The group shows of summer are nearly upon us, offering a unique opportunity to discover new artists and enjoy familiar artists in new contexts. Paula Cooper Gallery leads the pack this year with, ‘An Ongoing Low-Grade Mystery,’ an exhibition of mostly minimal artworks that opened earlier this month. It sounds preposterous for a self-respecting gallery exhibition, but the show’s premise – all artworks are predominantly red – somehow manages to work. On a decidedly more serious note, on June 9th, James Cohan Gallery opens ‘A Brighter Day,’ an ambitious show of work that seeks to address the ‘ominous tenor’ of today’s uncertain world. Also noteworthy, the venerable, now rejuvenated performance and exhibition space ‘The Kitchen’ promises an injection of new talent into the New York scene with a survey of video art by Eastern European artists, which opens May 31st.
Hottest Show: Wangechi Mutu
Wangechi Mutu’s exhibition of violently beautiful collages could be one of New York’s most anticipated solo show debuts ever. After receiving rave reviews for her participation in what seems like endless group shows around New York over the past few years, the Kenyan-born Mutu is having the dramatic coming out, with a dual show at Sikkema Jenkins and swanky uptown gallery Salon 94. Come see for yourself what all the chatter is about.
Read my profile of Mutu’s work from Art On Paper, Summer 2004.
Don’t Miss: Asian Contemporary Art Week
For one week only, New York hosts an extravaganza of Asian art made here and abroad in a series of non-stop lectures, exhibition openings and events. Highlights include an array of video works presented at art venues across the city, sculptures by legendary Indian outsider artist Nek Chand, and even an intergenerational showdown between two action painters on a blocked off street in Tribeca. With so many events happening in so many venues, it ’s a sure bet that something good with be happening near you.
For more information and schedules, visit Asian Contemporary Art Week’s website.
Mika Rottenberg at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
For ‘Time Out New York’ magazine
Mika Rottenberg’s unsettling videos – eccentric characters manning absurdist assembly lines – have already earned the artist fans, thanks to standout pieces in group shows over the past year. For her first solo show in New York (one large-scale video installation and a selection of drawings), the young artist ups the ante on her signature format, drawing an unnerving analogy between dough and the human body.
The video is set in a claustrophobically small, distinctly low-tech dough-packaging factory, where decorative touches – bunches of flowers, piles of towels, spray bottles – also suggest a beauty salon. As it is massaged by women in tidy uniforms, the dough clearly stands in for flesh. But far from evoking the pampered form of a spa client, the dough assumes the shape of the workers¹ bodies: An obese woman at the head of the line kneads globs of the stuff, as voluminous as her own flesh, into a skinny rope that she then passes into the elongated hands of a tall, thin woman.
Rottenberg renders grotesque both dough and flesh, baking and beautification. But fantastical moments lighten the pervasive sense of disgust. In one scenario, a woman sniffs flowers to which she is allergic, and her falling tears keep the rising mixture moist. But it is the abject subject matter of the artist’s drawings – which echo the video’s references to beauty parlor workstations, but also feature projectile vomiting, vats of yellow liquid and swarms of disembodied, snapping jaws – that laces this auspicious and entertaining solo debut with menace.
Otabenga Jones & Associates, at Clementine Gallery
For ‘Time Out New York’ magazine,
Otabenga Jones and Associates, a Houston-based collaborative that will participate in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, takes its name from an African pygmy who was put on display at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. As this detail suggests, the group is interested in the intersection of African and American history, specifically their own richly imaginative version of it as told in the show’s centerpiece: a sound installation recounting the outlandish story of Mudbone, a South Bronx MC who travels to the land of his ancestors during an out-of-body experience.
Mudbone’s tale is full of engaging magical-realist details (his crew shakes the earth as they walk to a competition; his hair takes on a life of its own and absconds). But the installation itself—a small stage decorated like an altar with a microphone; swags of red, green and black fabric; and offerings of junky items, including old sneakers and LPs—doesn’t do justice to the fabulous images conjured by the soundtrack. An amateurish wall mural, drawings and related sculptural objects feel like little more than a backup act for the main attraction.
We’re informed that Mudbone is empowered by knowledge of his ancestors, but the specifics of this revelation aren’t divulged. The tale’s ambiguity communicates an ambivalence about the possibility of constructing an African-American history. Inspiring historical figures like Harriet Tubman make cameo appearances in the tale but always in the confines of a stereotypical setting—either an urban ghetto or a forest’s dark interior. In the end, Otabenga Jones and Associates’ show hovers somewhere between an affirmation and an acknowledgment of futility.