{"id":19166,"date":"2013-12-06T17:30:06","date_gmt":"2013-12-06T17:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/blakegopnik-daily-pic-yet-another-picture-from\/"},"modified":"2018-12-05T20:12:33","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T03:12:33","slug":"blakegopnik-daily-pic-yet-another-picture-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/blakegopnik-daily-pic-yet-another-picture-from\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-19166 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/blakegopnik-daily-pic-yet-another-picture-from\/attachment\/19167\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" src=\"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-content\/uploads\/tumblr_mxamwvi9LO1qdr6jto1_1280-100x100.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blakegopnik.com\/post\/69100906476\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">blakegopnik<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>DAILY PIC: <\/strong>Yet another picture from my week-long study of the Black Paintings of Ad Reinhardt, now being <a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidzwirner.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/ARpressFINALOct30.pdf\" title=\"Ad Reinhardt at David Zwirner\">celebrated at David Zwirner<\/a> in New York. This canvas was painted in 1960.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So far this week, I\u2019ve been stressing the conceptual, even anti-retinal side of Reinhardt\u2019s project, but it would be crazy to go too far in that direction. The extreme subtleties in his paintings do demand the closest of looking, to be made out at all: The less there is to see, the more work we must do to see it. But as I sat there staring and staring and staring at Reinhardt\u2019s modulated blacknesses, something strange started to happen: I couldn\u2019t see them, or much of anything, anymore. The strain such looking put on my entire perceptual system, from eyeball to retina to cortex to mind, brought it close to a point of collapse. Staring at an almost-black square, brightly lit on a white wall, has some of the same blinding effect as staring too long at a black dot on a sheet of white paper: Generalized dazzle replaces the details of vision, to the point where you can\u2019t tell what\u2019s an illusory spot thrown up by your exhausted eyes and what\u2019s a real feature of Reinhardt\u2019s painting. This means that a painting that, more than most, invites close contemplation also sets out to foil it \u2013 which of course is as much a conceptual gambit as a sensory one.<\/p>\n<p>Reinhardt\u2019s game of sensory exhaustion reveals something else: Paintings that seem to be all, and only, about the details of their surfaces \u2013 paintings that seem entirely self-contained, within the limits of their frames \u2013 are actually hugely interactive with their environments and their viewers. (To use Michael Fried\u2019s famous language, they seem \u201cabsorptive\u201d, like a Frank Stella, but turn out to be \u201ctheatrical\u201d, like a Donald Judd.) The Black Paintings change radically as the lighting on them changes; they change as we move side to side in front of them, and as we move close and then retreat, and as we grow tired then refresh ourselves. And they seem to demand such changes and displacements, across both space and time, to fully reveal themselves.<\/p>\n<p>Even as they offer such visual self-revelation, however, Reinhardt\u2019s paintings don\u2019t provide the kind of stable stimuli that we associate with perceptual art, but provide instead the extreme, disabling flux of the most radical conceptualism. Yet where many conceptual works can boil down to a single conceit or joke or gesture, the perceptual richness of the Black Paintings \u2013 even their disabling dazzle \u2013 keeps us looking for more. Maybe they enable thinking by letting us watch as our looking gets disabled.<em> (Princeton University Art Museum Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921 Fund,\u00a0 \u00a92013 Estate of Ad Reinhardt\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy David Zwirner, New York\/London)<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>For a full visual survey of past Daily Pics visit <a href=\"http:\/\/blakegopnik.com\/archive\">blakegopnik.com\/archive<\/a>. The Daily Pic can also be found at the bottom of the home page of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/newsmaker\/art-and-photography\" title=\"Art Beast\">thedailybeast.com<\/a> and on that site\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/art.html\" title=\"Art Beast at The Daily Beast\">Art Beast<\/a> page.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>blakegopnik: DAILY PIC: Yet another picture from my week-long study of the Black Paintings of Ad Reinhardt, now being celebrated at David Zwirner in New York. This canvas was painted in 1960.\u00a0 So far this week, I\u2019ve been stressing the conceptual, even anti-retinal side of Reinhardt\u2019s project, but it would be crazy to go too [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-4Z8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19166"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19168,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19166\/revisions\/19168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}