Phong Bui

The sculptor Arthur Simms pays a visit to the Rail headquarters to talk to Publisher Phong Bui about his work and life in Jamaica and in Brooklyn.

On the occasion of his exhibit A Life in Days, on view at Sperone Westwater from January 8 to March 20, 2010, the artist Martin Wilner dropped by Art International Radio to talk to Rail Publisher Phong Bui about his life and work.

In addition to the artist’s other interview with Art Editor John Yau about his then current exhibit of working drawings and color studies at Peter Blum SoHo (January 13-March 6, 2010), David Reed stopped by Art International Radio to talk further with Publisher Phong Bui about other issues concerning the growth of his paintings.

It is good to remind ourselves that for every demagogue, tyrant, or dictator, their most fierce adversaries are the free thinkers, artists, writers, poets, and other creatives. We should also be reminded that painting, being the oldest form of human expression, long before the invention of language, has held an unusual and sustaining power to reflect directly or indirectly our perpetual struggles among ourselves while providing healing agencies through the artists’ inner impulses, guided by their ideals of truth that are opened to constant self-corrections without fear from others.

Many of us have come to identify Trumpian America as a kind of mirror image of Jacksonian America of the 1830s. They both, for example, shared a common distrust of any form of expertise, aggressively insisting instead that all important functions are simple enough to be performed by any ordinary citizen. And above all, they both had a strong desire to overthrow whatever they thought represented the establishment. We’ve come to realize, I think, that large parts of the population harbor nativist prejudices, which are surprisingly easy to make come to the surface.

Robert Motherwell Drawing: As Fast as the Mind Itself, a comprehensive survey of Motherwell’s drawings, is quite literally an eye-opening exhibition.

Anyone familiar with Paul Pfeiffer’s pioneering moving-image work knows that he has been out ahead of “the culture” for more than twenty years. Yet the manipulations and labors he thought to exert on at-one-time recalcitrant film and video frames have now been incorporated into platform and persuasion technologies that have touched us all, whether we’re aware of it or not.

PUBLISHER'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following conversation between Chuck Close and Rail Publisher Phong Bui was initially held at The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation—The Space Program in its new location at 20 Jay Street, D.U.M.B.O., Brooklyn, of whom both are members of the Artists Advisory Committee—then carried further at the painter’s West Village home last Sunday.

I so fondly remember when I was standing in front of the great Cézanne “Large Bathers” with an Italian friend from Tarquinia (we all came down from New York to see the Cézanne retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1996) and I ran into Anne D’Harnoncourt. We had met once with Meyer Schapiro in 1992 (I was Schapiro’s companion for the day with the wheelchair) at MoMa’s Matisse retrospective.