That the work of Shepard Fairey suddenly finds itself in a storm of publicity––from GQ to the New York Times––seems not only preordained but a bit tautological. For Fairey’s work began as a germ of ubiquitous, “viral” publicity, in the legendary form of small stickers depicting the mug of Andre the Giant, a former pro-wrestling phenomenon. ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE, announced these enigmatic decals, plastered in the most unlikely of places by a seemingly anonymous army in the early 1990s. (When someone offered one to me fifteen years ago, I duly placed it on my notebook. There was a strange thrill––mixed with misgiving––at being part of a nameless posse headed by a melancholic giant.) But suspicions that this phenomenon entailed more Big Brother than brotherly love have been dispelled. Fairey’s anonymity has crystallized into a multifaceted enterprise––including a clothing line and graphic-design company––recently punctuated on an even grander scale by the artist’s poster featuring (presidential candidate) Barack Obama. Fairey and his company, Obey Giant, are now embroiled in a lawsuit over the artist’s use of an Associated Press photograph as the basis for his poster.

His batiklike collages most often reveal newsprint barely poking through their figures’ creamy skin. Aside from the history of political posters, Fairey’s work finds its most obvious affinities with Haring and Basquiat, on the one hand, and Murakami, Lichtenstein, and Warhol (of whose “Marilyn” series Fairey has duly printed a “Giant” version) on the other. His use of bold black outlines, large scale, and increasingly Pop-ish composition also conjures Gilbert and George, though to more expressly ideological ends. The prankish aphorisms that pepper his imagery have gained poignancy in light of the economic crisis. His series “Two Sides of Capitalism,” 2007, plays on the iconography of American money; the tags OBEDIENCE IS THE MOST VALUABLE CURRENCY and RANSOM NOTE replace the usual pecuniary axioms found on bills. But these latter works are owned and sold by the Jonathan Levine Gallery––hardly a bastion of anticapitalist radicalism. Fairey was recently hired by Saks Fifth Avenue to design bags and advertisements in a pastiche of Russian Constructivist style, raising further questions about the blend of earnestness and irony in his work. In that vein, a few (clearly faux and sanitized) plastic newspaper racks sit in the lobby of the ICA, perhaps seeking to stir up the urban grittiness inevitably drained when Fairey is museumified. This gambit only calls further attention, although perhaps not in the way anticipated, to the important meta-questions that the show raises about commodification and activism, institutional critique and critical success.

— Ara H. Merjian

The second manifestation of Our Literal Speed (reprising a 2008 event in Karlsruhe, Germany) comprised a twenty-first century academicized Cabaret Voltaire–style gathering of the South Shore Drill Team, Art & Language, David Joselit, and a host of University of Chicago faculty, among others. The conference included conversations, performances, various displays of academic preening, and examples of hybrid pedagogies, such as a discussion on the topic of dissent with Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and several irascible interlocutors planted in the audience.

An accompanying exhibition, also titled “Our Literal Speed,” opened with a “live theory installation” by the collective Jackson Pollock Bar. The group employs game-show props and pedantic presentations to parlay history and fiction into numbing “truthiness.” The exhibition also includes a hardcover copy of T. J. Clark’s 2006 book The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, which rests on a vinyl peacock-blue Herman Miller shell chair, adjacent to a single packaged CD of the official OLS “sound track,” featuring the Size Queens, propped on a small white wall shelf. Rounding out the east gallery is a line of ten framed photographs by Rainer Ganahl documenting lectures and conversations that formed the 2008 installment of OLS in Karlsruhe, and Sharon Hayes’s single-channel video depicting a nonplussed audience of twenty-two people watching footage from the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Academy Records, the mercurial Chicago collective sustained for a decade by artist Steve Lacy, has contributed a large orange banner to the exhibition that reads IT’S NOT THAT I’M BETTER THAN YOU YOU’RE JUST DOING IT WRONG. This paradoxical sentiment speaks to the fraud occupying the heart of the OLS project. (The event’s organizers seem to welcome such chicanery.) The faux marching banner is both brave and naive, highlighting the basic psychological impulses—instead of the loftier intellectual justifications—that motivate OLS and underscore its creators’ desire “to present a microcosmic rendering of the contemporary art world,” as stated by one of the event’s devisers, art historian Matthew Jesse Jackson. The text’s blatant incongruity is also why the exhibition component of OLS is more successful than a weekend of academics playing at being artists playing at being critics. The exhibition is not simply a manifestation of academic ego and therefore is much more politically effective.

— Michelle Grabner

In his debut solo exhibition in the United States, the Berlin-based artist Torsten Slama introduces us to his unnerving postapocalyptic world. Part science fiction, part prophecy, his desolate landscape paintings and drawings depict a sinister, mechanized environment where technology and science rule.

For his accomplished paintings, Slama utilizes oil, acrylic, and airbrush to create flat surfaces that erase the hand of their creator, a style particularly appropriate for the works here, which are themselves often devoid of humans. His barren views are populated by industrial buildings, yet no activity is evident; no steam rises from the stacks of the Kryogenisches Institut “Wilhelm Reich” (Cryogenic Institute “Wilhelm Reich”), 2005, and no trains travel along the tracks in HYDRA-Hydrierwerke mit aufsteigender Überwachungsteinheit (HYDRA-Hydrogenation Plant with Ascending Surveillance Unit), 2008. It’s as if the isolated structures, while well preserved, are relics of a civilization now extinct. Strange UFOs hovering above a few of the buildings suggest that, if there were inhabitants, they might not be human.

The exhibition also includes skillfully rendered pencil drawings on paper. While some follow in the same narrative vein as the paintings, another series portrays a bearded elderly gentleman whose well-groomed appearance and friendly face contradict the precarious and often confrontational situations he encounters. One work depicts him in a business suit apparently startling another man dressed only in his undershorts; in another, the protagonist is naked, clasping a pipe in one hand and a briefcase in the other. In most cases, he stands facing the viewer, as if issuing a challenge to decipher the ominous sexual innuendos that riddle the work. Psychological underpinnings and narrative suggestions connect the two seemingly disparate bodies of work into a strong presentation by this promising artist.

— Rebecca Cochran

The title of Brooklyn-based artist Leonardo Drew’s midcareer survey, “Existed,” describes both the sprawling references the artist channels and the overall pluralistic stance he takes in his work. Much of his oeuvre is epic yet laconic, drifting into and out of heavy, elegiac tropes that never seem to negate his ultimately upbeat vision.

The show represents Drew’s production over the past twenty years and finds an aesthetic kinship with the work of post-Minimalists such as Eva Hesse. Drew’s lack of narrative titles adds formal distance to content that otherwise risks coming dangerously close to sentimentality. In Number 24, 1992—a mammoth-size collection of dark wooden slats interspersed with cotton and oxidized-metal slabs—an unavoidable historical gravitas brings to mind artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Leon Golub. In Drew’s installation, however, the unbearable weight of cultural tradition gone awry does not pander to morbidity. His choice of collage is based more on his developed relationship with his materials than on the cultural signifiers that infuse them.

Drew’s best efforts further a homogeneous presentation that is loose and refined at the same time. His overall voice is consistent and bold. An inviolable, direct connection exists between the formal presence of the work and its narrative associations. It is precisely Drew’s formal considerations—in particular, his confident use of scale in the face of the embraced entropy that characterizes his aesthetic—that address often-held notions about the substances worthy of being presented and those typically deemed to be throwaway. This undercurrent of clutter will confound some viewers, forcing them to reassess, perhaps with a measure of discomfort, their definitions of value. For those who follow Drew’s guidance and come out on the other side, a reawakening of aesthetic awareness is the reward.

— Garland Fielder

As the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, local artist John Barnes Jr. presents “Eschatology,” a dutiful reminder of the past and present struggles of New Orleans. Dozens of crudely hewn wooden structures are erected like totemic headstones around the gallery. These altars take various shapes: There are abstracted heads in the series “Hooded Lilliputian Gangster,” 2009, boats and houses within works like Canoe/Shotgun Hybrid, 2008, and in Inequity Loft Towers, 2009. Despite ranging in size from ten inches to six feet, they maintain one constant: monumentality. The structures are rough yet complex, featuring shoddy and often scorched wood riveted together and plastered with layers of paint.

The physical and conceptual climaxes of the show converge in the human-scaled Canoe/Shotgun Hybrid, whose towering husklike form confronts viewers with its evicted and abandoned state. Like other pieces in the show, graffitied text on an interior wall reveals sardonic sentiments: THAT BALD GUY TOLD ME THAT WE HAD 2 GO—a likely reference to Mayor Ray Nagin—with the dates of Katrina represented by the calendar page of August, nearby. This work, as well as others including Scorched Hood Fortress, 2009, the “Gangster” series, and Scorched Inequity Loft Towersm\, directly references poverty, crime, and institutional racism—all evocative of a volatile post-Katrina visual landscape still flush with instability and abandonment on many levels. While many artists and writers fear exploitation of disaster-related issues, there are those such as Barnes who impressively manage to engage an audience using a thorough and thoughtful reaction to what remains an ever-present reality for himself and countless others, ensuring that we never forget.

— Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart

“Black Page,” D. E. May’s fifth solo exhibition at this gallery, furthers the artist’s hermetic examination of the material ephemera and vernacular traces of the Pacific Northwest. His new drawings and assemblages consist of serial works on paper housed in reflective transparent document holders installed throughout the gallery in a variety of grid forms. With nearly forty drawings in the exhibition, the room is electric with the raw and refined energy of May’s passionate exploration of spatial forms, language, and storied materials such as weathered cardboard, old notebook paper, and other unidentifiable objects flattened and compressed by life on the streets.

May collects and reuses materials that he affixes to intricate drawings of grids and architectural forms, or uses them as the surfaces for other similar drawings. In Untitled (459), 2009, for instance, a rectangle of sagging, stained-brown “skin” is positioned in the center of a square, vertical grid. It is impossible to discern the precise nature of the material or whether May had a hand in its transformation. This ambiguity, which runs throughout all the work, habitually refocuses the viewer’s attention on the organization and observation of experience. The exhibition might read like an archive, but the system at work is cryptic, private, and self-sustaining.

Most of the works in “Black Page” are either mounted on or incorporate thick black paper. One group, bearing the title of the exhibition, consists of plans, schematics, and notations for the construction of various improbable objects. These pieces are drawn in fat white marker on the black paper and are the humorously erratic unconscious of the exhibition, containing instructions such as ARTIST’S STATEMENT BASED ON THE FILM THE SWIMMER W/ BURT LANCASTER IN WHICH THE ARCHITECTURE ALONG THE HILLSIDE OF SWIMMING POOLS BECOME THE SUBPLOT INSTEAD OF THE BORED HOUSEWIVES. One can imagine each drawing in this extraordinary body of work as a frame from a long-lost documentary or cartoon.

— Stephanie Snyder

Cold. Clinical. Ugly. Such were the epithets regularly launched at the tubular steel designs pioneered by Marcel Breuer in the early 1920s. But Breuer himself coolly ascribed such hostility to a “habit”––one that would, he argued, “soon be supplanted by another habit.” His terse surmise proved true. While his furniture designs were not an immediately profitable success, the respect they earned among his peers was eventually matched by commercial triumph. The steel armchair in which I sit typing these words is the direct descendant of Breuer’s invention––one patented in several countries and still a paragon of efficiency in industrial and domestic design alike. As this compact but comprehensive show reveals, Breuer’s designs were not limited to the “B3” model of the Wassily Chair, 1925, for which he is best known, nor was his oeuvre limited to one material or scale. His early work ranged through steel, aluminum, and lacquered wood. So, too, did his designs extend to a typewriter table, a bookcase, side tables, benches, chaise lounges, all manner of armchairs, and a stool for the canteen of the Bauhaus, where the Hungarian-born Breuer studied and eventually became head of the furniture workshop from 1925 to 1928.

As in the case of the De Stijl affiliate Gerrit Rietveld, whose remarkable Red Blue Chair, 1918, has masked a range of design and architectural activity, the prominence of Breuer’s famed chair often eclipses his other activities, set into relief in this exhibition’s retrospective scope. The latter half of Breuer’s career in the United States, where he emigrated in 1937, focused largely on single-family homes, beginning with his own in Lincoln, Massachusetts––now a standout legacy of modernism’s postwar exile on American soil. Breuer’s practice eventually encompassed other types of commissions (a large parish church in Muskegon, Michigan), as well as other materials, like the use of concrete in his hyperbolic-paraboloid concrete shells, which afforded a new mix of efficiency and formal innovation in his public works. While Breuer largely abandoned furniture design for larger-scale architectural projects, the former decidedly influenced the latter––as in his best-known building, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, whose stepped exterior recalls the streamlined cantilever of his steel armchairs. Such resonances echo in this exhibition not with a heavy-handed rhetorical flourish, but rather with a tactful simplicity worthy of Breuer’s work itself.

— Ara H. Merjian

Karel Funk’s hyperrealist portraits have the remarkable ability to incite a complicated relationship between the viewer and the painted image. To capture the likeness of his subjects––always ordinary college-age white men––Funk expertly builds up hundreds of layers of acrylic paint to re-create the most intimate details of his sitter’s skin, hair, eyelashes, wrinkles, and even stubble. Despite this fetishistic inspection, Funk goes out of his way to remove any evidence of the personal lives and inner workings of his subjects. Figures are set against a sober white or off-white background, wearing functional and nondescript Gore-Tex jackets; curiously, they either face the viewer with closed eyes or turn away completely. The alienating effect of these portraits is intensified in the installation at the Rochester Art Center, which denies the viewer the pleasure of the figure’s gaze at every turn.

Given the uniformity of Funk’s output, the exhibition does well to trace the subtle shifts in the artist’s use of format, scale, and concealment over the past seven years. Funk’s recent paintings are taller and come closer to the dimensions of the human body. Portraits from 2006 and 2007 depict figures concealed entirely by hooded jackets, figures who, with their backs to the viewer, display glamorous planes of synthetic fabric that behave almost as landscapes. Ironically, Untitled #32, 2008, features a life-size profile of a thin young man wearing a green T-shirt and jeans, his limbs strikingly bare, his eyes open and staring straight ahead. Despite revealing more information than is characteristic of Funk’s portraits, the ambiguous figure still brings to mind the perpetual distance between a painting and its viewer.

— Andria Hickey

In his exhibition “Rew-Shay Hood Project Part II,” conceptual jester Jonathan Monk riffs on the phonetic spelling of one of the art world’s biggest names––Ed Ruscha––while popularizing images from the elder artist’s first book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (originally published in 1963). Onto the hoods of classic American cars, including a 1969 Ford Mustang and a 1968 Pontiac GTO, Monk has airbrushed images of the gas stations that Ruscha photographed along Route 66, between his hometown of Oklahoma City and Los Angeles. Presented at Artpace, formerly a Hudson automobile dealership, in the midst of an energy crisis and GM’s descent into bankruptcy, Monk’s thirteen hoods (some featuring signs advertising diesel at less than thirty cents per gallon) imbue Ruscha’s aestheticized project with political and social gravitas. In Monk’s hands, these classic American cars, coveted in the way that some limited-edition art books are, exist as a single part––a useless relic of a historical moment. Meanwhile, by resituating Ruscha’s images, Monk extends his practice of undermining the idea of the unique art object, as well as the culture of consumption that has fueled it.

— Lillian Davies

In 1969, two bikers took to the road in search of freedom in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider and became emblematic subjects of the New Hollywood. Forty years later, the city of Taos celebrates this fictional duo and the world they encountered off the grid with the Summer of Love festival. Flower children, diggers, dropouts, and day-trippers convene through September in the city for music, film, art, and more. Singing along to Buffalo Springfield, I was transported back in time by the “Hippy Dippy Parade”—a groovy march down the town’s main drag that culminated, for many, in a visit to Lisa Law’s photography exhibition. Fresh off the parade route, Law’s handpainted bus was parked outside the Taos Center for the Arts. Inside, her color and black-and-white prints recalled an era of free love and “simple taste,” a revolution that peacefully raged from San Francisco’s 1967 Human Be-In to the New Buffalo Commune in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, and all the way to the 1969 festival in Woodstock. While Law’s subjects include the expected cultural heavy-hitters such as Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Timothy Leary, the most magnetic images in this exhibition are those that chronicle her family life and intimate relationships, including her daughter Pilar in the bathtub or asleep in a homemade cradle board. One gets the sense here that with the help of her camera, Law found what the youth of those years were seeking—happiness and community. Lucky for viewers, she was savvy enough to know it was an era worth capturing on film.

— Cameron Shaw