Tag: visual arts

Matthew Monahan at Anton Kern Gallery

Matthew Monahan, "Seppuku." Photograph courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

For a card-carrying member of the “Unmonumental” generation of sculptors (he was actually in the New Museum show of that name), Matthew Monahan’s latest freestanding bronze sculptures are both reactionary and a logical next step. His previous work consisted of installational displays crowded with objects and figures, idiosyncratic minimuseums chockablock with visual allusions to art history—a Greco-Indian eye here, a Northern Renaissance visage there. At Anton Kern, Monahan distills archetypal characters from a jumble of references, creating a fascinating group that looks like archaeological finds from an alternative art history.

One slender nude’s wire-bound body recalls photographer Nobuyoshi Araki’s soft-core titillations, but her quizzical expression is more provocative, suggesting spiritual superiority and/or mental disability. Another character’s cruciform pose begs explaining, but his craggy and practically concave face closes in as if guarding secrets. Nearby, a motionless, gold-leafed droid version of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Spacestands stiffly by.

While Monahan’s sculptures pique our curiosity with their mix of vague familiarity and uncertain identity, a series of oil-on-board images resembling tantric diagrams fairly exudes esoteric mystery. Collectively titled “Body Electric,” they summon Walt Whitman’s passionate appreciation of the human form but feature a fairly unnuanced, everyman element: a simplified kind of line drawing made by scraping black-painted paper to reveal the white below. The sculptures, on the other hand, turn appropriation into creation with their affecting cast and enjoyable synthesis of history, pop culture and sheer invention.

Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 793, December 9 – 15, 2010.

Kristin Morgin, “New York Be Nice” at Zach Feuer Gallery

Kristin Morgin, Wrecked Spyder, 2010. Photograph courtesy of Zach Feuer Gallery, New York.

The nervous plea in the title of Kristen Morgin’s New York solo debut seems warranted at first glance. This accumulation of meticulously crafted, painted-ceramic replicas of comics, toys, personal mail and more, laid out on rickety tables, looks like the world’s most precious yard sale. But behind a facade of understatement, Morgin cleverly challenges the ways in which we value things, making art that’s real and fake, handcrafted and reproduced, imitative and innovative, vintage and new, high and low, all at the same time.

Category-busting begins at the door with a shelf of roughly fashioned teacups featuring portraits of comics icons, from Wonder Woman to Snoopy, a cheeky mix of useful craft and pop-indebted fine art. Elsewhere, doodles on Post-its lie alongside a ceramic Curious George book, featuring the trouble-prone primate traveling through space. Despite its futuristic theme, the tome’s deliberately cracked and aged condition and added-on sketches—including a version of Picasso’s Guernica—summon a specter of ruin over predigital ephemera. Large drawings of a dodo bird and ticking clocks rendered over other ceramic facsimiles of comic books likewise reinforce the sense of imminent extinction, reminding us that the past is always mediated.

What would ordinarily be the show’s star attraction—a pale and crumpled replica of the Porsche Spyder in which James Dean met his end—is the Bamiyan Buddha of roadsters: a memory so wrecked that it’s barely related to the original. Morgin, however, isn’t after the trompe l’oeil virtuosity of Steve Wolfe or even Allen Ruppersberg’s reshuffled pop references. Instead, she gives us a pointed warning that everything starting out shiny and new inevitably crumbles to dust.

Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 791, November 25-December 1, 2010.

“Greater New York” at PS1

The third of three blockbuster contemporary art survey shows to hit New York in the past year, Greater New York was worth waiting for.  The New Museum’s youthfest, The Generational, showcased an under ripe generation still finding its voice.  The Whitney Biennial presented artists self-consciously grappling with new ways to be ‘experimental.’  Despite the fact that these shows shared several artists, Greater New York swapped the previous ‘watch-this-space’ vibe for mature, confident work by 68 artists and collectives, evenly balanced between male and female, whose collective fostering of identity politics – sexual, racial, political and personal – broke with recent art world trends towards hermeticism and reconnected with the larger world.

If identity politics has come to sound retro in ‘post-black’ days, Hank Willis Thomas’ monumental photo series made it joltingly relevant, connecting yesterday to today by tracking the persistence of stereotype and recent fantasies of racial integration through forty years of magazine ads.  Rashaad Newsome’s video of over twenty female performers uttering partial phrases like ‘excuuuuuse…’ or ‘giiirl’ is one of the best pieces at PS1 (though technically part of an auxiliary exhibition reviewing the last five years of artmaking), succinctly demonstrating how slang and role play create exclusive group identities.

Alternative sexuality was the norm in the third floor galleries, where Sharon Hayes’ five channel video installation ‘Revolutionary Love’ brilliantly integrated the concerns of participants inside and protesters outside the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions before veering quixotically off topic by demanding love along with legal rights.  But her assertion, ‘we’re all queer’ makes perfect sense in light of Leigh Ledare’s creepily incestuous photos of his exhibitionist mom, which prove that anyone, heterosexuals included, can pretty much chart their own course.  LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photos of her own mother come to mind (from the New Museum Triennial); in her video contribution here, her tense, naked torso – juxtaposed with clouds of factory steam – pulsated with unspoken feeling.

Proving that identity politics don’t have to be dour, K8 Hardy’s fabulously eclectic self-portraits in outrageous getups place her characters outside recognizable ‘types.’   A similar inventive exuberance carries downstairs to A.L. Steiner’s photocollaged lesbian utopia where one nude joker embraces a reproduction of Courbet’s ‘Origins’ and another dangles her pendulous breasts over two globs of dough.  Identity aside, other galleries exploded with color or formal inventiveness, including Kerstin Bratsch’s and Adele Roder’s abstract paintings, which distill distinctly a modernist appeal in terms of color and geometry, and Mariah Robertson’s audacious, show stopping 30” by 100’ photogram wrapped around gallery floor, walls, and ceiling.

Press material posited the ‘process of creation and the generative nature of the artist’s studio’ as the show’s dominant theme, though Robbinschild’s installation conveyed little when the artist’s weren’t present, Ei Arakawa gave out candy to studio visitors one day in apology for lack of a performance, and The Bruce High Quality Foundation’s program to swap new pedestals for used ones from art collages was a space-hogging one-liner.  On the other hand, Naama Tsabar’s ‘Speaker Wall,’ two walls of bookshelf speakers rigged with strings into irresistible collaborative instruments, generated the hive of activity that the curators must have hoped for.

Tsabar’s invitation to engage in her work was literal, but for the most part, Greater New York’s best pieces stood out for their complex engagement with issues outside the art world (gay rights, racial, class and gender politics, etc).  A couch featuring news clippings of President Obama and photos of a disfigured young Marine were among the most memorable images of the Whitney Biennial; likewise, pieces like David Brook’s living trees encased in concrete – a protest of deforestation in the Amazon, amongst other things – made the connection to an existing conversation amongst a wider audience, making this show the one we’ll likely continue to talk about.

Originally published in Flash Art International, no 274, October 2010.

 

Polly Apfelbaum, “Off Colour” at D’Amelio Terras

 

Polly Apfelbaum, "Off Colour" installation view. Photograph courtesy of D'Amelio Terras, New York.

Polly Apfelbaum is in rebellion. Unlike the pleasing forms and intricate color schemes of the floor-based fabric arrangements she’s known for, her latest installation of jagged panels in sequined cloth is attention-grabbing but jarring. Off Colour derives its title and loud appearance from amateur nude photos that Apfelbaum found at a London flea market, suggesting a futile attempt at titillation.

At previous shows Apfelbaum had brought in work crafted in her workshop, but this installation was made directly in the gallery. The result—slender fabric strips extending into the corners or hugging columns—could barely be termed a response to this unremarkable space, though the artist has upended expectations by diverting our attention from the walls to the floor. Still, tiptoeing between the zones of crimson, pink, yellow, green and orange (that a sign warns us not to touch) is more awkward than absorbing; the scheme is so calculated that it discourages any desire for interaction.

On the plus side, the panels’ rough edges, geometry and scattered appearance recall Jean Arp’s torn-paper collages, and look like they might harbor some sort of meaningful relationship between the shapes and the negative spaces they create. Unfortunately, a more concrete reading is elusive, as if Apfelbaum had deliberately left behind a self-conscious collection of isolated parts that, like her source photos, lead us on but give us no satisfaction.

Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 785, October 14-20, 2010.

Liu Xiaodong, “Yan’ Guan Town” at Mary Boone Gallery

Liu Xiaodong, "Z's Family," 2009. Photograph courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

Coincidently, while Liu Xiaodong painted this show’s realist portraits of a Muslim and a Christian family in China’s northwestern Gansu province, ethnic violence broke out between Muslim and Han Chinese in the region. Rather than an argument for peaceful coexistence, however, this body of work seems more motivated by the artist’s curiosity about the unique cultural adaptations of China’s religious minorities.

Coincidently, while Liu Xiaodong painted this show’s realist portraits of a Muslim and a Christian family in China’s northwestern Gansu province, ethnic violence broke out between Muslim and Han Chinese in the region. Rather than an argument for peaceful coexistence, however, this body of work seems more motivated by the artist’s curiosity about the unique cultural adaptations of China’s religious minorities. Complicated family dynamics and Liu’s own idiosyncratic symbolism add animation to already fascinating portraits.

For example, Liu places the Christian brood of Z’s Family inside a chapel, with the young mother astride a donkey while holding her antsy toddler in her lap: an image inspired (according to an entry from the artist’s diary, included in the show’s catalog) by Jesus’ flight into Egypt as an infant. Just as compelling, though, is the painting’s psychological undercurrents, particularly in a woman’s beatific expression, which barely conceals her apparent discomfort. More cryptically, a male relative on the left stands with a giant feather duster in his hand, suggesting some sort of emasculated posture, while the 80-year-old patriarch’s downcast glance conveys weakness as much as presumed humility.

The Muslim H’s Family is seen gathered together in the cramped restaurant that doubles as their home. Four adolescent daughters and a son strike awkward poses but telegraph their individuality by boldly meeting Liu’s gaze. So it seems odd that Liu asked the lively, eldest daughter to wear a head scarf (not owning one, she had to borrow one), then painted her odalisque-style in a cabinet-like enclosure in the background, which serves as a bed for the girls.

Both canvases recall the anthropological air of Thomas Struth’s family portraits, but Liu adds layers of interpretation that symbolize the challenges of understanding others.

Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 784, October 7-13, 2010.