Maggie Michael's Conflict Theory of Painting

Maggie Michael, To Make a Long Story Short, 2005–2008

My feature review of Maggie Michael's solo show from a while back appears in the issue of Art Papers that's currently on newsstands (I think). Finding a permalink to the review online was tricky, so you'll have to click here for the Google cached version. There's a lot of discussion of text and "text" as those things work in painting today. Here's a snippet:

In the end, Michael's recent work references uprisings: found objects, text-as-markmaking, proto-Pop strategies, and New Wave cinema. The works cite pivotal discoveries in abstraction, the uprisings that ushered the transition from the modern to the contemporary period. Michael has redirected these upheavals toward her own formal concerns: symmetry and coherence. It's a conflict theory of contemporary painting, with one formalist urge supplanting another, which makes for a sort of progress with an uncertain exit strategy. A Farewell to Arms, 2008, provides a bare-boned, bleak assessment of the state of abstraction. Like To Make a Long Story Short, it features text as a transparent window through which we see a veiled composition, whose features barely register through the narrow pane of the letters. The outer abstraction is textured but featureless, rendered in foggy gray.

And you'll have to read on for more.

So anyway. When I was writing this story, I had an interesting conversation. I'd mentioned to someone who'd asked me what I was up to that I was working on this feature. He replied (and I paraphrase) that of course Maggie Michael would warrant this kind of larger review spot in a magazine—the sort of slot that not many D.C. gallery shows receive. I don't remember what I said at the time, but thinking on it now, I think yes—that's right.

I don't hold to a hierarchy of media and have done stuff (and hope to continue to do stuff) for magazines, newspapers, Web enterprises, this blog, whatever. But I wouldn't think about doing the same things for all those places. Let me refer you to Jeffry Cudlin, praising this think piece by Blake Gopnik:

Blake did something really fabulous in this piece that made me want to jump out of my chair and applaud him. Did you notice? In laying out these practices, Blake examined international/Biennale artists, and offered them as a context for both what's happening in D.C. museums right now—including what Vesela Sretenovic's doing at the Phillips with this is not that Café, a project I am terribly remiss for not discussing here—and what's going on in local galleries, with a mention of Chan Chao's recent show at G Fine Art.

That strikes me as the right approach and really praiseworthy. I think newspaper reviews are at their best when critics draw from the broader universe in order to illuminate the local, unknown artist or artwork. Magazines, on the other hand, are better for figuring out how the star fits into the constellation.

Posted by Kriston at June 11, 2009 12:44 PM