{"id":19213,"date":"2013-12-02T22:05:12","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T22:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/blakegopnik-daily-pic-if-you-can-barely-make\/"},"modified":"2018-12-05T20:12:50","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T03:12:50","slug":"blakegopnik-daily-pic-if-you-can-barely-make","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/blakegopnik-daily-pic-if-you-can-barely-make\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-19213 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-if-you-can-barely-make\/attachment\/19214\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" src=\"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-content\/uploads\/tumblr_mx70iyibux1qdr6jto1_1280-100x100.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/blakegopnik.com\/post\/68807869899\">blakegopnik<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>DAILY PIC: <\/strong>If you can barely make out this image, that\u2019s as it should be. It\u2019s one of the black-on-black Black Paintings made by Ad Reinhardt between 1960 and 1966 and now on view in the important <a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidzwirner.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/ARpressFINALOct30.pdf\" title=\"Ad Reinhardt at David Zwirner\">survey of them at David Zwirner<\/a> in New York, where I spent a solid four hours the other day. In honor of Reinhardt\u2019s centennial, I\u2019ll spend all week indulging in the absurd gesture of commenting on one Black Painting daily, even though the differences between them are likely to be invisible.<\/p>\n<p>The absurdity of my gesture is, I think, vital to understanding these pictures. They are usually treated with the utmost sobriety, pondered as great works of formalist \u2013 even spiritual \u2013 exploration. They are read as being about blackness, as both color and mental state, or even as metaphysics. But I think the Black Paintings are also funny, even whacky, or maybe just mean: What\u2019s not to laugh about in a picture that\u2019s so barely there, it can barely be seen? I think that Reinhardt\u2019s Black Paintings are meant, in part, as a poke in the eye of the art world and its pretentious, overprecious art appreciators. The room just before them at Zwirner is full of the zany, often vicious cartoons that Reinhardt published to lampoon that art world, and I think this Mad Magazine spirit needs to cross the threshold into the gallery that holds his abstractions.<\/p>\n<p>In making the Black Paintings, Reinhardt may have been as indebted to Duchamp as to Malevich and Barnett Newman. (Although Malevich was probably more Duchampian than we realize.) What could come closer to the anti-retinal position of Duchamp than paintings so dark they can barely impinge on our retinas? The gesture of putting one black paint on top of another has to be as much about trying out a crazy, impossible artistic idea as it is about seeing what aesthetic dividends that idea pays. At Zwirner, there\u2019s a case full of vintage New Yorker-ish cartoons that poked fun at Reinhardt\u2019s Black Paintings; I can\u2019t imagine that Reinhardt wasn\u2019t expecting, and inviting, that response to his work from his cartoonist colleagues.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I visited the Reinhardts with my friend Arden Reed, who has just written a book about how some art demands the slowest of looking, but even this exemplary contemplator admitted that \u201cReinhardt would have smiled at the rubes who walk right past his pictures, but maybe also at the rubes who stick around\u201d \u2013 including Reed and Gopnik. How can we not be meant to laugh, or at least to exclaim, at the absurdity of the endless labors Reinhardt went through to make pictures that end up looking like nothing? (Our laughter, of course, dates back to William Hazlitt, who described Turner\u2019s most misty pictures as \u201cpictures of nothing, and very like.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cpurest\u201d, most extreme, most thoroughgoing of the Black Paintings are so entirely black-on-black that unless you came to them already knowing Reinhardt\u2019s premise, you\u2019d be almost certain to walk by without sparing a glance. They seem to demand a framing text as much as any work of conceptual art ever could. Paradoxically, and brilliantly, paintings that seem to make the very most extreme perceptual demands turn out to also be works of pure intellect.<\/p>\n<p>As I\u2019ll be insisting later in my Ad-athon week, the sensory particulars of the Black Paintings matter a great deal \u2013 but looking at them with your eyes closed is also an option. <em>(Image \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: If you can barely make out this image, that\u2019s as it should be. It\u2019s one of the black-on-black Black Paintings made by Ad Reinhardt between 1960 and 1966 and now on view in the important survey of them at David Zwirner in New York, where I spent a solid four hours the [&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-19213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-4ZT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19213","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=19213"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19215,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19213\/revisions\/19215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}