to contemporary society, not
if Krauss equated the universal systems of cognition in the brain—which are
to mention contemporary art. Here is where one could almost envision the origin of
fairly strict and inviolate in their tendencies—with a universal pathway that
Krauss’ brain implosion as she proceeds in her book to catalog her hatred of David’s
represented aesthetic tradition; as if avant-garde art (i.e., Modernist art) had at
curatorial stance.
its center essential qualities and recursive tendencies that were also absolute and
Under Blue Cup is, in part, an attack against David’s aesthetic imperative to merge art,
inviolate. However, in the heavy-breathing air of the many-headed postmodern
life, politics, economics, materials, history, as well as critical thinking, into a kind of filmic
beast, trying to tell art what it can and cannot be is like whistling against the wind.
flow of events that recreates the leading edges of a new avant-garde. And in her critiques
Enter the Dragon Lady.
of David, Krauss resorts to a decidedly snarky tone. She mocks the curator by calling her
The highly regarded French curator Catherine David, who at one time worked
Kha-tee, mimicking David’s assistant Hortensia Voelker’s pronunciation of David’s informal
at the Centre Georges Pompidou, was chosen to be the artistic director of documenta
name, Katy. I found this Kha-tee name-calling shtick to be the most irritating aspect of
X in Kassel, Germany, in 1997. Given that this was to be the last documenta of the
Krauss’ book—as if Krauss could categorically reduce David’s importance by pushing
twentieth century—a century marked by devastating ruptures, intense economic
her into a zone of extreme derision. It was like a stick of dynamite thrown at her every
expansions and contractions, and seismic cultural shifts that we are still dealing
time Krauss resorted to this petulant, perverse behavior. Here is Krauss’ description of
with—David used documenta X as a lens to focus on history and a density of social/
Voelker: “To be Catherine David’s double seems like a distant dream; she visualizes Kha-
cultural themes that reflected a global perspective. Bearing in mind the ascendancy of
tee’s French elegance as she picks her way through the materials in the studio of the artist
site-specific work in contemporary art, David’s documenta was awash in installations
she is visiting, dressed, as she always is, in her black pants suit, her tightly sheathed legs
that emphasized relational aesthetics. In David’s view, politics and visual culture were
deliberately extending below its jacket like the talons of an exotic bird.”
Metaphorical blood drips from Krauss’ pen…
f e at u r e
Catherine David, video stills, from A la rencontre de l’art contemporaine
Metaphorical blood drips from Krauss’ pen because, in her eyes, David has
provocative book Bachelors is one of the best scholarly investigations into criteria
committed the biggest sin of all: putting the finishing nails in the coffin of the Great
by which to evaluate contemporary women artists. Writing on Dora Maar, Claude
White Cube of the gallery or the museum space in favor of showing art as, say, a pig
Cahun, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine,
hut or as plants growing in the spaces of the railroad tracks that lead in and out of
Louise Lawler, and Francesca Woodman, Krauss considers the ideas these women
Kassel. David herself stated, “Unless you are naïve or a hypocrite, or stupid, you have
grappled with as they invented their own singular visual logic. Hence, the authoritative
to know that the white cube is over.” Krauss, for convoluted philosophical reasons,
empowerment within their work is key to a more lasting sense of self-determination
sees David’s acceptance of the death of the holy of holies, the modernist white
and provides a set of controls through which to assess the meaning of their work. It
cube, as symptomatic of “the ‘loss of desire,’ of the post-medium condition’s ‘refusal
must be said, though, that Krauss is not an easy read. Bachelors is a book born of an
of bliss.’” When everything is admitted into the game of art, the concept of art’s
intellectual feminism tempered in the fires of Krauss’ rigorous study within multiple
“essential qualities” comes off as quaint, and David’s political and aesthetic moralism
disciplines—Freudian analysis, Marxism, and all those thorny French philosophers like
and relativism appeared to amputate Krauss’ theoretical upper hand. At the fulcrum
Jacques Lacan and Georges Bataille. Nonetheless, this is a book worth all the effort it
of Krauss’ railing against relational aesthetics is the following paragraph: “Under Blue
takes to plumb its depths.
Cup is a polemic, adamantly shouting ‘fake’ and ‘fraud’ at the kitsch of installation.
One might think that Krauss’ near-death experience and intense period of
The effect of the genuine is not lost to memory, not swept away. A polemic is a call
recuperation, described in Under Blue Cup, might have made her a more generous
to remember, against the siren song of installation [art] to ‘forget.’” Forget what?
writer in her assessment of art’s evolution; made her more open to the vitality that
That a sea change in contemporary art has already occurred? Forget that
exists everywhere in today’s art world, to art’s continual rebirth. That Krauss’ recovery
the motivations behind an artist’s complex configuration of materials, spatial
seemed to make her more stingy, sarcastic, and entrenched in her thinking is unfortunate.
refinements, and textural, as well as textual, epiphanies do matter, as in the works
And that she should be defined as the heir apparent of Clement Greenberg—who has
of Ann Hamilton, for example? The visual, historical, and often political associations
been soundly deconstructed himself for his extremely doctrinaire thinking—is a weird
that Hamilton embeds within her intensely beautiful installations are so much more
case of reductio ad absurdum; a case of a writer writing herself into the confines of a
than kitsch.
sleek white box with no doors or windows or even a mirror. D
Under Blue Cup is an odd and unsatisfying diatribe against the wide-open nature of contemporary art in all its fertile and infinite possibilities. On the other hand, her
november
2012
Diane Armitage is a video artist, free-lance writer, and art history teacher at the Santa Fe Community College.
THE magazine | 39
Chaos to Complexity: Artists and Scientists Share Insights Into the Creative Process
As part of the recent extensive series of events and exhibitions associated with the International Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA), the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year, presented a panel discussion featuring theoretical physicist Geoffrey West and artist Mateo Romero, who currently has an exhibition in the Museum. The panel was moderated by Valerie Plame Wilson. The idea for this cross-disciplinary exploration came from political anthropologist Paula Sabloff, who has a particular interest in the integration of qualitative and quantitative methods. West, Sabloff, and Wilson are associated with the Santa Fe Institute. In daily life we alternate intuitively between operating on quantitative (this product costs less per pound) or qualitative data (that party has some interesting people invited, it could be fun). Society grapples with the distinction between these two modes of describing the world. (How do we measure what students are learning in schools; does the presidential election boil down to whoever seems more likable?) In 1959, C. P. Snow named a fundamental divide between the “two cultures” of science and the humanities, finding it detrimental to Western civilization. Efforts to bridge them have been with us ever since. ISEA tries to demonstrate the dissolution of this gap. The advent and surge of computing power has meant that artists and scientists now share a major tool. Seeking common ground, this discussion focused on creativity, which can be a vague, overly broad concept.
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Discovering DNA or painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling are both creative acts, but the lengthy preparation for them involves acquisition of very different knowledge and skill sets. Nevertheless, meaningful human enterprises involve a deep curiosity about the world. Curiosity, said West, is at the heart of his enterprises, asking good questions at the right level. “How does this work? If I discover a rule about how something works, can that be applied to something totally different and still be valid?” This involves processing massive amounts of data. Shifting from physics to biology, West has made forays into universal scaling laws that pervade biology from molecule to ecosystem levels. Out of that work, he zeroed in on metabolism. Using the quantitative models thus developed, he extended studies to cities. Metabolic rate is connected to questions of global consumption (not to mention distribution) of resources. We might take it up as a metaphor in this context. I believe that attention is our most precious resource; humanity’s rapacious use of the earth’s resources stems partly from a lack of it. Romero, sustained and inspired by the ideas of balance and harmony in Native tradition, spoke of paying attention and digesting the world in order to produce work that is unique and authentic. West and Romero are both familiar with the experience of inhabiting several worlds. Romero has lived and grown up in urban settings, but is native to Cochiti Pueblo. West is British, but has lived in the USA
Museum of Contemporary Native Arts 108 Cathedral Place, Santa Fe
since 1961. Moderator Wilson generated some passionate, complex replies by asking “how does money affect your work?” West believes science is distorted by the current funding processes. We could say the same of art and other fields. The majority of artists struggle while a few superstars are massively enriched. Romero responded personally and philosophically about our relation to need and “enough.” Process, even one’s own, remains something of a mystery. Romero relies on intuitive powers in his art process. West confessed, perhaps proudly, that his process can include channel surfing. Sometimes the discursive mind has to be temporarily switched off for imperceptible knowledge to float into awareness. The Santa Fe Institute is an environment where highly accomplished people in a variety of disciplines are given offices and allowed to interact intensively— as much informally in hallways and at coffee stations as formally via papers and talks. (It somewhat resembles Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, up to the late 1990s.) Mathematical models are designed and utilized to simulate and reiterate processes of change, development, or disruption in the evolution of biological organisms and, by extension, anything from literary genres to linguistic drift, from warfare to demographic change over time. Analyzing the causes of instability in systems such as financial markets, disease vectors, or societies can be seen as a quest for explanations, if not solutions—the solace of knowledge in a world where even curable diseases ravage vulnerable populations, wars rage like brushfires around the
globe, and things, from the nation-state to the earth’s climate-sphere, seem to be disintegrating in threatening ways. Cultural beliefs about the roles of art and science affect how they are practiced. In a classical model, the artwork embodies eternal forms, the scientific quest is for knowledge of sacred or eternal laws. The post-modern view emphasizes the reception of the artwork or the use-value of knowledge to society. The Romantic era (late eighteenth through late nineteenth centuries) focused on the artist’s struggle to express inner vision and the scientist’s wresting of knowledge from intractable nature. Despite today’s de-emphasis on the individual in science (most research projects are collaborative; most science papers are multi-authored), despite mashup and the “death of the author” in the arts, that heroic construct is still with us. The picture can be balanced by acknowledging two other disciplines. Design and engineering mediate what art and science invent or discover. Designers, influenced by art, shape our daily lives via clothes, furniture, housewares, product colors, logos, and media; engineers apply scientific data to make the bridges, airplanes, electronics, cars, and buildings we rely on. Thus do the visions and prototypes of art and science percolate to the vernacular. MoCNA did a courageous thing in setting up such a dialogue despite its ambiguities and potential pitfalls.
—Marina La Palma
Mateo Romero, Pray for Rain, plaster figures, 3” x 3” x 8.5” each, 2012
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critical reflections
Dancing
with the
Dark—Joan Snyder Prints: 1963-2010
The dark here is internal because what the visitor sees is color, glorious color. Organized by the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Dancing with the Dark is the first major retrospective of Joan Snyder’s prints, and presents over sixty works, and every imaginable nuance of pink. Snyder is no stranger to prints, having worked in the medium for over forty-five years. But it’s her approach that grabs the viewer. Part abstraction and part personal narrative, her art expresses her views on sexuality, death, feminism, and social slights. Symbolism abounds, with flowers, seedpods, lace, outright words, and all those pinks. The exhibition hangs in the museum’s second-floor Clinton Adams Gallery. When the elevator door opens we are pulled into a wall painted in rich, dark rose. It’s one of the colors in Snyder’s Wild Roses (color lithograph, etching, and woodcut) that greets us. There are seven pink roses with silvery centers and seven black, lacy seedpods. The wall color pulls hard at the identical color in the roses, making them dance. Just peeking out between the flowers and pods are the words “Oh Mary” and “Oh Boogie.” Both are references to the death of Snyder’s friend Mary Hambleton, which adds an element of friendship tribute to the obvious nature tribute. It is very difficult to stop looking and move on to the other prints. Snyder’s Madrigal series gives us more pink and introduces equally vibrant purples, greens, and oranges. The exhibition includes seven monoprints (color lithograph,
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monotype, and color woodcut) from the thirty-three-piece series. Snyder was inspired by a group of madrigal singers at a recorder workshop she attended. Each print has a central circle—some with flowers, some looking like photos of the earth from space, some reminiscent of fishbowls— surrounded by ten smaller, unevenly spaced, colored circles. These are the singers, some standing closer than others, and their music is the central flowers and shapes, and the petal-like spots of color surrounding each performer. Snyder began the series in 2001 after the events of September 11. “This, I suppose, is my attempt to bring order and beauty to ever-increasing times of great disorder,” she says. Easy to bypass in a side hallway off the Adams gallery and across from the Enyeart/ Malone Library and Archive are Cherry Tree II and Cherry Tree III. It would be a shame to miss them. Here Snyder combines the perfect teal with the perfect fuchsia with the perfect pale green. She creates an Asian feel in these trees with her contrast of dark and light tones. And there are cherries hanging, falling, and juicing everywhere. In the center of the gallery are examples of Snyder’s woodcuts and etchings. The most striking among them is Red Horse (1964). This two-color woodcut depicts said red horse, head lowered as it grazes. Its body is angular and its neck bones protrude from its shoulders, and yet it has a surprisingly lifelike quality where it really ought to appear two-dimensional.
University of New Mexico Art Museum UNM Center for the Arts, Albuquerque
There is a sense of refuge when wrapped in Snyder’s colors, especially her overdose of fuchsias, oranges, and reds, but the effect is oddly comforting. And when she needs to, she delivers actual words in splashes of color. “I never write on a print or painting unless there is an urgency,” she explains. In one case a print features the names of all of the women in the Old Testament, and of the women in her own family. In another, she presents a passage from one of Henry David Thoreau’s journals, and in another are the words of an Eliza Griswold poem. Most of the word paintings are grouped together in a sort of alphabet corner of the exhibition. In Serene Cries (color digital print, lithograph in green and carborundum plate in red and light green with chine collé) Snyder eases us away from the alphabet, but not quite. Sometimes the pale, stringy grass clearly forms the word MOM and that starts us looking for other words spelled out by the tall grass, but there aren’t any. The effect is of pale pink and green with a fleeting message blowing through. And just when you stop looking for missives in the blades of grass, four icons appear, all fertility figures either open-mouthed or grinning. Almost as hard to pull away from as Wild Roses is Snyder’s Souls Series installation. Compliments to the curatorial team at UNM for their beautiful presentation of these twenty-one woodcuts, hand-inked with oil paint onto various fabrics and papers. They are presented in their own corner on
two walls, painted in that same gorgeous rose paint we saw at the beginning of the exhibition. Here Snyder presents elegies for the dead, for loss of parents, and for deaths from AIDS. It is hard to resist touching the fabrics. There are several flower abstractions painted on velvet, but most of these souls are ghostly faces with prominent lips. In one case a piece of sheer peach silk floats in front of a sheet of handmade paper. The features—lips, ears, nose, eyes, and neck—appear on the paper and are also over-painted on the silk. Slight breezes in the gallery rustle the fabrics and animate the faces, but not enough. I blow gently until the faces shimmer. Accompanying the exhibition—in a side gallery with seating—is a short video by TalkingPointFilms called In the Studio: Joan Snyder and Painting 1998, which shows Snyder at work and being interviewed in her studio. We watch her pull a canvas off the wall and place it on the floor, the better to dab at it while bent double, smudging and smearing until she has exactly the effect she’s after. “For some reason,” she says, “I knew I always wanted to paint.”
—Susan Wider
Joan Snyder, Wild Roses, color lithograph, etching, and woodcut, 2010.
Joan Snyder, Madrigal X from 33 Madrigals, monoprint (color lithograph, monotype, and color woodcut), 2001 Photos: Peter Jacobs
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Kenneth Noland—Mysteries: Full Circle
Yares Art Projects 123 Grant Avenue, Santa Fe
Celebrated American artist Kenneth Noland (1924-2010) was never attracted to representational or figurative painting. He was drawn to knock-your-socks-off color, working it into deceptively simple geometric arrangements with exultant precision. There’s too much warmth and too much unselfconscious interest in the viewer’s response for Noland’s works to be called minimal. And they don’t easily fit into the category of Abstract Expressionism, with its tendencies toward free-wheeling rebelliousness. He is most often associated with Color Field painters like Morris Louis and Barnett Newman, with their unrelenting emphasis on form and color. This exhibition, however, with its sharp, clean lines and painstaking precision, is marvelously iconoclastic. Noland was a color wizard, and
on canvas he advanced the power of pure pigment with an alchemical know-how that appeals equally to instinct and intellect. Noland’s 1953 visit to pal Helen Frankenthaler’s studio has become the stuff of art history legend; he was so impressed with the twenty-four-year-old’s process of saturating and staining areas of unprimed canvas that he began painting directly onto a raw cloth surface, allowing color to take center stage. Throughout the course of his career, Noland experimented with stripes and chevrons, and shaped his canvases into triangles and diamonds. He began painting circles in the 1950s, but this series, called Mysteries, was created between 1999 and 2002. The humble circle—a baseball, an orange, a coin—seen
through the eyes of Kenneth Noland is something strange and special. Noland is known for bold, unexpected color combinations, and this exhibition is brilliant proof. Here, color is the main event, and form is decidedly secondary. In describing these works, it’s tempting to say they vibrate or pulse, which of course they cannot, but it’s only in ascribing movement to them that one can begin to approximate what they’re like to stand in front of. According to Noland’s whim, a circle is a radiant bullseye, a shining eyeball, a fantastic planet, or any number of bemusing things. Most of the eleven works in this neatly curated exhibition are multicolored concentric circles painted on square canvases, wherein alternating rings of color surround a solid-hued orb.
Each painting has a personality. There is something urgent and noisy about one, while the next is bristling and prim or inky blue and melancholic. Sometimes they’re naughty— a wash of hot pink on unprimed canvas is like a cherry Kool-Aid stain on white linen; a tipsily soaked square the color of Manischewitz wine is weirdly and wonderfully anchored by a priggish circle of emerald green. Golden Glow is a shock of color. A background of fuzzy ochre frames a circle that’s made of foxglove-purple. The central orb is fire-engine red, disrupting the coolness of the outer rings but magnificently complementing the outlying gold. Despite its intensity, the piece is somehow endearingly vulnerable: it looks tender, sensitive to the touch. Tiny, how-did-he-do-it bits of iridescent glitter are infused throughout, so that when you move slightly in front of the piece, disparate parts of the composition coalesce, assuming a united, shimmering vibrancy. Magic Theater is shadowy and mostly blue, and it appears to hover above the canvas or else just beyond it. Its crimson central orb is surrounded by rings of cobalt and cornflower blue, and outwardly, by a watery aquamarine. It feels oceanic and still, an impression augmented by the sense that darkness is fast approaching. Viewing this work, one has a disarming sensation of being underwater, looking up at the underside of an un-tethered and enigmatically spherical vessel. Noland maintains a simple, even formulaic, shape, but utilizes a fantastic range of color, imbuing even basic forms with a thrilling intensity. The hazy, mintgreen Dreams to Follow is offhandedly subdued—it seems sure of itself. Its colors, for me, have a specific relationship to sunlight, or more specifically, to sunlight hitting concrete. The circle’s light jade rings are vaguely reminiscent of the ubiquitous, bleached-turquoise color of the bowl of a public pool. The center orb is a crisp yellow, like the yolk of a hard-boiled egg. Rings of white and cucumber radiate outward leisurely, forming a fantasy—a constructed landscape seen through a filter of hot sunshine. Perhaps because the circle is so earnest and so humanly practical, it appeals to our most basic pleasure centers. Kenneth Noland’s late work, so cunningly drafted and so quietly intellectual, challenges and delights the eye. Though this exhibition includes works that are crucial to understanding this pioneering artist’s career, Mysteries is fresh and exciting and deeply enjoyable. If this is American art history, sign me up.
—Iris McLister Kenneth Noland, Golden Glow, acrylic on canvas, 60” x 60”, 2001
critical reflections
Ecumene: Global Interface
in
American Ceramics
The Santa Fe Community college chose thirty-two works of art out of a group of seven hundred images for their recent show at the Visual Arts Gallery, Ecumene: Global Interface in American Ceramics. Organized by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), the show ran in conjunction with the fortyfifth General Assembly of the International Academy of Ceramics. The NCECA was founded in 1966 as a non-profit to foster global education and appreciation for the ceramic arts. It is run out of Colorado, and one of the ways in which it tracks the ceramic arts is through juried competitions, such as the one that resulted in Ecumene. The International Academy of Ceramics is just that, an international academy consisting of artists, writers, curators and the like from fifty-five nations, who host biennial General Assemblies around the world. Their latest one happened to be here in Santa Fe at La Fonda Hotel and Ecumene was cleverly curated to coincide with this major event in the international ceramics community. The world, art included, is becoming increasingly globalized. Almost everyone has access to a tremendous amount of information. SFCC calls this the “New World of Art,” citing America as a full partner in this “trans-global cultural movement.” Indeed, ecumene refers to the known part of the inhabited universe and proffers notions of a bustling new world at the peak of an information revolution. Be it the Roman Empire or 2012, ecumene is the entirety of the known social sphere, and today that happens to stretch physically and virtually. SFCC therefore proposes a charming situation where their Visual Arts Gallery hosts thirty ceramicists who were curated by NCECA Exhibitions Director Linda Ganstrom, SFCC’s Director of Exhibitions Clark Baughan, SFCC’s Associate Professor of Ceramics James Marshall, and guest curator Jane Sauer of the Jane Sauer Gallery here in Santa Fe. These artists represent the chosen few of America’s top ceramicists whose work comprises a modest survey of the present American ceramic practice in light of globalization. So what happens to ceramics in the New World of Art? That often-aloof medium—loyal for centuries to the vessel— is inherently clannish. Clay sculptors habitually gather their material locally and so their finished product is resolutely bound to a specific terrain and is further embellished by
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native cultural meaning. With something so earthbound, so grounded, it seems difficult to pull pottery from its indigenous home and into a global cultural movement. After a few thousand years, the vessel is reimagined and redecorated but never overthrown. Thomas Edwards answers directly to this fate in his porcelain and concrete sculpture, Ridge. It looks like a slab of pavement that’s been perfectly preserved from an unknown urban underground. Centered inside is a stack of seven extremely spotless pale gray porcelain bowls. They are carefully inset with pieces from the front and the back cleanly shaved off to reveal their insides. Remaining is a simple pattern formed by the bowls’ stacked curved bottoms. Ridge offers quite a change from the shards of mismatched pottery found in New Mexico’s soil, for example. Porcelain and concrete
Santa Fe Community College Visual Arts Gallery 6401 Richards Avenue, Santa Fe
are engineered; an archeological dig often finds handmade pieces that are ruined— buried in soil, not cement. Edwards’ piece sits on a pedestal completely detached from any cultural identity. This sample could be from any major city. The porcelain offers little evidence of place and its encasement suggests an anachronistic time when overdeveloped cement roads are the sites of history past, not undeveloped land. It is perhaps haunting that in an age known for its overabundance of information, the piece in Ecumene that is most compelling is this intensely vacuous one. Otherwise Ecumene offers its fair share of pottery, mostly new takes on the long tradition, alongside a surprising amount of unsettling animal representations and larger sculptures that dare to break the mold. Virginia Scotchie’s Seven Deadly Sins—Punch is a reused shopping cart that overflows with forty-seven silver slip-cast
porcelain punching bags that look curiously like bombs. Neptune’s Daughter was made in response to the Gulf oil spill. The female figure stands intently with wind whipping around her and mud drenching her feet. She is life-size and swaddles a pelican. She looks strong, like she just extracted something deep from the earth. Van Gogh’s iconic chair emerges monochromatic from the collective conscious with degenerating legs in Lauren Mayer’s Untitled. The back legs slump down while the front one buckles under pressure and the fourth drifts off to the side in disinterest. Mayer’s chair is white and slumped with paint peeling off. It’s an old withered item that suggests The New World of Art’s global reference library is dogged and somewhat slippery.
—Hannah Hoel Installation view. Neptune’s Daughter in foreground by Lisa Reinertson Photo: Adele Devalcourt
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Walking
at the
Edge
The magnetism of Rulan Tangen’s passion for revitalizing her indigenous culture brought to the stage not only New Zealand’s multi-talented Maori choreographer and dancer, Jack Gray, but a remarkable group of seventeen dancers, from twenty-one tribal identities, to her Dancing Earth Creations, which had its world premier at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. Housed at the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI) for a month, the performers collaborated at co-creating a vivid story-dance, Walking at the Edge of Water. Gray, from Auckland, credited as dramaturge, co-directed the workshop and production with Tangen, and performed as Tangen’s partner in a riveting duet. Of her work, Tangen says, “Our objective is always to open doors; open the pathways for others.” Since speaking with indigenous elders over many years, from many tribes in many countries, Tangen repeatedly heard the phrase, “It’s sacred water.” The dancer in Tangen wanted to set those thoughts about water to choreography. Still, she made certain to edit out parts of stories that elder mothers had asked her to keep secret. The work had, like Tangen’s last opus, Of Bodies Of Elements, both a chronological and mythical timeline. The program described the first act as “Creation, in the Realm of the Sacred.” After an intermission, the second act, “Koyaanisqatsi to Transformation,” depicted schmutz—the pollution of earth, drilling and fracking, in body and spirit. Beauty returned with the Ancestors and a graceful purification ritual. A video cast on the back scrim helped to clarify the natural world topics the dancers were representing—a dry riverbed, sparse marshes, and parched land. A curandera blessed the gathering: that included drums, didgeridoos, Robbie Robertson’s lyrics and melody, contemporary indigenous music, Sacajawea and child, and the voices of women
of
Water
from Vanuatu. Shamanic chants accompanied water maidens, water goddesses, and warriors in their contemporary powwow, break-dance, and aerial movements. Imaginative costumes represented clean and polluted water and the land. The dancers in Act One wailed and summoned, each in their tribe’s language, the name of Water, a high desert prayer. Poetry excerpts from Sherwin Bitsui provided words for water in many indigenous languages. The words were shouted as a cacophony of sound and energy. The dancers and their words appeared separate enough to suggest that before chemical elements in the universe merged to become cohesive matter, the cosmos consisted of individual elements—Cosmic Chaos. A koan: how does a choreographer show chaos through performance qualities of beauty? The structure for this section wasn’t revealed with a clarity that brought a sense of aesthetic beauty or designed chaos. Three men flew through their in-place, bent-knee jumps, and spun with wild control. All three had adequate break dance moves—shoulder spins, flips, and cartwheels that didn’t touch the ground. Deollo Johnson descended on two lengths of fabric. Javier Fresquez showed an ability not all of the dancers had evolved—being able to move in space with ownership that included extending his movements with presence and grace during pauses and silence. Eric Garcia Lopez danced and acted the shamanic bringer of blessing, with ferocious male demeanor—leaping and shaking his rain stick over the company. Another theme threaded through the performance, the divine feminine, which was expressed as source of water and soft, sensual, creative power. In the first act, women danced strong, graceful motions of water, aided by a length of shaken blue-green silk and undulating
Lensic Center for the Performing Arts 211 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe bodies, especially arms and hands that reached and soothed. A third theme involved the external blending and mating of male and female energies through water... “To bring rain and fertility, creativity, magic, love, joy and pleasure.” The powerful singing voice and strong body sway of Sina-Aurelia Soul-Bowes represented and carried the eternal feminine theme. A pas de deux between Tangen and Gray concluded the first half of the program. They intertwined and morphed like the cloud form of water they represented. Tangen, translating undulant water wisps, almost evaporated into Gray’s raging powerhouse of a storm cloud, sucked up and integrated into the saturated gray rumble to which Gray ferociously gave his breath. Was the fulminating dancer a satyr, a Dionysian spirit, an ancient Maori warrior—or all of the above? Gray and Tangen danced phenomenally— he hissing, growling, and pawing the air with lowered shoulders, his limbs less like arms than forepaws; she, like a boneless vapor, moved as though wrapping her flesh into and around him. The rituals related to water were the most lucid of all the stories, interwoven throughout the concert, and conveying many meanings. A comely group of women performed a purification ritual, each holding large vessels, offering the precious fluid to others. When four quartets each shared water at the four corners of the stage— each cluster arranged like a staircase—the slow outreach of arms toward each other soothed and united. Sina Soul’s strong shamanic song and undulant movements spoke of water’s power and beauty. A women’s jingle dance started the second act. Particularly lovely was how energy rose in each body, from the rapidly shifting angles of the toes and heels, keeping contact with the ground but swiftly moving up through the knees and into the sedate upper trunk. The jingles oiled
the wheels for the much darker, post-apocalyptic sequences. Goggle-eyed dancers wore jumpsuits of shiny charcoal, schlepping garbage and smoke through the dark forces of a world droughtplagued and out of balance. Passages of great beauty, interspersed with many themes and rituals—each worthy of a concert to itself—were such that the inner soul of the work often appeared hermetic, often only known internally by the deeply committed indigenous artists who have expressed a longing for community among themselves. The dancers’ varied levels of technical skill, combined with the many stories and ritual threads, some as transparent as the beauty and necessity of water, some as the dark struggles and oppression of those powerless to protect their water, created a roughly-woven, bold blanket of a production. The threads of this design rarely matched up. The warp of its ideas was solid and fascinating. The woof of expression needed time to clarify the choreographic ideas and execution. The challenge for the audience throughout was to unite all of these themes, which in theory seem to have a unity, but in practice were experienced by this viewer as abruptly pulling apart with the choreography changing directions so often. Still, the ambitious production holds the promise of melding into a significant contribution to indigenous contemporary dance arts. The concluding section was outstanding, with all dancers on stage repeatedly and simultaneously slicing the air, their bent elbows at shoulder height, adding the Maori sizzle sound. The Lensic vibrated with unreserved enthusiasm that met the explosive energy of the company.
—Janet Eigner Right: Rulan Tangen and Jack Gray as Ancestors Left: Nichole Salazar in Purification scene Photos: Paulo T. Photography
critical reflections
Dust
in the
Machine
Center for Contemporary Arts 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe
The Ghost in the Machine: It would be fitting if the title of the current group show at CCA—Dust in the Machine—were an allusion to the “Ghost in the Machine,” coined in 1949 by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle to characterize what he found to be the faulty logic of the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy, one that denies the mind’s role as the organizing principle of the body. Alas, the phrase’s import is not evident in Dust’s attempt to convey the complex manmachine symbiosis of contemporary society with its mechanized environment. That omission serves to reinforce the sense that Dust in the Machine falls short in its claim to provide “a spectrum of interpretations of the industrialized West.” Two of the artists are engaging; the six others are, at best, interesting. Dust in the Machine underwhelms. CCA is one site for the multi-venue art exhibition launched this fall in conjunction with ISEA2012: Machine Wilderness. ISEA’s Eighteenth International Symposium on Electronic Art featured a conference “exploring the discourse of global proportions on the subject of art, technology, and nature.” The symposium comprised outreach art exhibitions, public events, performances, and educational activities in Santa Fe and Taos and throughout the region. Founded in the Netherlands in 1990, ISEA is an international non-profit “fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science, and technology,” largely through its annual symposium. This year the theme was Machine Wilderness: Re-envisioning Art, Technology, and Nature. Its advocacy of a more humane interaction between technology and environment reflected ISEA’s overall mandate of humanizing technology for the survival of the species. The Machine Wilderness exhibition venues drew upon several subthemes: radical cosmologies, econotopias, trans-species habitats, dynamobilities, and gridlock. ISEA is a potent force for the environment in its focus on a humanistic science achieved by the intersection of art, science, and technology. But what you can get as well with an academic intersection of art, science, and technology is just that— or at best a pastiche, a mixed bag of three distinct disciplines—aptly captured for me by the clever mechanized owl (Escape) perched on the ISEA2012 program cover.
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Symposium executive producer Suzanne Sbarge rightly notes that “crossing the divide between the arts and science opens up a vast realm of collaboration and possibility,” but I’d pause before her unqualified claim that “art and science, when combined, de-mystify each other and become more mutually accessible….” As often as not, a selective grasp of technology linked with a limited command of art will more likely muddle than de-mystify. ISEA’s goal is commendable, but the transformative potential on a regional community of an annual conference is problematic (recall similar ambitions of SITE Santa Fe’s biennial exhibition: Lucky Number Seven). It can be realized only to the extent that its audience is truly versed in science and the arts—what ISEA encourages. In short (too late), if Dust in the Machine falls short of its claim to explore the intersection of landscape and technology, it is in part a function of the enormous demand on the artist to harness artistic expression with technical concepts to form an aesthetic that engages the viewer. Much of the work in Dust shows a postmodernist tendency to fall back on text to validate a flat presentation. Few of Dust’s artists really “explore” the confrontation of landscape with technology—in the sense, say, that Monet explored the effects of light on Rouen Cathedral, or Sigmar Polke explored the relevance of postmodern painting. They just “document” it, mistaking aesthetic distance or detachment for “objectivity,” as if the mere invoking of the issue either suggests a critical stance or leaves it for the hapless viewer. Shirley Wegner’s chromogenic prints are just visually attractive. Adriane Colburn’s Just Below (sewer to bay) ink drawing on paper is more blueprint than commentary. Lisa K. Blatt’s looped videos of cloud pollution from a copper mine and a power plant reprise conventional clips about the beauty-and-the beast irony of a toxic source vis-à-vis its striking visual effect. Bethany Delahunt’s life-size wooden Watchtower and Jesse Vogler’s installations of industrial materiel are worn allegories of corporate assaults on the environment. China Town, Lucy Raven’s fifty-minute video, could have made its point in fifteen. Two artists really explored diverse effects of the dystopian brave new world of global technology on the landscape.
Chris Ballantyne’s acrylics and watercolors are no less scathing for their wry depiction of the follies of urban development, while the eerie nocturnal beauty of Jamey Stillings’ archival prints, documenting the construction of the Hoover Dam bypass bridge, also captures the promise of responsible technology at its best. But overall, Dust in the Machine offers neither powerful statements nor critical commentary on the juncture of natural landscape and technology. It begs the question by positing the mechanized
landscape as “necessary and destructive” and then purporting a range of interpretations of its status. It offers prosaic installations that—much like those of the 2011 Earth Now exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art—fail to capture the current risk of mechanization to the environment or challenge the viewer’s passive response to it. Dust approached the question of our role in technology as if we were already the Ghost in the Machine.
—Richard Tobin
Jamey Stillings, Arizona View, March 5, 2009, archival pigment ink print, 44” x 31”, 2012
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Cause & Effect
Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art 702½ Canyon Road, Santa Fe
The public benefits when seasoned professionals work together. That’s certainly true in the collaborative efforts of artist Nora Naranjo Morse in her latest exhibition, Cause & Effect, curated by Chiaroscuro’s gallery director John Addison. These two old pros brought their A-game, and the results are splendid. Naranjo Morse works with a freedom that only an artist with years of sure-handed practice behind her can do. Addison brought out the art’s elegant and otherworldly characteristics through his judicious utilization of placement and lighting. Together, they produced an exhibition that is well-grounded and airy. The exhibition announces itself to the visitor before he enters the gallery: The show’s largest piece, Gatherings, a monumental wireand-hoop concoction, hangs in front of the wall
outside Chiaroscuro on Gypsy Alley, where it beckons discerning viewers from Canyon Road. The play of shadow, line, and color presents the thesis of Cause & Effect—that clay as a medium is not limited to its functionality, nor are found objects necessarily limited to the garbage bin. The exhibition subtext lies within the artist’s roots as an indigenous woman. Naranjo Morse has, for years, dug clay from a sacred site near Santa Clara Pueblo. In a real juxtaposition of the sacred with the profane, she found herself fascinated by a trash heap next to the clay, and began mining both for their rich, earthy resources. Naranjo Morse shares her lineage with generations of highly regarded Pueblo ceramists. Her work is, however, highly conceptual for
an artist whose foundations are built upon an art that is primarily functional and often figurative. Known as an artist who investigates “the changing social landscape of Native life,” according to gallery press, she is a sculptor who also uses poetry and film. In the entry gallery at Chiaroscuro, three micaceous-clay pieces, Squash Pods I, II, and III, are good examples of a sensibility that emerged out of its native roots. Hand-dug clay lends an organic weight and tactility to the vessels—they beg to be picked up so that their heft can be experienced. As such, they suggest a relational aesthetic that is very much a defining quality of Naranjo Morse’s art. Outer-space discs, like something straight out of Jane Jetson’s jewelry box, perch on the necks of the pods, lending a cool, retro-modern look
to what might otherwise be simple autumnal gourds. A clay tip inserted into the rim of the largest squash pod, fired black, insinuates the naughtiness of bare genitals. Near the squash vessels, Moon Orchids wave their thin stalks in shades of yellow, chartreuse, and purple, as delicately animated as underwater sea creatures. The artist has developed in her ceramics a droll take layered onto serious overtones; the contrast is quite pleasing. In the same room, and above the Orchids, floats the wire armature of Swimmer, narrow and long as a gar fish. Its abstracted needle-like effect was spoiled, I felt, by the too-literal figure of an outstretched swimmer poised inside the armature. Naranjo Morse is at her most effective when she allows generalized forms to stand in for ideas of the mysterious mundane. Uncovering the tiny swimmer within the piece spoiled the effect of its overall swooping lyricism. In the next gallery, the artist’s imagination is fully exposed to, and supported by, the elements of recycled trash. Her County Road series tends toward smaller, open-ended pieces that strive to become architectural structures, like tiny geodesic domes for birds. Fine as gems, the directness of their wirework renders them approachable. The bright yellow doll-sized hut, My African Neighbor, made of clay with mixed media, is a fine example of this type. Still, on their own, the preceding pieces would be nice, but hardly outstanding as a body of work. It is the series of four tall, slim totemic forms, From the Bottom Up, which affords the exhibition its outstanding qualities. Satisfyingly tall and slender, these painted wire and mixed-media works are hung very effectively. Addison’s lighting prompts a dialogue between each piece and its own shadow, adding substance to the elusiveness of art made from the flotsam of rubble. The four sculptures are spiny and evanescent as the dried husks of cholla in the arid, high desert. And they are as solidly present as the clay pieces, seeming like animated stills that depict the frozen gyrations of a hoop dancer. The last piece in the exhibition, Untitled, began as a totem in the above series. As the artist had become freer with her medium, the long, thin shape folded into itself like a doughnut. Here, we witness the artist’s confidence in herself and in the artworks, with the happy results translated into an uncamouflaged generosity of spirit. This artist knows who she is and where she comes from, and her art moves out unshakably from this center.
—Kathryn M Davis
Nora Morse, From the Bottom Up 4 (detail), mixed media and clay, 100” x 17” x 17”, 2012
critical reflections
ISEA2012 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness
This fall in the Southwest, artists and scientists are working on their relationships with technology and, in turn, using technology to examine their relationships to the environment, culture, and more. From September 19 to 24, with additional outreach days in Santa Fe and Taos, Albuquerque’s 516 ARTS in partnership with the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History and the University of New Mexico presented ISEA2012 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness, launching a season-long schedule of activities that features connections among art, science, technology, and the environment. Sandwiched between ISEA2011 in Istanbul and ISEA2013 in Sydney, ISEA2012 marked the first time in six years that the symposium has been hosted in the United States. An advantage of ISEA taking place in a different location each year is that it adopts the inherent characteristics of its host city, highlighting local and regional interests. Fittingly, the Albuquerque title theme, “Machine Wilderness,” is concerned with creative solutions for how technology and the natural world can coexist in anticipation of a positive, sustainable future. In order to make ISEA2012’s big ideas easier to absorb, the more than one hundred artists and four hundred presenters were organized under themes, as well as incorporated into the Latin American Forum and the Education Program. Each day, conference attendees were introduced to varied ideas about how technology functions in our daily lives. Presentations addressed everything from seed sharing to Twitter, while workshops and scholarly papers engaged issues that have particular relevance to New Mexico, such as water conservation, land use, and education. The most notable moments of ISEA2012 were when technology was shown to be inherently necessary in order for a project or research to be effective, not when it was separated out as a novel attribute. For example, keynote speaker Mark Hosler spoke about his involvement with the culture-jamming group Negativland to challenge issues of art, ownership, and the law. The group is considered a pioneer in the realm of sampling, with their performances reminding the public that media is available for the taking and its purpose is up for debate. Also harnessing the power of the media in subversive ways was archivist,
november
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writer, filmmaker, and “outsider” librarian Rick Prelinger. He presented his in-process film about fossil fuels and the end of travel as we know it, created from appropriated materials in the Prelinger Archive and Prelinger Library. Festival favorite invitees Fritz Haeg and Laurie Anderson each brought a familiar warmth to the often cold, alienating nature of technology. Haeg spoke in his signature informal and endearing way about his garden project Edible Estates and native animal housing initiative Animal Estates. It is debatable whether Haeg can be considered someone who intentionally works with technology; however, the ecological side of his art practice is so strongly rooted in elements of design that his projects would not be nearly as successful without it. Conversely, Anderson is a name synonymous with technology. During her conversation with CalArts Art & Technology Program Director Tom Lesser, she brought a human face and a gentle voice to the electronic buzz around her lifetime of performance work. Featured panel discussions took on the arduous task of addressing technology’s role in politics, geography, information sharing, creative economies, extinction,
sustainability, and more. For example, as a participant in the panel discussion Technotopia: The Colonization of the Body as the Ultimate Frontier, performance artist and educator Coco Fusco, joining a host of renowned researchers who challenged assumptions of border issues and the body, spoke eloquently and boldly about the aestheticization of bodily harm, violence, and peer-to-peer abuse during and after the Iraq war. Additionally, the panel for What We Learned: The Changing Landscape of Curatorial Practices, moderated by Albuquerque Museum of Art and History Curator of Art Andrew Connors, brought together SITE Santa Fe Director Irene Hofmann and a roster of arts professionals who discussed the role of curating in a global art market, with an underlying question of the cultural relevance of exhibition-making. The conference was punctuated with exhibitions and performances at multiple venues throughout Albuquerque, with many artists attempting to insert feeling, materiality, and genuine communication where only electronic components seem to now exist. A common thread running through the exhibitions was the inherent physical nature of art-making, much of which is made possible through technology. For example, Basement Films presented an old school-style mash-up of 35 mm, 16
Various Venues
in
New Mexico
mm, and 8 mm films and video, reminding ISEA2012-goers that technology is not a new idea. And during the ISEA2012 gala at the Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum, Miwa Matreyek presented Myth and Infrastructure, a live multimedia projected animated performance that portrays her silhouette as an electronic shadow puppet, of sorts, moving lucidly through imagined cityscapes and fantastical environments, colorful experiences, and dynamic situations. Not all ISEA2012 conference activities and related artworks were groundbreaking or breathtaking. But as artists and scientists navigate the technological wilderness, a few necessary repetitions and less-thanperfect experimental creations are to be expected. What ISEA2012 was able to do was offer locals and visitors a specific reason to navigate the city with intention and purpose and to meet groups of people with similar interests. Albuquerque can be proud to be counted amongst the ISEA cities that have hosted artists, scholars, and symposium attendees as they engage in creative solutions to global issues within specific regional contexts.
—Nancy Zastudil
Miwa Matreyek, Myth and Infrastructure, multi-media animated performance, 2010
THE magazine | 47
Eddie Dominguez: Where Edges Meet
Roswell Museum and Art Center 100 West 11th Street, Roswell
Lucy R. Lippard: You’ve said that the elements of your work were the landscape, the object, the domestic, pop culture, and the environment. Landscape particularly interests me. How would you define it? Eddie Dominguez: How would I define landscape? As a beautiful thing, something that’s nurturing, something that’s growing, something that’s harsh, something that’s comforting. Nature has so many elements to work from…. —From the catalogue Where Edges Meet, “A Solstice Conversation,” Eddie Dominguez and Lucy R. Lippard, June 20, 2012
The retrospective of Eddie Dominguez comes at a perfect time in the celebration of New Mexico’s long cultural history because the artist is a native son and his career has been particularly successful in New Mexico and nationally. Born and raised in Tucumcari, Dominguez— primarily known as a ceramic artist—has been influenced by all things local, and yet he has traveled a great deal and lived in other parts of the country. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art, followed by graduate school at Alfred University; he has taught in Montana, done countless workshops all over the United States, and now the artist divides his time between life in Roswell and Lincoln, Nebraska, where he is a professor in the Department of Art and Art History. Dominguez’s horizons have always been expanding, but he is also an artist who has embraced his roots, digging into early influences for inspiration, and then transforming memory into arrangements of form, color, texture, and content that are unique and stylistically recognizable as his work. The artist’s vision has always been distinctive and informed by his personal history and his sensitive relationship to the land—whether in the Southwest or the Midwest.
Years ago, when I first saw a ceramic piece by Dominguez, I was struck by the work’s visual exuberance and its unique presentation of landscape, similar to Landscape Vase. The work was like a painting that came to life in high relief—with its textured surface, made from cut marks in thick slabs of clay and then glazed in saturated colors that carried the hint of cultural signifiers with them. Dominguez’s ceramics have been called unorthodox, but perhaps what this means is that in the art world in which he came of age, he didn’t hesitate to reveal an unabashed joy in the making of art; in its way, the artist’s work probably seemed at odds with the milieu of a prevalent and dour sense of minimalism. Dominguez’s exuberance is seductive and giving, his embrace of color and texture is expressive and stimulating, and yet the artist can also pare down his elements and create an almost medicinal quality as in the work Desert Rose. This is a more formal piece, soothing to look at and devoid of attempts to heat up an interior environment by radiating intense color. Instead, the artist pulls the viewer into a sublimated world of white against white, shadow against shadow, and the overall mysterious effect more than equals the sum of its parts. Desert Rose is a seven-foot-high white cabinet full of plates, cups, pitchers, and bowls that, while a paragon of domestic symbolism, is also an homage to Louise Nevelson, whose work Dominguez admires. In the same way that Nevelson would unify her disparate pieces of wood by the application of a single color, Dominguez does the same with his use of white. The subtle artworld reference is bracketed by the artist’s equally subtle sense of humor as he brings together personal influences and sets them in the context of domesticity; by inference, Dominguez is suggesting what it means for a contemporary artist to be at home with himself. Herein lies the artist’s strong sense of place and his stylized
way of anchoring his own history and the landscapes that reside both inside his head and outside his window. One of the most stunning of Dominguez’s pieces in this retrospective is his suite of eight large plates called Landscape Platters. In this work, the artist has painted landscapes of New Mexico and Nebraska. Using his signature richly hued palette, Dominguez depicts atmospheric skies and expanses of Midwestern and Southwestern grasslands, and roads that lead to and from home. The artist’s first love of painting comes full circle in these poignant vistas that symbolize an individual who lives in two places at once. However, there is a more somber, reflective quality in this series—a feeling of longing for something that the sky or the land can’t quite provide. Or maybe it’s the realization that maturity brings with it a deepening sense of responsibility. In this quest to translate
one’s visions into an ongoing and coherent body of work, the possibility of inner weather and uneven terrain brings with it both excitement and a sense of reservation, even ambiguity. In the piece Rain Cloud, the artist rendered himself as a life-giving storm cloud that connects both heaven and the land below. Dominguez takes on the guise of an all-seeing deity, but I don’t mean to suggest that he appears as a persona with an inflated sense of importance. In this work, Dominguez radiates both pain and resignation and perhaps an admission of time passing, and his inner landscape is watered, cultivated, weeded, and harvested in an ongoing, cyclic engagement with life and the artistic process. But no matter how much free play the artist allows himself as he branches out into new technologies and performance art, Dominguez always seems to find a way to bring everything back down to earth.
—Diane Armitage Left: Eddie Dominguez, Rain Cloud, ceramic, 21¾” x 21¾” x 3”, 2009 Right: Eddie Dominguez, Landscape Vase, ceramic, 24” x 18” x 8”, 1987
critical reflections
Christopher Felver: The Importance
of
Being
Zane Bennett Contemporary Art 435 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe
We have such a hard time determining why
we’re here on the planet. Speaking here not so much of the cosmic why of why does the universe exist with us in it, but more toward finding an answer to “Why are we here?” in the sense of what are we really supposed to be doing with our time? It seems that if we had that answer, then pursuing it would give life more meaning. What is being for, what are you supposed to be doing with it? What is the “importance of being?” What is our raison d’être? Recent discoveries in astro- and metaphysics have made it abundantly clear that getting an answer to the ultimate why of the existence of everything is not really an achievable task. The resultant bounce back from this wall of impossibility is toward human-scale meanings, and in this sense all human knowledge and intellectual constructs qualify as being derived from a melding of purely human subjectivities; subjectivities that are both collective and highly individualized yet participate in the cooperative thinking, painting, sculpting, writing, acting, dreaming, singing, playing, discovering, and polemicizing that is culture. You can get all academic about it and discuss art in erudite terms as a “site for
cultural meaning,” or you can shave your beard and remove your reading glasses and just face the real reason we’re here—that the common element in all our cultural activities is, quite simply, human connection. Ipso facto, your purpose in life is to be human, to have a body bound to this particular planet and to do those most important of human things—to cooperate, communicate, and connect. “People who need people” and all that, like the song says. Christopher Felver’s photographic portraits of contemporary poets, priestesses, painters, and thinkers put the emphasis right where it belongs, though Barbra Streisand doesn’t make an appearance. Felver’s greatest ability is to put his famous sitters at ease, even to capture some quintessential aspect of each unique individual’s character. Anjelica Huston is stately and regal, with just a glimpse of good humor and sensuality in the curling corners of her mouth. Hunter S. Thompson looks as sublimely paranoid as ever in his aviator glasses, while Gerhard Richter maintains the Teutonic distance and reserve that typifies his best work. Felver’s
first cultural heroes were the Beats, and Felver’s images of Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg are both outstanding. In fact, as far as portraiture goes, and the requirements of presence it imposes, Felver is masterful. The shots themselves are clean, cropped, and composed for the most part. Nearly every sitter looks directly into the eyes of the viewer. Face to face, human to human, there is a primordial power in Felver’s pictures of people. And when they are people who have achieved the iconic status of celebrity, our voyeurism kicks in. Is that what she really looked like? Is his head really so round? What made Roy Lichtenstein smile so broadly at the photographer? Jasper Johns, John Chamberlain, Helen Frankenthaler, John Updike, Noam Chomsky, Joan Mitchell, Yayoi Kusama, Georg Baselitz, Richard Serra…the list goes on and on. Some key players are MIA, but for the most part this exhibition reads as a current Who’s Who in the realms of art, poetry, and philosophy. This is the current intelligentsia on pictorial parade. Larry Rivers becomes a collage element in one of his
own paintings. Johns is slightly turned away, demonstrating the elusive reclusiveness that is his hallmark. The pleasure of seeing your favorites depicted exactly as they ought to be is matched by the surprises. Louise Nevelson always worked the dramatic eye shadow, but who knew she could look so much like a tragic, homeless gypsy? The Rauschenberg shot looks strikingly sanitized, like an overproduced Hollywood headshot. Where is Rauschenberg drunk and disorderly like we like him? Still and all, Felver has a remarkable gift for the poetry of portrait making. The only solid criticism of this show is that the quality of the prints themselves seems to be somewhat compromised. These are all old-school, made-in-the-darkroom gelatin silver prints, and as such they really ought to be displayed in frames, under glass. I’m not sure if the print quality is not great to begin with or if exposure to light and air has caused them to fade somewhat. Truly white whites and deep, rich blacks are hard to find in this body of work, which despite this one technical concern is quite extraordinary, just like the individuals depicted, all of whom along with Christopher Felver have found and forged incredible human connections.
—Jon Carver
Above: Robert Rauschenberg Left: Louise Nevelson november
2012
THE magazine | 49
jennifer esperanza photography
505 204 5729
new mexico
california
GREEN PLANET
Jim Hightower:
National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go with the Flow.
LO CA L I Z E
Pass your own local and state laws to stop the wholesale corporate purchase of our government. These include outlawing any corporate claim of personhood in your area, providing the alternative of public financing for your local and state elections, and banning campaign donations by corporations that try to get government contracts and subsidies. Remember, the Constitution plainly says “We the People,” not “We the Corporations.”
jimhightower.com PublicCampaign.org ReclaimDemocracy.org
photographed in santa fe, new mexico
by Jennifer
november
2012
Esperanza
THE magazine | 51
With these hands. . . I will build you
picture frames & furniture of uncommon value.
Randolph Laub Studio 2906 San Isidro Ct
505 473-3585
MARK Z. MIGDALSKI, D.D.S. GENERAL AND COSMETIC DENTISTRY “DEDICATED TO PREVENTION, SERVICE & EXCELLENCE”
In our December/January Double issue:
BEST BOOKS 2012 BEST BOOKS 2012 BEST BOOKS 2012 Advertising Reservations: Thursday, November 16 Camera-Ready Art Due: Monday, November 19 All Calendar Listings: Wednesday, November 14
Reserve Your Space Now! Lindy Madley: 505.577.4471 Judy Bell: 505.819.9357 THE magazine: 505.424-7641 themagazineonline.com
A R C H I T E C T U R A L D E TA I L S
On the Wire image by november
2012
Guy Cross THE magazine | 53
WRITINGs
HOW TO APPRECIATE ART by
E rik C ampbell
Firstly, find the most beautiful Person in the room, choose Based on how their face Translates when they see A certain painting. Secondly, follow them From room to room, mindful Of what they pause for, Where they find awe.
Do this enough times That someone can follow you, Until everyone’s a spy With a sublime agenda Roving about the gallery.
Erik Campbell’s poems and essays have appeared in The Iowa Review, Tin House, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and Rattle, among other journals. “How to Appreciate Art” is from Arguments for Stillness (Curbstone Press, $13.95).
54 | THE magazine
november
2012
Santa Fe art auction The Southwest’s Classic Western Art Auction House Since 1994
Live auction | noveMBer 17, 2012 | 1:30pM MSt Santa Fe Convention Center | Previews: November 16th from 5pm - 8pm & November 17th from 9am - 1pm
view HigHLigHtS & regiSter onLine at SantaFeartauction.coM Presented by Gerald Peters Gallery
©
Santa Fe Art Auction | P.O. Box 2437, Santa Fe, NM, 87504-2437 Tel 505 954-5858 | Fax 505 954-5785 | curator@santafeartauction.com PleASe viSiT Santafeartauction.com FOr MOre iNFOrMATiON Clockwise from Top Left: Charles M. Russell (1864-1926) INDIANS ON HORSEBACK, 1894, watercolor, 16 7/8 x 22 5/8 inches G. Harvey (b.1933), WINTER HAZE, 1982, oil on canvas, 24 1/8 x 30 1/8 inches Leon Gaspard, MONGOLIAN GIRL WITH SLED AND WHITE HORSES, 1921, oil on canvas mounted on board,28 7/8 x 31 inches Howard Terpning, ADVANCE OF THE LONG KNIVES, 1980, oil on canvas, 30 x 46 inches © 2012 courtesy, Santa Fe Art Auction
Andre w Beckham “The Lost Christmas Gif t” Images and Artifacts
Andrew Beckham, The Tree, 2012, m/m print, 16 X 19
In conjunction wit h the national release of the acclaimed s torybook creat ed, written and illus tr ated by Andre w Beckham
“The Los t Chris tmas Gif t” published by Prince ton Archit ectur al Press, 2012
Nov ember 23 - December 29, 2012 Opening Recep tion: Saturday, Nov ember 24, 5-7 pm
Jay Tracy, Blast #38, 2012, m/m on panel, 23 x 24
Rebecca Bluestone, Diptych #1, 2010, Silk, 50 x 37
Holiday Group Show
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