More than 50 artworks were donated for the 19th edition of the event by contemporary artists including Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Allison Katz, Emma McIntyre, Shota Nakamura, and Marina Perez Simao. The ArtCrush Gala, slated for August 2nd, is the museum’s largest annual fundraiser, generating support for the museum’s exhibitions and educational programs. In celebration of the Aspen Art Museum 45th anniversary, the artists for the first time have been invited to retain up to 30% of the proceeds from their works sold during the auction. 

“As an artist-founded institution, artists are centered within all we do, and the fulfilment of our mission depends on their trust,” Nicola Lees, the museum’s director, said in a statement shared with ARTnews. “This year’s outstanding ArtCrush auction is a testament to the remarkable artists and supporters within our community…and we invite artists to retain a portion of the proceeds of their donated works, thereby promoting continuity, equitability, and sustainability. It is a policy we will be proud to implement long into the future.”

In the lead-up to the gala, the ArtCrush 2024 Auction Exhibition will be on display at the museum starting July 17. For the first time, the museum is partnering with Design Miami to include an array of design works in the auction, broadening the scope of the event. 

Christie’s, the museum’s auction partner, will conduct two auctions for the event. The first will be a live auction during the gala, led by Adrien Meyer, Christie’s global head of private sales and co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art. The second auction will take place virtually, with online bidding opening on Christie’s website on July 25. 

Katz is certainly a “connectionist.” Contemporary art luminaries (Kerstin Brätsch, Ei Arakawa) pop up in the video, sometimes performing with her, invoking an international context for her art. That Katz is primarily a painter—and painting is the least “connectionist” pictorial medium, the most inclined to abstraction—seems perverse, but her use of the medium challenges the diversity of her imagery, grounding an eclectic range of references in the here-and-nowness of a brushstroke’s trace, and the site-specificity of paintings designed to occupy a particular space.

The particular is here synonymous with the subjective. Like Seidel, Katz both is and isn’t in her art. The title of the exhibition, “All Is On,” puns her first name with a phrase suggesting cultural relativism. The ranging of Katz’s video over cultures and continents—from a trailer for a 1974 film following David Hockney in London, New York and Los Angeles to part of a 1977 interview with the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector in the last year of her life—is as varied as her painting’s juggling of idioms, from geometric abstraction to magic realism to a sinuous figuration. 

This installation, comprising 10 paintings in addition to the video, was notable for the absence of the decor elements—such as printed screens and floor-based, decorative sand compositions—with which Katz has previously tended to complement her paintings. Site-specificity defaulted to the paintings themselves, their flighty virtuosity called back at the last minute, made to connect to the exhibition space and the other paintings sharing it. Although it is based on an Indonesian fabric, an untitled work from 2015, which checkers dark grays and blacks around two upright white rectangles, fortuitously echoed the columns dividing entrance from gallery. Marienbad Fountain On (2015) reproduces, with trompe l’oeil verisimilitude, the red ceramic tiles and grotesque mask of a fountain in a neighboring theater. 

And yet, in Katz’s hands, this give-and-take between picture and model ultimately serves to highlight their dissimilitude. The consummate seductiveness of her painterly illusionism is made self-reflexive. The gamut of the forms her motifs adopt with shape-shifting fluidity suggests a critical metaphor for digital culture’s dematerializing of images by infinitely morphing them. I (2015), depicting an egg, as though for a exercise in academic painterly modeling, reflects the fantastic, hovering planet in Belo Horizonte (2013-15), the fish-eyed kaleidoscope of Half and Half (2012) and the “O” forming the mouth of a sphinx in All Is On (2015), its features composed out of the three titular parts of the artist’s name. These various “O”s are reconciled as the I of the artist. Katz sets chains of diverse imagery into far-flung motion, then brings them into congruence by assimilating them to a space of her own that is both the artistic world her painting makes of them and the ground beneath the viewer’s feet.

Weirdly, when I first saw this painting I felt the desire to sketch it. It was one of those literary/kitsch impulses that make you feel like a young artist traveling through Italy in a BBC adaptation of a Victorian novel. My actual surroundings were a concrete storage facility in Newark, N.J., so instead of drawing I took out my phone and tapped photos until the feelings subsided. But again they burbled up, these atavistic hiccups, and I made some notes in an attempt to circumscribe them. However, this linguistic tourniquet also proved insufficient—I never got deeper than writing “Turquoise” and “Circle” and one phrase that I don’t really understand now, which says “food’s insane.” Ultimately I succumbed and began to sketch a few light marks, eyelashes really, before I stopped, mildly embarrassed. Like the best art, this painting caused a cramp in my mimetic faculty which compelled me to ask that most basic question: how should one relate to objects?

Let me double way back. One of the favorite narratives of modernity—a movement whose propensity to self-narrativize is matched only by its proclivity to categorize—is the story of the creation of its categories. In this tale, fields of knowledge and production are verbally differentiated from one another. Fences are erected between science, philosophy, art, religion, and then the layer of shale beneath the newly autonomous fields is hydrofracked into still more distinct sections. Each segment, qua segment, is then used to expound the atomized cosmology which made it possible.

In the crooked little fragment called painting, this tale runs the gamut from quixotic to neurotic. So as I looked at this particular painting, I came to admire it because it looked so damned irresponsible. I was impressed by how thoroughly detached it seemed from the aforementioned narrative, from what Althusser called, in reference to ideological conditioning, “the inexorable circle which dominates the connexions between men, the connexions between objects and their men,” and how it achieved this distance not through some dour form of negation but through a kind of joie de vivre. It seemed to portray “the circle of ideological existence” ¹ as a decorative china plate, something to be privately smiled at in a hallway on one’s way to the bathroom.

But then, of course, this plate is more than decor or artifice. It contains a meal of sorts: one giant cock (I’ll leave the symbolic algebra to the viewer) and a healthy side of arborio rice which overflows its ideological limit, i.e., the plate, and covers the entire canvas. It was this rice which I think unnerved me most and which, when the owner of the painting politely vacated the room so I could think, I promptly touched. Now we’re talking, said my hands.

Adorno—to stay with the As—said, “Artworks are alive in that they speak in a fashion that is denied to natural objects and the subjects who make them,” ² and I feel this to be somewhat true as I write, touch, talk and look my way toward what is still ultimately only a partial understanding of this painting. And I think it is this artwork’s strange language which, though it describes a cock, keeps making me think of my neighbors, the Monk Parakeets of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Apparently they escaped from a cage at JFK years ago and colonized the highest spire of the gatehouse near the graveyard entrance. From nature to culture and back, these feathered interstices are classified as released exotics, and they speak in a beautiful hybrid cadence, exhibiting an instructive indifference to the funeral processions that daily pass them by. Though obviously you cannot exactly speak to them, you can look at them, and sometimes simply looking is enough.

SEBASTIAN BLACK is an artist living in Brooklyn.

Endnotes

1. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp. 235-36.

2. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 5.