John Miller

METRO PICTURES
519 West 24th Street
January 19–March 10

John Miller, Suburban Past Time (detail), 2012, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

John Miller’s revered output finds inspiration in the writings of Henri Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin, the drawings of Douglas Huebler, and the indisputable hospitality of the Midwest. His latest site-specific installation, Suburban Past Time, 2012, a work in three “sites,” seems to expand the scenes depicted by Miller’s ongoing series “Middle of the Day,” 1994–, in three-dimensional space and scale by presenting familiar landscapes whose jarring mundanity disarms viewers.

A behemoth concrete and foam board rock, a synthetic sugar maple tree, and decorative wallpaper depicting an apartment block in Berlin establish the first site as an unlikely commons, one that articulates the paradox of a privatized public space such as city parks, or even, the gallery space itself. Alienation, work, and time––three tropes rampant throughout the exhibition and Miller’s oeuvre––further complicate the second site, where two performers (seemingly college students gaining an hourly wage) mostly read while sitting, either on chairs or on a plinth. Miller insists on paying for your pleasure, and you, in turn, must pay as well (albeit with an awkward intrusion). In the same site, Miller pairs gray plinths with metallic Staples filing cabinets. The objects’ proportions are similar, this visual simile rendering equitable, by extension, the matte finish of Robert Morris’s Slab (cloud), 1973, and the glittery luster of DeWain Valentine’s Triple Disk Red Metal Flake––Black Edge, 1966. Both Morris and Valentine tirelessly insist upon phenomenological surface; Miller directs their argument to the tedious maintenance work of archiving.

The third and final site presents Look 49, 2012, an animated video projection created with Takuji Kogo. Wall-size picture-postcard settings (London’s Big Ben; a romantic, deserted byway) are spliced with shots of parking lots and close-ups of white plastic chairs. Texts taken from personals ads—seeking generic sexual encounters and wealth opportunities—are superimposed on the images and vocalized by a computer voice. Miller’s predecessor and late collaborator Mike Kelley demarcated the territory of the spectacular underbelly of Americana; in retort, Miller resuscitates middlebrow culture, locating in it an unspectacularly rich theoretical paradox where the everyday subsumes individual reference and experience. Here, alienation begets community.

— Piper Marshall

Jesús Soto

GREY ART GALLERY
New York University, 100 Washington Square East
January 10–March 31

Jesús Soto, Sans titre (Étude pour une série) (Untitled [Study for a Series]), 1952–53, paint and paper on wood, 40 1/4 x 40 1/4 x 2 3/8".

A focused show featuring forty-seven works from the two-decade period after the Venezuelan artist Jesús Soto moved to Paris, this exhibition tracks Soto’s experiments with abstract painting as a lively, embodied act of perception. Soto relied on ordered matrices of Schönberg's twelve-tone system as a point of departure for early work like Sans titre (Étude pour un série) (Untitled [Study for a Series]), 1952–53, a grid of colorful indentations on wood. Playing with the surface and depth of his paintings during this period led Soto to his singular innovation: augmenting his surfaces using Plexiglas overlays, as in Luz plateada (Silver Light), 1955–56. Here the Plexiglas at once extends the painting into the space of the viewer and destabilizes the act of looking, causing the geometry of both the background and the foreground to dissolve into a dizzying array of colors and lines.

In 1957 Soto abandoned Plexiglas overlays to produce his “Vibraciones” (Vibrations) series, covering his mechanically painted lines with an improvisatory tangle of wires. At the same time Soto began the “Escrituras” (Writings) series, inscribing his painted surfaces with thin bits of metal, wire, and rods. Experimenting with the sculptural possibilities of painting, Soto added putty, wire, and wood to his pictures; or, in the case of the large-scale Mural, 1961, he covered a large black wooden surface with pipes, brooms, and other detritus salvaged from the streets of Caracas. While his Plexiglas and sculptural paintings anticipate innovations in Op art and kinetic art, pieces like El tambor (The Drum), 1963, suggest the possibilities of participatory art. Throughout the twenty years covered here, Soto was in conversation with Duchamp, Yves Klein, and Group Zero, and although he never aligned with a single group or movement, this exhibition argues for his centrality to postwar Paris.

— Lori Cole

“A Postcard from Afar: North Korea from a Distance”

APEXART
291 Church Street
January 11–March 10

Jung Lee, Bordering North Korea # 15, 2007, color photograph.

For all its coordinated means and forcible ends, North Korea’s official footage relaying the nation’s demonstrative mourning of Kim Jong Il may have let other woes escape into view. Coat-swaddled, sob-buckled—bare fists beating pavement—this suddenly visible public seemed possessed by still older grievances, vaster grief, deepened in Kim’s lifetime, irredeemable by his death. Or so observers outside “the hermit kingdom” might be tempted to glean, forced to parse through the country’s tethered tourism and constricted traffic of abductions and defections. The eight artists in this show roam just that moral-epistemological murk, evading expedient genres like exposé, lampoon, or Manichaean sci-fi for subtler sightlines of desire and identification.

Soni Kum’s lyrical documentary memoir Foreign Sky, 2005, ponders her melancholic attachment to the North by sifting the century-old history of Japan-born North Koreans like herself—a refugee underclass ineligible for Japanese citizenship—alongside US vets’ and reparations activists’ rueful retrospections on America’s “forgotten war.” Karl Tuikkanen’s video installation Untilted, 2011, revisits the artist’s preteen participation in an anti-American march in 1980s Pyongyang, when accompanying his Swedish socialist parents on a solidarity delegation. These works address eclipsed affiliations that summon further contexts, from the Non-Aligned Movement to East Asian postcoloniality and racialism, including the ethnic nationalism fueling some Korean reunification campaigns.

Kim Jong Il’s own storied avidities—for Hollywood and Harleys—inspire works here by Tony Garifalakis, Magnus Bärtås, and Jim Finn, whose loving, absurdist collage-film parable The Juche Idea, 2008, rummages stillborn socialism for what the political imagination might learn there. Yet the desire to feel along with and on behalf of those afar turns uneasy in Jung Lee’s C-print series “Bordering North Korea,” 2005, where pithy text like “Let us live our own way” floats voicelike amid the DPRK’s misty borderlands—the obscuring beauty of it all inviting belief.

— Chinnie Ding

Noriyuki Haraguchi

MCCAFFREY FINE ART
23 East 67th Street
January 6–March 27

Noriyuki Haraguchi, Air Pipe C, 1969, acrylic on canvas mounted on plywood, 53 1/2 x 61 x 9 7/8".

On the heels of the Guggenheim’s recent retrospective of Lee Ufan, this exhibition offers New Yorkers a reintroduction to another of the central figures of the Japanese postwar avant-garde. Noriyuki Haraguchi, born in 1946, works in a rougher and altogether more industrial idiom than the other artists grouped under the designation Mono-ha, and his sculptures and works on paper often veer away from a purely Minimal vocabulary to wrestle with questions of the environment, modernization, and war. Air Pipe B and Air Pipe C, two wall reliefs from 1969, are each painted a brilliant white and bulge from a flat ground into a cylindrical protrusion to the side. They call to mind the factories associated with Japan’s breakneck industrialization of the 1960s––or, more trenchantly, the exhaust of a jet engine on the sort of military aircraft the United States still stations there.

The forms of the airplane, sometimes mimetic and sometimes more abstract, recur throughout Haraguchi’s career. During the student riots in Tokyo of the late 1960s, he created a plywood reproduction of an American jet bound for Vietnam, which police finally destroyed when the university barricades came down. A-7 E Corsair II, 2011, recalls that lost work: It’s a one-to-one replica of the tail of an American fighter jet, though this one is fashioned out of canvas and aluminum and fits into the gallery so narrowly that the viewer has to shuffle past its wing. The sculpture is personal as much as political, though: Yokosuka, the port south of Tokyo from which the US deployed its Vietnam-era forces, is also the artist’s birthplace. The forms of militarism and industry that Haraguchi repurposes may be the signs of Japanese modernity and America’s often brutal contribution to it, but they’re also, just as significantly, the look of home.

— Jason Farago

Doug Wheeler

DAVID ZWIRNER
519 West 19th Street
January 17–February 25

Doug Wheeler, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12, 1975/2012, reinforced fiberglass, LED lights, high intensity fluorescent lights, UV fluorescent lights, quartz halogen lights, DMX control, architecturally modified space, composed of two parts, 47 x 58 1/2'. 

For the first time in New York, Doug Wheeler has created a pristine, white architectural environment, its curved walls suggesting a limitless interiority that allows the viewer to focus on its tangible atmosphere. Wheeler’s art has been preoccupied with such ethereal-seeming phenomena since the 1960s, when he began exploring “Light and Space” along with Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and James Turrell in Southern California. The current installation is lit with a mixture of purple and white LEDs, fluorescent, UV fluorescent, and quartz halogen lights, positioned in plain view above and beside the work’s wide entrance. Set to a thirty-two-minute cycle that mimics changing light conditions between day and night, its luminosity morphs slowly and nearly imperceptibly, managing an almost foglike density in the stark space. The clarity of vision when focusing on a hand, companion, or entryway seems practically photographic in its precision when set against the spatial indeterminacy of the room and its light cycle.

SA MI 75 DZ NY 12, 1975/2012, the fourth in a group of room-scaled “Infinity Environments” begun by the artist in 1975, encourages experiential slowness. Initially this manifests as a cautiousness of physical acclimation. Entering the installation, shod in white slippers provided for the experience, I carefully shuffled along the floor, arms slightly extended, grasping after the parameters of my surroundings. This measured advance—my attempt to answer bodily the question, “Where am I?”—gradually gave way to a second, lengthier, experience of deliberate observation. Here the act of looking was itself cast into relief by the paradoxical, almost granular materiality of the space.

Wheeler’s installation offers differing infinities: While the architecture only appears to continue indefinitely, the lighting really is cyclically infinite. This intersection amplifies both, creating a site of perceptual experience so intense that its effects linger powerfully with the viewer beyond the room itself.

— Edward Vazquez

Paul Heyer and Virginia Poundstone

RACHEL UFFNER GALLERY
47 Orchard Street
January 15–February 26

View of “I know that I am awake,” 2012. Foreground: Virginia Poundstone, Miss Margaret Legge, 2012. Background: Paul Heyer, Wine, 2011.

Painting and sculpture make peaceful bedfellows in this exhibition by two artists whose works, while formally dissimilar, mirror a taste for bucolic and understated beauty. The show’s title, “I know that I am awake,” is lifted from author and Zen Buddhist Peter Matthiessen, who in his 1978 memoir Snow Leopard climbs the Himalayas in search of the elusive titular beast, but finds exquisiteness in the pedestrian sights along the way. Following suit, Paul Heyer and Virginia Poundstone evoke a sense of the existential via more modest matter.

Heyer’s subtle marks on canvas (stippled strokes, calligraphic lines, flashes of underpainting) and diverse subjects (doughnutlike wreaths, sprigs of leaves, a lamppost) showcase slippery symbols amid abstract smears and flecks. Here, the historical weight of the medium rolls off, and depth occurs instead in the painting’s visual encounter. An effortlessly wrought but particularly juicy painting, Burrow, 2011, for example, is velvety red and layered with leopard spots in black and bright blue. A shadowy slit sketched at its center conjures a feeling of being engulfed by the painting’s heart of darkness.

Meanwhile, Poundstone’s sculptures merge the floral and the industrial in striking balancing acts. Her recent works feature freestanding pedestals made of ceramic tile or solid concrete. Strips of steel—digitally printed with photographs of purple rhododendron—loop and twist around these bases. Ikenobo Yuki, 2012, a waist-high assemblage (named after a foremost female practitioner of ikebana flower arranging), resembles an elaborately considered present topped with ribbon curlicues; another, titled (after the late British “society florist”) Constance Spry, 2012, sports a fan of brass rods, peacocklike and proud. Like the master florists she references—and Heyer too—Poundstone takes the materials at hand, strips away both burden and banality, and re-presents a rather enlightened arrangement.

— Emily Weiner

“Images Rendered Bare. Vacant. Recognizable.”

STADIUM
548 West 28th Street, Suite 636
January 20–March 3

View of “Images Rendered Bare. Vacant. Recognizable.,” 2012.

As Facebook feeds and Tumblr streams send digital images further from their indexical referents with every passing “Post,” the only image whose integrity cannot be eroded is the image that never laid claim to any: the stock photo. And while the strategic appropriation of stock images has become something of a generic plug-in itself, curator Karen Archey keeps the conversation critical with “Images Rendered Bare. Vacant. Recognizable.” The title’s punctuated rhythm echoes Rachel Reupke’s 10 Seconds or Greater, 2009, a fifteen-minute montage of staged, stilted interactions, all intentionally infomercial-ready. Her delightfully multicultural cast trade toothpaste-commercial smiles over vegetable-laden chopping blocks or wipe their brows as if after a hearty but sweat-free workout. For the adjacent projection, Frieze Stock Footage, 2011, Oliver Laric took a slow-motion camera around the Frieze Art Fair, erasing the specific context of the fair with footage of overtly generic events such as “energy drink poured into cup,” “cigarette falling,” or “urinal,” which features liquid shimmering like confetti over the porcelain surface. Yngve Holen splashes his neuro-themed mood boards with digital renderings of water, a substance fundamentally not able to be scanned.

If these artists nod to the semantic disjuncture inherent in the digital image, Sean Raspet gives form to that frustration. Starting with photographs of police reports stuffed in manila envelopes, Raspet folds in neutral scenes, like the tiled floors of fast food restaurants. The resulting visual accumulations are printed on vinyl banners that hang in imperfect overlap, suggesting browser windows on a desktop screen. Selected excerpts reappear as icons on coffee mugs, ordered online through a photo-personalization service and then stacked on the floor in a pyramid of packaging material. Installation shots of these arrangements are then inserted back into the piece, in what Archey terms “a self-cannibalizing archive.” This archive ultimately leaves no access; at its root, the documents remain sealed. The images of information are made as “happily vacant” as the staged stock photography of the surrounding works.

— Kate Sutton

George Ortman

ALGUS GREENSPON GALLERY
71 Morton Street
January 14–February 25

George Ortman, Journey of a Young Man, 1957, oil on canvas mounted on wood, plaster, collage, 40 x 110”.

George Ortman’s math doesn’t always add up. His colorful geometric relief paintings, while seemingly well behaved, are anything but. Diamonds, octagons, arrows, and the occasional obtuse angle—all made of canvas, wood, and plaster—nearly align in these surprisingly relaxed constructions of less than fastidious manufacture. Ortman’s inclusion in Donald Judd’s 1965 Minimalist sermon “Specific Objects” promised a legacy that never quite materialized, perhaps due to Ortman’s ambivalence in a moment that asked artists to abandon both painting and sculpture. Yet Ortman’s independent aesthetic has given his equivocal oeuvre “something new,” as Judd noted in a review from 1963.

Journey of a Young Man, 1957, reveals Ortman’s bumpy transition away from youthful Surrealist influences through a symmetrical tableau that recalls the seven stages of life as the Bard outlined them in As You Like It. A Lee Krasner–esque swath of pink paint seeps down onto seven horizontally arranged panels, each perforated by a structural opening that contains symbolic objects (the first and last are, pleasantly, eggs), quite unlike the soul-sucking voids featured in the oft-compared reliefs of Lee Bontecou. A particular midcentury American vernacular permeates the exhibition: an offbeat abstraction reminiscent of works by contemporaries Paul Brach, I. Rice Pereira, and Alfred Jensen. A key work from that milieu, the coyly titled Blue Diamond, 1961, is particularly arresting, with its interlocked symbols and shapes and its conflation of a formal vocabulary with a sauvage handmade quality that muddies any possible ties to Minimalist gestalt tendencies. To further illustrate Ortman’s unique position, Algus Greenspon has adroitly included studies on paper of Paolo Uccello’s masterwork Battle of San Romano, ca. 1438–40, a work whose play of form and perspective resonates with Ortman’s own. In the back gallery, recent works from 1997 to 2011 complete Ortman’s latest turn. His bravura gestures of illusionism have been neatly refined, resulting in intricate reliefs as winsomely curious as their mystic progenitors.

— Beau Rutland

Sarah Sze

ASIA SOCIETY
725 Park Avenue at 70th Street
December 15–March 25

Sarah Sze, Checks and Balances (detail), 2011, stone, string, and ink on archival paper, 75 x 18 x 2".

Occupying adjacent galleries on the Asia Society’s second floor, eight new installations by Sarah Sze, all from 2011, meet with a selection of her works on paper from the past fifteen years. The juxtaposition of Sze’s installations with her prints, drawings, paper cuttings, and collages flaunts the artist’s fluidity working in both two and three dimensions and highlights the consistency of her peculiar aesthetic despite significant shifts in scale and means of production. In the installations and on paper, Sze’s spiraling vertical landscapes swarm with imagery (representational and invented) set within vertiginous and intricately latticed geographies. Any impression of chaos signaled by Sze’s whirling multiperspectival depictions of fantastic worlds, however, is calmed by the artist’s intense control and precision.

Several installations stretch from ceiling to floor, engaging the walls, corners, and, in certain cases, windows of the museum. In Random Walk Drawing (Eye Chart), 2011, a roll of delicately cut paper cascades down from the ceiling, echoing the elongated format Sze often uses to accommodate multiple perspectives on paper (a style that recalls traditional Chinese scroll painting). The artist’s consistent cadre of materials reinforces the visual coherence of her topographies, whether flat or three-dimensional. Razor blades, blue painter’s tape, string, and tape measures appear throughout both bodies of work and draw attention to the creative process. By incorporating tools and supports into her final artworks, Sze exposes how she conceives landscapes physically and metaphorically.

Moving between Sze’s works on paper and her installations affords the viewer a greater appreciation for both. The installations bring Sze’s involute drawings and intricate paper cuttings to life, offering viewers a chance to experience her otherworldly landscape on a human scale. The artist’s two-dimensional architectural imaginings, in turn, appear more viable when seen in conjunction with actual physical constructions.

— Mara Hoberman

Ridley Howard

LEO KOENIG INC.
545 West 23rd Street
January 19–February 25

Ridley Howard, Nudes, 2011, oil on linen, 24 x 30”.

“Young girls? I don’t give a damn. I like small feet, I like my fabulous house with cool stuff in it.” This was John Currin’s impression, from a 2001 interview, of the staunchly antimodern painter Balthus. Currin enlists Balthus on behalf of his own postmodernist gambit, yet it’s Ridley Howard in his second exhibition at this gallery who brings Balthus’s earnestly sensed joy full circle after modernity’s linear exhaustion.

In “Slows,” Howard’s twenty paintings jubilate through thrumming color planes and a slight drafting curvature that owes as much to Botticelli as it does to Adrian Tomine. Howard’s predilections are emphasized by art-historical cross-referencing, but also by slyly referencing his own work. For instance, Nudes (all works 2011), depicting a tryst that becomes a structured arrangement of interlocked bodies (evinced by a constellation of moles on a man’s back), is clearly indebted to the kindred films of Michaelangelo Antonioni. To its right, Mint Green, a lambent abstraction punctuated by an archipelago of black dots on a cream ground, shows Howard mining color theorist Joseph Albers (particularly his little-known album covers). Not coincidentally, Antonioni’s 1964 classic Red Desert owed much to Albers and his Color Field disciples. The comparable moles and black dots show Howard employing both representation and abstraction in an effort to further digest––as well as convey––his penchants.

Despite the humility of these images, “Slows” offers a range of esoteric associations. Liquors, for example, is a cluster of grayed geometries fronted by the painting’s titular store sign that evokes Ralston Crawford’s deserted scenes of industrialization. Howard deftly allocates his appreciable influences, but quotation is hardly the point; his adroitness is as much a component of his style as is his line or color sense. All these elements are on display in this richly innovative show, which profoundly accents the beauty of everyday life.

— Ryan Steadman

“Campaign”

C24 GALLERY
514 West 24th Street
January 12–February 25

Jill Magid, From a Distance You Don't Look Anything like a Friend, 2011, letterpress, neon, dimensions variable. Installation view.

In the neon pink zine-catalogue produced for this group show, curator Amy Smith-Stewart describes a heightened cultural hostility to women’s bodies fostered by contemporary mass media that traffic in “unattainable avatars” of femininity. Celebrity culture, reality television, and social networking are her particular culprits, and with “Campaign” she rallies against their imagemaking monopoly. But if the artists don’t present an alternative propaganda front, as the exhibition’s tongue-in-cheek title suggests they might, their disunited, often humorous challenges to “our prevailing depictions of women” still add up to an exciting chaos of dissent. Beyond the works’ common strategies (largely appropriation and collage) and recurring themes (fashion, porn, tabloid stars, and the nude), they reveal other surprising threads of camaraderie.

Kathe Burkhart’s Liz Taylor paintings are a perverse homage to misogynist projection. In Beaver: From the Liz Taylor Series (publicity shot) (all works cited, 2011), a deck of strip-poker playing cards silhouette the flatly painted Hollywood icon, and a shaggy length of fake fur, affixed as Taylor’s stole, underscores the obscenity of the red text that bisects the canvas like a protest sign: BEAVER. Burkhart’s painting shares a corner with a like-mindedly antivirtuosic, but quieter, piece by Amy Wilson. Reminiscent of a strange school project, Fashion for Co-Joined Twins is an expository text about the confluence of fashion and fascism beginning with the Nazi occupation of Paris, penciled on a series of brown kraft paper pages and illustrated with embroidered figures clothed in surreal designs for the conjoined. These works shine as stylistic oddities even among this very diverse gathering of work.

Jill Magid’s From a Distance You Don’t Look Anything like a Friend also sticks out—as a nonfigurative installation piece (a passage of appropriated text is impressed into the gallery’s drywall alongside an inverted neon arc), but also as a more oblique contribution to Smith-Stewart’s activist aims regarding “this world of interchangeable, digitally manipulated homogenous girls.” Magid takes her text from Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s influential 2009 book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Online controversies surrounding law enforcement protocol, combat-based video games, and post-traumatic stress disorder populate the Internet rabbit hole of further research on Grossman’s ideas about desensitization and conditioned killing—perhaps an appropriate, if disturbing, maze to find oneself in when considering this show’s ultimate concern with the exposure and disruption of dehumanization in our particular moment of new media immersion.

— Johanna Fateman

Greg Parma Smith

BALICE HERTLING & LEWIS
Film Center Building, 630 Ninth Avenue Suite 403
January 6–February 25

View of “Life Drawings, Poseurs, and ‘thirteen oil paintings on canvas,’ ” 2012.

If paintings produce painters, how might one understand this painting subject correctly? Certainly correctness is relative to its milieu, so in what sense can painting’s social proprieties be sullied, and, more important, to what reasonable ends? With this in mind, let’s consider Greg Parma Smith’s current exhibition, “Life Drawings, Poseurs, and ‘thirteen oil paintings on canvas.’ ” In the eleven works on view, this conceptual trio of figurative themes are put to work with wildly disparate results. Painted from nude models, the “Poseurs” offer a United Colors of Benetton–esque collection of bodies rendered on decoratively embossed gesso grounds. The works collected under the heading “Life Drawings” appropriate cells from indie comics in brightly colored compositions that disorient their emphatically autobiographical narrative to artful disarray. Complementing this appropriative line is “thirteen oil paintings on canvas,” which binds together unstretched paintings of thuggish cartoons into an artist’s book that seems to teasingly adapt that quintessential subcultural form, the zine, for the symbolic economy of canvas and oil paint. Throughout, an exacting technical method is present, where musculature is rendered with the same machinic passion as an area of flat color.

Through his own investment in the dedifferentiated technical mark, Parma Smith’s conceptual mobilization of the figurative canvas seems part and parcel to a larger project that seeks to critically antagonize the role that identificatory interests culled from subcultural markets serve to inhibit artistic practices from articulating something of an ethical statement—like a teenager who refuses to leave the cultural hub of his or her bedroom. The dissonances and disorientations between the acculturated bodies figured in these variegated canvases are a barbed offering to a practice whose latest principle of sufficient reason is an idea prompted by David Joselit that, given the post-Fordist economies that circulate its mean(ing)s, painting is beside itself. In Parma Smith’s case, painting is recalcitrantly within itself to the point of bodily discomfort.

— Sam Pulitzer

Lee Mingwei

MUSEUM OF CHINESE IN AMERICA
215 Centre Street
October 20–March 26

Lee Mingwei, The Quartet Project, 2005, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Lee Mingwei, who emigrated from Taiwan to the United States in his adolescence, presents a pair of installations as a contemporary coda to this museum’s permanent exhibition on 150 years of Chinese-American history. The Quartet Project, 2005, comprises four computers, each showing a video that features one member of a string ensemble in an otherwise dark gallery. The musicians play Antonín Dvořák’s 1893 American Quartet, which the Czech composer wrote in Iowa and which, like his New World Symphony, pays a debt to American folk music, not least African-American and Native American sources. The monitors are hidden behind L-shaped baffles and facing the wall, so that all you can see is a hazy light from the musical source. One’s impulse may be to peek around the partitions—but that trips a motion detector, cutting both sound and image with a hideous click. To hear the full piece, especially its aching second movement, you’ll have to stay put in the center of the space. There might be beauty in the story of migration, but try to get to the level of the individual and it’s access denied. (Lee is also presenting a participatory installation in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum, on view until January 22.)

For The Travelers, 2010–11, the artist sent one hundred empty notebooks to friends and art-world acquaintances, as well as to strangers, whom he asked to “write a personal story of leaving home.” (“I still see myself as a Midwesterner, not a true New Yorker,” writes Maya Lin—who also confesses that “it took years to get a New York driver’s license.”) These correspondents then sent the books onward to their own relatives or friends; some have since returned to MoCA, and some are probably lost. Part chain letter, part exquisite corpse, the books have bounced from Vancouver and London to Beijing and Guangzhou, and one went as far as the arctic Svalbard archipelago. Visitors have to wear protective gloves to handle them, which freights the at times stunningly personal stories with an added fragility—as if, in this new Chinese century as much as the lapsed American one, the individual character of our lives and movements risks crumbling in our hands.

— Jason Farago