Friday, February 26, 2016

Judith Bernstein at Mary Boone

Judith Bernstein at Mary Boone
(link)

Always interesting the late career rise, speculating the difference then that occluded the work and now what allows its flourish. Judd's three separate 1960 repetitive comments on Anne Truitt reveal mostly what he himself couldn't handle and kept incanting against her, unsystematic color. Judd getting it wrong reveals way more about the culture than it does about Truitt. And for Bernstein painting what had always been repressed as explicit - the large male "personality" embedded in art's very culture - of course couldn't be acceptable, art despises the frank open, it must be embedded; the great irony that Boone is showing these now: think of a giant crusty cock painting hanging in the same room as Schnabel, asserting maybe just where all that great thick paint on large canvases was coming from, the Yale professors of course uncomfortable by this exposing, like totally classic Freud. And so now 2016 this is for many reasons acceptable and but we should be nervous again about now what isn't.