Art and Architecture: The Art of Reading: Peter Nagy and the Xerox | Peter Nagy, Richard Milazzo, Ross Bleckner, Philip Taaffe | Art and Literature Series Event

FREE - Auditorium doors open at 5:30 p.m.

Peter Nagy’s Xeroxes, the earliest body of work he produced from 1982 to 1985, when he was artist-gallerist of Gallery Nature Morte in the East Village, New York, in the ’80s, is the subject of a panel discussion, The Art of Reading:  Peter Nagy and the Xerox.  Nagy is joined by the critic, curator, publisher and independent scholar, Richard Milazzo, author of Peter Nagy:  Entertainment Erases History – Works 1982 to 2004 to the Present , and the artists Ross Bleckner and Philip Taaffe.  

This event is augmented by a one-night only exhibition of the Xerox works by Peter Nagy in the anteroom of Celeste Auditorium.  

Reopening Gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi, India, in 1997, Peter Nagy runs what is considered by many to be the most important gallery of contemporary art in India today.  In his book, Richard Milazzo writes “the timelines and floor plans, and even the ‘ads’, that comprise Nagy’s 11 x 8 ½ in. Xeroxes, with their diverse art and architectural references, utilizing the processes of collage, montage, and miniaturization, some of which became iconic in the 1980s - such as Passéisme and The 8-Hour Day - help to prepare the way for what has become today a wider global ethos in art.”  These collages, the so-called ‘originals’ or source-materials (which were never seen by the public), generated the copies, the Xeroxes, that became the works of art. 

Ross Bleckner’s subversive utilization of the perceptual modalities of the 1960s movement of Op Art to forge his infamous Stripe Paintings of 1981 and 1982 led some critics to contend that he was “painting at the end of history,” and later, that his use of birds, flowers and the biology of cells as placeholders for mortality extended the Postmodern discourse revolving around the exhaustion and hypothetical disavowal of painting.  Others believed that his tender deformations spoke to a psychologically deeper, more subliminal practice, but which tropes still could not be discounted as the ironic playthings of an apocalyptic humanism.

Philip Taaffe’s controversial appropriations of Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings, during this same period in the ’80s, asserted that a so-called ‘original’ work of art was actually no longer possible, not, at least, without acknowledging the underlying transformative reality of the copy as an endlessly generative process – so much so that he considered his ‘copies’ as Postmodern homages to Newman and Kelly.

The Art of Reading:  Peter Nagy and the Xerox panel asks such questions as how does the copy or what is appropriated come to function as a work art and what is its relation to originality; how does ‘reading the caption’ to understand a work of art, how does ‘reading’ itself (which pretty much describes the complaint against so-called ‘caption art’) become an integral part of the work of art; does the context of a work of art define that work in some vital way; are there languages embedded in this “reading” process, in the culture, and does it behoove us to try to decode them?  Frank Stella once famously said:  “what you see is what you see.”  Even dislodged from its original intent, can this assertion be maintained meaningfully today about any work of art?

Copies of Peter Nagy (New York: EISBox Projects, 2014) are made available for purchase and signing by Ursus Books at the end of the event.

Peter Nagy studied Communication Design, Art History and Theory at Parsons School of Design, N.Y., from 1977 to 1981. His works were included in such museums as Centre Georges Pompidou; Museum of Contemporary Art, L.A.; and The Whitney Museum of American Art.  He also participated in Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany and the Whitney Biennale in New York.  Public collections include The Menil Collection, Houston; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; La Caixa Pensiones, Barcelona; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Recently Nagy’s works from the ’80s were included in the shows at the Tate Modern, Magasin / Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.  Nagy has received awards from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Jean Stein Foundation, as well as an award for Curatorial Excellence from the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi.  

Richard Milazzo was the editor and co-founder of Out of London Press in the 1970s.  His exhibitions and critical writings in the 1980s with Collins & Milazzo brought to prominence a whole new generation of artists, fashioning the theoretical context for a new kind of Conceptual Art, one that argued simultaneously against Neo-Expressionism and Picture Theory Art.  Hyperframes:  A Post-Appropriation Discourse in Art transcribes the lectures he co-delivered when he was a Senior Critic at Yale in 1988-89.  In the 1990s he founded the exhibition space, 11 rue Larrey at Sidney Janis Gallery, and co-founded and edits Edgewise Press.  He has since curated shows and written monographs on Malcolm Morley, Ross Bleckner, Saint Clair Cemin, Robert Longo, Alex Katz, David Salle, Mark Innerst, and William Anastasi.  His latest book is Sandro Chia:  Paintings, Sculptures, Drawings, Mosaics.

Ross Bleckner was born in New York in 1949.  He received his B.A. from New York University in 1971, and his M.F.A. from Cal Arts in 1973.  He has had one-person exhibitions in many of the major museums and galleries in the world, including a retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York in 1995.  He has worked tirelessly on behalf of the AIDS organization ACRIA for many years.  Two major monographs on his work, The Paintings of Ross Bleckner (Editions Alain Noirhomme, Brussels) and The Flower Paintings by Ross Bleckner, by Richard Milazzo, were published in 2007 and 2011, respectively. Edgewise Press has published three books by Ross Bleckner:  Examined Life:  Writings 1972-2007 (2009); My Life in The New York Times (2011); A3:  Our Lives in The New York Times (2011).  Most recently, he had a show at Sargent’s Daughters in New York City and saw the publication of Freddy Presents Dick (2015).  He has been represented by the Mary Boone Gallery in New York since 1979.

Philip Taaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1955, and studied at Cooper Union in N.Y. His work has been included in the Carnegie International, two Sydney Biennials, and three Whitney Biennials, and in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Reina Sofia, Madrid. In 2000, the IVAM museum in Valencia organized a retrospective survey of his work, as did the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2008, entitled The Life of Forms in Art:  Paintings 1980-2008, with a publication by Hatje Cantz. He has shown with Lucio Amelio, Donald Young, Gagosian, Max Hetzler, Thaddaeus Ropac, and is currently represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery. He lives and works in New York City, and West Cornwall, Connecticut.

Conceived and organized by Arezoo Moseni, and in its fifth year, Art and Literature Series events bring forth pollinations across the literary and visual arts with readings and discussions by acclaimed artists, authors and poets.

Events at The New York Public Library may be photographed or recorded. By attending these events, you consent to the use of your image and voice by the Library for all purposes.

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