Bessma Khalaf

STEVEN WOLF FINE ARTS
49 Geary Street, Suite 411
October 9–November 14

Bessma Khalaf, Monument, 2009, still from a color video, 3 hours 56 minutes.

In two of the three videos that compose “You’re Not There,” Bessma Khalaf’s first solo exhibition at this gallery, the artist shares—through precise actions—an extremely ambivalent relationship with the American landscape and much of what it signifies. In Projection (all works 2009), a sequence of Sierra Club–style photographs of golden plains, majestic mountains, and rolling rivers is revealed as fictional when a fist punches through the sheets of paper the images are screened on one by one. These efficient blows to the land form a rhythmic slide show of constant insertion and, perhaps, rejection. On the opposite wall, in Landscape, the paper itself forms a relief that seems just as volcanically violent.

An abrupt moment is temporally distorted in the show’s epic centerpiece, Monument, a video documenting the Iraqi-American artist straddling a life-size ice sculpture of a horse for the nearly four hours it takes to melt in the hot California sun. Her pratfall is defused by the viewer’s prolonged anticipation and becomes a memorial to inevitable defeat––not to mention frozen inner thighs. The artist’s body is also something of a conduit in Ectoplasm, a creepy Victorian-inspired work that involves Khalaf knitting a scarf with nubby white yarn pulled from her mouth. The dark mirror used in the video is mounted nearby, and though Khalaf’s sculptural gesture is not quite there, her videos make the discomfiture of the show vividly present.

— Glen Helfand

“Toward Abstraction: Photographs and Photograms”

DE YOUNG MUSEUM
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
June 20–November 15

Arthur Siegel, RCA Building, ca. 1940–49, gelatin silver print, 13 1/4 x 10 3/8".

If the quiddity of photography is the realism it affords, then what is the medium’s relationship to abstraction? Most of the works in this tight, striking exhibition take up well after an answer was provided by modernist photography’s conquest of a nonmimetic domain, driven by the likes of Edward Steichen and Alfred Steiglitz.

The work of Arthur Siegel—who studied with László Moholy-Nagy, one of the masters of early-twentieth-century photographic abstraction—forms the exhibition’s touchstone, weighted as it is toward midcentury. In Siegel’s RCA Building, ca. 1940–49, the company’s acronym forms a lone referential anchor in a blurred field of light-smeared architectonics. Siegel’s extended exposure charges an otherwise straightforward cityscape with an air of brooding, miragelike menace. Photogram, 1946, and Right of Assembly, 1939, sit across the gallery, offering further examples of his range of experimentation. Both fill the frame with innumerable objects, but the patterns of the former are purely formal, while the latter’s quasi-abstraction stirs up wider metaphors of anonymity and collectivity, modernity and ideology. Here, as in many of the works on display, the voluntarily embraced limitations of photographic representation—croppings, occlusions—invest the image with a wider range of nonrepresentational meanings.

Jack Welpott’s shots of the sides of a house with exposed clapboard produces, by virtue of his framing, flattened planes of geometric near abstraction. More painterly effects emerge in William Garnett’s Untitled (Aerial Landscape), ca. 1976, which was shot from the seat of his own plane and which seems to register the distortions of speed and distance as part of the image’s smeared, buckled landscape. The human body, too, is the object of many artists’ abstractions—all the more uncanny for their focus on this most familiar form made strange and foreign. Lee Friedlander’s Wilmington, Delaware, 1965, figures a lanky human shadow distended and distorted over a solitary chair in the foreground. The body’s transformation into alien shapes is inverted in pictures such as Anton Bruehl’s close-up of machinery, in which the objects of modernity come to take on a nearly corporeal presence.

— Ara H. Merjian

“Undercover: Performing and Transforming Black Female Identities”

SPELMAN COLLEGE MUSEUM OF FINE ART
350 Spelman Lane SW,
September 10–December 5

Nandipha Mntambo, Europa, 2009, archival ink on cotton rag paper, 39 1/2 x 39 1/2".

Physical representation of the black female is explored in this thoughtful and thematically rich exhibition. Curators Andrea Barnwell Brownlee and Karen Comer Lowe have brought together more than seventy-five often-challenging examples of video, painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography that explore how black women sometimes disguise, adorn, and otherwise manipulate their appearances in an effort to conceal or reveal their identities.

The cross-referencing of voices throughout the show—which, crucially, are neither just black nor just female—is fascinating. The legacy of blackface performance runs through the work of Lyle Ashton Harris, Ellen Gallagher, and Cindy Sherman. Yet Harris’s cross-dressing as female also speaks to Emma Amos’s poignant self-portrait as an artist wearing a jumpsuit painted with a nude male body. Gallagher’s work simultaneously explores the identity issues behind black hair, a concern evident in both Lorna Simpson’s multipaneled study of wigs and Mequitta Ahuja’s exquisite wall-size drawings of black tresses. Sherman’s black-and-white self-portraits initiate an interesting conversation with James Van Der Zee’s and Doris Ulmann’s early black-and-white photographs of African Americans. And Ulmann’s portrait of a young black nun in her habit connects to the costuming of Renee Cox in upper-class trappings, Nandipha Mntambo in home-cured animal skins, Sheila Pree Bright’s portrait of herself morphed into a black Barbie, and Nick Cave’s richly decorated full-body sound suit. These overlapping themes occur across genres and generations, bringing together old favorites and new voices in what is clearly a continuing conversation.

— Rebecca Cochran

Hank Willis Thomas

BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART
10 Art Museum Drive
July 29–November 29

Hank Willis Thomas, “I AM A MAN,” 2009, Liquitex on twenty framed canvases, 25 1/4 x 19 1/4".

Moving seamlessly across media, Hank Willis Thomas’s meticulously crafted works employ the formal language of late Minimalism to produce graphic, historically steeped meditations on imaging blackness in America today. The exhibition’s strongest moment, a series of twenty canvases titled “I AM A MAN,” 2009, typifies Thomas’s modus operandi of trawling through the archives of American literature, visual culture, and advertising for source material: in this case, Ernest Wither’s famous 1968 photograph of striking sanitation workers all bearing signs with their iconic, eponymous message. Forming a dynamic working improvisation on Wither’s work, Thomas’s painted texts—I AM HUMAN, I AM THE MAN, and YOU THE MAN—roll around the quiet gallery like a piece of jazz.

The Day I Discovered I Was Colored, 2009, also speaks to us from the under the dust of the historical archive. A printed cartoon of three children talking beneath the fiery orange canopy of a tree, it is the only work to feature vivid color. And it does so precisely to illuminate the distance between the formal and political valences of the word colored, between the hidebound categories of race and the broad range of human diversity. That every other work in the small exhibition is visually structured by the stark play of black pigment against white ground, or vice versa, highlights the politics of color that is Thomas’s subject here, while functioning, too, as a metaphor for the codependence of racial categories: the idea that blackness is culturally readable only against a conceptual ground of whiteness. Thomas’s lenticular, with its two declamatory phrases—BLACK IMITATES BLACK and WHITE IMITATES WHITE, wherein one statement shifts to the other with the movement of the viewer—further emphasizes this point by refusing to resolve these two extreme readings. As the sclerotic logic of the binary prevails, the work becomes literal “writing on the wall,” asserting the intractability of the issue of race in America today.

— Leora Maltz-Leca

“Heartland”

SMART MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
5550 South Greenwood Avenue
October 1–January 17

View of “Heartland,” 2009. Left: Cody Critcheloe, Boy, 2009. Right: Carnal Topor, Purifications of the CalmDome, 2009.

This eye-opening group exhibition highlights the work of visual artists and other cultural producers who take tactical advantage of their peripheral geographic relationship to major urban cultural centers. From its title onward, “Heartland”—a collaboration between the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands—simultaneously embraces and debunks regional clichés. The independent spirit, bootstrapping gumption, and friendliness often attributed to midwesterners, for example, here takes the form of a determined DIY mind-set, a willingness to collaborate, and a savvy ability to get the job done by “making do.”

Such methods are certainly not exclusive to this region, but they are arguably most prevalent (and essential) in cities like Detroit, Kansas City, Chicago, and Memphis. Falling real estate prices have enabled the Detroit-based, community-minded collective Design 99 to purchase studio and storefront space, while Lowndes County, Alabama—the birthplace of the first independent African-American political party—provides a rich vein of unwritten sociopolitical history for artist Jeremiah Day to tap. Oral histories and other forms of storytelling enable artists to situate a dislocated present in terms of a shared past or an imagined future, although sometimes, as in the comics-style drawings of Chicagoans Kerry James Marshall and Deb Sokolow, such place-based narratives can take surreal, truth-twisting turns.

The Chicago iteration of “Heartland” wisely includes smaller ancillary exhibitions of paintings by self-taught artist Joseph Yoakum and the Chicago Imagists, ensuring that the unique contributions of the city to the region’s art are not overlooked. Overall, however, the focus is on shared practices rather than common stylistic attributes.

— Claudine Ise

Allan Sekula

THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY
The University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Cobb Hall #418
September 20–December 13

Allan Sekula, My Father with His List. Sacramento, December 1979, black-and-white photograph, 24 x 36".

In “Polonia and Other Fables,” photographer Allan Sekula documents Polonia, the diasporic zone of expatriated Poles—an “imagined community,” in Sekula’s words—in which he immersed himself during the past three years. The forty pictures in the exhibition, a joint commission of Chicago’s Renaissance Society and the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw, plumb the links between the two cities—migration, hibernal light, hardscrabble working-class conditions—through a mosaic of fragments.

“Polonia” finds Sekula modulating fluidly between street photography, aerial surveillance, and hagiographic portraiture, his subjects linked by his ethnographic sensibility and a centrifugally propelled cloud of association. Although its style is ostensibly documentary, the exhibition has the feel of an imperfect archive, the pictures that of extant evidence of a rapidly shifting place. Diaspora is territory that has been aggressively intellectualized in the past decade, but it is presented here as memories at once lucid and surreal.

Hence instances of Sekula’s now-familiar concerns: post-Soviet landscapes updated in flimsy Western dress, pig farmers displaced by industrial agriculture, and ominous military installations cropping up throughout New Europe. These more global issues are tempered, however, with hints of the autobiographical—Sekula’s father holding a list of names alluding to the family’s contested Catholic and Jewish heritage—and the local, in pictures of Latino workers in Chicago marching on May Day or a middle-aged black woman warily smoking. These sorts of pictures push Sekula’s cartography to its extremes but also render his ideologically rich survey both poetic and grounded.

— Ian Bourland

“Reduced Visibility”

THE GLASSELL SCHOOL OF ART AT THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
5101 Montrose Blvd.
September 4–November 15

Mark Lombardi, Frank Sharp and Sharpstown State Bank, c. 1968–72, 1994, graphite on paper, 11 x 13 1/2".

If abstraction can distill the essence of an otherwise quotidian occurrence, it can also achieve a seemingly contradictory end—simply obfuscating the obvious, rendering any meaning arbitrary. “Reduced Visibility,” curated by Kurt Mueller, carries on this tradition of duplicity. The exhibition comprises five artists working in the more politically entrenched region of abstraction. Its success depends on the viewer’s interest in and, at times, tolerance for didacticism.

Mueller does well in choosing artists who gravitate toward the sublime. Trevor Paglen’s blurred vistas, which capture a purported secret military testing site off the coast of southern California, formally reference Rothko’s color fields. The sci-fi-seeming content of the large-scale photographs enriches the ambient mood created by the works’ atmospheric soft focus. Lisa Oppenheim’s “Multicultural Crayon Displacements” series, 2008, similarly embraces a modernist aesthetic: Drawing from Crayola’s recently launched color palette—expanded to include non-Eurocentric skin tones—Oppenheim creates photograms of rectilinear compositions. The results are as sumptuous as her concept is hackneyed. Rico Gatson also deals with racial overtones in his video installation, History Lessons, 2004. This frantic montage of culturally loaded source material, like scenes from The Birth of a Nation and imagery of the 1965 Watts riots, pulsates to a syncopated beat on two screens separated by a black divider. The result is engaging, but at times it is unclear how the commentary extends past a trendy music-video montage. The quietest voice in the show packs the most punch. Mark Lombardi’s drawings of corporate malfeasance are direct and elegant, composed of simple arching lines and circles that trace various money trails. They are disturbing without relying on irrelevant aesthetic decisions to enhance dialogue. The works are abstractions, to be sure, but illustrative enough of the myriad scandalous financial ways of our times to insinuate a cabal of paranoia without coming off as heavy-handed.

— Garland Fielder

Greely Myatt

MEMPHIS BROOKS MUSEUM OF ART
1934 Poplar Avenue
August 15–January 3

Greely Myatt, I gotta learn to talk (detail), 2006, steel, acrylic on paper on canvas, 106 x 65 x 7".

To mark Greely Myatt’s twentieth year working and teaching in Memphis, his work is featured in nine venues around the city for nearly four months. This proliferation of exhibitions offers a vast retrospective view of his output, much of which suggests or actively engages in dialogues––between the artist and art history, the art and its imagined audience, or notions of fine art and the craft tradition.

One motif that appears repeatedly in Myatt’s work is the cartoon speech bubble. He fashions these from found pieces of wood, scraps of metal from discarded signage, old cookie and baking tins, and even false eyelashes. In Talking, 2006–2009, an installation that was on view at Rhodes College’s Clough-Hanson Gallery, eleven speech bubbles hung on a single wall, containing fragments of brand names, embossed architectural decorations, or a zipper or ruler embedded in their surfaces. The speech bubble appears again at the Memphis Brooks Museum in I gotta learn to talk, 2006. Here, instead of recouped materials mounted on wood, Myatt has meticulously assembled 156 paper rectangles, each containing a comic strip, their surfaces whitewashed save for a single statement in a bubble. Each seems to represent dramatic introspection by the artist––NOBODY APPRECIATES THE WORK I DO or MY NAME WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY––if not gentle mockery of art criticism or a reaction from a blasé audience––DO YOU HAVE ANY OTHER IDEAS? or WE DON’T GET IT EITHER.

Myatt’s role as a southern artist facing the canonical works of art history is never far from his mind, as works including Roomrug, 1999, demonstrate. The combination of multicolored broomsticks fashioned into a fragment of a rug and reflected into a right-angled mirror re-creates a Smithsonesque non-site, though the site represented is that of the domestic sphere. The playful attitude and meticulous rigor with which Myatt handles his materials might be considered a mask that hides a deeper understanding of the roles and restrictions of regional artists in a universal context.

This exhibition is also on view at the Art Museum at the University of Memphis until November 7 and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens through November 14. It was recently at the Clough-Hansen Gallery at Rhodes College, the Metal Museum, Power House Memphis, David Lusk Gallery, P & H Center for the Arts, and the On the Street Gallery at the Memphis College of Art.

— Chelsea Weathers

“Broadcast”

RONNA AND ERIC HOFFMAN GALLERY OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Lewis and Clark College, 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road,
September 8–December 13

Chris Burden, TV Hijack (detail), 1972, panel 1: three gelatin silver prints and one photocopy on mat board, 20 1/4 x 38"; panel 2: three gelatin silver prints and one chromogenic print on mat board, 24 1/4 x 45 5/8".

“Broadcast” brings together artists who have, according to the exhibition’s press release, “engaged, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio.” Whether attempts to engage with mainstream media are hostile, indifferent, judgmental, passive, or proactive (all of which attitudes are documented in the exhibition), the strategies employed say much about the political potential of art but also about each artist's proclivity for confrontation.

For The Amarillo News Tapes, 1980, Doug Hall, Chip Lord, and Jody Procter became “artists-in-residence” at station KVII-TV Channel 7. The Tapes show the anchors at Pro News, along with the artists, reading bizarre copy and inconceivable weather reports (all written by the artists), in the manner of charming small-town anchors. Most important, though, the artists' relationship with Channel 7 was jovial and respectful, yet they still managed to disrupt the presumed authority of the newscasters.

Chris Burden’s TV Hijack, 1972—documented here with video stills—occupies the opposite side of the spectrum. On February 9, 1972, Burden held TV interviewer Phyllis Lutjeans hostage with a knife to her throat during their interview. It remains a bit troubling to learn that Burden’s act—confrontational in form—was a response to his TV programming proposals having been repeatedly turned down. Was Burden simply acting out, behaving like a petty artist who had his suggestions rejected? Whether vengeful or critical, Burden’s strategies hardly seem viable for challenging mass media.

A different strategy, one that circumvents any obvious critique of power structures, opts for a live relationship with broadcast media. For Telemistica, 1999, Christian Jankowski repeatedly called phone-in psychic shows in Venice, asking “Will I be successful?” and “What will the public think about my work?” Perhaps Jankowski was sincere when he went looking for answers by way of kitsch broadcast. Rather than employing deconstructive strategies, Jankowski suggests that an artist’s role in mass media is best defined by performing within the parameters put forth by the broadcasters.

— Micah Malone

Kirsten Hassenfeld

CADE TOMPKINS EDITIONS AND PROJECTS
198 Hope Street,
September 25–November 14

View of “Kirsten Hassenfeld,” 2009. From left: Blueware (Cloud), 2009; Blueware (Garden), 2009; Blueware (Bouquet), 2009.

Paper gains mass and volume in Kirsten Hassenfeld’s exhibition of recent sculpture: It shimmers and swirls in the low-lit gallery at David Winton Bell, drawing the viewer into a luminescent world of alabaster baubles and dangling airy chains. Part Aladdin’s cave and part dollhouse, Hassenfeld’s sumptuous installation Dans la Lune (In the Moon), 2007, is constructed entirely of paper that has been cut, folded, rolled, and glued to form suspended sculptures that call to mind enormous snowflakes magnified to reveal their crystalline structure or massive lanterns strung with rivers of pearls. Hassenfeld toys with scale in this elaborate installation—lunar not only in its weightlessness and its spectral glow but also in its call to Dionysus and the gods of all paper party favors—inflating gems to the size of boulders and making cameos for a giant.

Yet despite the nimbuslike aura summoned by both the work and its title (meaning, idiomatically, “to have one’s head in the clouds”), both beauty and lust circulate freely through this fantasy space of platinum light and paper diamonds. Hassenfeld’s enlarged bibelots speak to a grotesque desire for objects: as if a penumbra of insatiability––the dark side of the moon––lies just beyond the visible in these delicate, ethereal forms, whose ghostly silhouettes gesture to the elusiveness of possession.

Hassenfeld’s penchant for consummate craft similarly marks her recent freestanding sculptures in which paper beads, now painted in washy cobalt and aquamarine inks and petrified by acrylic, masquerade as glossy ceramics. Confounding our sense of materiality, these works evoke a craft as historically gendered as the embroidery and wedding-cake decorations of her lunar phase. Hassenfeld’s “blueware” continues in delicate ink-on-vellum drawings on view at Cade Tompkins Editions, which return this protean artist to her papery origins in drawing and printmaking.

This exhibition is also on view at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University until November 1.

— Leora Maltz-Leca

“Presuntos Culpables”

MUSEO DE ARTE MODERNO MEXICO
Paseo de la Reforma y Gandhi, Bosque de Chapultepec
April 3–November 15

Antonio Vega Macotela, Exchange 63: shake hands with all the neighbors of “De La Mora,” and in exchange the inmate narrates to the artist a basketball match as concrete poetry, 2007, ink on paper, 17 x 11".

“Presuntos Culpables” (Alleged Culprits) is a group exhibition of artworks—photographs, installations, videos, objects, and drawings—that explore confinement in prison. Pericles Lavat’s series, titled “Aquí Estuvo Su Padre Putos” (Your Father Waz Here Motha’fuckers), 2002, consists of interior shots of an abandoned prison. By depicting remains of objects and decorations that were left inside cells, the pictures evince the identity and language codes of the spaces’ inhabitants. In Time Divisa, 2006–2009, Antonio Vega Macotela explores time as a container of actions through 365 exchanges with prisoners of Santa Marta Acatitla—one of the largest and most overpopulated jails in Mexico City. On a specific date and time in the outside world, the artist performed tasks for the inmates, whether by visiting their kids or friends or simply by traveling to specific places. In exchange, the prisoners were asked to document actions requested by the artist. Santiago Sierra’s installation, titled Room of 9 Square Meters, 2004, invites visitors to experience the feeling of confinement in a small space where they can remain from half an hour to four hours, depending on dice rolled by a guard. Overall, the pieces in this exhibition attempt to make visible the invisibility of reclusion, through gestures that interweave social and intimate aspects. Here, art works as a testimony to a territory too often hidden from public view.

— Claudia Arozqueta