New review on Artforum Online

Dallas

Otis Jones and Bret Slater

HOLLY JOHNSON GALLERY
1411 Dragon Street
May 17–July 26

View of “Otis Jones and Bret Slater,” 2014.

Otis Jones and Bret Slater each make spare, nearly monochromatic paintings that are injected with basic shapes of opposing colors. Both artists toy with oddly shaped canvases and an elementary language of marks and forms. Nominally, their work seems primed to elicit a correspondence, which is the occasion for their latest exhibition together, but upon closer inspection Jones and Slater are making very different paintings.

Slater’s art tends toward the miniature and the raucous. He frequently slathers garish paint on tiny canvases with a comically crude irreverence, which sometimes succeeds with boldness but can also occasionally falter with a lack of nuance. Humboldt, 2013, is Slater’s most deftly crafted painting in this exhibition; its poured, creamy surface holds two irregular craters of milky-white circles that glow with a muffled seductive haze. This standout painting is buttressed by a restrained color choice, which serves to highlight the delicate patina of the painterly surface.

Jones, in turn, confidently and consistently embeds intricacies within his formal vocabulary. In all of his works, including Pink with 3 Circles, 2014, Jones creates constructed objects as much as painted flat surfaces. Each painting has rounded corners and includes stacked glued layers of plywood anchored behind the canvas. The artist casually and excessively staples the canvas to the wood frame, making each seemingly slapdash construction decision one of aesthetic import. The dots and lines in the elegantly spare Two Lines One Moved, 2014, resemble the iconic symbols of Tantric painting or the 1980s Atari video game Breakout. These references enliven Jones’s art and tether an associative richness to an already distinctive physical presence.

— Matthew Bourbon

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Artforum Robert Smithson Review

Here is the latest Artforum review.  Find more reviews of other artists at Artforum.com.

Robert Smithson

DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART
1717 North Harwood
November 24–April 24

Robert Smithson, Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport Layout Plan: Wandering Earth Mounds and Gravel Paths, 1966, pencil, crayon, paper, 11 x 14”.

Few artists are as universally known for a single work of art as Robert Smithson is for Spiral Jetty, 1970. Yet this art-historical hallmark wouldn’t have existed had Smithson not been commissioned to create a site-specific installation for the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport in 1966. With this project at hand, Smithson was inspired to imagine flying in airplanes as the primary vantage to see his proposed sculptural experiments, proving a key turning point in the artist’s conception of monumental works executed with and in the landscape. Except for the posthumously constructedAmarillo Ramp, 1973, this small exhibition pays homage to five of the artist’s unrealized artworks in various locales around Texas.

Earth Window, 1966, which was designed as several horizontal square holes excavated and filled with baseball-stadium lights, then covered with crushed glass, would have glittered like a disco ball radiating from the earth. Dallas‐Fort Worth Regional Airport Layout Plan: Wandering Earth Mounds and Gravel Paths, 1966, which as the title suggests is carefully arranged dirt mounds and rock trails, appears as meandering burial mounds. With Island of Sulfur (Dollar Bay), 1970, Smithson envisioned a dramatic film project documenting numerous dump trucks moving boulders of sulfur from a quarry to a barge, finally to deposit their neon yellow loads, overwhelming the small Dollar Bay Island.

In its totality, Smithson’s work embodies a kind of hubris, not unlike the ancient desire to be monumentalized via ostentatious architectural edifices. The difference between the Egyptian pyramids, for instance, and Smithson’s proposals is the intended audience. Smithson understood art as an active force in the world that can alter the substance and comprehension of human situations, place, and possibilities. Not surprisingly, the mood of this exhibition is reverently melancholy; one can’t help but feel the divide between the hastily drawn plans on various sheets of paper and the heroic vision they were ultimately meant to become.

— Matthew Bourbon

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