Singing in Unison
Part X

In the raucous painting What Manhattan Makes Brooklyn Takes (2004-2006), myriad names in colorful bubbles swarm at the center of the canvas in a way that seem to vibrate and expand, drifting over the map which vainly attempts to site  those names in space.  It’s a map of downtown Manhattan and greater Brooklyn which displays the studio locations of well and lesser known artists: it disappears under this cloud of individuals, and creative generations begin to mix and meld: Francisco Clemente with James Brooks. Words, colors, places all become paint.  Don’t be fooled: these are paintings, not maps or charts of data.  In business and industry, analysts are often commanded to present their data in interesting ways that engage the viewer, so that information can be transmitted more easily:  the opposite is happening here.  Painting is masquerading as information.  The data is the jumping off point, as much as romantic partners or the human figure were for Krasner or De Kooning.   Loren Munk generates the paintings, and his alter ego, James Kalm, of the beloved and popular Youtube series  Rough Cuts, provides an ongoing narrative of the New York art scene.  In the same way that the names, dates, and details don’t actually elucidate the colors, lines, and patterns in the paintings, Rough Cuts provides a wandering invisible eyeball style view of the contemporary arts, but is not correlated 1:1 with the information on the paintings either.

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Drawing from Larry Poons early paintings, lozenges are everything for Loren Munk. These ovals and rounded forms are the indivisible unit, conceptually and psychologically the artist and their studio.  The lozenges are intersected by lines tethering them to a geometric pattern substrate, and then there is a title emblazoned on the form. These patterns aren’t maps really, they posit an orthographic/geometric grid system to the lozenges—a loose rigor opposed to the floating life of the artist (and to a lesser extent the gallerist). These paintings are a precise formal typology of painting, descended from AbEx; Gottlieb and Rothko. The words make you look longer, and make the painter paint more, and gives him a reason for laying down specific shapes and colors. 

 

On the right hand wall by the desk and on the back wall, we have banks of video screens. They replay the artist's perambulation around the New York art world; immortalized in his well-viewed YouTube show. They're part research but more motivation.  James Kalm and his crispy voice wobble along looking at a disorienting variety of shows, endless walking and biking, mimicked in the lines that snake across his canvases, the stuttering motion of art history.  Curators Phong Bui and Cal McKeever position the screens as oases from the word salad:  the videos purport to be documentation of some kind—they have earphone and everything, but they’re in on the joke too:  the videos are performance art, they’re more about the fluctuations of light between street and gallery, the act of looking, ephemeral glimpses of grainy canvases and sculptures, trying to recognize bystanders. It’s art soup.

 

Munk sets about in his paintings to develop  a pattern, at the base is  the map, a literal image, resting on top is an abstraction based on human movements. The forms are thick impastoed paint which gives them a volume, their edges cross each other—we see streets submerge under words, connecting lines slither over each other, brushstroke against carefully taped straight clean lines, the closer you get the more sculptural the surface becomes.

 

Soho: Hell's Hundred Acres (2014-2018) is a perfect example—a data cloud—in this case the elliptical artists name bubbles, are in a heated battle with the information rectangles and gallery bubbles. A tangled knot of bright colorful connector lines is played against a deformed downtown grid of black and white. Ascension (New York Becomes the Center of the Art World) (2005-2008) is the same—the background grid is the map of the five boroughs, and as the scale has increased the polychrome lines have become more orthogonal, not as squiggly as the lines creeping across Soho; they’re vying for a much smaller patch of real estate.  In The Dualistic Nature of Aesthetics (2007-2008) the lozenge art is named “Barnett Newman 343 East 19th st.” “Eva Hesse 134 Bowery” “Arthur Dove Helen Torr...” and dozens of others, now descend on Manhattan, like paramecium feeding on floating detritus in a pond. 

 

18 Situations over 6 Decades (2016) plays with squares against  squares. As always, there is a central map, almost-square, and it is circled by a sneaking snake of info-bits about the literal New York scene, starting with Hans Hoffman and culminating in Larry Gagosian. Chronology provides the momentum as each rectangular box is penetrated and penetrates with its own arrows, pushing the frame in a serpentine motion around a stable center.  One could draw some historical conclusions from these swirling encompassing paintings, but the whole point is that you don’t have to, and like history itself, there really isn’t any lesson.