Charles Burchfield

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
June 24–October 17

Charles Burchfield, An April Mood, 1946–55, watercolor and charcoal on joined paper, 40 × 54”.

One might expect the painting of Charles Burchfield—since forming the subject of MoMA’s first monographic exhibition, in 1930—to loom large in the annals of American art. But like the retiring Burchfield himself, who painted for decades in a quiet garden studio near Buffalo, his work has remained mostly on the margins of larger historical trends. Curated by fellow artist Robert Gober, this sprawling survey of Burchfield’s patient research goes a long way in restoring the dimensions of a career that refused the pigeonholes of various aesthetic schools and commonplaces. (Notably, one is hard pressed to find any trace of Gober’s own sensibility in the exhibition).

Having worked both as a camouflage designer in the US Army during World War I and as a wallpaper designer of some renown, Burchfield displays a sensitivity to abstraction that subtends his uniformly figurative oeuvre. From The Insect Chorus, 1917, which schematizes the proverbial chant of nature into a series of calligraphic patterns, to An April Mood, 1946–55, with its prominent fireflies and fallen leaves set in a stormy scene of bare trees, Burchfield approaches landscape as a storehouse of temperamental meanings. Many of the works are too overwrought and heavy-handed in their symbolism. The most successful images are those in which formal elements take on a pictorial life of their own—as in the shadow haunting a house in The East Wind, 1918. Here, as in the bulk of Burchfield’s early work, his painting envies little of his more renowned American contemporaries.

— Ara H. Merjian

Arnold Odermatt

LEO KOENIG INC. PROJEKTE
541 West 23rd Street
July 26–September 10

Arnold Odermatt, Emmetten, 2010, gelatin silver print, 12 x 15 3/4”.

In his seminal book Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes famously claimed photography’s equivalence, if not superiority, to painting, given the allusion it creates to that which is not seen. Arnold Odermatt’s images in this exhibition evoke Barthes’s idea, as they depict the aftermath of automobile accidents in moments of uneasy solitude. The pictures were taken during the artist’s twenty-year tenure as a police photographer and officer in Switzerland, and as a result, many of the works have an unsurprisingly deadpan, documentary tone. This quality is enhanced by titles that link the jarring events exclusively to their location. In many cases, the wrecks are severe and vehicles are portrayed entangled with their surroundings, ripped from their frames, or impossibly trapped. Despite this violence, the images break from sensational reportage in the acute absence of the cars’ passengers. The perpetual lack of people in Odermatt’s photographs imbues the works with that implacable sense of inquietude that Barthes saw as a hallmark of the form.

The photographs vary widely, from the narrative Hergiswil (all works cited, 2010), in which police survey and record an accident, to the ominous Emmetten. Here, a Volkswagen appears lodged on its side near a grove of trees, seemingly after sliding down an embankment. Although at first it appears that the photograph is exhibited on its side, the horror of the scene becomes clear on further examination, and the viewer is left to ponder the evoked yet unseen victim and action.

— Britany Salsbury

“Grass Grows by Itself”

MARLBOROUGH CHELSEA
535 West 25th Street
July 15–September 9

Robert Žungu, Hemingway and Cat, 2010, color carbon print, 20 x 24".

It is clear from “Grass Grows by Itself” that the recent accumulation of environmental traumas and social malaise has prompted some artists to retreat inward. The eighteen artists exhibited here evince subtle, meditative strategies, in keeping with the Zen proverb from which the exhibition takes its title: “Sit quietly, doing nothing, as when spring comes, the grass grows by itself.”

Although the investigations on view trace back to the 1980s, with the inclusion of Carmen Herrera’s geometric abstract paintings and Wolfgang Laib’s brass cones resting on beds of white rice, curator Sima Familant foregrounds the practices of four outstanding emerging artists: Kianja Strobert, Robert Žungu, Leigh Ruple, and Molly McIver. Strobert incorporates pigmented pumice, gilded chicken bones, and discarded newspapers to compose paintings suggestive of new cartographic terrains, somewhat reminiscent of Jasper Johns’s monochromatic maps. Žungu’s photograph Hemingway and Cat, 2010, documents the interior of a barn in the Catskills where outsider artist Micrea Ionescu composed his last assemblage. Here, the scene seems to emblematize entropy, decay, and dismantled identity.

On the second floor, the exhibition embodies feminist overtones: Ruple’s abstract painting depicts a female figure entwined in warped stretcher bars. The stretcher bars, now curved, accentuate the female form. McIver’s silk-screen painting enlarges an otherwise imperceptible pattern found on the inner flap of a security envelope. The artist also presents a series of eggs suspended, and sometimes exploded, in clear resin blocks. Inside this sculptural, umbilical space, the ova are frozen in time.

“Grass Grows by Itself” neither proposes retreating to Walden Pond nor encourages building Ted Kaczynski’s cabin. Rather, it achieves a meditative tone, facilitating introspection of the sort that allows change to occur.

— Jeffrey Uslip

“Today I Made Nothing”

ELIZABETH DEE GALLERY
545 West 20th Street
July 27–September 18

Jonathan Monk, The Sound of Music (A Record With the Sound of Its Own Making), 2007, vinyl, outer sleeve, black-and-white photographic print, sleeve dimensions 12 1/4 x 12 3/8”, print size 12 x 12”.

Alejandro Cesarco’s print Why Work?, 2008, imagines the table of contents to a book that doesn’t exist. Along with his unwritten introduction, “Arguments for the Leisure Society,” Cesarco lists several classic critiques of labor, such as Paul Lafargue’s “The Right to be Lazy” (1883) and Raoul Vaneigem’s “The Decline and Fall of Work” (1967). Cesarco thus stockpiles justifications for refusing to work—and, to an extent, acts on them as well: He gestures toward the possibility of a book but shirks the effort involved in actually producing one. That said, Why Work? is undoubtedly itself the outcome of time devoted to design, research, and extensive reading. The degree to which Cesarco evades “labor” depends largely on how you understand the term. “Today I Made Nothing,” organized by Tim Saltarelli, investigates the difficulty in defining labor today, when ceaseless activity may have nothing to show for itself, and when refusing to work just might prove perversely productive.

Discussions of such ironies often reference the rubric “immaterial labor,” yet several of Saltarelli’s selections locate the contradictions inherent to today’s working conditions within material forms. For instance, the four upholstered panels that comprise Mika Tajima’s A Facility Based on Change, 2010, at first appear consistent with the visual vocabulary of the artist’s prior sculptures, which have served as backdrops to musical performances. In fact, the panels are repurposed components from the Herman Miller Action Office, the 1960s precursor to the ubiquitous cubicle. Performance and administration, it turns out, can occur in remarkably similar confines.

Jonathan Monk likewise mashes two eras in The Sound of Music (A Record with the Sound of Its Own Making), 2007. An LP embedded with the recording of the pressing that created it, the multiple harks back to Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961. In that earlier piece, a nearly three-hour tape recording directly relates to the time it took to construct a wooden box. In Monk’s variation, that correspondence between hours spent and final product breaks off into tautology: Recording elapsed time results in a record of elapsed time. Given Morris’s involvement in the Art Workers’ Coalition, the piece implicitly asks how artists should respond to today’s unstable labor conditions: help define their new parameters, or unravel them even further?

— Colby Chamberlain

“Housed”

ALICE AUSTEN HOUSE
2 Hylan Boulevard
July 1–September 5

Kathryn Parker Almanas, Blueberry Danish, 2006, color photograph, 11 x 14”.

The word house conjures grim associations these days. The recent collision of the invisible hand of the market with fantasies of domesticity forms a subtle undercurrent for this group show of American photographers who mine the familiar allegiance between the camera and familial environments. Installed in the stately Victorian mansion where the nineteenth-century photographer Alice Austen lived and worked (until it was repossessed after the crash of 1929), “Housed” scrutinizes the idea of home in the age of foreclosure.

The overall mood hovers around deadpan detachment. Kathryn Parker Almanas goes so far as to prepare a fast food Blueberry Danish, 2006, for laboratory analysis, exposing a daily breakfast ritual as a medical mystery. More ominous is the banality of David Deutsch’s Pink House, 2002, an aerial view of suburban homes that will seem oddly familiar if you have ever looked at the world as surveilled by Google Earth. But romantic sentiment also creeps in: There is a sublime euphoria in Peter Garfield’s Harsh Realty III, 2000, a grainy black-and-white enlargement of a model suburban abode exploding in a cloud of bathtubs, windows, and walls. Juxtaposed with a view into Austen’s well-appointed dining room and her own images of domestic bliss, Catherine Opie’s iconic Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993, carves out an intimate and affective substrate in the palpable ideological operations at work in a “home.”

Although there are plenty of reasons to be cynical about the state of the American dream, the show ultimately favors photography’s irrational operations over documentary realism. Christopher Miner’s video The Best Decision Ever Made, 2004, plays on an old TV tucked away in a cupboard like a dirty secret or a set of plates. The artist’s plaintive confession of professional and financial failures layered over a slow montage of the comfortably worn interior of a house about to be sold elicits a type of embarrassment that also feels profoundly normal.

— Megan Heuer

“Le Tableau”

CHEIM & READ
547 West 25th Street
June 24–September 3

Louise Fishman, Violets for My Furs, 2010, oil on jute, 50 x 42”.

Conceived by artist and curator Joe Fyfe as an antidote to the dominance of New York School abstraction in accounts of mid-twentieth-century painting, this exhibition argues for the continuing relevance of an unruly, dirtier, and at times assaultive Paris School. As such, the show does not hunt the medium of painting back to its essence, à la Clement Greenberg, so much as probe fault lines. More to the point, this diverse selection of artists working in Paris and New York from the 1950s until today has a general concern with attacking the pictorial surface by making its materiality apparent. Jean-Paul Riopelle cakes on paint, Jean Fautrier trowels it like plaster, Bianca Beck whittles and chips at the support, and Sarah Rapson takes six bowed vertical canvas panels with irregular surfaces and lines them up together to form a piecemeal sexpartite painting.

Other paintings have within their spontaneously worked veneers subliminal structural devices. Louise Fishman’s gestural marks loosely hew to an underlying pattern of a rectangle that expands from a flash of bright red in the upper left-hand corner, which is then balanced by a patch of dark green in the opposite corner. The long piano key–shaped strokes at the bottom of Joan Mitchell’s Untitled, 1977, work like ballast or a predella that orients the painting to the pull of gravity and links it to the floor. Finally, Bernard Piffaretti’s alternation between blurred and tightly ruled paint application imparts a sense of the options one has when handling paint. Curiously, it also creates a stop-and-go illusion, a sensation of acceleration and sudden braking.

— James Glisson

Julie Mehretu

SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street
May 14–October 6

Julie Mehretu, Fragment, 2008–2009, ink and acrylic on canvas, 47 x 66”. From the series “Grey Area,” 2008–2009.

Painter Julie Mehretu is currently the leading revivalist of the epic-landscape form. Over the past decade, her large canvases, which invoke everything from traditional Asian inkwork to Constructivist geometries, have made both a medium and a genre newly relevant to the artistic investigation of globalization. Barely legible pictures of fragmented and centrifugal topographies, they capture the peculiar feeling of dispersion and interconnection specific to the digital age.

In “Grey Area” (all works 2008–09), a suite of six new paintings commissioned by Deutsche Bank and the Guggenheim, Mehretu applies her idiosyncratic cartography to a decidedly Northern European context. The result of this specificity is a remarkably cogent and restrained series of pictures that envelop the viewer and invoke a concrete sense of place that registers both cognitively and intuitively. The urban palimpsest of Berliner Plätze and the hibernal quiet of Fragment, for example, highlight Mehretu’s ability to coax remarkable variation of tone and depth from a limited palette. And in many works on view here, barely controlled chaos gives way to individual elements that were embedded in Mehretu’s earlier practice and emerge in “Grey Area” in sharpened relief. You can see them fully expressed in the delicate latticework skyline of Berliner Plätze and the hazy expanses that evoke the sea in Believer’s Palace.

Mehretu’s early works tend to feel displaced, which is both their strength and, at times, their weakness. Although its title refers to “a liminal state in which something is not clearly defined” (according to the press release), “Grey Area” is by turns sublime and beautiful, demonstrating the adaptability and endurance of Mehretu’s vision while reminding us of the capacity of painting to show us our environments anew.

— Ian Bourland

“Retratos Pintados”

YOSSI MILO GALLERY
525 West 25th Street
June 24–September 18

View of “Retratos Pintados,” 2010.

In the eternal return of contemporary aesthetics, the search for a new medium often leads to the recuperation of one that is felicitously outmoded. So it happens with “Retratos Pintados” (Painted Portraits): an assembly of small, hand-painted photographs from Brazil, which, precisely in their quaint obsolescence, appear strikingly new. Set against a uniform background (usually of sky blue or pea green), family members appear both individually and in groups, their faces and clothes enlivened with color. The (unidentified) artist often adds a sfumato shading to cheeks and noses, endowing the sitters with more corpulence and detail. At the same time, their outfits appear flattened and bounded by exaggerated outlines; the splayed lapels of men’s suits seem as much like abstracted patterns as actual garments. The tinted embellishments render certain individuals more animate; others appear, instead, something like dressed corpses, spectral and wan. Yet those transformations are often the most arresting precisely in their strangeness.

Resembling a “salon hang” in its serried proximity, the gallery’s display approximates how such portraits would have been hung in the homes of rural Brazilians. The works invite––especially given their clustered collectivity––not simply an aesthetic evaluation but also sociological attention. The cross section of physiognomies, ethnicities (African, European, and indigenous), and familial and class structures opens up a world as richly varied as it is anonymous. Certain anomalies further underscore the curiosity piqued by such inscrutability. One portrait bears a postage stamp, which reveals, in turn, a further portrait. Some sitters stare at the camera, while others look away blankly; some touch tenderly and some appear coldly distant. One poker-faced grandmother appears with her glasses entirely offkilter. The endearing––if unwitting––particularity of such details repays repeated looking.

— Ara H. Merjian

David Goldblatt

JEWISH MUSEUM
1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street
May 2–September 19

David Goldblatt, The farmer’s son with his nursemaid, on the farm in Heimweeberg, near Nietverdiend in the Marico Bushveld. Transvaal (North-West Province), 1964, black-and-white photograph, 9 x 13”.

For more than half a century, David Goldblatt has patiently stalked his country from behind a lens; this past year, his output has witnessed renewed and deserved attention. Rather than offering a comprehensive survey, “South African Photographs: David Goldblatt” focuses on a few interrelated themes of the photographer’s remarkably consistent oeuvre—from his early depictions of the brutal racial politics of South Africa’s mining industry to his frank renderings of Afrikaner life in the 1960s to his evocation of the nation’s history through its landscapes and architecture. Goldblatt counts himself both an involuntary agent of apartheid’s regime and a victim of anti-Semitism (he is the son of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants); his ambivalent identity decidedly informs his ease with a range of subjects, as well as his visual idiom. Yet his images, whether single shots or photo essays, appear remarkably unrhetorical, even as they evince the most chilling and insidious of phenomena. How to tease apart the mix of sweetness and injustice, of personal affect and ideological abjection, in an image like the tellingly titled The farmer’s son with his nursemaid, 1964?

Apartheid, for Goldblatt, consisted not of images to be captured but rather of a way of being in the world. “To draw breath here was to be in it,” he once stated. Images don’t tell the whole story; a cross section of an all-white Dutch Reformed Church congregation in 1965 doesn’t bear evidence of the church’s ideological support for apartheid. Even when Goldblatt’s photographs frame their subjects head-on, they reveal history as viewed from the wings. It is a history not of “decisive moments” but of time charged even as it seems slackened.

— Ara H. Merjian