The Munk Who Knew Too Much About New York’s Art Scene

Loren Munk can’t help himself. The paintings of his currently on display at Ruttkowski;68, the majority of them being ample in size, are diligent to the point of overkill, and better for it. Many of us suffer from information overload; Mr. Munk thrives on it, inventorying innumerable factoids using a slow-drying medium whose physicality would seem antithetical to the job — that is to say, oil paint. But there he goes, putting brush to canvas and charting the convolutions of art history with an infinitude of purpose.Mr. Munk is really two men: One of them is a veteran New York City painter; the other, an online chronicler of the art scene. He’s no Clark Kent, our Mr. Munk: It’s a poorly kept secret that he is, in fact, the vlogger James Kalm. Having not kept up with the latter’s YouTube channel in recent years, I was heartened to see that the erstwhile Mr. Kalm is still at it, riding his bicycle through the streets of New York City with camera in tow, visiting exhibition spaces and documenting them with an ongoing, if often whispered and sometimes long-winded, commentary.Mr. Munk may not be Clark Kent, but he is kind of a superman. A near octogenarian — the artist was born at Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1951 — he shows no signs of slowing down. The paintings at Cortlandt Alley, a gritty byway just south of Canal Street and east of Broadway, are among the most ambitious and intense of a career that has not been lacking for either. The canvases might be text heavy, but Mr. Munk has less in common with the dreary post-conceptual musings of Lawrence Weiner or Jenny Holzer than with the abstruse accumulations of numbers, patterns, and charts of Alfred Jensen.Jensen wasn’t a member of the New York School, but he was adjacent to it and the same holds true for Mr. Munk. In a 2014 interview he stated that “I always considered myself first and foremost an oil painter, carrying on the grand legacy of . . . Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns.” Given the all-over nature of the pictures, with their compressed energies and congested surfaces, comparisons with Pollock are warranted. Squint your eyes and you could mistake “Tribeca, Triangle Below Canal” (2024-26) or the almost terrifyingly comprehensive “Super Map” (2007-2014) for compositions by Jack the Dripper himself.‘Super Map,’ by Loren Munk, (2007-2014). Detail. Via Ruttkowski;68What, then, is Mr. Munk up to? The title of the Ruttkowski show, “Time and Place,” points to an abiding fascination with mapping the geographical particularities of art communities. Notwithstanding the best efforts of historians in organizing anything so unruly as human creativity, artists are a headstrong lot with a range of initiatives, ideas, and approaches. Take “Tribeca, Triangle Below Canal” (2024-26). There is an inset toward the bottom of the picture informing us that state and national funding for the arts was “the single most important development of the seventies” and that it constituted “a social rather than aesthetic shift.”Then steel yourself to take in myriad colored blocks of stenciled text detailing the names of artists and venues that are linked by a mass of overlapping lines to a map of the area. “A 1940s style favorite with truckers and downtown artists alike,” Puffy’s Tavern, is there to be gleaned, as are the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (“destroyed in the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001”), the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club (“a 1976 music venue hosting the Talking Heads, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and the B-52s”) and the Odeon Restaurant (“an art deco style establishment”). Galleries are listed, including Ruttkowski;68, as are the studios of artists both renowned and not: Yoko Ono, Romare Bearden, Cindy Sherman, Tom Evans and Robert De Niro — the father of the actor, presumably, and not the actor himself.The addresses of all and sundry are listed on the canvases. Scuttlebutt has it that denizens of the art world are irked to have them made public by Mr. Munk, though there’s an equal and opposite contingent that begrudges him for not listing their names and addresses. Should all of this sound like esoterica best suited for insiders and hangers-on, be aware that these ideograms have the requisite attractions of touch and color, texture and rhythm, line and gumption. Peg Mr. Munk as an art world crank and he’d likely take the compliment, but don’t dismiss his eccentricities. The pictures are a public service rendered in a manner that is ours to delight and boggle in.

The Munk Who Knew Too Much About New York’s Art Scene

The Munk Who Knew Too Much About New York’s Art Scene

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