Ruth Kligman Dies - from NYTIMES

WOW! the last link to one of the most tragic events in the history of art is dead . . . .

From The New York Times
March 6, 2010
Ruth Kligman, Muse and Artist, Dies at 80
By RANDY KENNEDY

Ruth Kligman, an abstract painter who for decades seemed to know everyone and be everywhere in the art world and who was the lone survivor of the 1956 car crash that killed Jackson Pollock, her lover at the time, died Monday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. She was 80 and lived in Manhattan.

Her death was announced by the artist Jonathan Cramer, a friend.

Ms. Kligman was riding in the front seat of the Oldsmobile 88 convertible the August night near the Springs, N.Y., when Pollock, after a day of drinking, ran the car off the road and flipped it, killing Edith Metzger, a young friend of Ms. Kligman’s, and himself. Ms. Kligman was thrown clear of the car and seriously injured.

“Edith started screaming, ‘Stop the car, let me out!’ ” Ms. Kligman wrote about that night in “Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock,” her 1974 book about their tumultuous relationship, which had started only a few months earlier when she met Pollock at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. “He put his foot all the way to the floor,” she wrote of the crash. “He was speeding wildly.”

Though it was to be the event that wrote Ms. Kligman irrevocably into the history of postwar art, she turned up frequently in its pages for many years afterward, less for her own work than for her role as a muse, lover, friend and subject of an impressive number of American artists.

Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethorpe made portraits of her; Willem de Kooning, with whom she was romantically involved, titled a 1957 painting “Ruth’s Zowie,” supposedly after she made that exclamation upon seeing it; Andy Warhol mentions her in his diaries several times, and she wrote that they “had a terrific crush on each other” for many years; she was friendly with Jasper Johns, to whom she once proposed, and with Franz Kline, whose former studio on 14th Street became her home and the studio where she continued to paint almost to the end of her life.

Born in Newark on Jan. 25, 1930, Ms. Kligman said she had wanted to live the artist’s life since reading a biography of Beethoven at 7. She moved to New York when she was young and began to paint seriously in 1958, studying at the Art Students League, the New School for Social Research and New York University.

She was 26 and working as an assistant at a small gallery when she met Pollock, who was 44, estranged from his wife, Lee Krasner, and losing his battle with alcoholism. Ms. Kligman wrote that he looked “tired out, sad,” and that “his body seemed as though it couldn’t stand up on its own.”

Ms. Kligman, by contrast, as described by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan in “de Kooning: An American Master,” their 2004 biography, “had about her the air of the earthy, voluptuous movie stars of the era, such as Elizabeth Taylor or Sophia Loren.” (She was portrayed by Jennifer Connelly in “Pollock,” the 2000 movie about his life; Ms. Kligman filed suit against the film’s makers, contending that they had violated her copyright in using parts of her memoir.)

After Pollock’s death, she began a relationship with de Kooning that lasted several years. She traveled with him to Cuba, Italy and France, fending off art-world accusations that de Kooning had taken up with her, as Mr. Stevens and Ms. Swan recounted, in part because he was “still competing with Pollock, even now, after Jackson’s death.”

Ms. Kligman said that de Kooning had called her “his sponge” because she asked him so many questions and soaked up so much about the New York School of painting, though her own work, which she exhibited throughout her life, drew from her Abstract Expressionist mentors only in the beginning.

She was married for seven years to a Spanish painter, Carlos Sansegundo, and lived briefly in Ibiza and later, off and on, in Santa Fe, N.M., though her life remained centered on the New York art world. She had no children: information about immediate survivors was not available.

“ ‘Art is my life,’ is my motto, ” Ms. Kligman wrote, and in an interview she once said that she knew better than many how hard such a life was. She recalled running into Kline at the Cedar bar and telling him that she had just finished what she thought was her best painting. He bought her a drink and told her, of the world: “They think it’s easy. They don’t know it’s like jumping off a 12-story building every day.”

What’s Left: Art Made by a Public at Alexander Gray Associates

Alexander Gray Associates inaugurated their new gallery space with an ambitious exhibition examining the art of public participation. What’s Left: Art Made by a Public is a cross section of art since the advent of conceptualism, showcasing performance art projects that are activated only through viewer engagement. Affected by the political and cultural turmoil since the 1960s, Allison Knowles, Karen Finley, Lorraine O’Grady and Paul Ramírez Jonas conceived spaces where public intervention simultaneously critiques the social order and contends with the traditions of the art institution. More perplexing is the exhibition’s investigation of how such performances can exist as both documentation and an archive, and by extension the possibility of these events to exist as objects in a gallery. What story will these objects tell of the performer and of the audience who participated?

The exhibition’s opening reception featured a reperformance by Alison Knowles of #2 Proposition (Make a Salad) from 1962. This iconic Fluxus performance elevates the banal activity of making and serving a salad to high art form. It has been reperformed continuously for nearly four decades with recent incarnations at the Tate Modern and the Wexner Center for Contemporary Art. The performance began – as it always has - with a Mozart duo for violin and cello immediately followed by Knowles and three assistants chopping away at lettuce, tomatoes, and carrots, amongst other items. According to the artist, the Mozart remains the same but the salad ingredients are different in each reperformance. At first the audience seemed unaware of the connection between the finely attired musicians and the aged Knowles who was adorned with an old cooking apron. Little to no attention was given to the salad preparation until the gallery was filled with the scent of fresh cut onions and peppers. The ingredients were combined in two large plastic vats, seasoned and distributed. As the audience furiously ate away at their salads (possibly the only thing that most of them have ate all day . . . some of them were so skinny . . . it is a sin) individuals became a collective we. We were there to watch Knowles, we were there to eat the salad she prepared, we were there to participate as have others in a performance whose potential for reincarnation are limitless. The strangeness of making a salad being viewed as art quickly gave way to a sense of tradition and continuity perpetuated by the reperformance.

The three other performances in the exhibition were not represented by their original incarnations as performances rather by documentation and artifacts. Despite the limiting qualities of these materials, they testify to the potential that participatory performances have in stimulating audiences from passive to active. Lorraine O’Grady is represented by Art Is . . ., which answered the challenge from an acquaintance that “avant-garde art doesn't have anything to do with black people." So in September of 1983 during Harlem's African-American Day Parade the artist took avant-garde performance directly to a largest congregation of blacks in New York City. The bohemian artist was not so such much invading the party then she was a wedding crasher swept up in the merriment of celebration. O’Grady, and a group of 15 women artists dressed in white, hopped on and off a slow moving float and framing people in the crowd with a 9 x 15 ft. antique-styled gold frame. Anyone “framed” by the frame was declared a work of art. The photo documentation of the performance shows the playfulness of both performer and audience as they smile and laugh at the prospect of being considered a work of art. Much akin to Duchamp's readymades, the artist is not only a creator of art but a creator of taste, dictating what constitutes art. The field of art is opened beyond the confines of the institution, and is especially poignant as it is a black female artist who dictates the framing. The performance was not advertised to the art community at large, despite having received a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts. Thus, O’Grady was able to create a performance outside the boundaries of the art establishment that was not critical of a community, rather acted to celebrate and engage a community that has long been alienated by the avant-garde. This engagement is done by populist means, not through the jargon of post-modernist practices.

Karen Finely’s work takes a darker turn in her 1991 project Momento Mori. Originally presented at the Kitchen and LA MoCA, the public was invited to tie multi-colored ribbons to an aged wrought-iron gate in memory of someone who had died of AIDS. Finley’s work has noticeable aged as the thousands of ribbons that cover the gate have faded. As well, the names and prayers written on the ribbons are barely visible. These traces are stark reminders of those who were impacted by the AIDS crisis. The work is an emotional footprint even in its dilapidated state, acting in one regard as a memorial to the dead while also serving as an archive of individuals who became communities bonded together by a deadly disease.

Paul Ramírez Jonas' Talisman I (2008–2009) is the most recent project in the exhibition. The original performance is represented by a triptych containing the objects from his public art work in the 28th São Paulo Biennale. Deriving his performance from the Biennale’s theme of “in living contact,” Jonas had hundreds of Sao Paulo residents exchange their house keys for those of the Biennale’s main building. He required each participant to sign a contract that detailed in several different language the rules and regulations of access to the exhibition space. The keys are symbolic of the bonds that can open and close out a society to the artistic process much like O’Grady’s golden frame. The contract, which each participant was free to enter into, is premised on the artist’s longstanding interest in exploring the interactive bonds between art work and the public, where one must give in order to receive. This is the moral which unites all the works represented in this small, yet powerful exhibition: for giving their time, their interest, their participation, in turn audiences were given the opportunity to be part of a community of participants whose gestures are part of a fleeting moment. While documentation and subsequent reperformances attempt to capture the atmosphere of what originally took place, the experiences are unique to those who made them possible.

Ida Appelbroog at Hauser and Wirth

Hauser and Wirth’s press statement for the new Ida Appelbroog exhibition, Monalisa, draws parallels between the artist and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). Unfortunately, Woolf’s room for seclusion and creativity was only possible for those who could afford it. For everyone else the only place to find solitude is the bathroom. And that is where this exhibition begins in 1969, in a bathroom.

Creating a mythic vision of her creative impulse, Appelbroog sets the scene of living in southern California with her husband and four children and not having a space to call her own. So she retreats to the bathroom as a “little sanctuary” where for two to three hours each evening she could go about sketching her crotch from reflections in a mirror. She produced some 160 drawings in a ritualistic act akin to Tee Corinne’s “Cunt Coloring Book.” Corinne asked women to not only be comfortable looking at vaginas, but also to take a good long look at their own and even draw and color them. This exercise would allow women to understand themselves and their bodies. Appelbroog’s exhibition reinvigorates the feminist gusto for the taboo.

The exhibition presents a certain bravado that has only just recently been resurrected in the history of feminist art. Art institutions are beginning to recognize these pioneering works from the 1960s and 1970s that challenged the social order. As such Lynda Benglais, Ana Mendiata and Hannah Wilke have enjoyed a renaissance of interest and scholarship. Like them, Appelbroog’s images are a reversal of traditional representations of womanhood. They are Courbet’s Origin of the World turned in on itself. No longer do we gaze at the vagina, but now the vagina gazes at us. Some of Appelbroog’s images are highly detailed with pubic hair accurately rendered, while others are much more abstract with elegantly curved lines sweeping across the paper.

The centerpiece of this exhibition is a room-sized wooden structure covered with more than one-hundred facsimiles of the vagina images. Applebroog scanned, enlarged and digitally manipulated the drawings on vellum and soaked them in translucent coats of blues, yellows and reds. The bathroom sanctuary gives way to an impenetrable fortress with the haunting gaze of vaginas watching as visitors peer into a space they can never enter. There is no door but only gaps between the paper and bare wooden structure of the room. These slits offer a view of a large painting, Monalisa, which hangs on an interior wall. The painting made in deep red is of a slouched over figure, looking like a rag doll, with its legs spread open. Like the wallpapered vulva images, the doll gazes uncomfortably at the viewer as if disturbed by their presence. This guarded room has parallels to Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnés, which was made public for the first time in 1969 the same year these drawings were begun. However, again, like Courbet’s famous canvas, the gaze has been reversed. Duchamp’s lifeless figure spreads her legs but we cannot see her face, masking if she is uncomfortable or complacent in the peep show. Appelbroog’s figure, on the other hand, challenges us to keep looking and follows us as we exam the room that we are not permitted to access. The artist brilliantly weaves together her past and present. By including digitally made drawings, she demonstrates that artists even in their late years can produce new and surprisingly engaging work. Monalisa is not a variation on a theme but Appelbroog’s own renaissance in the art world.