Further to yesterday’s post, Ai Weiwei’s activism continues at Mary Boone’s Chelsea gallery with ‘Forge’ an installation of twisted pieces of rebar. Though the print and carefully arranged, twisted pieces of metal on the floor appear to be calligraphic abstractions, they’re created from pieces of metal retrieved from shoddily constructed schools that collapsed in the 2008 earthquake, killing thousands of children. (Through 21st.)
In Chinese, ‘river crab’ sounds like a euphemistic term used to describe censorship, so when artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei learned in 2010 that his newly built studio was to be demolished by the local government, he hosted a protest feast at which 10,000 river crabs were served. This installation of 2,500 handmade ceramic crabs at Mary Boone Gallery’s Fifth Ave & 57th Street space recalls that event and demonstrates WeiWei’s insuppressible resistance. (Through Dec 21st.)
Alessandro Pessoli’s painted figures usually look like they’ve emerged from a dream or hallucination; these absurdly phallic Maiolica ceramic sculptures, fittingly titled Sancho Panza & Don Chiscotte, lack the typical atmospheric surroundings of Pessoli’s paintings, but their lighthearted vibrant colors and mobile-like hanging lend them an amusing whimsy. (At Chelsea’s Anton Kern Gallery through Oct 20th.)
As Sally Mann recovered from an accident in which she was thrown from and pummeled by her dying horse in ’06, she turned to self-portraiture to create haunting ambrotypes like this one. Streaking, blurring, over and underexposures mar the images, speaking movingly to the damage inflicted on their subject. (At Edwynn Houk Gallery on Fifth Ave & 57th Street through Nov 3rd.)
Gordon Parks’ iconic photographs spanned the worlds of fashion, celebrity and social documentary from this 1949 photo of Ingrid Bergman on location for the filming of Roberto Rossellini’s ‘Stromboli’ to a photo from the ’56 Segregation Series that demonstrates the respectable normality of Mr & Mrs Albert Thornton in their living room in Mobile Alabama. Both are on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery on 57th Street through Oct 27th.
Smashed gallery windows and a wall plowed down by a shiny cart set a restive mood for Andra Ursuta’s latest solo show at Ramiken Crucible on the Lower East Side. Totemic female torsos crafted from a mix of concrete and manure and marble statues of a Romanian gypsy woman awaiting deportation from France are weighed down and beautified by jewelry made from coins. Partly informed by a story of Romanian witches casting a curse on their government, the show’s female characters stubbornly resist tidy concepts of national identity. (Through October 21st.)
You don’t even have to be a dog lover to appreciate William Wegman’s videos with his Weimaraners May Ray and Fay Ray. Here, the duo watches an off-screen ball with rapt attention, creating a mesmerizing, slow-motion dance performed with the utmost concentration. See this video and more early Wegman videos at Salon 94 Freemans on the Lower East Side. (Through Oct 27th).
Conceived of by accident when a shirt used as a glue rag dried into an arresting form, Matt Johnson’s Wifebeater is as pedestrian and delicately ephemeral as a plastic bag in the wind. At least on first glance. A closer look reveals Johnson’s trademark twist of using unlikely materials to make his sculpture. This t-shirt is made of bronze. (At Chelsea’s 303 Gallery through Nov 17th.)
From dyeing fabric to altering the weave of burlap, Brooklyn-based artist Anya Kielar harnesses an assortment of techniques to create her monumental ‘Women’ now on view at Rachel Uffner‘s Lower East Side gallery. Totemic goddesses and folksy females on floating screens transcend the everyday, literally becoming larger than life. Join Merrily next Saturday the 13th, 2-4pm on a tour of this show and more on the Lower East Side.
For two and a half months in 2010, during every hour the Museum of Modern Art was open, performance artist Marina Abramovic sat silently facing a chair filled by a steady stream of visitors. Photographer Marco Anelli was there with her, capturing the thoughtful, blank and tearful faces of each participant as they engaged in a wordless exchange with the artist. (Anelli’s ‘Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramovic is at Chelsea’s Danziger Projects through Oct 27th).
Lips and eyes fill Team Gallery’s 47 Wooster St space in SoHo where Sam Samore (whose 1973 ‘Suicidist’ photos were featured here yesterday) continues to summon filmic moments, offering seduction on an enormous scale. Here, Lips Tower (#7) resembles a stacked sculpture by Minimalist Donald Judd, though the serial units – lips – are the antithesis of the Minimalists’ cold aesthetic.
Thirty-nine years ago, artist Sam Samore killed himself by asphyxiation, stabbing, overdose, and in an amusingly absurd twist, being buried head first in a sandbox. Photos of these grisly, staged deaths from his 1973 ‘The Suicidist’ series and many more line the walls of SoHo’s Team Gallery recalling film stills both familiar and bizarre. (At Team Gallery’s 83 Grand Street location through October 27th).
Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s latest feat of installation art takes visitors through a series of rooms, transporting us into both strange and familiar worlds. This show is the talk of the town, art-wise, and is a stop on this Saturday afternoon’s Chelsea Gallery Tour, 2-4pm. For more info, see the scheduled tours page. (At Chelsea’s Marlborough Gallery through Oct 27th).
The young British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was a standout in last spring’s New Museum Triennial. She’s back with a show of new paintings at Chelsea’s Jack Shainman Gallery titled ‘All Manner of Needs’ in which solitary subjects gaze out at us with searching eyes. (Through October 13th.)
‘You break it, you buy it’ does not apply at the Austrian art collective Gelatin’s latest solo show at Greene Naftali in Chelsea, where the point is to send art objects flying in order to ‘finish’ them. Pressing the pedal to send objects like these crashing to the floor feels as wrong as dropping a baby, regardless of their artistic merit (or lack thereof). (Through Nov 13th.)
This is one watermelon you do not want to eat…or be eaten by. A giant lick of modeling paste extends from Valerie Hegarty’s repulsive ‘Watermelon Tongue,’ curbing the appetite and recalling ‘Little Shop of Horrors,’ one inspiration for this painting. Hegarty was also thinking of last year’s news reports of exploding watermelons in China, which were mistakenly sprayed with growth accelerator. Now do you want to know where your food comes from? (At Nichelle Beauchene Gallery on the Lower East Side, through October 20th).
What’s at the cutting edge of visual art animation? Check out the New Museum’s answer to that question – the on-line only exhibition, ‘3-D Form,’ which features four artists whose human characters dance, flirt and float as they occupy strange realms of cyberspace. (Through October 17th.)
One thousand hand-painted, porcelain sunflower seeds made in Jingdezhen, China are on offer at Carolina Nitsch as part of a show of work (80s NYC photos and Qing Dynasty chairs) by dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Once a metaphor for the Chinese populace following their leadership as the sunflower follows the sun, these remnants of Weiwei’s five ton installation at Tate Modern suggest that it’s the artist who is followed so closely as his popularity continues to rise. (At Carolina Nitsch through Nov 3rd.)
Why is one textile hung carefully on a wall for display while others are put on the floor for everyday use? Andrea Zittel’s latest solo show, designed by her and crafted by weavers from around the country, digs into the question of why we want both beautifully designed objects with use value and objects to rever as fine art. Zittel created this carpet to fill the floor of her yet-to-be-built 12 x 16 foot cabin. (At Andrea Rosen Gallery, Chelsea, through October 27th).
Toba Khedoori is known for her monumental paintings on paper devoid of human subjects, but in her latest show at Chelsea’s David Zwirner Gallery, she makes a major shift to small-scale oils on canvas. The size change lessens the works’ dramatic impact but a mood of still isolation remains, prompting writer Julian Bismuth to compare each new work to, “…a puzzle piece removed from its set and held up to the light.” (Through October 27th).
Ever think Christopher Columbus would invite you over to his place? Something like that is happening on Columbus Circle, starting tomorrow, as the Public Art Fund opens Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi’s ‘Discovering Columbus.’ After climbing six flights of stairs, visitors who’ve reserved free, timed passes can lounge in a furnished living room constructed atop a scaffolding that surrounds the 13-foot tall sculpture from 1892. (Through November 18th. Passes available at publicartfund.org.)
LA artist Julian Hoeber’s first NY solo show features a recreation of an old roadside attraction, a ‘gravitational mystery spot’ in which the laws of gravity were altered. Inside a plywood and metal-framed cube, the trick is a simple sloping floor and ceiling which non-the-less demonstrates how easily our perception can be tricked. (At Harris Lieberman, Chelsea through October 20th).
Teresita Fernandez created this sculpture on site at Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side location this summer, turning thousands of translucent, colored layers of polycarbonate into an installation evoking the lights of the aurora borealis. (Through October 20th.)
You use tools to make art, but can you make art out of studio tools? Martha Friedman gives it her best shot, transforming a rather impersonal object – the wedge – into mysteriously totemic towers punctuated with flaccid, pizza-paddle shapes in day-glo orange silicone rubber. (At Chelsea’s Wallspace Gallery through October 20th).
‘Bye Bye Babylon,’ the title of Erik Parker’s latest solo show at Paul Kasmin Gallery, and his subject matter – edenic landscapes teeming with psychedelic flora – suggest he’s left the city for greener pastures. In fact, he’s still Brooklyn-based but uses the exotic locales he depicts to take a mental break from urban life. (Through October 13th). For more fuchsia skies and purple seas, check out Paul Kasmin’s website.
Before you get to the giant inflated and conjoined rear ends, you have to pass under ‘Carnivaleyes’, a pair of 3 x 4 ½ foot wide peepers made from latex, fabric and rope by Nancy Davidson. Slightly risqué with their net-stocking-like lids, they seem a little vexed with their oddball neighbors in Davidson’s solo show at Chelsea’s Betty Cunningham Gallery. (Through October 6th). Check out Davidson’s odd bodies on her website.
Paul Pfeiffer continues to manipulate footage of sporting events in his latest solo show at Chelsea’s Paula Cooper Gallery; though he makes welcome forays into new areas, the show’s most entertaining piece collages footage of basketball games from the 50s through the 90s, only with the players and ball digitally removed. What’s left are bright lights and a ghostly, swishing net as Pfeiffer turns a popular game into a magic act. (Through October 13th).
Books – in colorful grids on the floor, piled on a remainders table, preciously designed and placed far out of reach on high shelves and in many more guises – fill Friedrich Petzel Gallery’s biblio-centric group show, ‘The Feverish Library’ (organized in cooperation with Matthew Higgs). Rachel Whiteread’s plaster, polystyrene and steel ‘Untitled (Sequel III)’ from 2002 lends a note of gravitas and mystery to the show by recording only the cast space around a bookshelf. (In Chelsea’s Friedrich Petzel Gallery through Oct 20th).
Known for his nature-inspired, mural-sized dramas affixed to the gallery wall, Adam Cvijanovic doesn’t disappoint in his first New York solo show since ’08. At 15 x 65 feet, the show’s centerpiece, ‘Discovery of America’ is a trompe l’oeil triumph, appearing to bring a prehistoric, Rocky Mountain scene into a wall-splintering conflict with an image of human settlers racing across the plains all of which appears to take place in a messy art studio. (at Postmasters, Chelsea through October 13th).
The new art season officially roared to life again this week with dozens of major shows opening in the last few nights. Leonardo Drew’s installation at Chelsea’s Sikkema Jenkins & Co is one of the outstanding offerings thanks to a huge, gallery-filling installation composed of rough lengths of burnt wood as well as more tidy but no less ambitious wall relief sculptures. (Through October 12th.)
There aren’t many artworks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that could be described primarily as ‘fun.’ Anish Kapoor’s ‘Untitled’ from 2007 falls into that category by creating a surprising visual experience as tiny, polished stainless steel tiles on a concave form reflect viewers’ images as a blurry multitude of shapes. London-based Kapoor’s best known works in the US (Chicago’s Cloud Gate, for example) make viewers aware of their surroundings. At the Met, Kapoor’s piece is surprisingly intimate and thoroughly amusing. (On view in the 2nd floor Modern and Contemporary Art Galleries).
Alighiero Boetti’s gorgeous installation in the MoMA’s atrium defies Sol LeWitt’s oft-quoted 1967 remark about conceptual art that ‘all of the planning and decisions [for a work of art] are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.’ In ‘Mappa’ from the 70s and 80s (on the back wall) and kilims from 1993 (in the foreground) Boetti commissioned his artwork from Afghan craftswomen, ensuring that execution shares the spotlight with conceptual content while recalling Minimalist seriality and Jasper Johns’ proto-Pop.
Xaviera Simmons is known for her portraits in America landscapes, but in ‘Landscape (2 Women)’ from 2007, her models contend with an urban environment consisting of a dramatic red wall that sends out conflicting associations that include love, anger, danger and a sense of urgency. Simmons past series have sometimes featured subjects with skirts pulled over heads and assortments of objects hung around the waist like visual essays on identity; here, however, the womens’ differently aged bodies and their relationship are left to speak for themselves. (Included in tête-à-tête, curated by Mickalene Thomas at Yancey Richardson Gallery through Aug 24th.)
Stepping out of the elevator at Gagosian Gallery’s uptown, Madison Ave location, the roar of rushing water is immediate and surprisingly loud. Around the corner, squeezed into the main 6th floor exhibition space, is iconic conceptual artist Bruce Nauman’s sculpture of 97 cast bronze fish spouting water from their bodies as if they’d been hunted by rifle as well as hook and line. Elegant in photos, the mechanics of the piece – trailing tubes, a leaky basin, wires – dominate the in-person experience, creating typically Nauman-esque disconcertion. (‘One Hundred Fish Fountain’ is at Gagosian Gallery through Aug 31st).
Imagine perusing bedroom sets in IKEA and finding a quarrelling married couple bedding down for the night. Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner is half of the couple starring in his own hilarious 18 minute 2007 video ‘Stealing Beauty’ that he shot without permission with a small camcorder in IKEA stores in New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv. As he, his wife and two kids discuss the ramifications of capitalism on their family life, they pretend to read from the store’s libraries, shower in the bathroom and sip drinks in the kitchen, creating a provocative dissonance between public and private life and questioning the personal impact of political ideology. (‘Stealing Beauty is in ‘Idea is the Object’ at D’Amelio Gallery, Chelsea, through Aug 24th).
Lizzie Fitch’s ‘Title TBD’ begs a few suggestions. ‘Man power?’ ‘Guy stuff?’ The central panel’s car/power tool/DIY theme and a pile of spike-ended lumber that looks like its destined for fencing tries hard to conjure masculinity. The piece tries so hard to look manly, it looks nothing like usual gallery fare (though it recalls Josephine Meckseper’s hot rod imagery). ‘Feminine’ artwork abounds in New York galleries, so why so little that’s blatantly male? (At Andrea Rosen Gallery, Chelsea, through August 21st).
Can abstract art be used as a tool to resist Google’s efforts to map the world’s every nook and cranny? Using screen grabs from Google Art Project’s museum walk-throughs, Brooklyn-based artists Erica Love and João Enxuto have launched a ‘counter archive’ of blurred images that have been obscured for copyright reasons. As large inkjet prints on cotton panels instead of tiny rectangles on a computer screen, they have a shimmering depth that recalls the 60s ‘Light & Space’ movement while pioneering a new medium somewhere between photography, installation and virtual art. (Love and Enxuto’s ‘Anonymous Paintings’ are included in ‘The Skin We’re In’ at Yossi Milo Gallery through August 31st.)
Known for overtaking galleries with his wood and concrete constructions, Oscar Tuazon’s new site-specific sculptures on the Brooklyn waterfront have space to breath. Here, a sugar maple, concrete, backboard and hoop come together to form ‘People,’ a sculpture inviting folks to play a role in cleaning up the Brooklyn waterfront by having a little fun. (Organized by the Public Art Fund, Tuazon’s sculptures are on view at Brooklyn Bridge Park.)
‘Dazzling’ is a good way to describe Alyson Shotz’s optically enticing sculpture whether it’s the shimmering curtain of Fresnel lenses she memorably installed in the Guggenheim’s atrium in ‘07 or a mirrored fence hidden in plain view in the fields at the Storm King Art Center. ‘Wavelength #2’ from 2008 continues Shotz’s interest in waveforms and uses dichroic acrylic to both transmit and reflect different wavelengths of light, creating a range of colors from a clear material. (‘Wavelength #2’ is at Paul Kasmin Gallery as part of ‘Sculpted Matter’ through August 17th.)
As far as self-portraits go, ‘Seascape: Floating Costume to Drift for Eternity I (Armani Suit)’ by Ashley Bickerton is a little on the dark side, despite its bright orange buoys. Made in 1991, just two years before this regular on the downtown New York art scene relocated permanently to Bali, it seems to foretell his departure. Quixotic, a little lonesome, and stylishly branded by Armani and his signature ‘Susie’ logo – a semi-corporate brand of his own invention – Bickerton’s craft signals a dignified leave-taking, a memorial to a past life and an adventure about to begin. (Through August 17th at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Chelsea.)
Artist Tyler Rowland was so taken by 19th century Realist painter Gustave Courbet that he spent a year impersonating (in appearance anyways) his forebear. In ‘HiJack!’ a show of work organized by the art handlers at Chelsea’s Jack Shainman Gallery, Rowland’s contribution is a missing Courbet painting (presumed destroyed in the WWII bombing of Dresden), along with the tools necessary to install it (all carefully manufactured by the artist from materials recycled from construction jobs). The layers of reference are complex but readable, making this piece a testament to the continuing influence of art history on contemporary painting while challenging preconceptions of what an artwork should look like. (‘The Stonebreakers (All the Objects Needed to Install a Work of Art), 2004-06’ is on view through Sept 1st. )
Linsanity goes on hiatus in Andrew Kuo’s tiny painting of Houston Rockets star Jeremy Lin as he is chastised by an angry basketball. Floating in a tank a la Jeff Koon’s basketballs in his 1985 ‘Equilibrium’ series, the ball becomes the object of our attention, forcing a downcast Lin into the backseat. The vicissitudes of stardom never looked so cute. (‘Tallboy’ is in the group exhibition ‘In Plain Sight’ at Chelsea’s Mitchell-Innes & Nash through August 17th).
If you’re at The Jewish Museum to visit the Vuillard show, don’t miss the chance to see a side exhibition of a single work – Sanford Biggers and Jennifer Zackin’s memorable video ‘a small world’ from ’99 – ’01. Zackin grew up in a New York Jewish American family and Biggers an African American family in LA; the video piece pairs home movies from each artist’s family side by side. Similarities between their experiences beg the question of how viewers might expect race and geography to influence a middle class upbringing. (Extended through October 14th).
Whether he’s burning trees to make charcoal or soaking a photograph of a lake in lake water to get an abstracted effect, Matthew Brandt uses his subject matter to create an image of that subject. When bee colony collapse led to his discovery of hundreds of dead or dying bees on the California coast, he collected the bees and photographed them in his studio, printing them with an emulsion made of the bees. The resulting prints are huge and swarming with bees (like the one in this detail), but chilling when a closer look reveals that they are in various states of decomposition. (At Yossi Milo Gallery through August 31, 2012).
Apart from its large size and bold color, Joan Brown’s ‘Mary Julia Y Manuel,’ from 1976 stands out for its romantic drama, played out on a bright red stage before a swirling San Francisco Bay. Mary Julia, model and poet, holds a similar pose to Goya’s supposed lover, the Dutchess of Alba and her name is paired with Brown’s ex-husband Manuel, making this nighttime scene ring with tension. (‘Viva la Raspberries’ is at Harris Lieberman, Chelsea, through August 17th).
Three panels of painted concrete covered in shattered safety glass by Davina Semo at Chelsea’s Derek Eller Gallery rest on the floor like they were just brought in from a war-zone. Minimalist stripes in safety orange appear to have suffered heavy attack but survive to bear witness. Together they’re titled, ‘You said we’re skipping the prelude: start the insults.” (Though August 16th).
Walter Robinson’s ‘Dallas BBQ’ arouses a different kind of desire than his erotically charged paintings (resembling romance novel covers from the 60s) at Chelsea’s Haunch of Venison. ‘Here’s the beef’ this small but powerful canvas shouts as it evokes the danger of a cholesterol bomb and the pleasures of one of America’s favorite indulgences. (Through August 17th).
Alessandro Pessoli’s ‘Old Singer with Blossoms’ on the High Line is half hidden amongst short trees and lush plantings, making this odd character all the more strange once you become aware of his presence. A balaclava in pretty, rainbow colors gives him a childlike or hippy appearance completely at odds with his cold steel body and bronze head. As a mechanical creature subject to ridicule (for that silly hat), he could be one of Marcel Duchamp’s bachelors grown old. (On the High Line as part of the group show ‘Lilliput’ through April 2013.)
Ellsworth Kelly’s approximately eighty plant drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art could be some of the most insubstantial artwork on view in the city at the moment and some of the most enjoyable. In graphite on paper renderings from 1948 to the present of poppy flowers, beanstalks, ginkgo leaves and more, Kelly distills each plant into an easily identifiable outline that offers insights into the renowned abstract artist’s iconography.
After appearing on the cover of May’s Art in America magazine, Carol Bove’s sculpture ‘Aurora’ is on view in Chelsea at Luhring Augustine’s ‘Painting in Space’ summer group show. Bove is known for accumulating and displaying books, objects and ephemera that relate to 60s culture. More recently, she’s been scavenging natural materials to continue her investigation of what a readymade object (or collection of them) might convey when put on display as art. With their spikes, undulating surfaces and bands of color, these shells are exquisite examples of nature’s creativity and a contrast to the manmade, geometric rods that cradle them. (Through August 17th).
In a private moment of Olympics-mania today, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s installation of Panathenaic prize amphora to reconnect with ancient Olympians. One of the earliest of such vessels (560-550 B.C.) in the Met’s collection, it was filled with olive oil and awarded to winners of events like the 200 yard race depicted here. If you were an Olympic winner, would you rather have a gold metal or 42 liters of olive oil?
41 years ago today, LA-based artist and graphic designer Robert Overby created ‘Long wall, third floor (From the Barclay House Series), 4 August, 1971,’ a nineteen foot long cast of an abandoned building made of latex and cheesecloth. Its dirt, holes and grubby material make it a powerful symbol of entropy and decay. It’s both kin and contrast to Lizzi Bougatsos’ more delicate cracked eggshells on white bathmat – discards arranged into a fragile and pristine grid. (At Andrea Rosen Gallery, Chelsea, through August 21st.)
Kiki Smith’s ‘Milky Way’ brings to mind a more benevolent Edenic serpent hovering over a field of pointed breasts (a fertile Eve? multi-breasted Greek goddess Artemis?). Murrini glass, plastic glitter, and gold leaf amongst other materials create a dazzling backdrop and light up the snake from beneath. The piece could read as an exhuberant celebration of fertility or its opposite, as sharp breasts threaten. (In ‘It’s Always Summer on the Inside’ at Anton Kern Gallery, Chelsea, through August 24th).
Over years of avid art viewing, particular museum security guards have become as familiar to me as the art they guard though we’ve never exchanged words. ‘Artists Guarding Artists’ a group show at Family Business breaks the silence with work by artists who work as guards at the city’s major museums, from the Met to the New Museum. Next time I go to the Guggenheim, I’ll be looking for Sandro Rodorigo to congratulate him on his tongue-in-cheek, self-aggrandizing ‘Sandro at Work: The Great Self-Portrait.’ Though it’s a small painting, it perfectly pillories art world hierarchies of importance that don’t favor guards. (Through August 17th).
Berlin-based Greek artist Despina Stokou makes her New York debut with ‘Conversations on the Dirty Dozen,’ an unmissable mixed media wall installation featuring a nude surfer and scrawled text. The haphazard look of Stokou’s writing channels Cy Twombly’s energetically repeated words and marks and Matt Mullican’s automatism, and looks as if it would involve insane ramblings. In fact, the words trail off with a piece of tongue-in-cheek art world advice (from an artist who is also a curator) reading “I used to be an artist too, you know. If you don’t watch out you’re going to end up a curator.” (Stokou is part of ‘Sweet Distemper,’ organized by Isaac Lyles at Derek Eller Gallery through August 16th).
Nobody outdoes iconic German artist Dieter Roth for the aesthetic possibilities he derived from rotting food, from oil-extruding sausage to pressed bananas. It makes his work a shoe-in for ‘The Nature of Disappearance’ at both of Marianne Boesky’s galleries, a group show focusing on “…the intentionally initiated process of decay.” ‘Lauf der Welt’ (The Way the World Runs), 1970 (seen here in detail) is one of three Roth pieces included and features a smashed chocolate Santa and Easter Bunny. Though he does it by crushing the gaiety from children’s treats, Roth easily lays low the commercialism of the holidays by displaying a graphic version of their aftermath.
‘Kultur ist ein Palast der aus Hundescheisse gebaut ist.’ Spelling out the phrase ‘Culture is a palace built from dog shit,’ in German gives the idea more gravitas. Putting it in blue neon, more consumer appeal. Both are relevant to artist collective Claire Fontaine’s use of this quote by Bertold Brecht via Theodore Adorno criticizing mass culture’s commercialization. How the art world’s own extreme commercialization in recent years changes the equation is the question begged by this piece. (‘Dogma,’ a show more or less about dogs and people runs at Metro Pictures through Aug 10th).
It’s not clever words or phrasing but a pretty, undulating shimmer that make German artist Juergen Drescher’s six-foot wide speech bubble attractive. Silver-plated laminated polystyrene reflects the gallery’s light and the viewer, drawing us into conversation that must surely be intended to charm or impress. (The group show ‘Systemic’ is at Carolina Nitsch through August 11th.)
Allen Ruppersberg’s ‘What Should I Do?’ from 1988 poses a simple but often relevant question. It relates to his ‘70s autobiographical project ‘The Novel that Writes Itself’ for which he sold the parts of individual characters to people he knew. By the 80s, he hadn’t resolved the novel and in its place, began accumulating a series of short, unrelated texts like this one. Though only a few words, it assumes a lot: that the speaker has an audience, agency and options. With almost no means, this silkscreen on steel portrays a life in flux. (At Zach Feuer through August 3rd).
‘Stand still like the hummingbird’ at David Zwirner is a group show as full of contradictions as it sounds, from Rodney Graham’s upside down oak tree photos to Robert Gober’s bronze slab painted to look exactly like a block of dirty Styrofoam. Musician and comedy writer Mason William’s 1967 life-size silkscreen of a Greyhound bus is a standout for its size alone, but the warning on the side of its box (displayed on a pedestal in front of the print) to avoid opening the artwork in the wind creates an amusing mental image with even more impact. (Through August 3rd).
“Only Queens Museum would have a pile of decomposing tree trunks and branches out front instead of a piece of contemporary sculpture,” I thought outside the QMA the other day. Signage quickly proved, however, that the pile is a sculpture titled ‘Elephant’ by NYU professor Hiroshi Sunairi, one of whose major projects has been worldwide distribution of seeds from trees that survived the Hiroshima bombing. These trimmings come from Flushing Meadows/Corona Park trees, however, and take the rough shape of a reclining elephant (the trunks are its legs). They not only take on the form of an animal known for its good memory, they create a new, mini ecosystem which, it’s hoped, will house new trees of its own.
Barbara Kasten’s photographed constructions from the mid ‘70s to the present at Bortolami add some welcome historical background to the recent vogue for abstract, set-up photography (think Sara VanDerBeek and Eileen Quinlan). Mirrors and light create enticing spatial ambiguity in some constructs, but not this one from ’82, in which awkwardness enlivens the image. A disappearing backdrop, hovering shapes, twisting light beams and tense wires lead the eye around an aesthetic obstacle course.
‘It’s Always Summer on the Inside’ at Anton Kern Gallery features some pretty dark fare, from the Coke logo emblazoned with the word ‘blood’ to one of Joyce Pensato’s sinister Batman paintings, making Mary Heilmann’s ‘Mojave Mirage,’ a blessed burst of candy-colored happiness. Her signature technique of adding extra canvas to the conventional rectangular shape works a treat as the sands of a flat desertscape suddenly swoop and swirl. (Through Aug 17th.)
John Dilg is no outsider artist (he’s an art professor at the University of Iowa) – though his pared down painting style may look unskilled it purges unnecessary details from his eerie, uninhabited landscapes. Muted colors and hazy lines add to the ambiguity of this scene titled, ‘A Religious Experience.’ Monumental in theme but not size (at 11 x 14 inches, it’s a little larger than book size), Dilg invites personal interpretations as he evokes a cascade of water or mountain capped by cloud a la Moses on Mt Sinai. (‘The Big Picture,’ a group show of small-scale painting, is on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co through July 27th.)
Israeli artist Adi Nes created this startlingly beautiful image as part of a series of staged photographs picturing a fictional kibbutz in Israel’s historically embattled Jezreel Valley. Dense orchard foliage creates a sense of intimacy with this sun-lit boy and his horse but brings with it a sense of our intrusion. (Adi Nes’ ‘The Village’ is at Jack Shainman Gallery through July 28th.)
Thomas Houseago’s ‘Lying Figure’ lurks in shadow on the High Line under the Standard, like a voyeur lying in wait for the hotel’s notorious exhibitionist guests. Composed of repulsive, fecal-looking coils cast in bronze, the character is nonetheless a commanding presence despite being laid low and missing his head. (On the High Line through March 2013).
‘Window with View of the Gowanus Heights,’ a tiny, meticulous diorama by Patrick Jacobs set into the gallery wall, imagines what paradise would look like if it suddenly materialized beyond the fire escape. It is part of the group exhibition, ‘Great Photographs: Scapes’ at Hasted Kraeutler, which includes huge photos of lush forests and burning woods, magnificent aerial views and vintage prints of the 19th century Colorado railroad. But it’s Jacobs’ humble ‘what if’ that really dares to dream big by turning a superfund site into a verdant Eden. (Though July 20th.)
With his swing set turned sculpture at D’Amelio Gallery, LA-based artist Mateo Tannatt exploits the shock value of mixing themes of car crashes and children, though after a moment, it seems just as likely that this auto fragment has been junked like so many old toys. Swinging can be relaxing or thrilling, and Tannatt deftly suggests both the insulating attraction of a car-like pod and the consequences of pushing it too far. (Though August 24th.)
Rather be in the Caribbean? The next best thing might be seeing ‘Caribbean: Crossroads of the World,’ a 200 year survey of visual culture from the islands at three NYC museums. At the Queens Museum, highlights include videos like ‘Complete Structure,’ by David Perez Karmadavis. Here, a blind Dominican man carries a handicapped Haitian woman through busy streets to allude to the relationship between their neighboring countries. Though reminiscent of Francis Alys on Mexico City streets, Karmadavis’s video captivates by concentrating on the dynamic between this unlikely duo. Watch the video on Vimeo. (Also at the Studio Museum in Harlem through Oct 21st and El Museo del Barrio through Jan 6th.)
In January, David Zwirner’s 519 W. 19th St location housed one of the most expensive to install and popular site-specific artworks ever shown there. Just seven months later, this prime real estate has been turned over to gallery employees (who happen to also be artists) for the group show, ‘People Who Work Here.’ A few participants might want to keep their day jobs, but among the standouts is this oil on wood portrait of Thomas Jefferson by David Ording titled, ‘Melanin.’ Based on a freckle-free 1805 original, the painting repatriates Jefferson’s pigmentation…perhaps at the expense of his dignity? (Through Aug 10th).
It isn’t news that art jargon can obscure more than it illuminates. But in Christian Jankowski’s video ‘Discourse News,’ the spectacle of a popular New York news anchor delivering the artist’s wordy definition of art from her usual desk in the NY1 studio makes visual art verbosity seem particularly absurd while also reminding viewers of how over-simplified normal news programs can be. (Jankowski’s latest solo show runs through July 28th at Friedrich Petzel Gallery.)
One detached, one accusatory, doll-like and dark, masculine and feminine at the same time, these have to be among the stranger mermaids out there. Conceived of by Aurie Ramirez, an artist working at Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center, a studio program for mentally, physically and developmentally disabled adult artists, these girlish ladies stick in the mind for their sheer weirdness. (‘Creative Growth’ is at Rachel Uffner Gallery through August 10th.)
They’re not exactly light summer fare, but Alex Van Gelder’s photos of gravestone, mausoleum and family tomb portraits are a visually stunning showcase of the effects of aging on pictures. Cracked and deteriorated, images like this untitled portrait are no longer about solemn memorials; now they demonstrate the aesthetic effects of disintegration, as if the hand of time wielded Photoshop for its own pleasure. (On view at Cheim & Read through Sept 8th.)
Christian Marclay’s 24 hour video installation ‘The Clock’ – praised as one of the standout artworks of the past decade – opened today at Lincoln Center as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Composed of thousands of film clips featuring timepieces, and synched with real time, it entertains while making viewers eerily aware of the time they’re spending watching it. Arrive early – lines snaked down the block to view it in Feb ’11, so check out the Festival’s twitter ‘line update.’ (Runs through Aug 1st).
Adolescent awkwardness has been Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s stock in trade, starting in the early 90s with photos of gangly youngsters on the beach and continuing through series focusing on young mothers, bullfighters, dancers and more. The surprise delivered by her retrospective, which opens June 29th at the Guggenheim Museum, is the marked shift in her subjects’ confidence level from the 90s to the present day; her career now memorializes a time before reality TV and social media primed kids for their moment in front of the camera.
The show opens with young bathers from South Carolina to Croatia posed on the beach and brilliantly lit to highlight pimples, pores and, most notably, bodies still in formation, often in ill-fitting or unflattering swimsuits. Nearly nude, the teens have nowhere to hide, and the tension is palpable, whether the subject is a pretty blonde in an orange bikini or her less manicured Belgian counterpart, whose robotic stance – hands to her sides, palms flat on her thighs – suggests she’s itching to get away.
Other subjects kept returning to Dijkstra, notably ‘Almerisa,’ who we meet as a six year old Bosnia refuge in a portrait taken at a Dutch asylum center. Two years later, her blank stare has changed to a smile, later to a knowing expression, and in her teen years to a challenging look. She gains confidence, fills out and by the time she’s twenty has her own baby. As amazing as Almerisa’s physical transformation happened to be (her morphing style choices make it hard to tell she’s the same girl sometimes) distilling her life into an image every year or so denies the complexities and variation of her experience. Watching Almerisa grow up is frustrating as we’re left to guess at what or who influenced her shifting appearance, how she assimilated or challenged her new Dutch environment.
In her pictures of Almerisa, or the Israeli twins Chen and Efrat, whose faces and characters undergo a remarkable change from tame tweens to club vixens and finally to softer featured young ladies in white tank tops, the teen age years look like a scary time without giving a great deal of insight into how the difficulties were navigated. From our after-the-face perspective, Dijkstra’s subjects are survivors. Somehow, sass and sullenness eventually departed, leaving young women who look more in control of their identities and self-presentation.
Dijkstra’s more contemporary subjects seem to have missed out on this phase, however. ‘The Buzz Club,’ A video from ’96-97 shot in a Liverpool club shows young people swaying or dancing with restraint to a beat. A little over a decade later, a second video titled ‘The Krazyhouse’ and also shot in Liverpool features five confident teens who could be in trails for ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ so confident and practiced are their moves.
In contrast to earlier work, in which impending transitions created drama (bullfighters range from gormless to wise, Olivier, the model-handsome French legionnaire developed from a sad-looking, vulnerable boy to a hardened man) or individuals like the bathers symbolized a moment of change, it’s become harder to see past the teens’ practiced exteriors. Though they’re more self-possessed, Dijkstra’s recent subjects can still elicit sympathy and concern via the daring cut of a dress or greasy-haired headbanging. But they, like a group of students thoughtfully considering Picasso paintings in one of Dijkstra’s more recent videos, have evolved into having, or at least appearing to have, more of their own agency, an upbeat final impression conveyed in the show’s final galleries.
As he did for his 2010 show, Jedediah Caesar pairs gorgeously hued cast-resin sculptures with drabber offerings in his latest outing, necessitating an unfortunate choice for viewers: Fall back on enjoying the now-familiar resin pieces, or try to engage the work that’s not as compelling.
Caesar creates the former by embedding found objects (in this case, rocks collected in the Mojave Desert) into blocks of variously colored resins, before slicing the forms like a loaf of bread to reveal whatever formal arrangements chance created. The latter are represented here by three bulky, sand-castle-like sculptures made of clay, stamped with the imprint of various hard-to-identify items sourced in New York. The impressions left behind include wedge shapes, dots and dents suggesting a little pig sticking its nose where it didn’t belong. Unlike the resin pieces, which have an insect-trapped-in-amber allure, the clay works seem inert, presenting a sense of disconnection in lieu of a poetic evocation of absence.
For some of his previous resin pieces, Caesar sawed off thin tiles to form stacks, or grids on the walls. Here the highlight consists of similar rectangles assembling into a baseboard around the gallery, proceeding in the order in which they were originally cut. This affords an opportunity to see how various patterns unfold and surprising associations arise. Klimt’s jewellike decorations come to mind, but at heart, Caesar’s process is about making the mundane seem extraordinary—or at least aesthetically pleasing.
When asked how he felt about his imitators in a 1962 interview, Alexander Calder replied, “They nauseate me.” Aaron Curry’s recent sculptures—which continue to blatantly quote the biomorphic forms pioneered by Calder, Frederick Kiesler and other High Modernists—suggest he wouldn’t mind irking his art-historical predecessors. The show’s tongue-in-cheek centerpiece, Buzz Kill (a hot-red rendition of a Calder-like stabile in aluminum), as well as other sculptures featuring curvy interlocking shapes à la Kiesler and Noguchi, seems eager to take down modernism’s utopian ideals without offering much in their place.
The space-hogging Buzz Kill—along with a grainy black-and-white wallpaper of Minimalist collage patterns that plasters the space, floor and ceiling included—hints at a major statement by aggressively altering the gallery’s townhouse setting. But the work fails to go beyond a kill-the-father treatment of modern art. A recurring image within the wallpaper resembles a straight razor at first glance, and a disembodied cardboard “head” briefly conjures dread, before the limp phallic protrusion it dangles from disperses any serious reaction.
The pieces in the foyer (small paper collages featuring a sci-fi sex-goddess type atop a primitive sculpture, and an alien head affixed to a nude female totem) prime viewers for a transgressive punch that the exhibition fails to deliver. Instead, we get more of the artist’s now-signature wooden sculptures composed of organic, interlocking shapes, including Dezvil, which doesn’t resemble an evil presence so much as a goofy moose with someone clinging to its back. The modernist hope of creating a harmonious society through art may be dead, but stasis and pastiche aren’t suitable replacements.
The big draw of Mark Dion’s exhibition at the members-only, Upper East Side Explorers Club is, unsurprisingly, the club itself. But Dion seems to have anticipated the distractions posed by the club’s exclusivity and the exotic appeal of its artifact displays from around the world by offering an installation of all-white sculptures that literally contrasts its colorful surroundings.
With his history of creating museum-like displays that question how we categorize information and pursue scientific enquiry, Dion seems like the perfect artist for the Clark Art Institute’s commission to commemorate the 100th anniversary of a publication by Singer Sewing Machine heir Robert Sterling Clark (whose brother’s old residence now houses the club) documenting his 1908 specimen-gathering expedition to northern China.
Dion responded by crafting a catalogue of items representing those taken on the Clark expedition, including barrels and boxes of supplies, tools arranged carefully on a long table, a Chinese rock squirrel scaled up to eight times its normal size, a wild boar and a cooking fire. Sculpted in white celluclay (and white furry material for the squirrel), each item stands out as particularly unnatural amid the ‘Trophy Room’s’ hunting lodge décor.
The barrels recall Gary Simmons’ white backwoods liquor brewing stills, both of which take objects out of context to question the context itself, while the huge squirrel is hard to take seriously, looking like a giant stuffed animal from the polar regions. Removed from their native locations and uses, Dion’s whited-out objects are made unavoidably strange, and they resist absorption into a narrative of daring discovery.
Join art critic, college teacher and tour guide, Merrily Kerr on a small group gallery tour (limited to ten or fewer participants) for an intimate exploration of New York’s best art. At each venue, Merrily gives information on the galleries themselves and the artwork on display – questions and conversation are encouraged!
Tours last two hours and take place regardless of the weather. Advance registration is required to reserve your place and can be made by visiting newyorkarttours.com.
Our itinerary will showcase eight of the most important and talked about exhibitions of the moment, including an energizing mix of artwork in different media by emerging talents and internationally acclaimed artists.
Meet at 508 West 26th Street. Tour departs at 2pm. $40 pp in cash or check on the day.
Join art critic, college teacher and tour guide, Merrily Kerr on a small group gallery tour (limited to ten or fewer participants) for an intimate exploration of New York’s best art. At each venue, Merrily gives information on the galleries themselves and the artwork on display – questions and conversation are encouraged!
Tours last two hours and take place regardless of the weather. Advance registration is required to reserve your place and can be made by visiting newyorkarttours.com.
Our tour will include exhibitions at veteran downtown galleries and outside-the-box projects, guaranteeing a lively mix of unconventional artwork and unique spaces.
Meet in front of 235 Bowery (The New Museum). Tour departs at 2pm. $40pp in cash or check on the day.
No artist stereotype is as persistent as the garret-living starving artist, but a runner up with a more contemporary feel must be the artist trapped in the studio, ruminating on his or her surroundings. Bruce Nauman’s floor-pacing, wall-bouncing videos from the 60s and ‘Mapping the Studio…’ from ’01 give the artist’s space itself a role in the creative process. Jeanne Silverthorne casts her studio floor as a means of ‘archaeology’ while artists like Ellen Altfest have created meticulous renderings of paint-splattered floors, plants and views from the window of her studio.
London-based artist Elizabeth McAlpine also reproduces scenes from the studio, but obscures their origins in ‘The Map of Exactitude,’ her first New York solo show. The exhibition features mysteriously shaped sculptures combining organic and geometric forms and even more eccentric-looking framed images on paper that hint at architectural diagrams which, in a way, they are. McAlpine’s sculptures are actually casts of the ceilings and corners of another artist’s studio, which she then made into pinhole cameras with multiple tiny openings.
Photosensitive paper folded to the dimensions of the casts’ interiors records multiple views that are often so abstract, they don’t really give much insight into a place that is intended for art making. Instead, McAlpine puts the artistic process itself on display by exhibiting her tools and the resulting images – sculpture-like cameras – on equal footing. Using the peculiarities of the space to make artwork about the space could be obnoxiously self-referential, but comes across instead as a thoughtful reflection on the process of pursuing ideas and discerning meaning in the studio.
Elizabeth McAlpine at Laurel Gitlen, 261 Broome Street, Show extended through July 1, 2012.
Virginia Overton’s habit of using unexpected objects to challenge our experiences of a particular space would seem well suited to the Kitchen. Yet the five sculptures she presents in this exhibit—made from steel pipes, two-by-fours, pedestals and other items collected behind the scenes at this venerable nonprofit—don’t greatly alter our sense of the institution, though they do reflect on the relevance of Minimalism today.
In the past, Overton’s sculptures have sometimes involved startling incongruences, but the pieces here—like a collection of well-used rigging poles propped against the wall and lit to create an elegant installation—look more attractive than out of place. Others carry on a more overt conversation with 1960s Minimalist art, such as the strongly spotlit, diagonally wall-mounted steel bar that recalls a Flavin fluorescent tube, or the floor-bound array of creaky two-by-fours that noisily raise one’s awareness of his or her footsteps, à la Carl Andre.
These two pieces and others touch on Minimalism’s penchant for interacting with or altering the exhibition space, but Overton ostensibly wants to elicit a deeper understanding of the venue’s identity (in this case, as a gallery and a theater). By quoting Minimalist aesthetics, she brings to mind concerns with light, space and viewer participation, all topics clearly relevant to the Kitchen’s history as a performance center. Considering the highly experimental nature of that history, however, Overton could have taken more risks, instead of just settling for tasteful arrangements.
Join art critic, college teacher and tour guide, Merrily Kerr on a small group tour of the biggest museum show of the season, the Whitney Biennial. Find out why critics are calling ‘the show everyone loves to hate,’ one of the best ever.
In early May, Merrily will guide you to the best Chelsea gallery shows of the moment, including a jungle gym-like installation composed of crocheted netting and plastic balls by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto and the late Richard Avedon’s monumental photo murals.
‘Best of the Whitney Biennial,’ Sunday, April 29, 2012, 11:30am – 1pm
“Artists are taking matters into their own hands,” says New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz, “…resetting the agenda, and fighting back against an art world that had been focused on selling, buzz and bigness.” Join Merrily to find out what the buzz is about on a small group tour focusing on the visual art in a show dense with performance and film.
SPACE IS LIMITED to the first six participants to register with Merrily by visiting newyorkarttours.com. Meet in the lobby of the Whitney Museum, (945 Madison Ave at 75th Street). Please purchase tickets prior to the day of our tour at whitney.org or arrive at least 20 minutes in advance to purchase a ticket to this extremely popular show. The museum opens at 11am and the tour departs at 11:30am. $40 pp in cash or check on the day. Does not include museum admission ($18 general admission, $12 seniors 62+).
‘Best Contemporary Art in Chelsea,’ Saturday, May 5, 2012, 11am – 1pm
Our itinerary will showcase eight of the most important and talked about exhibitions of the moment, including an energizing mix of artwork in different media by emerging talents and internationally acclaimed artists.
With space limited to ten or fewer participants, Merrily’s small group tours are an intimate exploration of New York’s best art. At each venue, Merrily gives information on the galleries themselves and the artwork on display – questions and conversation are encouraged!
This tour will last two hours and take place regardless of the weather.
SPACE IS LIMITED to the first ten participants to register at newyorkarttours.com. Meet at 508 West 26th Street. Tour departs at 11am. $40 pp in cash or check on the day.
Francesca Woodman changes from girl to woman within seconds in the first two pictures displayed in her retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim: first we meet a fresh-faced kid wearing a billowy flower-patterned tunic and her signature Mary Janes, making a motion as if she’s holding a clapper board and about to shout ‘action.’ Next, we see her nude lower body coming from a cupboard, the tilting camera catching her as if in a fugitive act. Taken in her freshman year at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975-6, the precocious Woodman already explores the signature themes of her short career – non-narrative scenarios in which her young, perfect body interacts with the crumbling architecture of a Providence house or an old warehouse-like space in Rome (during her Junior year abroad).
Whether she’s lying curled up on old floorboards under a heavy wooden door propped precariously against the wall or straddling an old fireplace mantle leaning against the wall, Woodman attempts impossible hiding acts that ironically expose her to both prying eyes and the danger of falling props (in later pictures, we see a snake slithering across her outstretched arm and threat arrives again in the form of a wasp on her neck).
Her interaction with the space of the dilapidated room she’s in (in one, a view out the window shows a presentable house next door) resonates with Gordon Matta Clark’s radical interventions in abandoned or otherwise neglected spaces. But Woodman’s nude or partly clothed body (looking very unlikely to have ripped a door from its hinges or detached a mantel) forces unlikely connections with domestic space rather than destroying it. In one image, she covers herself modestly at breast and pubic area with two jagged sections of ripped wallpaper that cover her face and create a flattening of space that merges her body with the wall.
Using her body and physical surroundings as materials, Woodman aligns with late 70s conceptual art and body art contexts in the show’s most surprising images, such as one alarmingly masochistic image showing her at close range with clothespins attached to her nipples and abdomen. Whether this is a larger comment on womens’ bodies or sexual behavior, references to sexuality are rare, despite her frequent nudity. So much so, in fact, that when a’79-‘80 image cropped to exclude her head shows her clutching three sizeable zucchini, the allusion is so out of place that it’s more funny than it might be in another context. Later, she poses in a jeweled belt or dons multiple garter belts like an overdecorated Bellocq model, but the photos feature her curves more as formal compositions than critiques or self-exploration.
In three pictures, Woodmans lets a man into her mostly solitary, female world. All titled, ‘Charlie the Model’ they feature a heavyset man clothed, crouching nude while peering in a mirror, and smiling through a circular glass while a nude Woodman moves in a blur behind him. Perhaps because of his size or his smiles, he dominates, which put viewers in mind of his personality rather than Woodman’s retiring character and emphasizes how her more characteristic images don’t really aim to explore identity. The closest to narrative or role-play she comes is in an early photo series (exhibited in an easy-to-overlook passageway between galleries) titled, ‘Portrait of a Reputation,’ a five-image artist book from 1976 in which Woodman poses with hand over her heart, with or without clothing and with the outline of her hand eventually degenerating into two handprints suggesting an assault.
It’s a Woodman moment in New York now, with a show of the artist’s late work at Marian Goodman Gallery and the monumental ‘Blueprint for a Temple’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s contemporary photo galleries. Woodman appeared to be in a transitional stage when she took her own life in 1981 at the age of 22, making larger images and experimenting with blueprinting processes and collaged images. In ‘Zig Zag’ from 1980, she creates a zigging and zagging line by linking photos of bent arms, v-shaped dress backs, scissoring legs, and more expanding her subject matter to include other people while still exploring the body and pursing formal relationships in her art. Cruelly, seeing so much of her work whets the appetite for more, but true to the Guggenheim’s purpose, offers opportunity to reconsider the context for photography in late 70s America.
My first stop at this year’s Armory Show (New York’s 4 day art fair extravaganza on Hudson River Piers 92 and 94) was the new WSJ Media Lounge – a spacious theater offering respite from the milling crowds and endless white cubicles. Inside, Danish artist group ‘Osloo’ offered up possibilities for what they call “public spiritualism” through music and lectures, as they did last summer for their national pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennial aboard their floating platform. It wasn’t clear where the spiritualism lay, but the vibe was definitely not commercialism – a palpable contrast to what lay beyond the lounge.
Performance – both on and off the official program – was in evidence here and there, notably in Marina Abramovic’s ‘Bed for Human Use,’ in which a woman in a lab-coat lay prone on an uncomfortable looking bed face-to-face with a chunk of quartz crystal at Sao Paulo’s Luciana Brito Galeria.
Over in Armory Focus: The Nordic Countries, curious onlookers watched as a young woman sitting on a fur rug in front of a mini-teepee stapled canvas to a stretcher in the light of pentagram at Stockholm’s Fruit and Flower Deli. Meanwhile, front and center in Italy/China/France–based Galleria Continua was a vast mirror by Michelangelo Pistoletto which seemed like a tempting invitation for narcissistic visitors to put on a show of their own.
Armory Show Commissioned Artist Theaster Gates wasn’t manning his Pier 94 Café installation of school chairs and desks rescued from a Chicago school, designed to be a place for him to ‘hold court.’ But in nearby Chicago/Berlin gallery Kavi Gupta’s space, Gates’ white concrete rectangular columns, glass and wood cubes and section of framed chalkboard also evoked missing kids and teachers, leaving the history and future of the school where he sourced his materials an open and worrying question.
And speaking of missing, Michael Riedel’s installation at New York’s David Zwirner’s booth was easy to miss, but worth checking out. Wallpapering one end wall was an image that appeared to be a reflection of the rest of the booth – three simple, large silkscreens – making for a daringly ephemeral installation in one of the Show’s prime spots.
As the reviews come out, Cindy Sherman’s retrospective at MoMA (open Feb 26 – June 11) seems set to break ‘best-loved show’ records. Universal critical adoration usually arouses suspicion of cliquish agreeability. But Sherman takes the very notion of conformity to fashion and self-presentation -negotiated through society’s expectations – as her subject matter. Absurdity and grotesquery appear at every turn in this show, making Sherman an uber-critic whose acuity forces the following homages from New York’s major cultural commentators:
Roberta Smith, New York Times:
Though Smith takes umbrage with the show’s selection and non-chronological arrangement, calling it “magnificent if somewhat flawed,” Sherman herself is “…an increasingly vehement avenging angel waging a kind of war with the camera, using it to expose what might be called both the tyranny and the inner lives of images, especially the images of women that bombard and shape all of us at every turn.”
Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine:
Saltz also gives Sherman fighting cred, calling her “…a warrior artist – one who has won her battles so decisively that I can’t imagine anyone ever again embarking on a lifetime of self-portraiture without coming up against her.” He adds, “I think of Cindy Sherman as an artist who only gets better.”
Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker:
Schjeldahl affords Sherman the highest praise, saying, “The mysteries are irreducible…they qualify Sherman, to my mind, as the strongest and finest American artist of her time.” Pointing out that delusion allows a disconnect between “inner feeling” and “outer attributes” he adds that, “…Sherman makes hard, scary truths sustainable as only great artists can.”
Halle calls the MoMA retrospective “…the best show I’ve seen there since the Gerhard Richter survey [in 2002], and probably the best exhibit I’ve seen anywhere in a while…The way I’d put it is that Sherman uses glamour and horror to send up and celebrate the feminine mystique, including her own. She quantifies and categorizes the notion of one’s appearance, which fashion also does. But unlike Anna Wintour, Sherman isn’t in the business of marketing the cultural; she’s in the business of laying it bare.”
The biggest surprise in Cindy Sherman’s major career retrospective, opening to previews today (and officially on Feb 26th) at the Museum of Modern Art, is that there are few surprises. It testifies to Sherman’s stature and influence that so much of the work in the show – 171 photos from the 1977-80 Untitled Film stills to the most recent send-ups of society matrons – is so familiar that it’s hard to even find the critical distance to reconsider it.
What does emerge is Sherman’s consistent and merciless pillorying of character types from the fashion victim to the aging coquette in galleries arranged by series – history portraits, centerfolds, etc – or by theme – fashion, carnival, abjection. By comparison, the Untitled Film Stills (appearing in their entirety) appear kind by virtue of their hidden fakery and purposefully glamorized subjects.
Grotesquery – not limited to the fairy tale or sex series – is a heavy component of most of the work, whether in the repellent muscles of a prosthetic cleavage or the big hair and garish makeup of a woman trying desperately to hang on to her looks. Sherman’s caricatures let most of us off the hook – at least until we start wearing caftans to lounge around our loggias – by representing ‘other people’ who’ve lost their style compass.
Sherman’s early work – seen at the beginning and end of the show – belies such distancing, specifically a stop motion animated short film depicting Sherman as a paper doll who selects her own outfit only to be returned to her case by a giant hand. The artist’s ‘hand of God’ is now aided by Photoshop, as she alters facial details like those on an 18 foot high mural at the gallery entrance. But though technology lends Sherman the potential for serious distortion, she holds back, continuing to tweek the conventions of dress and representation to which we adhere to a greater or lesser degree.
Can a museum exhibition claiming to “embrace the energy of this generation’s (international artists in their 20s and 30s) urgencies” compete with still fresh images and reports of Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street protests? While socially aware, The New Museum’s second Triennial, ‘The Ungovernables’ demonstrates less of a radical edge than a persistent questioning of the status quo and power structures in artists’ home countries around the world. More of a chipping away than an uprising, for better or worse the show largely dispenses with aesthetic pleasure or craftsmanship in favor of often personal engagements with broader cultural or national identities.
The standouts include:
Hassan Khan, b. ’75, lives Cairo. Jewel, ’10 – This mesmerizing video choreographing a two-man dance-off in traditional Cairo style is the show-stopper.
Cinthia Marcelle, b. 74, Brazil. The Century, ’11 – Barrels, hardhats and more objects are hurled down a street in a video orchestrated by Marcelle, offering some of that talked about urgency and exciting the senses but without reference to any particular conflict.
The Propeller Group, founded 2006, Ho Chi Minh City. TVC Communism, ’11 – On a circle of five monitors, five ad execs from an international agency hired by the Group hash out the intricacies of rebranding Communism, a fascinating conjuncture between competing ideologies.
Pilvi Takala, b. 81, lives Amsterdam and Istanbul. The Trainee, ’08 – For a month, Takala posed as an intern at an accounting firm raising the ire of fellow workers as she sat motionless at a desk or rode the elevator. Their irritation seems to be the point, and while this illumination of social and workplace expectations yields results that are hardly surprising, it’s an amusing scenario for us, especially when Takala tells chagrined employees that she’s ‘working in her head.’
Jose Antonio Vega Macotela, b. ’80, lives Amsterdam, Mexico City. Time Divisa ’10 – Over a four-year period, Vega Macotela exchanged labor with Mexico City prison inmates, completing agreed upon assignments simultaneous that included smuggling in items in return for a map showing the route that 100,000 pesos took inside the prison.
Slavs and Tatars, founded 2006, Eurasia. Prayway, ‘12 – A communal, ‘riverbed’ seat by the collective Slavs and Tatars appears to be an enormous folded sheet of metal resembling an open (prayer) book with a Persian rug arranged on top and a blue neon glow beneath – a Star-Trek channeling exercise in incongruity that should get conversation started.
Figurative sculpture of fantastical creatures being rare in Chelsea, Monica Cook’s first New York solo show starts out as strange, but gets more eccentrically alluring. A monkey-like character by the door sets the tone with a dignified look in his eye but a half-finished, diseased-looking body. His simian brethren, in sculptures, photos and a stop-animation video, are equally grotesque, cobbled together assortments of fur and plastic. They recall David Altmejd’s gaudy giants, but elicit more sympathy.
A parent-and-child grouping and a female with her dog hint at the possibility that the beasts are stand-ins for us humans. This suggestion is confirmed by the video, in which the critters court and mate in a manner recalling Cook’s excellent 2010 YouTube Play contribution (not in the show), featuring romantic encounters driven by bestial desires. Things work out better in Cook’s animal kingdom, however, as ulterior motives fall by the wayside and, after a series of shy glances, a male magically impregnates a female by merely proffering her a bauble.
The fact that this pretty seed was torn from a fetus-like pod, or that the female attracts the male by munching on an olive-like oval pulled from the skin of her leg, is the repulsive flip side to these creatures’ damaged beauty. Missing flesh reveals skeletons cleverly constructed from coiled phone cords, internal organs made of glass balls and baboon bottoms filigreed with lingerie-like ornamentation. Despite their disconcerting appearance, their rituals of attraction and reproduction are sincere and absurdly simple, offering a kind of prelapsarian seduction of their own.
Contrary to its title, there’s nothing particularly subversive about ‘Spies in the House of Art,’ the Metropolitan Museum’s enticingly titled exhibition of its contemporary photography collection, which opened yesterday. Photos, films and videos take museum display and visitor responses as subject matter, but the mood of the best pieces is more fond criticism than biting institutional critique. Still, by bringing the myriad ways we navigate the museum experience to our conscious mind, the show counteracts purely passive viewing pleasure.
A standout is Francesca Woodman’s 1980 ‘Blueprint for a Temple.’ Completed a year before her untimely death and marking a major shift from her small scale photos, this 15 foot high photo collage of a Greek temple supported by her friends dressed as caryatids and printed on blue architectural blueprint paper playfully remakes ancient culture while forces a connection between past and present that resonates with the Met’s newly crafted Moroccan court.
The show’s second major highlight, Rosalind Nashashibi’s and Lucy Skaer’s 16mm film ‘Flash in the Metropolitan Museum’ from 2006 was shot at night with a flash strobe as the artists moved through the museum, momentarily illuminating Greek ceramics one minute, African or Medieval European sculpture the next. Unclear images, seen for a moment in varying scales and unflattering angles turn usual museum display on its head while creating an alluringly mysterious anthropological study that is equal parts ‘Blair Witch Project’ and ‘Mixed Up File of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler.’
Less familiar work comes across as amusing and fresh, like Laura Larson’s photograph of a display in the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia which delights in pointing out the tasteless clash of style in a Regency settee, a wallpapered landscape and patterned marble floor. Sophie Calle’s text and image of a gender-ambiguous blind person describing the ‘terrific ass’ of a sculpture in Paris’ Rodin museum invites reflection on our own ideas about beauty.
By comparison, a photo of a shelf of stored artworks by Louise Lawler, an image of a painting by Tim Davis with his flash blotting out the subject’s face and a video by Lutz Bacher following a young adolescent through the Picasso Museum in Paris look at art stored, reproduced or visited in unexpected if not particularly compelling ways. In a sense, the Met itself undermines the less nuanced work in the show – the stunning artwork and displays encountered on the way to the 2nd floor photo galleries are a tough act to follow.
Photos of Texas death-row prisoners’ last meals, giant prints of dead insects and sculptures of diseased flowers (titled, for instance, after a poem from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal or a U.K. waste-management company) confirm that original Young British Artist Mat Collishaw still traffics in sensation. Surprisingly, the most gratuitous subject—the last meals—proves to be the most thought-provoking, despite the fact that it, too, reflects Collishaw’s fondness for grotesquery.
Collishaw rightly calculates that our morbid fascination will attract us to these photos of french fries, steak, cinnamon rolls and other repasts, dimly lit to recall Dutch still-life painting, but mainly looking gray and unappetizing. Still, evoking this last moment of pleasure does create twinges of sympathy for the condemned, whose orders range from a dish of yogurt to a heaving pile of food.
Vitrines of waxy-looking, boil-covered, meat-pink amaryllis, lilies and other flora growing in toxic soil are so blatantly gross that they kill any such nuance of feeling. A video animating decaying flowers buzzing with flies in a comically misty dead forest does a bit more than the sculptures to suggest the dark enchantment hinted at in Baudelaire’s title, but setting the flatscreen behind an 18th-century altarpiece seems like a mere ploy to stir the pot with a tangential religious reference. Collishaw gets it right when he mines the contradictions in humanity’s capacity for base thoughts and actions. But when he simply represents it, he produces more of the same.
Relational aesthetics took a beating last fall as critics decried participatory artworks like Carsten Holler’s three story slide at the New Museum and MoMA’s installation of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s free lunch. The visitor’s physical experience is also key to Doug Wheeler’s installation which opened today at David Zwirner Gallery and recreates a 1975 piece made in Milan by the influential So Cal ‘Light and Space’ artist. But the hushed environment, limited to ten people at a time and entered after donning white booties so as to keep the floor pristine, is all about aesthetics, and less about interrelating with your fellow gallery goers.
The lighting in the installation changes in intensity and color as it simulates the transitions from dawn to day to dusk, slowly revealing where the boundaries of the flat floored, egg-shaped room are. But even in the strongest light, it’s a strain to make out where gallery wall ends and floor begins; only the toes can tell as you feel the floor’s upward slope. The impulse is to find the spot where your senses are most confused.
Visitors who stayed in the gallery the longest this morning inched their way to the front and center of the installation and stood looking into an optical illusion – a space that appeared to extend to infinity. The sensation was like peering into a deep fog or a snowstorm (under comfortable conditions) as my perception of space kept shifting to make sense of what I was seeing.
Wheeler’s installation recalls James Turrell’s installations, in which visitors approach a shape on the wall only to realize that it’s a rectangle of recessed light. Here, the experience is more intimate – like entering into the space occupied by light rather than gazing in from the outside. Uta Barth’s photographs of light come to mind, as do Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets but both treat light and infinity as more concrete subjects than Wheeler does with what he calls his ‘molecular mist.’ The scale and ambition of Wheeler’s project won’t be matched again soon in New York; catch it while you can and arrive early to avoid lines.
For more background, read Randy Kennedy’s Jan 15th NYT article.
The centerpiece of Uta Barth’s latest solo show is a photo series depicting a continually morphing strip of light beneath her living-room curtains, a preposterously simple conceit which nevertheless yields complex optical illusions. As this diaphanous sliver shifts course over an afternoon, it variously resembles a snake, a line on an EKG or a trail of cigarette smoke, all the while transforming the space between the camera, the curtain and the window into an ambiguous territory where volumes flatten or swell, and light can pass for white paint.
Two glimpses of Barth’s hand arranging the curtain folds remind us of her agency, but it’s nature’s hand that propels the work’s attractively simple narrative as the sun’s changing position gradually increases the width of the band. At this time of year, as the onset of winter makes Barth’s invitation to contemplate sunlight especially attractive, the work entices us into the pleasures of solitary idleness that are at odds with the pace of everyday urban life.
In the back room, by comparison, a second group of photographs depicting built-in closets and drawers in the artist’s bedroom seems coldly architectural. Each image is emblazoned by squares or rectangles of light cast from an opposite window: One features a particularly bright patch that suggests celestial or alien visitation; another, a band of shadow over a door latch, creates the illusion that the surface of the print is scratched. But otherwise, the real drama of transformation takes place in the front gallery.
Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 839, Dec 1-7, 2001.
Sarah Braman’s trademark combinations of disparate materials in precarious arrangements achieve a new level of gravity with the incorporation of components from a cut-up camper. In her debut at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, hefty chunks of the vehicle act as both painting surface and gritty foil to the clean-cut cubes of gorgeous blue and purple Plexiglas to which they are sometimes conjoined. The resulting juxtapositions defy expectations as the funky, roughed-up trailer becomes impersonal, and the slick geometric elements charm with their transparent beauty.
In a sculpture near the gallery entrance, the back of the RV creates an archway with two Plexi boxes forming an L. Tinted the color of limousine windows, the latter are doodled with spray paint, recalling Sterling Ruby’s defaced pedestal pieces, but without the air of menace. If this treatment somewhat softens these cold, corporate forms, a lack of any trace of habitation within the camper does the opposite, making it makes seem less like a repository of past adventures, à la Mike Nelson’s airstream installation at 303 Gallery last spring, and more like one of Gordon Matta-Clark’s deconstructions of an abandoned place.
In a piece titled 8pm, a smaller fragment of the camper is sandwiched between two aquarium-like shapes, while a larger nearby structure in blue, pink and purple Plexi recalls an empty Damien Hirst shark tank crossed with an Anne Truitt. But it is in Braman’s misleadingly titled and exceedingly lively Coffin that viewers are finally offered the delayed gratification of imagining past lives. Here the Plexiglas takes something of a backseat to a segment of camper laid with a mirrored floor, creating a boudoir-like stage for memories.
Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 837, November 17-23, 2011.
In his New York gallery debut, British artist Tris Vonna-Michell explores the stories of little-known historical figures (an East German border guard, a forgotten concrete poet) in a group of distinct but linked installations that collect, sift and reconfigure information to create intriguing, and charmingly quixotic, alternative histories. Despite deliberately low-tech, low-key visuals—slide shows of bleak urban scenes, displays of texts on tables and shelves—the artist’s soundtrack of urgently delivered word streams provides an irresistible hook.
In the darkened front gallery, a voice speaks pressingly about magnetic tapes, tanks and Russians, while a projector slowly flashes images of the former no-man’s-land near the Berlin Wall. Texts spell out the story of a young soldier canonized by the East German state for being shot by defectors escaping west in 1962, but the actual details are left untold because, as the piece suggests, truth was subsumed by official legend long ago.
Elsewhere, Vonna-Michell tells of his not entirely successful attempt to track down an obscure French avant-garde poet, Henri Chopin (a former neighbor), and also recalls the 1989 mass demonstrations around Stasi headquarters in Leipzig, as nervous authorities shredded incriminating files inside. Seamlessly segueing from their frantic efforts to destroy records to Kurt Schwitters’s collage technique, Vonna-Michell demonstrates that while none of us may ever completely know the past, it can be engaged, at least, on one’s own terms.
Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 832, October 13-19, 2011.
Four years after Matthew Ronay overhauled his style from comic grotesque to soberly spiritual, his ambitious new installation feels like an apotheosis. Dramatically veiled behind a huge black curtain, an enchanted forest populated by birds of prey, totemic figures and fertility symbols invites pleasurable discovery and even a sense of wonder at the level of detail, imagination and effort involved. A lingering question remains, however, as to what you’re supposed to do with this otherworldly space.
Considering that Ronay’s previous pieces have included sculptures of hamburgers alongside delicately arching penises with bites taken out of them, it’s hard to believe that the artist is being entirely straight-faced here. In the gallery handout, he suggests that he wants to give gallerygoers an opportunity to transcend the quotidian by offering them a genuine spiritual experience. Yet with all the papier-mâché volcanoes, trees made of Ikea-like prints, diminutive beings and the cutest owls this side of Disney lying about, they’ll have to stop chuckling first.
Abundant mushroom imagery (growing on felled trees, hanging in chains) suggests some sort of transport of the mind. But it’s the commanding Masculine Pillar—a robed column with a giant eyelike symbol—that grabs attention by virtue of appearing to conceal someone inside, as it did on the show’s opening night, when Ronay occupied it. Which is a reminder that while forests are classic settings for fantastical tales, characters are what make a story, so Ronay’s installation feels a little hollow when it’s empty. Without the presence of a person, the installation is like a stage set, and all the totems simply props with no ritual significance to add to their relevance. Thus, the piece’s potential to achieve the artist’s hoped-for transcendence is diminished.
Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 823, August 4-10, 2011.
Mona Hatoum’s 1999 sculpture Home (featuring kitchen implements with wires running out of them, accompanied by the sound of pulsating current) inspired this unsettling exhibition plumbing the darker side of the places in which we live. High on anxiety but regrettably low on risk factor, this hit parade of big-name artists still affords the pleasure of reconnecting with iconic artworks about painful circumstances.
Family relations simmer in the show’s best pieces. Louise Bourgeois’s claustrophobic house teeming with phallic/breast/fungal forms and Rachel Whiteread’s black urethane mattress creased by a labial fold conjure a dread matched by a Luc Tuymans painting of place settings that foretells the drama of a family gathering.
Violence spills over in Gregor Schneider’s photos of a strung-up sex doll and in Mamma Andersson’s painting of a disordered bedroom with ominously bloodred furniture. But the most disturbing pieces hint at souls lost to the chaos (Jeff Wall’s photo of a disheveled character standing by the door of his decrepit domicile) or obsessive order (a Thomas Ruff living-room scene) of their lives.
Even a cheery painting of a beach house by Maureen Gallace turns suspiciously, unbelievably idealized in this context, while a whimsical paintbrush by Michael Brown, its handle crafted from melted Neil Young records, seems primed for a cover-up. Viewed from the right angle, David Altmejd’s plaster sculpture of a fantastical lair with dangling staircases turns out to be the head of some deranged giant. Such twists add intrigue to this domestic thriller of a group show.
If it weren’t for the schooner by the doorway at Paul Sietsema’s first New York gallery solo, I’d have missed the boat. Not-quite-right details reveal that what looks like an aged old photograph of a sailboat is in fact a meticulous drawing that demonstrates in a flash how painterly skill adds value and interest to an artwork. In this otherwise aesthetically restrained but intellectually stimulating show, Sietsema allows trace evidence of his hand in pieces that look digitally produced or printed, questioning his own role as a craftsman in the digital age and floating an inconclusive but engaging argument that artistic survival means cleverly thwarting expectations.
In the past, Sietsema has exhibited films of sculptural objects; the drawings here allow us the intimacy to appreciate his handiwork. Two untitled pieces resembling expressive abstractions in black ink also include depictions of bottles of Krylon ‘Short Cuts’ paint, humorously highlighting how Sietsema doesn’t take shortcuts in his labor intensive, cerebral, and non-emotive project. At the bottom of one, the phrase “broken down and experimental…broken down beauty,” bespeaks the pleasure of piecing together Sietsema’s deconstructions.
Two pieces titled, ‘Painter’s Mussel’ refer to shells used to hold paint but show Sietsema flexing his intellectual muscle in complicated pictures of disassembled framed photographs drawn to resemble photographic negatives which appear to have been printed. From the aged photograph of the boat and images that pit old technology (the brush) with new, to two pieces replicating the dated medium of newspaper pages (including an article on Obama reversing a Bush policy) Sietsema suggests that with passage of time ascendency fades – the smart artist adapts by working outside of traditional expectations.
Condensed version of this review published in Time Out New York, issue 815, June 2-8, 2011.
Laurel Nakadate cried every day of 2010. And whether she was in her apartment, in an airplane lavatory or on a beach, she captured the result in 365 photographs, meant to document her effort, as she put it, to “deliberately take part in sadness.” Contrary to this suggestion of shared unhappiness, however, the images portray her in isolation. Often nude or semiclothed, she plays the role of a vulnerable woman needing rescue, appearing to offer her body in a compromised sexual exchange for attention. Sensational, narcissistic, yet incisively illuminating in some respects, Nakadate’s project is an uncomfortable portrait of alienation.
It also tests our willingness to indulge in so much self-inflicted pain. The seasons and the artist’s travels introduce a minor narrative arc, but there’s no resolution to her misery. Unlike Tehching Hsieh’s yearlong performances tracking the effects of self-imprisonment, or Eleanor Antin’s photo diary of being on a diet, Nakadate undergoes no transformation and promotes no politics, personal or otherwise. And unlike the lovelorn Sophie Calle’s exhaustive investigation of a Dear John letter, there is no catharsis.
Instead, the act of repetition dominates, and the mind wanders to questions about Nakadate and her motives: How does she make herself cry? Is she merely acting? What goes on off-camera: Does she happily go about her day until the requisite moment to shed tears? Part of “365 Days” is on view at MoMA PS1, where the photographs are huge, implying an unwarranted monumentality to the artist’s questionably authentic emotion. Even in this more modest installation of smaller-size prints in a tight grid arrangement, Nakadate is still center stage, limiting any possible commentary on collective grief or widespread disaffection.
Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 815, June 2-8, 2011.
Angel Otero’s unconventional process—fashioning assemblages or lively paintings using “skins” of oil paint applied to glass before being peeled off—is the draw in his New York solo debut. An awkward anthropomorphic object perched on a chintzy armchair, messy Expressionist interiors in garish colors and one uninspired composition with text demonstrate the young artist’s competing sensibilities. Far better are Otero’s large-scale abstractions—action paintings in which paint itself seems to have agency, shooting off the edge of the canvas, bunching dramatically or seductively veiling its support.
The show’s smallest and punchiest piece—a black number whose surface is concertinaed like a crushed soda can—has an affinity with Piero Manzoni’s pleated white canvas, but in place of purity there is an excess of paint, piled up in waves as if to hide some (perhaps failed?) experiment beneath. Likewise, a blocky form wrapped in streaks of yellow and black traffics in concealment, channeling Christo’s early wrapped objects—minus, unfortunately, the mystery.
The play between a vibrantly colored surface and an occasionally glimpsed support that is waxy and dead is more alive than, say, Steven Parrino’s twisted and pulled canvases, and aligns Otero with Fabian Marcaccio’s use of paint as a sculpting material. Recurrent blurring also recalls Gerhard Richter’s scraped abstract canvases, but unlike Richter, Otero’s intent is to build, not cancel out. His undulating skins re-create the drama of a hastily drawn curtain, awaking the senses and offering a celebration of paint’s possibilities.
Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 807, March 31 – April 6, 2011.