Category: Reviews

For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine

Given the impenetrable nature of Manfred Pernice’s work, you wouldn’t confuse him for an introspective soul. Despite its title, his latest show does little to change his trademark reluctance to communicate clear meaning. Instead, a mysterious centerpiece sculpture—emblazoned with unexplained dates, dotted with everyday objects and accompanied by giveaway pamphlets stamped DIARY#8212;tentatively suggests that experience is subject to many interpretations.

A few zones of fluorescent green and deep red on the central installation are among Pernice’s few concessions to aesthetic appeal. But for those willing to grasp for associations, a honeycombed-patterned platform suggests an after-hours cafeteria, while empty plinths evoke museum or trade-show displays. If those same pedestals could also be imagined as buildings in a model urban landscape, then a kid’s ball could be a stadium, while a tiny floral tile might be seen as a garden. Who’s to say?

Certainly not Pernice, whose “diaries” mix dates, texts and underwhelming photos of blurred or mundane scenes. One unremarkable photo of a man carrying a bag is captioned EXPRESS YOURSELF, while another image shows the artist with a glazed look in his eyes. Both touch on the challenges of being original, but beg the question of why Pernice can’t provide his audience a few more clues to understanding his work.

As if anticipating such criticism, a sculpture in the back gallery consists of nothing but empty boxes (for cookies, cigarettes, etc.), dated to create a chronicle of the artist’s activities. While appearing to go in a direction diametrically opposed to the rest of the show, it still maintains the same line that artistic identity is ultimately elusive.

For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine

Mai-Thu Perret’s first solo exhibition in New York aims to mine past avant-garde movements for newly provocative images and ideas, but provides little of either.  What you do get are lots of arcane references underscoring the video, sculpture and diagrams.  Take for instance, the show’s centerpiece video of young female dancers in utilitarian garb which, according to Perret, is inspired by artist Varvara Stephanova’s set designs for Vitalii Zhemchuzhnyi’s 1924 agitprop theater piece ‘An Evening of the Book.’ You wonder whether knowing any of this is worth the piece’s slim rewards.

The front gallery offers an oddball assortment of artworks, including a ball of neon tubing looks like a wadded up (rejected?) version of props the Geneva-based Perret has previously shown, a carpet with a Rorschach pattern and large wall diagrams of dance steps.  But nothing quite sums up the pointlessness of this show better than the eight gigantic, cardboard commas  – which tellingly resemble quotation marks – that line a wall leading to Perret’s take on Zhemchuzhnyi’s homage to revolutionary literature.

The same commas, along with a huge blank-paged book, appear in the video as part of a set, around which the aforementioned cadre of young women performs synchronized movements that see-saw between energy and lethargy.  Apparently unable to sustain the stamina to convert past ideology to present-day meaning, the characters convey the disappointing message that such attempts are better in theory than practice.

For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine

Even if Dan Perjovschi’s doodle-like, politically charged wall drawings seemed a little out of place in MoMA’s pristine atrium last year, the incongruity created a certain frisson. His first New York solo show is just as arresting, despite being relegated to a much smaller space. Using white chalk on gray walls, the artist turns the gallery into a giant blackboard on which he has scrawled lively if uneven critiques on issues ranging from the environment to Iraq.

Perjovschi’s nervous line, and his tendency to overlap bold and faint images by erasing as he goes along, give his work an energetic, experimental feel. On the downside, drawings of a naked derriere surrounded by puckered lips and of a puppeteer making anonymous figures dance, amount to little more than generic symbols. Perjovschi’s spontaneous approach often misfires, as in his unnuanced drawing of a giant trash can scrawled with .

Most of the time, however, Perjovschi’s economy of means yields more trenchant results. A sun labeled rich on one side and poor on the other emanates more rays on the “poor” side—a concise commentary on the inequity of global warming’s impact. The clarity, punch and provocation of such pieces suggests that they’d be just as at home outside as in a gallery—which would be just as well, given Chelsea’s recent profusion of mindless street art.

For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine

Diana Thater has spent the last year learning all she can about chess and falconry, but don’t expect her latest video installations to provide much edification on either topic. Thater doesn’t seem interested in educating her audience about these ancient pastimes, leaving the viewer frustrated as well as tantalized.

Unlike the participants in a dog show, raptors don’t take too kindly to competition, so the set-up of the exhibition’s most engaging video, Horus, is immediately puzzling. As Thater’s camera swoops overhead on a crane, falconers of different ages and sexes sit with their birds in an atmospheric ampitheatre as if waiting to go on. Nobody goes anywhere, however, which only makes you wonder what all the medieval-looking hoods, straps and other equipment used to calm the birds say about the piece’s apparent subject – the relationship between falcon and handler.

Likewise, Thater promises stories without really telling any in a series of individually titled video reenactments of legendary chess matches. In Gary Kasparov vs Deep Junior, for example, we see the legendary Russian grand master pitted against a computer, a contest which certainly offers fertile symbolic possibilities. But absent the gallery’s explanatory handout, it looks just like the other videos in this group, all of which show similar scenes of hands moving pieces on a board. Even so, Thater’s work, beautiful as it is, inspires at least an appreciation for her subjects (her players move their fingers with the poise of dancers). It may entice you to find out more.