Ewan Gibbs

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
151 Third Street
January 16–June 27

Ewan Gibbs, San Francisco (detail), 2009, graphite on paper, 11 11/16 x 8 1/4".

The not-unfounded stereotype of northern-California fog is well suited to Ewan Gibbs’s modestly scaled, labor-intensive graphite drawings, which previously depicted famous buildings and anonymous hotel rooms. This exhibition comprises eighteen works, commissioned for SF MoMA on the occasion of its seventy-fifth anniversary, and are titled as a group San Francisco, 2009. They show tourist views—think snapshots from Flickr instead of postcard-perfect shots of Coit Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge—that subvert image conventions through their conceptual strategies. Gibbs constructs his works through the repeated inscription of a single mark. This method translates into thousands of tiny slashes or circles, notations borrowed from knitting patterns, which in turn form pale, monochromatic views of the streets of San Francisco. The British artist’s visual tropes echo Photorealist strategies; the results look something like pint-size versions of early Chuck Close works crossed with Robert Bechtle’s paintings of impassive Bay Area abodes.

Gibbs’s quietly demanding output reveals itself slowly—most emphatically in his wan rendering of the Transamerica Pyramid, which is made nearly invisible by a blanket of fog. With a deft hand, the artist manages an impressive amount of tonal variation within his tight framework, yet more compelling is how he encapsulates issues of temporality in his compositions. While the photographic sources were culled from brief visits to San Francisco, Gibbs manages to transform travelogue into an extended poetic meditation.

— Glen Helfand

“Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out”

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
220 East Chicago Avenue
February 6–May 30

View of “Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out,” 2010. From left: William Kentridge, Tabula Rasa I, 2003; Balancing Act, 2003; Moveable Assets, 2003; Feats of Prestidigitation, 2003.

“Production Site” highlights the studio as a place of work, as well as a compelling aesthetic subject in itself. The “selected visual history of the artist’s studio”—installed on a wall directly outside the exhibition galleries, as an initial point of reference—includes a variety of iconic images: Jackson Pollock throwing his body into an “action” painting; Lee Bontecou in her New York studio, blowtorch in hand; Andy Warhol seated alone in his cavernous Factory. There’s even a film still of Julianne Moore as an “avant-garde feminist artist” from The Big Lebowski (1998).

This ancillary display reminds viewers that long-standing misperceptions about the nature of artists’ studios are inevitably linked to the clichés surrounding artists themselves. Perplexingly, however, it is also one of the few points in the exhibition where practitioners actually manifest an embodied presence. Mostly, they appear as trace elements: the whirling dervish of anxiety in Justin Cooper’s video Studio Visit, 2007; the hot white blob of infrared light shutting the studio door at night (Bruce Nauman, Mapping the Studio II, 2002); the covert operative who comes in to expand and edit her painting’s sprawling narrative only on Mondays, when the museum is closed (Deb Sokolow, You Tell People You’re Working Really Hard on Things These Days, 2010).

There are several memorable exceptions. Nikhil Chopra’s two-day gallery performance offered a brief but potent instance of an artist responding directly, if theatrically, to his immediate environment, while William Kentridge’s magnificent multichannel animation—a meditation on the medium’s place in the history of cinematic trickery—draws viewers into a space that feels authentically “magic,” despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s like walking into a waking dream.

— Claudine Ise

“Starburst: Color Photography in America: 1970–1980”

CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM
953 Eden Park Drive
February 13–May 9

Stephen Shore, West Ninth Avenue, Amarillo, Texas, October 2, 1974, color photograph, 8 x 10".

“I photograph in color because the world is in color,” Eve Sonneman declared in 1976. Such a statement presented color photography as a near tautology––as exquisitely self-evident. But it also addressed an art world where the medium was understood as black-and-white. So argues this exhibition, which charts the fraught and uneven emergence of chromatic photography in the 1970s. While black-and-white images were seen as artful translations of the world––and hence cerebral abstractions of it––Sonneman’s comment captured a desire for an artless empiricism that several early color photographers toyed with as they married the camera’s capacity for dumb transcription with the radical de-skilling enabled by new technologies like the Polaroid.

Stephen Shore’s 1971 postcards of Amarillo, Texas, clearly indebted to Ed Ruscha’s serial cartographies, are situated as one point of origin of the emergent tradition. Yet these deadpan Conceptual beginnings seem to quickly slip into more traditional documentary modes. In the many images of vernacular landscapes, clapboard houses, billboards and signage, the legacy of Walker Evans looms large, even if his focused vision is now splayed out into a spectrum of possibilities. By contrast, Jan Groover and Barbara Kasten turned their backs on the dialogue with documentary, using color instead to articulate a range of formal, painterly concerns. This chromatic intensity reaches a saturated frenzy in John Divola’s Zuma #29, 1978, Richard Misrach’s 1978 “Hawaii” series, and, most famously, in the milky-veined, crimson ceiling of William Eggleston’s Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973.

Unhitching pigment and dye from the seemingly natural relationship they currently enjoy with photography, the show adeptly denaturalizes color. In prodding the general amnesia on this point, “Starburst” also accounts for the monumental Gurskys and Struths of the 1990s, worlds away from Shore’s drugstore prints, yet arguably the apotheoses of color photography’s chameleonic history.

— Leora Maltz-Leca

Francesca Fuchs

TEXAS GALLERY
2012 Peden Street
February 18–March 27

Francesca Fuchs, Abstract Print and Bed,
 2009, 
acrylic on canvas, 
59 3/4 x 80".

This deceptively enigmatic exhibition by Francesca Fuchs, simply titled “Paintings,” will not appease those looking for a quick read. While the ten canvases might initially come off as staid, their metaphoric import is tantalizingly tautological—a self-reflective statement on value. The questions raised by the works are both simple and stubborn and thus recall the novels of Magnus Mills. The protagonists in Mills’s stories are typically part of a maddening, self-sustaining, yet purposeless system. Similarly, Fuchs creates an existential conundrum in her show, one that implores the viewer to question profound issues via a simple apparatus.

All the works here depict paintings of paintings, and the artist’s signature washed-out pastel palette is dominant, if somewhat more painterly than in earlier works. Fuchs’s source material is culled from a mix of junk-shop kitsch paintings, which are sometimes positioned next to pictures by renowned artists. By rendering both genres in one work, she not just draws the mercurial nature of aesthetic value into focus but also, more poignantly, pulls herself into the mix. While so much contemporary art distances the maker from the viewer, these paintings expose the artist’s deep-seated questioning of worth and value within the very context of the system that is celebrating her. The fact that the exhibition is in one of Houston’s top venues only enriches the dialogue.

— Garland Fielder

“The Graphic Unconscious”

THE PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY OF THE FINE ARTS
118-128 North Broad Street
January 29–April 11

Tromarama, Serigala Militia (detail), 2005, 402 woodcuts, video projection, woodcuts 10 x 8" each.

This ambitious five-venue exhibition brings together thirty-five artists who incorporate prints or printmaking into a wide array of styles and practices. The highlight of the exhibition (itself part of Philadelphia’s citywide festival “Philagrafika 2010”) is at Morris and Fisher Brooks Galleries at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and features Christiane Baumgartner, Mark Bradford, Orit Hofshi, Pepón Osorio, Kiki Smith, Qiu Zhijie, and the artist collective Tromarama. The show encourages a broadened definition of printmaking, one that takes into account digital reproduction technology and encompasses the use of printed matter in combined-media works.

Several of the pieces challenge the traditional notion of prints as multiples. Hofshi, for example, incorporates hand-carved pine panels along with the prints pulled from them into a large-scale sculptural installation. By including the blocks in If the Tread Is an Echo, 2009, the artist blurs the line between process and final artwork. She also precludes the possibility of an edition. Another print that would be challenging to reproduce is Osorio’s You’re Never Ready, 2009. For this piece, he used a laser printer to superimpose an X-ray of his mother’s skull onto a flattened, compressed pile of confetti. The single continuous image––printed across thousands of individual paper bits like a giant jigsaw puzzle––is a technological feat that subverts printmaking’s tradition of multiple reproductions of a single image by instead printing one image on numerous surfaces.

Also worth pointing out as an effective fusion of new media and traditional printmaking technique is Tromarama’s Serigala Militia, 2005. This stop-motion animation, projected in a small chamber, was made by filming a sequence of wooden panels that also line the exterior walls of the room. The blocks’ handmade materiality and implicit labor-intensive production enrich the slick, fast-paced video. Overall, the assimilation of prints and printmaking into a wide variety of contemporary art practices confirms the sustained relevance and versatility of this ancient medium.

— Mara Hoberman

Carey Young

MUSEUM OF ART, RISD
Rhode Island School of Design, 224 Benefit Street
October 9–April 18

Carey Young, Declared Void, 2005, vinyl drawing and text on wall, dimensions variable.

As this small show demonstrates, Carey Young has considered deeply the realm of corporate-structured business and the legalization of Western culture. In the nearly fifteen-minute video Uncertain Contract, 2008, an actor in business attire roams an empty white set while dramatizing legalese such as parties, tender, and notice—at one point furiously punching an imagined victim while repeating the word “damages.” Body Techniques (after Parallel Stress, Dennis Oppenheim, 1970), 2007, is a photograph of Young, in a business suit, resting facedown in a hollow of sand on the outskirts of an anonymous Arab boomtown. The work comments ruefully on the fate of the individual in transnational capitalist enterprises while evoking still other artistic precedents, including performance documentation of Valie Export’s 1972–76 series “Body Configurations.”

The exhibition hinges on Declared Void, 2005, a cubic space delineated by a thick black vinyl line applied to the walls and floor. Alongside it, a text declares: BY ENTERING THE ZONE CREATED BY THIS DRAWING, AND FOR THE PERIOD YOU REMAIN THERE, YOU DECLARE AND AGREE THAT THE US CONSTITUTION WILL NOT APPLY TO YOU. The contractual language imbues the emptiness with a charge that simultaneously repulses and seduces. During my visit, two men discussed the work’s implications (“Someone could come in there and strip my clothes off and beat me to a bloody pulp, I guess”) and a woman gingerly stretched her foot across the line. She withdrew it quickly and then, for the rest of her time in the gallery, skirted this seeming black hole of rights. In fact, while crafting the piece Young sought legal advice on how best to re-create the “gray area” of the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay. An irony, no doubt intended by this consistently observant artist, is the presence just above Declared Void of one of the museum’s surveillance cameras, watching over the scene below impassively.

— Brian Sholis

Tania Bruguera

NEUBERGER MUSEUM OF ART AT PURCHASE COLLEGE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
735 Anderson Hill Road
January 28–April 11

Tania Bruguera, Untitled (Havana, 2000), 2000, Performance view.

Tania Bruguera is a name familiar to anyone tuned in to the international biennial circuit. Less known are her actual installations, which are conceived in and for specific environments and are, in many cases, transient. As the recipient of the first Neuberger Exhibition Prize, Bruguera is now the focus of a painstakingly installed solo show that assembles more than a decade of her work for the first time.

“On the Political Imaginary,” however, is no mere rehearsal, and the avowedly committed character of the projects therein is augmented, but not lost, in translation. While performances that rely heavily on foreign constituencies, such as Displacement, 1998–99, or Untitled (Moscow)/Trust Workshop, 2007, do not benefit from the participation of the Cubans or Russians around whom they were conceived, they gain new life here when placed in dialogue with other works and with the museum itself––a juxtaposition with a Kongo figure from the Brooklyn Museum, and a wall cut that physically links the Moscow piece to another gallery.

The vitality of these works also owes much to the presence of live performers who inhabit the installations, their presence at once subtle yet critical to the success of an intentionally dialogic process of display and spectatorship. There is certainly a political leitmotif running through the installations, but the works never feel didactic, inviting their participants to make choices and draw their own conclusions, to act out the democratic impulses that course through the work rather than ingesting ideas wholesale. While it is easy of late to be cynical about the social potential of contemporary art (relationality, performance, “politics”), Bruguera’s balance of erudition and viscerality might make a believer out of you.

— Ian Bourland

Wafaa Bilal

HELEN DAY ART CENTER
5 School Street
January 21–April 4

Wafaa Bilal, Chair, 2009, color photograph, 40 x 50".

Chicago-based artist Wafaa Bilal’s recent work turns the topicality of its subject matter––the horrors of war in the artist’s native Iraq, which he fled as a dissident in the run-up to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait––into a set of chilling meditations on photography and representation, outrage and loss, and the long-distance violence of technologically mediated warfare in the digital age. The ambiguous evidentiary character of the war-zone photograph––and of the stories it tells––plays an organizing role in this overtly political body of work. Chair, 2009, is a large-format image of an elaborate dollhouse reconstruction based on a scene captured in 2003 by photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg in one of Saddam Hussein’s war-ravaged palaces. The installation Samarra, 2009, allows visitors to perform the same trick for themselves: The viewfinder of a battered Pentax embedded in the gallery’s wall opens onto a dioramic re-creation of a ruined mosque interior in Fallujah, destroyed by American bombs in 2004.

Bilal is perhaps best known for his 2007 performance piece Domestic Tension, which took shape in response to the 2005 death of his brother, killed by an unmanned American Predator drone in Iraq. It is represented here by a life-size reconstruction of the ersatz bedroom the artist inhabited for thirty days at the now-closed Flatfile Galleries in Chicago. Watched round-the-clock via webcam, Bilal invited online visitors to “shoot an Iraqi” with a remote-controlled paintball gun. Some forty thousand paintballs later, the room’s paint-spattered walls and furniture bear mute witness to the sharp aim of Bilal’s provocation and the remarkable lengths he was willing to go to turn what he calls his “comfort zone” into a “conflict zone.” Silenced and stilled here, the scene takes on the hushed atmosphere of a battlefield memorial hastily erected before the end of a war.

— Alexander Keefe

Pedro Reyes

LABOR
Colima 55
February 25–April 18

Pedro Reyes, Babymarx, 2009, still from a color video, 23 minutes.

Pedro Reyes first conceived of a television series that would feature puppets of Karl Marx and philosopher Adam Smith in 2007. It was not until the next year, however, when Akiko Miyake, the cocurator of the third Yokohama Triennale, put him in touch with Japanese master puppet maker Takumi Ota, that Reyes was able to move forward with the project. Through elaborate drawings, Reyes designed twelve puppets for Ota to create, after which he began to work on a trailer and the pilot episode of Babymarx, 2009. This exhibition presents many of the objects, props, and sets that resulted from the filming of both the pilot and the trailer. It includes puppets of Marx, Smith, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Guevara, John Maynard Keynes, and Milton Friedman—all of whom take part in the ideological debate central to Reyes’s film. Also on view are Reyes’s puppets of fictional characters, including the librarian Miss Lena, which create the engine and support for the debate between capitalism and socialism in “Crisis City.”

Monitors on top of two tables here portray scenes of the making of the first episode of Babymarx. Members of the Japanese puppet theater company Hitomiza manipulate the characters in a two-story library building designed by Reyes, which references modern architects and designers including Le Corbusier, Jean Prouvé, Richard Neutra, and Jørn Utzon, as well as Mexican modern masters such as Mario Pani and Reynaldo Pérez Rayón. Nearby, the actual model of the library takes up the rest of the exhibition space. While it may seem strange that Reyes’s characters inhabit the library, Babymarx suggests that the premise of that sacred space as a container of knowledge is now subject to revision. Eschewing cynicism, the artist imagines it as space from which it is possible to conceive of new economic systems and perhaps even question the premise of capitalism.

Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.

— Montserrat Albores