Goode
Sea of Desire
June 2 - November 4, 2018
at Porquerolles Island
Curated by Dieter Buchhart
A group exhibition Sandro Botticelli, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Joe Goode and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Laughing on the Outside: Selections from the Permanent Collection presents artworks from MOCA’s collection that register the ludicrous, the impossible, and the playful. On view are stairs that lead to nowhere, invitations to exhibitions that contain no objects, and boots that appear to walk by themselves.
Read MoreThere are a pair of chimerical blue orbs by Lita Albuquerque, an early study of boxy green forms by seminal Modernist Josef Albers and a series of monochromatic paintings by Félix González-Torres that depict the colors of the Palestinian flag — a sequence of white, green, red and black that was once outlawed by Israel.
Read MoreArtists of Color is The Underground Museum’s third exhibition curated by our co-founder Noah Davis. It presents color-driven work in the form of monochrome, hard-edge and color field painting, sculpture and immersive installations. The show includes works by artists Joe Goode, Josef Albers, Michael Asher, Dan Flavin, Carmen Herrera, Jennie C. Jones, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Diana Thater, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Lita Albuquerque and more.
Color is a building block of artistic practice and our own aesthetic experiences. Artists of all mediums use color to express shapes, light, mood and emotion. Think about the specific shades that represent serenity, nobility, energy, or purity. Color is also used by people and political movements to define culture and countries. It can make visible the often unseen connection between our bodies and the cosmos.
Our hope is that through this show you develop your own relationship to color. That together we expand the dialogue around color theory. That you take new notice of how colors interact with each other, both on the canvas and in life.
Joe Goode in LALA
Joe Goode, Milk Bottle Painting 229, 2015, acrylic on board with milk bottle, 42 x 42".
I WAS ALWAYS AWARE THAT MY WORK WASN’T POP. And Walter Hopps knew it too, even though he included me in the Pasadena Art Museum’s “New Painting of Common Objects” in 1962. I had the attitude of, I don’t care where you show me as long as you show me. It’s not very often I choose to revisit a series I’ve done before.
Read MoreOne of Joe Goode’s fond memories of the New York art scene of the '60s was when the great Andy Warhol invited him to dinner at “my favorite restaurant.” Goode, who was then so poor he had hitchhiked to Manhattan, was dazzled. Would it be Grenouille or maybe the Cote Basque, where Truman Capote nestled among his entourage of millionaire fashionistas?
Read MoreI’ve often wondered why writing about art must be so complex, so ponderous, so filled with grandiose vocabulary and overly-intellectual concepts. Not so with Michael Kohn Gallery’s catalog, “Joe Goode: Paintings, 1960-2016.”
Read MoreCoinciding with the artist’s 80th birthday, Los Angeles’s Kohn Gallery will present a survey exhibition of the Los Angeles artist Joe Goode, a veteran of the Californian light and space and conceptual art movements.
Read MoreJoe Goode is 79 and still painting vigorously in his studio near the Santa Monica Airport, but back in the early 1960s, he was sitting in a car in Oklahoma City with an old high school buddy. Artist Jerry McMillan was trying to convince him to join him in California.
Read MoreThe Norton Simon Museum presents Duchamp to Pop, an exhibition that examines Marcel Duchamp’s potent influence on Pop Art and its leading artists, among them Andy Warhol, Jim Dine and Ed Ruscha.
Read MoreThe magic of the LA art scene over the last four decades: portraits of artists in their studios by photographer Jim McHugh and a selection of original artworks by these artists. The exhibition is curated by Edward Goldman, Host of KCRW’s “Art Talk.”
Read MoreLos Angeles in the early ’60s was a blank canvas for a new generation of artists. It was a city almost completely devoid of an art scene; unencumbered by the artistic history that haunted Paris and New York.
Read MoreGoode is probably not that well-known to New York’s current art audience, but he was a seminal figure in the development of the Los Angeles art scene in the early 1960s. A colleague of Ed Ruscha, Goode was included in one of the very first exhibitions of Pop Art in America, “New Painting of Common Objects,” curated in 1962 by Walter Hopps at the former Pasadena (now Norton Simon) Museum. Goode’s work evolved over the ensuing years to include expansive painted views of the sky, which he then defaced by tearing away or gouging substantial portions of the image. Much like the slashed canvases of Italian abstractionist Lucio Fontana, Goode’s work focused on the space behind the painted surface. This show presents a small selection of his “Torn Cloud” and “Vandalism” series, dating between 1967 and 1976.
Joe Goode traces half a century of selected works by one of America’s most innovative yet under-recognized painters. Often identified with Southern California pop art, Goode ultimately transcends this classification, creating bodies of work with influences ranging from Midwestern iconography and environmental destruction to pop culture and the sublime.
Read MoreJoe Goode traces half a century of selected works by one of America’s most innovative yet under-recognized painters. Often identified with Southern California pop art, Goode ultimately transcends this classification, creating bodies of work with influences ranging from Midwestern iconography and environmental destruction to pop culture and the sublime.
Goode first gained international recognition following his inclusion in Walter Hopps’s seminal exhibition New Painting of Common Objects, organized at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962. That same year, a key example of Goode’s milk bottle painting series appeared on the cover of Artforum; another commences CAM’s exhibition. In Purple (1961), Goode positions a milk bottle in front of a domineering monochrome canvas, both of which have been applied with layers of purple oil paint. The usually transparent—but now paint-encrusted—bottle foregrounds Goode’s concept of seeing through the picture plane, allowing the viewer to contemplate their own personal and cultural associations within, and through, Goode’s pictorial spaces.
In addition, the exhibition features representative works from several of the artist’s other series, including bodies of work created in large part through acts of destruction. In his Torn Cloud series (1967–76), Goode often uses razor blades to slash through compositions of illusionistic skies, forming jagged clouds. He then layers excised canvases on top of each other to allow viewers to peer through their torn surfaces. Goode’s performative surface violations increase in intensity with his introduction of firearms in the Environmental Impact series (1978–83). In these works, Goode literally draws with shotgun pellets, using a shotgun to blast through the monochromatic surface of the canvas. The bullets pierce and abrade the surface, forming seemingly chance compositions.
Tornado Triptych (1992), a monumental sumi ink painting, calls upon the lived Midwestern experience as source for the work’s iconography. Goode’s tornado paintings depict the progression of formidable natural forces, combining the visual liquidity of ink with nature’s raw energy in an uneasy relationship between beauty and violence. In his more recent body of work, titled Flat Screen Nature (2012–current), Goode uses an industrial hand saw to cut through sheets of painted fiberglass, creating allegorical landscapes of jagged edges and menacing peripheries; the artist’s visual vocabulary comes full circle to represent our environment’s vulnerable sky, land, and sea.
Joe Goode demonstrates how depictions of the sublime can speak to contentious American issues ranging from environmental vandalism to the Second Amendment. CAM’s presentation repositions Goode’s critical importance through an in-depth investigation of his concept of beauty through destruction as intrinsically tied to a Midwestern regional sensibility—milk bottles, big sky, tornadoes, and shot guns, for example—that has never before been explored in depth. In conjunction with the exhibition, CAM will publish a catalog on the artist’s work with an exhibition history and bibliography, a foreword by CAM Executive Director Lisa Melandri, and critical essays by Chief Curator Jeffrey Uslip and art historian Thomas Crow.
Joe Goode (b. 1937, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); Texas Gallery, Houston (2002, 2004, 2010, 2012); Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York (2009); and Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles (2001, 2005). Goode’s work is included in numerous major museum collections, including the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Smithsonian Institution; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Joe Goode is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Jeffrey Uslip, Chief Curator.
This exhibition is generously supported by Eve Stelle and Peter Gelles and Joan and Mitch Markow.
Unlike a lot of transplants to L.A., Joe Goode was not amazed by the horizontal nature of this city where the sky is usually blue and broad. He had come from Oklahoma City, an even flatter expanse of terrain with far worse weather. He came in the ‘50s at the behest of his childhood friend Ed Ruscha and never looked back. Nonetheless, over the years, Goode has repeatedly explored the sky in paintings and drawings.
Read MoreJoe Goode has long made pictures designed to be looked through, not at. His work is deadpan, and seemingly innocuous. The LA Times critic William Wilson, in 1971, called it ‘neutrality-style art’. Perhaps this mildness is why he never got quite as much attention as his childhood friend Ed Ruscha, who also does deadpan but who usually cuts his neutrality with non-sequiturs (often verbal) that are arresting and funny. Goode only trades in the very lightest of humorous touches – a milk bottle painted mauve, for instance, placed on a shelf in front of a mauve monochrome canvas. That was his early Milk Bottle series, (1961-2), still amongst his best-known work.
Now in his seventies, the Los Angeles-based artist continues to experiment and refine. He has filled Michael Kohn’s spacious new gallery on Highland Avenue with apparent ease, showing off a new series of seascapes made on large fibreglass panels. Most of these paintings are only cursorily representational: they typically consist of one horizontal four-by-eight foot panel, painted dark blue, beneath another horizontal panel painted a lighter blue. The seam where the two rectangles meet is the dead level horizon.
Even the simplest paintings here achieve in their brushed surfaces infinite degrees of nuance and depth
Not so fast. Behind the poker-face, Goode is a deft and sensuous painter. Even the simplest paintings here – So Still, for example, or Sail Away (both 2013) – achieve in their brushed surfaces infinite degrees of nuance and depth (their Ikea-bland titles are decoys, I would like to believe). On sustained inspection, Goode’s palette goes far beyond shades of blue. The sky in Sail Away is a lightless grey; in Cruising (2013) soft clouds of dusty pink pile up on the horizon. The best paintings here, like the sublime Know Means No (2013) and the extraordinary, infernal, Honk If You See Jesus (2014), are the ones that stray furthest from the programmatic simplicity of Goode’s template.
In any case, these paintings really aren’t about sea and sky. They are about their ontological status as objects that attempt – and fail – to capture a particular archetype of pristine natural perfection. We know this because Goode has taken a grinder to the sides of the fibreglass panels, cutting off corners and gouging into horizons. These torn edges reveal a honeycomb mesh inside the fibreglass; this too represents a kind of perfection, in contrast to which the painted surfaces seem weathered and dirty. In past works, as with the Torn Sky and Torn Cloud series (1969–76), Goode slashed canvases that he’d painted and then mounted the wreckage over another canvas support. A selection of charcoal drawings in this show, from 1977, consists of dark clouds on paper that has subsequently been scratched and gouged.
Goode titled the exhibition Flat Screen Nature. In places, the texture of the honeycomb panels gives the paint a pixelated effect, which apparently reminded the artist of a computer or television screen. (Again, surfaces to be looked through.) But this contemporary technological twist seems less germane than the works’ relationship to the divergent histories of landscape and non-representational monochrome painting. After all, how relevant, really, is pixilation to digital experience in the era of Retina screens and HD?
Goode is at his best when he keeps it analogue. In a side gallery, several charcoal drawings from his X-ray series (1976) depict sheets of tattered white paper apparently taped against a dark background. Goode’s method was to tape one piece of ripped paper to another clean sheet, and to strafe it with charcoal powder. When he removed the taped-on piece, a perfect x-ray-like impression remained. The drawings offset the gritty evidence of their own dilapidation with transcendent illusionism. They are perfect, even as they are ruined.
By Jonathan Griffin
1. That might be Jesus
If you know painter Joe Goode, who road-tripped to L.A. from Oklahoma in 1959 to make his go as an artist, you probably know his drawings of torn paper or paintings of blue skies. They’re pretty nonchalant and usually modestly sized, so it’s surprising to see how big and majestic the new paintings in his "Flat Screen Nature" show at Kohn Gallery are. They’re two-tone expanses of color painted on sheets of fiberglass. Even though you could tumble right into those deep blues, Goode’s still not taking himself too seriously. Every piece has weirdly ragged edges and the titles are jokes: Honk if You See Jesus for one with a ghostly shape near the bottom, or Coming Attraction for one that looks like a big-screen sunset.
By Catherine Wagley
