Gary Panter

FREDERICKS & FREISER GALLERY
536 West 24th Street
October 6–November 5

Gary Panter, Boarding Pass, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 48 1/2 x 35 1/2".

Gary Panter’s first solo show at Fredericks & Freiser is an odd affair. It is presented much like a debut exhibition, with introductory remarks about his general style, yet it offers a quarter century of work. What's more, the show’s twenty paintings on canvas and paper draw from the entire length of his production to date, with a focus on his recent works, but the selection does not aptly represent his breadth. Still, one is given a sense of Panter’s versatility and omnivorous art-historical and pop-cultural consumption. His newest canvases, of which there are several here, pit Op art’s illusory three-dimensionality against collage’s flat representation. The results read like holodecks of Manet paintings, in which clusters of frozen figures interact ineffectually with a vibrantly oppositional background––reverse Le Déjeuner sur l’herbes. Stumbling Block, 2011, for instance, places a quartet of gray-tone cowboys within one of three ever-diminishing green-striped “rooms.” One cowboy shoots his rifle into a perspective that disappears faster than a bullet.

Panter’s spatial investigations extend to earlier works. Door Jam, 2009, depicts objects––such as boxes, buildings, fences, and doors––that describe and control space. Boarding Pass, 2008, hints at the sense of freedom frequently associated with travel––a car speeds along an open stretch of highway; the horizon line disappears murkily into the distance––while frustrating that notion with limitations, as the painting’s title implies. Elsewhere, a series of 2004 works on paper resembles a set of palimpsests, with the pieces’ layers of acrylic markmaking merging into a complicated composition of color and line. Long, horizontal canvases such as Melt Gas, 2004, and Gulf Port, 2003, use color-gridded backgrounds as an organizing principle for Panter’s pop-cultural subconscious: a hodgepodge of cartoonish figures, objects, and forms arrayed neatly as symbols of and stand-ins for culture at large.

— Nicole Rudick

Zak Kitnick

CLIFTON BENEVENTO
515 Broadway
September 10–November 5

Zak Kitnick, A Representative, 2011, steel shelves, 18 1/2 x 147 x 18 1/2".

Framed, glossy food posters form the basic units of Zak Kitnick’s grids––less a raw material than a polished and reified one, subject to wry recontextualization. Compendium (Distribution) and Compendium (Capital) (all works 2011) set a neat catalogue of sumptuous cheeses next to berry counterparts; a taxonomy of shellfish borders a cohort of plump pears. Elements of a Baroque marketplace still life haunt the wall, stripped of any sensual or moralizing redolence––stripped of any redolence, period. Of course, in their encyclopedic sorting these posters bear more than a whiff of bourgeois taste. The readymade quaintness of that idiom is the real object of Kitnick’s project. The juxtapositions invite speculation as to the (il)logic of their union. Why squash next to chilies, after all?

At once larger and possibly overlooked, a further installation is conducted in the reordering of the contents of the room’s built-in bookcases. Kitnick supervised the resorting of their books from white to black, according to the color spectrum. Its title, The Rest of the Room, underscores a presence both inconspicuous and unavoidable. The more bibliographic resonance of this reordering evokes the same “aesthetics of administration” as his clustered posters. Wrought from entirely different materials, though bound up with the same notions of containment and (dis)ordering, two other sculptural works, A Representative and Perfect Schedule, could be confused with ambient furniture. Assembled from black steel shelving components, these pieces have been set deep into the gallery walls and hence removed from any surrounding context or scale. Held in place by ordinary crosshead screws, they in no way dissemble their workaday materials. The banal familiarity of shelves has been transposed into a lattice of crisscrossed geometries. The unfeeling anonymity of industrial parts––erected into rhythms both manic and meticulous, futile and precise––conjures a range of connotations, from girder bridges to something out of Kafka. Even––or especially––judged on their own, these latter pieces merit a long look.

— Ara H. Merjian

Nicola Tyson

FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY
535-537 West 22nd Street
September 8–November 5

Nicola Tyson, Two Figures Touching, 2011, oil on canvas, 81 x 72”.

Boasting a promiscuous palette of tart, toxic brights and smudgy flesh-tones, Nicola Tyson’s recent oil paintings seethe with ambiguity. Their not-entirely-human protagonists bear scrambled faces and polyps more than limbs, as if subcutaneous stirrings have burgeoned new orifices and naked nerves. Often these characters are paired into riddling relation. It’s hard to determine, for instance, whether the veiled pantless biped in Two Figures Touching (all works 2011) prances or stalks toward that imminent touch; whether the boyish Figure with Sphinx is ward or prey to the taloned thing nearby; and whether the character in the foreground of Two Figures on Orange, baring a swollen fist and spongy brain (doubling as smirking face), is arrested by desire or moved to violence. His object of attention struts on, meanwhile—nose high, hips jutted back—perhaps perked to his gaze.

Occasional furried brushstrokes evoke similarly ticklish, chancy exposures, as in one haunchy figure’s fluffy scut and peek-a-boo sweater in Self-Portrait with Friend, or the jaunty protagonist of Figure with Tree, who jitters forth pincers while striding toward a mushroomy presence that looks as if it is about to uncurl as a colossus. The pale underpainting peering through these canvases adds to the sense of volatility and distress; solvent cyans oxidize, Band-Aid pinks nearly melt. Yet Tyson’s use of color also recalls childhood art—washable markers filling up paper, dirtied up by penciled lines, simultaneously compulsive and free.

In the gallery next door, other impromptu gestures have birthed nine small sculptures, marking a new medium for the artist. Save for a bronze specimen, all are as white as meringue: Dollops of fast-drying Crayola Model Magic have been cozied into puckering, softly coiling creatures, with names like Weak Swan and Foxy Bird. Mere fragmentary flourishes from afar, these bodies nestling themselves—midtransformation, perhaps in self-love—seem to affirm that true aliveness is always polymorphous and a touch perverse.

— Chinnie Ding

Charles Mayton

BALICE HERTLING & LEWIS
Film Center Building, 630 Ninth Avenue Suite 403
September 16–November 5

Charles Mayton, The Long Exposure, 2011, oil on canvas, 66 x 51”.

Charles Mayton’s first solo show in New York begins with a doormat placed directly outside the gallery entrance proclaiming the title of the exhibition: “THE DIFFICULT CROSSING.” The door is propped open to reveal two vivacious, brushy abstract paintings, dotted with words in a style of cursive we’ve come to associate largely with the artist René Magritte (think The Treachery of Images, 1928–29). Dozens upon dozens of lemons, limes, and oranges are scattered over the floor, which likewise recalls the Surrealist’s fixation with fruit. In the center of the room sits a coatrack with two paper eyes dangling by a piece of string. Magritte is not an unconscious inspiration here (as Breton might have had it) but a decidedly conscious one: “The Difficult Crossing” is a three-dimensional realization of his 1926 painting of the same title, which depicts an artist’s studio.

By plunging the viewer into the center of Magritte’s canvas, Mayton conjures a world that demands that one consider the role of the unconscious within the artist’s studio, a place where ideas take material shape. This is ironic, as Magritte cared little for the literal; but then again, not much is literal these days. Given that our daily experience increasingly plays out against a digital wasteland of information, it’s worth pausing for a moment to remember the ethos of the Surrealists. Mayton builds on the group’s pursuit of psychic freedom, stimulating a dialogue about the importance of artistic creation and its relationship to consciousness, which, in an age when the creative mind often finds itself pacing restlessly within a cell of LCD screens, is more salient than ever. Mayton’s works, particularly his paintings, are tantalizingly beautiful—vivid hues of paint swept across canvases featuring bright semiotic symbols, including question marks, quotations, and clouds—this quality places a premium on the tangible, thus reminding us that the best way to incite the unconscious, to release the imagination, is to begin with the overtly physical.

— Allese Thomson Baker

MPA

LEO KOENIG INC.
545 West 23rd Street
September 15–November 12

MPA, Initiation, 2011. Performance view.

“To perform is a request for witness,” states MPA. Since 2005, the self-labeled feminist and exhibitionist has garnered attention for her live performances, often pushing her body through hypersymbolic physical thresholds in an ongoing engagement with dynamics of power and resistance. MPA uses the two-month run of “Directing Light onto Fist of Father,” her solo gallery debut, to extend the framework of her performances––collapsing the line between daily practice and live act.

The exhibition opened with Initiation (all works 2011) on September 15. The artist stood with eyes closed, silent amid the crowd, holding a plaster-cast fist. After two hours she opened her eyes before a hushed audience and panned the room with direct eye contact. “Thank you for standing with me,” she said before exiting. Occupy Wall Street commenced two days later; reconsidering Initiation through that filter, MPA’s public meditation on the fist—a striking emblem of power—evokes the oft-heard chant “This. Is. A non-violent protest.”

Various materials installed in the gallery function as coordinates for an implied architectural triangulation––a yellow square painted on the wall by the entrance; a mound of ground turmeric on a shelf at the rear; and a looping 16-mm film of light training on the same cast fist, bounced off a mirror and refracted writ large on an opposing wall. The film prefaces The Act, a seven-week-long series of unscheduled actions, for which MPA can be found on sunny days outside the gallery, mirror in hand, catching sunlight and redirecting it into the space, onto the fist (now placed on a glass shelf). There is quiet ritual at play in MPA’s study of shifting layers of power: She harvests it from the sun; exposes and undermines it on the fist; and embodies it via her commitment to gaining insight through disciplined action. Paramount to this show is the fact that no single aspect is a fixed point. Turmeric fades over time with exposure to sunlight. Daylight lessens as winter nears. Over the weeks of The Act, visitors have often been met with a handwritten sign: “DIRECTING LIGHT ONTO FIST OF FATHER” IS AT OCCUPY WALL ST. . . SINCERELY THE ARTIST, MPA. It is fitting that she has gravitated toward Zuccotti Park. The art gallery and the public demonstration are two socially constructed arenas contingent on a viewership, on cultural attention. “The Whole World Is Watching!” MPA recognizes the potential of that gaze. She has written that her work “is not about defining radicality, but performing a response to feeling constrained.” Her actions are marked by extreme focus, stamina, patience, presence, and strength––precisely the traits required in order to transform our current populist moment into a lasting movement toward radical change.

— Corrine Fitzpatrick

“33 Fragments of Russian Performance”

PERFORMA
The Old School, 233 Mott Street
November 2–November 23

Anatoly Osmolovsky, From A Trip to the Land of Brobdingnag (Mayakovsky/Osmolovsky), 1993, color photograph, 24 x 24”.

A joint venture between Performa and Moscow’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, “33 Fragments of Russian Performance” occupies an entire floor of the former elementary school in Nolita where Performa Hub—a pop-up academy, bookshop, visitor center, and exhibition space rolled into one—has set up quarters for the duration of the biennial. Given its resolutely institutional setting, it is unsurprising that the exhibition should read like so many variations on the theme of rebelliousness.

Russian Constructivism is among the thematic strands explored in this year’s edition of Performa, and this show, an overview of Russian performance art and its antecedents, lays special emphasis on avant-garde art and artists of the 1920s. Rarely seen archival materials, from photographs of Constructivist stage sets and athletes forming “living sculptures” in sports parades to agitprop posters by the Blue Blouse collective, build up piecemeal a picture of art in the service of revolution. In their respective spheres of activity, David Burliuk, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Lyubov Popova, and Vladimir Mayakovsky—to name only the movement’s most revered practitioners—are some of the giants on whose shoulders stand future generations of Russian performance artists.

As the title makes clear, “33 Fragments of Russian Performance” does not aim to be exhaustive. You only have to blink and a decade has passed. From the early 1930s, we leap forward to the dawn of performance art proper with Moscow Conceptualism and end in a flurry of contemporary artist collectives with more or less playful or provocative names and actions to match: Mukhomor (The Toadstools), Anatoly Osmolovsky’s ETI (Expropriation of Art Territories), the Blue Noses Group, and the Radek Community, which grew out of Avdei Ter-Oganyan’s “School of Contemporary Art.” The notorious art group Voina (War) is conspicuous by its absence in the portrait of the artist as a young hooligan that emerges from these narrative fragments.

— Agnieszka Gratza

Rico Gatson

EXIT ART
475 Tenth Avenue
September 28–November 23

Rico Gatson, The Group, 2011, acrylic paint on wood panel, 49 x 56".

Emblems simplify complex matters and often slide dangerously into propaganda. Using the clean lines and precise forms of familiar signs and symbols, Rico Gatson’s art does the opposite, opening wide a world of resounding significance. As seen in this fifteen-year survey, Gatson’s achievement comes in part from his recurring subject matter—twentieth-century African-American history—but also from his keen exploitation of wide-ranging visual strategies, with sources including hardedge abstraction, Minimalist sculpture, Soviet-era posters, and Emory Douglas’s iconic designs, among others. The exhibition forgoes chronology and skims over earlier breakthrough videos to focus almost exclusively on Gatson’s painting, sculpture, and mixed-media output from the past five years. Nearly half the forty-six works date to 2011 alone; yet many of these pieces should be counted among Gatson’s best.

For Southern Comfort, 2006, he systematically applied modest tones of red, blue, orange, and brown paint on a plywood panel to create intoxicating triangular patterns, with thirteen faintly visible stars in the central X-shape that come straight from the Confederate flag. An identical color scheme turns up in Nazi Eagle, 2006. In dialogue with other works, this depiction of a Reichsadler encourages an alternative, associative historical reading, establishing a lineage starting with Jesse Owens’s victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and ending at Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s Black Power salute at a 1968 medal ceremony.

Fields of black granulated glitter in The Group, 2011, outline the forms of Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and other Black Panthers. The contours of their springy Afros, berets, and stylish boots, filled in like bruises with red and purple acrylics, portray the revolutionaries as glamorous rock stars. In decades past, both entertainers and activists—Josephine Baker, Stokely Carmichael, and Sam Cooke all make visual or textual appearances in Gatson’s work—were equally considered subversive, controversial, and inspirational. Their emblematic appearances across the exhibition remind us of a rich heritage to regularly reexamine.

— Christopher Howard

Kristof Wickman

BROOKLYN MUSEUM
200 Eastern Parkway
September 16–November 27

View of “Kristof Wickman,” 2011.

Kristof Wickman’s debut solo show fills the second-floor mezzanine of the Brooklyn Museum with decidedly nonbombastic work. Wickman celebrates the everyday object made strange––he casts and recasts until an uncanny, often humorous, ghost emerges. The exhibition’s entrance is flanked to the right by a plaster pumpkin fused with Wickman’s face, eyes closed, nose to the ground, atop an understated plinth (Untitled, 2010). To the left there is a silicone version of Wickman’s slender arms, clasped together, squeezing a purple Pilates ball (Self-Portrait, 2010). The sense of piety and self-improvement evoked by these works is cut short by a cheeky replica of a butt (Untitled, 2011). Emerging from similarly colored “rock,” with multicolored “sprinkles” for body hair, this delicate behind moons a pubescent bust from the museum’s permanent collection (Ted Wagner, ca. 1925, by Emile Robert Zettler).

Cleverly placed atop a pair of trestle tables re-created in solid wood, the butt, bust, and other objects by a variety of artists attempt the comical task of relating to one another––across time, aesthetic, and intended audience. Damned Women, ca. 1885, a bronze sculpture by Rodin condemning a Sapphic moment of passion, is placed next to Wickman’s Untitled, 2011, a slumped ceramic mass, formless except for the emergence of a golden dog nose. A Zuni Pueblo chair, ca. 1850, rests its legs atop Wickman’s two painted casts of squished jelly doughnuts (both Untitled, 2010). The funniest, lewdest piece, however, has no direct historical counterpart. At the far corner of the tables, incongruously placed next to an ancient Egyptian vessel with spout, a polished, ceramic, life-size hand presents two fingers coated in gold––perhaps, one might imagine, freshly removed from a golden other. Attached to the fingers, taking in the golden residue, is . . . a nose.

The show is a fitting debut for the museum’s yearlong “Raw/Cooked” exhibition series, which extracts local, underrepresented talent and creates much-needed fresh dialogue with its own collection. Curator Eugenie Tsai may well be onto a winning formula: Wickman’s carefully unpolished and untitled works are the best kind of half-baked.

— Chloé Rossetti

“A Show About Colab (and Related Activities)”

PRINTED MATTER INC.
195 10th Avenue
October 15–November 30

View of “A Show About Colab (and Related Activities),” 2011.

From photocopied flyers, the word jumps out: OCCUPATION. On January 1, 1980, Colab (aka Collaborative Projects) rang in the decade with the “Real Estate Show,” a group exhibition illegally installed in a vacant city-managed building on a derelict stretch of Delancey Street. As a poster later wheat-pasted to the property stated, “This was to be the beginning of an exchange about landlord speculation, tenants’ rights, property misuse, projected housing development, arbitrary urban planning, etc.—a citizen’s center.” The police padlocked the building the next day.

This “Insurrectionary Urban Development” and the subsequent “Times Square Show” (famously held, with permission, in a former massage parlor) usually garner Colab a mention in survey texts. “A Show About Colab (and Related Activities)” ventures past the group’s landmarks and explores the surrounding territory. During this unwieldy autumn when another occupation and citizen’s center has sprung up downtown, there’s good reason to revisit Colab. The organization was decidedly nonhierarchical, with open membership and rotating committee positions, and its DIY ethic of establishing alternatives to everything can be seen in the range of its affiliated undertakings: not just guerrilla exhibitions, but film distribution (the New Cinema on St. Mark’s Place, which incubated No Wave), publications (X Motion Picture Magazine), retailing (A. More Store), television (All Color News, Nightwatch, Potato Wolf), and telecommunications (Liza Béar and Keith Sonnier’s pioneering Send/Receive, Qwip, and Slow Scan initiatives).

One undeniable pleasure of exhibitions rich in historical material is spotting the small-type names that now loom large. The screening schedule for the “Times Square Show” lists a midnight film by “Jim Jarmish” and another entry laconically titled “SLIDE SHOW by Nan Goldin.” (Also, don’t miss Jack Smith’s oracular warble in the late-night television advertisement for his “Palace of Exotic Landlordism.”) Yet that pleasure is also a danger: It dissolves Colab into a history of prominent proper names, what lately we might call the 1 percent, or what one “Real Estate Show” document dismisses as “the intellectual gambling of elitist art circles.” Better, perhaps, to focus on a cluster of flyers announcing Colab meetings, the material remainder of a social density sustained by hand-to-hand exchanges. On one, a drawing by Tom Otterness represents a committee restructuring proposal as a hilarious hermaphrodite automaton. Here we get a glimpse of the process, not the product: the conditions in the distillery that led to creative ferment.

— Colby Chamberlain

Deville Cohen

LOUIS B. JAMES
143B Orchard Street
October 26–December 3

Deville Cohen, Poison, 2011, color video, 19 minutes. Installation view.

The five aluminum-mounted ink-jet prints on view in Deville Cohen’s first New York solo exhibition seem like souvenirs from the main event: a nineteen-minute video playing on a large screen in the gallery’s basement. Combining photographs of set pieces from the video with stock images of outer space, the decontextualized photomontages fall flat as isolated works. Within the first thirty seconds of Poison (all works 2011), a pair of hands reaches across what appears to be a book. The “book” is pried open to reveal a pop-up paper sculpture depicting rows of parking meters. One seamless edit later, a person, holding a photocopy cutout of a car in front of his torso and head, walks through a life-size replica of the parking meter scene amid the unmistakable sound of an ignition switching on. Welcome to Cohen’s allegorical alter-reality, where faceless stagehands (and legs) mobilize intricate paper sets within a black box theater–like stage. In a conflation of signifier and subject, everyday objects—and/or their reduced and enlarged facsimiles—are recast as backdrops and actors in his hermetic, immersive, time-based collage.

Poison is a meditation on our relentless consumption and depletion of natural resources, namely petroleum and water. Beginning with Google-culled images (Chevy trucks and highways, gas stations and mountaintops), Cohen created a kinetic landscape from hundreds of Xeroxes, some as large as thirty-six by forty-eight inches. (One wonders, given the theme, how dutifully the artist recycles.) Long reams of dyed lace symbolize petrol (black), water (white), blood (red), and pollution (yellow-green). Readymades, most notably a toilet seat and lid, pop up occasionally among the assemblages. Approximating protagonists are an eight ball and a single die (each an oversize photocopy) who hit the open road as if in a buddies-on-a-road-trip film. Diegetic time is marked by the emptying and refueling of their gas tank.

Narrative takes a backseat to Cohen’s prosody and obsessive adherence to visual detail. Though the moral takeaway is clear—humanity is going to choke on the poison of its own excesses—the real star of the show is the system of referents and signs the artist has created: a singular visual vocabulary whose primary unit is the photocopied representation.

— Corrine Fitzpatrick

Llyn Foulkes

ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY
525 West 24th Street
October 28–December 3

Llyn Foulkes, Lost Horizon, 1991, acrylic on canvas, 83 x 110”.

Llyn Foulkes never really “fit in” and didn’t try to either—not with the “Cool School” surrounding the Ferus Gallery, the site of his first solo exhibition in 1961, and not with the contributors to Wallace Berman’s Beat magazine, Semina, of which Foulkes was one. The bellicose Los Angeles legend has evaded artistic affiliations and classification by resisting any one recognizable style throughout his unruly oeuvre, which consistently illustrates his fraught relationship with his hometown. This much can be seen in his current exhibition of just six paintings featuring his signature rock formations. Spanning four decades of the artist’s half-century-long (and counting) career, the show plots Foulkes’s various methods of individuation; a concurrent exhibition at Kent Fine Art of his “Bloody Heads” from the past decade further elucidates his ambulatory practice.

Early canvases on view such as Untitled (Holley Rock), 1963, typify Foulkes’s desert images lifted from postcards, a procedure the artist later decried as too obvious and successful. Like Michael Heizer’s forthcoming monolithic monument on LACMA’s campus, Foulkes’s depictions of LA’s bouldered terrain revel in the static, terrestrial underpinnings of a city built on fantasy and transformation. Paintings from the 1970s and early ’80s display an evolving stubbornness through brash insertion of Pop imagery for the sake of explicit social and political commentary. In Eagle Rock, 1984, a sign-painted eagle embellished with a smirk hovers over a gestural mountainside. Foulkes regurgitates the myth of American heroism with a wink and a splattering of paint.

Foulkes’s mystifying relief tableaus, which confound with their oscillating surfaces, are the culmination and synthesis of over thirty years’ worth of painterly exploration. Lost Horizon, 1991, for instance, reveals an apocalyptic vista of a deserted ravine; a humanoid boulder is visible in the distance. If the hikers in Balthus’s The Mountain, 1936–37, had experienced a bad acid trip, the scene might look like this. The view of the panorama is disrupted by a resolute Foulkes pulling himself over the precipice only to find crushed soda cans, a “for sale” sign, and a fallen American flag. As dismal as it may seem, Foulkes reminds us that seemingly eternal, commercially driven entities such as popular culture and national pride become detritus in time, and only nature itself will outlast it all.

— Beau Rutland

Josephine Halvorson

SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO.
530 West 22nd Street
October 21–December 3

Josephine Halvorson, Green Machine, 2011, oil on linen, 30 x 40”.

The objects and surfaces rendered by Josephine Halvorson’s brush are inanimate. But as suggested in this exhibition’s title, “What Looks Back,” they appear as something more than passive. Nearly all of the oil-on-linen paintings presented here (except Sign Holders, 2010) were completed this year, and while they concentrate on a relatively limited repertoire, they induce something strange. Walls, wooden doors, cardboard sheets, industrial tools, machine parts: These are the painter’s objects of choice, usually rendered close to the picture plane. The mechanomorphic oddity of Steam Donkey Valve is brought into further relief by its juxtaposition with the blood-red Carcass; if the latter is plainly carnal, the gaping maw of the mechanical valve in the former, with its interior exposed, displays a strangely animallike dimension.

With more muted, nearly coy, anthropomorphism, Cracked Back reveals a plate screwed into place on the back of some fractured surface, shaped vaguely like a head with two ears. The brick-red Barrier stands out for the symmetry and weird design of its object, the use of which is by no means apparent. Within its sunken grooves and geometric cavities, function appears rivaled by a certain sculptural curiosity. Halvorson likes edges, sills, lips––the broken drawer of The Heat Inside, the ledge of Green Machine, the concrete block of Mine Site––in other words, the bread and butter of simple figurative illusion, of things receding into space, however shallow.

With two strips of fake blue tape, Cardboard Template reaches into the old bag of painterly tricks to hold its pieces in two-dimensional place. Yet the artist reveals equal interest in materiality, in how the stuff of things does or does not square with its painterly representation. With one exception (Inlaid Stones seems somewhat clumsily rendered), that investigation succeeds admirably in its effort. The treatment of surfaces in these paintings––the patina of Sign Holders; the raised, decorative motif of Water Link––is as arresting as the objects themselves.

— Ara H. Merjian

Antonio Manuel

AMERICAS SOCIETY ART GALLERY
680 Park Avenue
September 15–December 10

View of “Antonio Manuel: I Want to Act, Not Represent!,” 2011.

As one of the few artists who remained in Brazil under the military regime of 1964–85, Antonio Manuel made work that provoked the artistic and political worlds alike. Viewers of this exhibition are confronted with controversy immediately on entering the gallery, wherein five black cloths are fastened to ropes that, when pulled, uncover red-paneled silk screens of police violence. Using graphics culled from newspapers, Repressão outra vez—eis a consequência (Repression Once Again—This Is the Consequence), 1968, tantalizes spectators with censored images while simultaneously inviting us to expose the redacted material.

Throughout Manuel’s practice, the newspaper has served as a proxy for Brazil’s dictatorship, and he has deftly appropriated the medium, repainting discarded stereotype molds—the very mechanism of publication—to emphasize government repression in A imagem da violência (The Image of Violence), 1968. Part of a larger series titled “Flans,” these images read graphically as newspapers while protesting the violence they depict. He inhabits media even more seamlessly in Clandestinas (Clandestines), 1973–75, by taking over the presses of O DIA to create his own version of the popular tabloid, skirting censorship by distributing the publication around Rio de Janeiro.

Manuel’s acts of defiance have a licentious side, too. In response to artistic censorship stemming from the military government, Manuel submitted his own height and weight as an artwork’s measurements to the Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna in April 1970. After his body was rejected as art, he persisted, arriving nude to the opening in a performance documented in this show only by press photographs as O corpo é a obra (The Body Is a Work of Art), 1970. He devised a more permanent record of the incident in Corpobra (Bodywork), 1970, which invites the audience to tug a rope on the back of a human-size vertical wooden box with straw at the bottom. Tugging the rope sends the image of the artist strategically covered with the word CORPOBRA––mimicking the conventions of censorship—into the straw, and replaces it with a photograph of Manuel’s naked body. While Manuel worked across media and collaborated with the leading Brazilian artists and critics of his time—Rogério Duarte, Lygia Pape, and Hélio Oiticica—his pieces form a recognizable corpus, as they all single-mindedly insist on the freedom of political and artistic expression.

— Lori Cole

Ann Lislegaard

MURRAY GUY
453 West 17th Street
November 11–December 10

Ann Lislegaard, TimeMachine, 2011, mirrored box with video projection, sound, dimensions variable.

What is the ontology of science fiction? This seems to be at least one of the questions posed in Ann Lislegaard’s latest body of work. In one room, a computer-animated foxlike being with rolling eyeballs and a floppy tongue chatters in a stuttering and repetitive fashion: This cartoonish figment of human imagination has been created with a speech impediment. “And the mystery is not whether I have been in the future, but to believe what I actually found there,” it stammers, as part of a disjunctive account of time travel partially drawn from H. G. Wells’s 1895 Time Machine, often considered the inaugural work of sci-fi. The creature is projected onto the mirrored inside of a box that is partially unfolded onto the floor. One interpretation might be that all futuristic projections necessarily involve some mirroring of the present, and moreover that contemporaneity contains an admonition of what the future holds—although such warnings are often denied (signaled here by the impending closure of the box and thereby, also, the sealing of the testimony within it).

The other room-size installation comprises large black panels partially obscuring the words SCIENCE FICTION in white neon letters that shed the only light in the room. On the floor are large speakers emitting compressed and extended sound bites from five sci-fi films (from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1955 Alphaville to Luc Besson’s 1997 The Fifth Element). Instead of visually representing a coming world, Lislegaard’s meditation on the science-fiction convention of time travel exhibits a sonically refracted future, via the faint murmur of past cinematic visions and the bizarre tale of a digitally generated vulpine being that speaks from a position beyond history. By reducing sci-fi to its constitutive elements, Lislegaard’s work reminds us of the genre’s relation to utopian imaginings that, as Fredric Jameson wrote, come to us “as barely audible messages from a future that may never come into being.”

— Sarah Lookofsky

Jesse McLean

INTERSTATE PROJECTS
56 Bogart Street
October 21–December 10

Jesse McLean, Trust Falls, 2011, still from a color video, 10 minutes 8 seconds.

To suspend disbelief can be a frightening proposition, for the act forfeits prescribed boundaries of control. In her first solo exhibition in New York, “Trust Falls” at Interstate Projects, Jesse McLean puts considerable pressure on the structures that subtend our belief systems through operations that shuttle between the documentary and the purely pictorial.

Working in a vein that could be considered picturesque, Remote (all works cited, 2011), the first of two video installations encountered by viewers, draws liberally from the tropes of the horror-film genre. Nearly every moment of it is taut with impending terror: Ominous scenes include buzzing flies, an empty stairwell, a man looming in the shadows, and the silence-splitting ring of an unanswered telephone. However, the fear conjured doesn’t ever culminate in violence, nor does it ever really subside. Instead it becomes repeatedly reanimated in the process of the looping video. The second work, Trust Falls, is a silent and graceful film that records moments of suspended disbelief by way of facial expressions of those taking part in the time-tested trust-building exercise in which participants fall backward to be caught by their peers. Through the close-up shot, McLean captures in vivid detail that unnamable sensation we experience when completely and willingly surrendering control.

The installation of the two works might help us surmise the artist’s intent: Their proximity allows for a constructive bleed, as the eerie sounds from Remote color the anxious moments before subjects “let go” in Trust Falls. What is that we fear? How do we place enough trust in another human being that we might overcome the wayward projections of our imagination? It is a testament to the power of McLean’s art that we find the empty space of the video installation filled with an effervescent tension, whereby the cinematic play of light and sound induces an affective state that verges on the physical.

— Zachary Cahill

“GERMANY IS YOUR AMERICA”

BROADWAY 1602
1181 Broadway, 3rd Floor
September 13–December 15

Xanti Schawinsky, Untitled (Armor Heads), 1944, charcoal on paper, 18 x 24"

In 2004, in the midst of writing a book about Roxy Music, the British writer Michael Bracewell had a portentous dream featuring a Gabriel-like visit from Brian Eno. In the dream, Eno delivered a prophecy both mordant and somewhat enigmatic: “Germany is your America.” Bracewell took this pronouncement seriously and developed a series of essays for the BBC exploring the mutual fascination between Germans and Americans in the twentieth century. Seven years later, Bracewell’s hallucination has grown into an exhibition at Broadway 1602 that attempts to trace what he calls the “modern cosmology of German Romanticism,” mapping eighty years of Anglo-American Germanophilia alongside its inverse, the Teutonic obsession with America. The show includes modernist oldies by George Grosz and Xanti Schawinsky, midcentury goodies by Jerzy Lewczyński and Joseph Beuys, and contemporary updates by Nick Mauss, Katharina Wulff, and Dexter Dalwood.

The notion of artistic pilgrimage is the show’s organizing principle. An accompanying wall text describes an art party the poet Stephen Spender attended in Hamburg in 1929 where a film was projected depicting the same party from the previous week—in Bracewell’s words, “the same guests, watching film of themselves embracing, in the same room, participating in a kind of bored yet nervous ritual of repetition.” Andy Warhol repeated the procedure thirty-five years later, Bracewell notes; it’s been reprised any number of times since then, often under the umbrella of one or another brand of institutional critique.

Watching last night’s party may or may not retain its power to perturb, but watching last year’s party, like watching the 1974 Beuys video included in the show, quenches a certain nostalgic lust, whether the memories are real or imagined. What the exhibition most powerfully conveys is the extent to which Anglo-Americans remember Germany as a stand-in for memory itself—a figure of figuration—much as America conjures visions of the future—that is to say, of memory’s obliteration.

— Christopher Glazek

Daniel Gordon

WALLSPACE
619 West 27th Street
October 28–December 17

Daniel Gordon, Nectarines in Orange and Blue, 2011, color photograph, 24 x 30”.

The subject of Woman with a Blue Eye (all works cited, 2011)—like all the “sitters” for Daniel Gordon’s recent portraits—is a bust built from photographs. The woman they form is scarred with seams and rifts. One of her eyes is bigger and more brightly blue. Her hair is blonde and thickly pixelated in some spots, softly unfocused and brown in others. A purplish pattern—blue particles emerging from a red field like sandpaper’s grit—interrupts the skin in a swath of color from the right temple to the left cheek. I wondered if the artist had drawn the pattern with software. “There is no digital manipulation!” a gallery worker snapped. Softening, she added: “He probably found it on the Internet and printed it out.”

What’s at stake in editing and its absence? By printing, Gordon transforms the fluidity of the digital image into paper’s crisp substance; then he rips and folds to give several flat images the shape of what they collectively depict. Photography is photography. Cutting and pasting belong to sculpture. This distinction gives reason to marvel at the dexterity of Gordon’s compositions—at how a pair of profile cutouts can cast shadows to form a fan of four silhouettes, or at how spatial reality dissolves in the quasi-abstract in July 20, 2009, and how paper scraps seem to float between light and darkness. But the artist’s declared abstinence from “digital manipulation,” even though his pictures have visible traces of digital files, also suggests that the finished photograph has an untouchable surface, lying above—but still connected to—its inner workings.

The wadded paper fruits of Nectarines in Orange and Blue, 2011, are distributed between the orange and blue halves of a table’s surface, with only one bisected fruit straddling the middle; its half-blue skin is broken to reveal the flesh and pit. On paper or onscreen, a picture never has the real interiority of fruits or people. But Gordon fabricates belief in the image’s depth, by photographing paper made into skins and rinds.

— Brian Droitcour

Claire Fontaine

METRO PICTURES
519 West 24th Street
November 3–December 17

View of “Working Together,” 2011.

As the title, “Working Together,” foregrounds, this exhibition considers the social aspect of production. Beyond a concrete practice, industry is presented as an essential social force inseparable from economic-philosophical and ontological dimensions. To an extent, the show’s collection of sculptures, videos, paintings, and neon signs made by the French collective pairs the social logic of late-capitalist organization (characterized by principles of fraternity, interdependency, and competition) with other forms of collaborative and cooperative enterprise. As a group of assistants, the artist “herself” represents a communal framework and lateral power structure. The concept of the assistant (a subordinate, dependent element) is a central motif, explored directly through works such as The Assistants, 2011, a video in which, via a reading of Giorgio Agamben’s text of the same name, poet Douglas Park traces the position of these “parallel and approximate beings” in our cultural psyche as they are mapped out in folklore and literature.

A series of paintings based on Richard Prince’s Joke Paintings (Richard and Marc), 2011, outline a certain flippancy and a complicity between art and fashion, while corporate ephemera, scaffolding, party lights, and bags of empty beer and soda cans hew a sense of postfestivity and disengagement—as if the material yield of society’s productive force had come into conflict with, and overwhelmed, the ideological system that supported it. Several works, including a replica of a Newton’s Cradle swinging-ball toy produced by Lehman Brothers with a tennis court base and inscription reading “Networking,” are motorized to remain in perpetual motion. The constancy represented by these works, as well as by the illuminated neon sign Past Present Future, 2011, may gesture toward Marxist notions that the “relations of production” we establish—whether in business, art, the business of art, or any other intermutual practice—can be understood in terms of evolving, historical continuities.

— Genevieve Allison

Andreas Gursky

GAGOSIAN GALLERY | 522 WEST 21ST STREET
522 West 21st Street
November 4–December 17

View of “Andreas Gursky,” 2011.

Centering on the Chao Phraya River that cuts through Bangkok on its way to the Gulf of Thailand, Andreas Gursky’s latest series of large-scale photographs (all 2011) swell with a pelagic, even metaphysical sense of sublimity. That aqueous fantasy is punctured by objects that stealthily––but pointedly––upend its slick fantasy: a dirty pink satin child’s mattress afloat on the water; a stray tire; other bits of flotsam that blend in, from afar, with the images’ shimmering surfaces. The play between detail and alloverness is clearly one that Gursky aims for. So too, do the works’ licked, glossy perfection stand in tension with the more painterly aspects that seem to ineffably congeal and disperse.

Rather than whirl or eddy, light in Bangkok I and Bangkok V streaks down the image in quick zips. In Bangkok III, illumination appears more diffuse, dancing on the water in a reversed perspective that looks as if it could spill into the gallery space. In Bangkok IV, by contrast, streaks and patches of lit surfaces appear more strikingly flat: buoyant on the river’s surface, and at the same time almost plumb with the picture plane. The eye is also pulled to empirical minutiae––thick clumps of water-borne greenery and the occasional scrap of trash they harbor. The images stir up an implicit tension between aesthetic delectation and environmental reality, between anonymity and fragments of life set adrift.

The formal devilry of the “Bangkok” series lies in its detail. Gursky’s suite of enormous prints titled “Ocean,” 2010, pull back dramatically in the other direction. While the former approximates something of Monet’s Water Lilies, “Ocean” conjures Clyfford Still. Gleaned from high-resolution satellite imagery, these images mark a departure from Gursky’s typical photographic practice. At first sight, they evoke Google Earth or the Discovery Channel––aerial shots of the planet at once vast in scale and immaculate in surface. With only the cropped edges of landmasses visible at the margins of each work, recognizable cartographic coordinates are rendered unfamiliar. The oceanic expanse between continents––which Gursky was obliged to fill in, in the absence of satellite information––forms the looming center of each piece. Here, too, tensions between photographic exactitude and painterly evocation lift the images out of their particular representations into ideas about the practices, aims, and provocative ellipses of representation itself.

— Ara H. Merjian

Dexter Sinister

ARTISTS SPACE
38 Greene Street, 3rd floor
October 30–December 18

Dexter Sinister, “Identity,” 2011, three-channel video projection, 20 minutes. Installation view.

“Identity”, 2011, a new film by the New York–based publishing and design duo Dexter Sinister, is installed in the main gallery at Artists Space, while a model of the Serving Library, the pair’s ongoing archival and publication project, occupies an adjacent room. The three-channel film chronicles an abridged history of branding. A narrator recounts historical anecdotes and cites contemporary marketing guru Wally Olins, as well as theorist Terry Eagleton and hip-hop artist Jay-Z, to explain the significance of branding in late-capitalist culture. Projected alternately onto one, two, or all three of the side-by-side screens suspended in the main gallery, trademarked logos and primary shapes exemplify the commercial semiotics characterized in the voice-over.

The film highlights the extension of branding practices from sellable objects to museums—specifically, the Pompidou, MoMA, and Tate. As presented in the film, the branding of museums is the most recent development in a tradition of product placement in the history of art. The narrator claims that this history begins with Bass Ale bottles on the bar in Édouard Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère, 1881–82. The Bass logos in the painting are signifiers that contemporary viewers would easily recognize on a tap handle today.

If identification of the Bass labels manifests the modernist reification of the observer’s presence, the museum brand commodifies the viewing experience. The museum markets a prescribed visit that informs an audience’s awareness of its place within a larger exhibition space, historical discourse, and cultural environment. The film alludes to Olins’s theory that museums now consider how the cachet of their brands plays into their audience members’ respective personality profiles. In this way, Dexter Sinister suggests, museums vie with other branded enterprises for popular attendance and attention.

— Zoe Larkins

“We would provide complete darkness”

GOETHE-INSTITUT WYOMING BUILDING
5 East 3rd Street
December 2–December 22

Kitty Kraus, untitled, 2011, mirrors, lightbulbs, dimensions variable. Installation view.

The title of this group show is a provocative, if not quite fulfilled, threat. Nowhere in the gallery is darkness complete, but the imagery in the video art in the narrow entryway challenges the limits of obscurity. Heike Baranowsky’s Mondfahrt 2001, a filmed loop of the moon bouncing around on a blank wall like a projected beach ball screen saver, beams over a monitor, and headphones play Carsten Nicolai’s abstract tone-poem video future past perfect pt. 01 (sononda), 2010. The dark passage to the gallery’s back room stages the dazzling patterns of Kitty Kraus’s untitled 2011 site-specific installation in which two asymmetrical boxes composed of mirrors enclose hundred-watt lightbulbs. Through their irregular joints, sheets of complex refracted light escape, striking the walls of the room erratically but also with mathematical perfection. That shadowy displacement of the mirrors’ infinite regression is entrancing even as it is confounding.

Emerging into the foyer, one encounters a small library of “underused books” free for the taking; booklets with butterflied spines, printed for the exhibition, have been inconspicuously inserted into several of the volumes. A collaboration between Sarah Demeuse, the show’s curator, and the design firm Project Projects, the book offers ruminations on the complexities of written communication, from Alejandro Cesarco on the fantastic encyclopedias in Jorge Luis Borges’s literature to Angie Keefer’s dialectical examination of the disembodiment and reification of signs. The central paradox of language is most tellingly essayed by Adam Kleinman, through an analysis of the gold discs designed in the early 1970s to communicate with extraterrestrials, with grooves encoding greetings, songs, and pictures from Earth. The problem with making LPs for ETs is the same with comprehending any language system from the outside: Not only do you have to decode the message, but you then have to know what it means. (Kleinman suggests that a response from aliens clever enough to actually play the records might be, “We enjoyed your library, but don’t quite get it all, and wonder what on Earth you are trying to tell us.”) One might have a similar thought standing in front of the unordered library—moon bouncing around in the shadows—and pivoting between darkness and understanding.

— Zachary Sachs

Corin Hewitt

LAUREL GITLEN
261 Broome Street
October 30–December 22

Corin Hewitt, Medium/Deep, 2011, apron, concrete, cosmetics, I-beam, 80 x 40 x 36".

On entering Corin Hewitt’s first solo show at Laurel Gitlen, the viewer is confronted by five cast dirt screens. It soon becomes clear that these works are part of a double act; each of the chromatic and texturally uniform screens is a deadpan stooge, shielding a highly detailed, playfully self-reflexive sculpture. These are actors in various states of preparedness, set against plain plywood backsides constituting the wings of an abstracted theater. In the most obvious example, a steel I-beam is covered in patches of makeup, with half-empty bottles of foundation and powder strewn about its cemented base. The idea of steel using flesh-toned makeup is absurd, yet the clumsiness of the application is exactly how you would imagine such a macho object would attempt to conceal itself. Far more subtle are the trompe l’oeils that Hewitt quietly inserts; a printed paint splotch camouflages itself among actual paint in The Mimic (all works 2011), and plastic is punctured and painted to appear as pegboard in The Longhand. The Time Traveler, a concrete column in the center of the gallery is saturated in a decidedly earthy odor, achieving the effect of an architectural element that masquerades as autonomous artwork.

This repeated disguising lends multiple interpretations not only to the objects, but also to the idea of the artist who creates a “show” by the conversion of otherwise plain material. In the past, Hewitt has frequently exploited this by putting himself on display––the working artist as performer. Here, the visitor takes on this role, the tight installation forcing viewers to share the stage with the artworks. Fluidly switching identities between the anthropomorphic, the natural, and the man-made, Hewitt’s sculptures resist the resoluteness of an object by acknowledging that they are onstage; like the most effective actors, their vulnerability allows them a transformative capacity.

— Lumi Tan

Nan Goldin

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY | 522 W. 22ND STREET
522 W. 22nd Street
October 29–December 23

View of “Scopophilia,” 2011.

“Scopophilia,” a term borrowed from the psychoanalytic set to denote a desire rooted in observation, is a fitting title for an exhibition by an artist well known for her voyeuristic proclivities: Nan Goldin’s latest show is a penetrating, self-critical look at a career spent depicting others. Blending photographs from her archives with a series of studies commissioned last year by the Louvre, the exhibition evinces her complicity in the act of voyeurism and her acknowledgment of its persistence throughout the Western art-historical canon.

Central to the show, Scopophilia, 2010, a twenty-five-minute slide installation, pairs portraits spanning the artist’s career with others made by old masters. Employing her favored format, Goldin has her intimate circle share the screen with a cast of art history’s more amatory luminaries (Narcissus, Psyche, Pygmalion), in alternating vérité and fantastical depictions that amount to a collective meditation on the exchange between desire and visuality. Among other works in the exhibition, seven grids of photographs are grouped in themes that recall Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, 1928–29, a constellation of images concerned with the recurring “iconology of the interval” in Western art. Among Goldin’s grids, Hair, 2010, weaves within a fascination of feminine tresses the strands of purity and seduction, while in Crazy Scary, 2011, traces of the divine are to be observed within the touch of the mortal.

Elsewhere in the gallery, a group of portraits from Goldin’s archives are mounted along the walls of a curved room, each crowned by a Louvre portrait showing a similar physiognomic expression. Creating an architectural analogon to the corneal arc, Goldin foregrounds the peripatetic eye by drawing attention to our visual processes, confronting our scanning of the images in the returned uniformity of the portraits’ collective gaze. Ultimately, whether holding the mirror to the artist or her subjects, Goldin’s work becomes less about the depiction of others than about the reflection of ourselves.

— Joseph Akel

Lucas Blalock

RAMIKEN CRUCIBLE
389 Grand Street
November 6–December 23

Lucas Blalock, JKF NNN, 2011, color photograph,
32 1/4 x 40 1/2”.

Our image culture could be called a collective fantasy, a dream dreamed up for us by those with plans to oil the gears of our desires, and the designers working at Adobe have succeeded in helping make our reverie clean, smooth, and numinous, almost imperceptibly. Photoshop is, after all, an editing program that is most often deployed in advertising as a means of making things disappear by seamlessly integrating them into our ways of seeing and perceiving. As a result, when the mechanics of this often invisible technology are dredged unceremoniously to the surface and paraded around, as they are in the lion’s share of the awkwardly beguiling photographs that make up Lucas Blalock’s exhibition “xyz,” you get the discomfiting feeling that something has gone wrong.

Here, a stone chimney sprouts bulbous, mutant growths (Double Chimney, all works 2011), and a monumental triptych proffers three psychedelic permutations of a car tire that seems as if it has been stretched and shredded by a Cubist, one straining to provide us with all possible views at once (Tire, Tire II, Tire III). But as odd as these images are, they are made still stranger by the fact that they possess none of the disingenuous magic of true Photoshop wizardry. Anyone with an even rudimentary knowledge of the software can see these manipulations are bald-faced—Blalock makes no attempt to cover his tracks. Shouldn’t these, you are provoked to wonder, be better done? But, of course, adroitness is not the point. Like all things that appear slightly “off,” Blalock’s digital tinkerings—and, for that matter, his equally odd, jerry-rigged still lifes, such as Pink Moon and JKF NNN, which have the appearance of product shots for ad campaigns too weird to make it past committee—enjoin us to reflect on the machinery and the mores of that which we consider the norm. In this way, his images represent a novel step in the history of photographic self-reflexivity: They are playful, surreal pratfalls, which alchemize failure into success.

— Chris Wiley

Jason Middlebrook

DODGE GALLERY
15 Rivington St
November 19–December 23

Jason Middlebrook, New New York, 2011, acrylic on English elm plank, 12 x 3”.

Shimmering artifice embraces natural wonder in Jason Middlebrook’s new wooden-plank paintings, inscribing nature with the abstract patterns it inspires, in an act of closeness akin to tracing, gilding, gifting. Stele-scale cuts primarily of maple, walnut, redwood, and elm, the fifteen works have long, lean edges that are sometimes smooth, sometimes craggy or crusted with bark. Framed by, and occasionally wrapping, those edges, handsome lines or angular shapes traverse the fissures, streaks, and tawny eddies within the sanded, waxed surfaces. If the results acknowledge Ellsworth Kelly’s graceful wood sculptures and Roy Lichtenstein’s brushstroke motif—rewilding such visions—they feel no less kindred with Papuan Gulf gope boards.

Acrylic paint here both skids and sculpts. Sinuous inky waves coursing down a wide lane of white hug the scapular curves of Black and White Number 2 (all works 2011). Little Black Mamba transmits the live-wire velocity of freeways long-exposured at night, its single hot-pink line skating in the dark amid bronze currents. Bare material always gets ample air: A rounded leaf of luxuriant myrtle hung at an alary tilt, All of the Corners fans to a wide margin beyond the bright, nesting right angles gracing its interior. Faintly iridescent pigments, and occasional mists of spray paint, sensualize hard-edge striping, as in the urban architectural New New York.

Other works draw more overtly on wood’s time-steeped, time-marking ontology to contemplate, and confound, disparate scales of duration and formation. Geode Plank, a rose-spectrum, octagonal starburst around an eroded hole, rhymes arboreal with geologic forms, while massive beech tablet Once again a version of nature through my eyes, a geometric tribute to tree rings, exudes atavistic power. As densely lined as fore edges packed aslant, this work nearly quakes in its dizzying concentricity, as if evincing that the book of nature is both fathomless and intensely near.

— Chinnie Ding

Tommy Hartung

ON STELLAR RAYS
133 Orchard Street
October 30–December 23

Tommy Hartung, Anna, 2011, still from a color video in HD, 20 minutes 37 seconds.

When a mannequin is in the gallery, Surrealism is on the table. That’s been the case since 1924, when André Breton identified mannequins as a signature appearance of the “marvelous” (a romantic’s term that mirrors Freud’s uncanny). Sometimes the connection goes slack—for instance, during the grim cocktail party of waxwork figurines called “Skin Fruit” that showed at the New Museum last year. Lately, however, there’s been a trickle of exhibitions being casually described as disturbing, creepy, or simply fucked-up—after-hours chatter that, when parsed more rigorously, spells out Surrealism. Consider Josh Kline’s disembodied hands of cultural workers currently at 47 Canal, or Debo Eilers’s distorted Elmo masks at On Stellar Rays this past May: Here we see treatments of the effigy and the found object that owe an (unconscious?) debt to Hans Bellmer or Man Ray, even as their immediate points of reference are the office cubicle or Sesame Street.

Nothing has announced a new Surrealist sensibility more programmatically than Tommy Hartung’s video Anna, 2011, which stars eight mottled-plaster mannequins brought eerily to life by stop-motion animation. In contrast to Bellmer’s notorious poupées—violently mashed bundles of feminine erogenous zones—Hartung’s figures are androgynous and literally sexless. Hollow torsos swivel on mic stands, mechanically dispensing smoke or dribbles of salt through roughly fashioned orifices. Their patient, inscrutable actions take place in Hartung’s studio, a setting so dim and dank as to conjure associations with ruins or keeps; tricksy camerawork warps the space’s perspective and scale, recalling the psychic vertigo of Max Ernst’s 1920 The Master’s Bedroom. Yet these borrowings from an interwar visual repertoire are not what make Anna so consummately Surrealist. Rather, it’s Hartung’s play with Surrealism’s lingering political charge, what Walter Benjamin famously described as “the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded.’” On one register, stop-motion animation is itself outmoded, jerkily syncopated when juxtaposed with Hartung’s computer-graphic sequences and high-definition recording. (A running horse motif harks back to animation’s origins in Eadweard Muybridge’s racetrack motion studies.) A second outmoded “object” is Soviet Russia, which flashes up through film clips from the workers’ epic Earth (1930). What could be more outmoded, moribund even, than visions of a collective proletarian subject? Then again, the insertion of this film is rhetorically most stirring when it’s projected against Hartung’s mannequins; flickering motes of light catch the glitter in their curlicued plaster hair, creating the semblance of an undersea reef. Coral, of course, is another favorite Surrealist emblem, since it imbues petrified rock with the pulse of organic growth, an unsettling confusion between the dead and still living.

— Colby Chamberlain

Andrea Bowers

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY
525 W 22nd Street
October 29–January 7

View of “Andrea Bowers,” 2011.

The content and forms of the women’s movement make up the stuff of Andrea Bowers’s latest exhibition. But it is form that overwhelms as one enters the gallery. Bowers has compiled a book consisting of materials collected from the past four decades of women’s struggles, and she has papered the materials onto two of the gallery’s walls as well. Many of the historical resources are drawn from a 1974 zine titled The New Woman’s Survival Guide, also the show’s namesake, which constituted an effort to disseminate information about organizations and services across the United States run by and for women.

As with the book, the exhibition works to create a patterning of past and present. The materials from the 1970s, which display clear affiliations with the psychedelic aesthetics of a broader counterculture, are interspersed with current visuals put out by the National Organization for Women, 9to5, and Planned Parenthood, among others, which exhibit a sensibility closely tied to the graphics of contemporary advertising and political campaigning. Also of our time are photorealistic colored-pencil drawings of women attending the 2011 May Day march in Los Angeles and hand-drawn copies of testimonials published by Planned Parenthood, written by women who received the nonprofit’s assistance.

The interjection of the movement’s history into these contemporary representations evinces more than ornamental changes. The displays of LGBT and immigrant rights slogans by the participants documented at the May Day march, for example, demonstrate not only the continuing relationship between women’s and labor struggles but also how calls for a unified front have been complicated by the recognition that not all women are the same. Difference notwithstanding, given the present political climate in which past gains made by the women’s movement continue to be furiously contested, this historical compilation serves as testimony to the persistent grounds for a common cause.

— Sarah Lookofsky

Matthew Northridge

KANSAS
59 Franklin Street
November 5–January 7

Matthew Northridge, Welcome Back to the Nuclear Age, 2011, collage on paper, 23 x 27 1/2”.

In his exhibition “Pictures by Wire and Wireless” at this new gallery, Matthew Northridge has inverted the basic utility of maps, collapsing their readability by rolling, crumpling, and obscuring diagrams and representations of charted territory. Yet his collages, sculptures, and installations are configured through the very methods necessary to a cartographer: obsessive research, collecting, and cataloguing visual information.

Northridge’s 12 Ladders, or, How I Planned My Escape, 2009, and Map of Washington DC, 2010, speak to this paradox. In the latter, a tightly rolled map of the nation’s capital fits snugly in a slender, elongated wooden and steel cage, which hangs from a low ceiling. In the former, a small, bucolic photograph of a landscape is pinned precariously in place at knee level by twelve handcrafted, miniature wooden ladders. In both works, the two-dimensional scenery is contained, made abstruse, and just out of reach. Also included in the show are twenty eight-by-ten-inch collages from Northridge’s ongoing series “The World We Live In,” 2006–. Each collage features a photograph of the natural world, sourced from Northridge’s vast archive of wilderness books. The pictures serve as a backdrop onto which he has methodically overlaid graphic abstractions. In effect, the work is a cogent collection of antimaps, all distinct in form but united in meaning. The series recalls another collage in the show, Welcome Back to the Nuclear Age, 2011, which is composed of hundreds of colorful paper fragments, each with a thin, discrete black line connecting to form a single loop that leads to nowhere. Throughout the show, Northridge’s pieces obscure and confuse rather than reveal and describe, ultimately throwing into relief a definition of ourselves based on how and where we’re located. In the best way possible, this show is a no-man’s-land.

— Carmen Winant

Rona Yefman

DEREK ELLER GALLERY
615 West 27th Street
November 18–January 7

Rona Yefman, Martha Bouke and Andy's Flowers, Visit at the Museum, 2011, color photograph, 40 x 30”.

In Rona Yefman’s installation The Mountain, 2011, the artist features a quote from her subject, Martha Bouke, on a pillar, which reads: “This world is bad. You wish to get to the sky. The question is: How do you get to the sky?” Yefman’s artistic practice springs from this idea, her work showcasing individuals who try to reach the “sky,” or, in the artist’s words, “embody possibilities of freedom,” via their gender, sexuality, or assumed personae. Martha is the female alter ego assumed by an eighty-year-old Ukrainian man who immigrated to Palestine after surviving the Holocaust. Now, Martha lives in Tel Aviv. Since 2002, Yefman has followed, filmed, and photographed her. Two videos and a series of photographs that chronicle Martha’s nine-year collaboration with Yefman are on display in the artist’s first solo show at Derek Eller Gallery.

A two-channel video installation, Martha Bouke, project #4, 2011, shows Martha dressing, transforming her figure, and assuming her persona on one screen, and, on the other, posing for the camera in her home and walking the streets of Tel Aviv at night. Yefman’s dialogue with Martha about her character, lifestyle, and personal history plays over each channel. Martha’s body—hairy legs and lumpy groin—plays off the garish pink lips of her undecorated Venetian carnival mask, which Martha dyed to match her skin tone. The incongruous combination of the mask’s pale, hard surface with her sagging neck seems to manifest the futility of Martha’s assumed femininity. Though Yefman’s portrait celebrates Martha’s persona, her photographs and films also fetishize it. That Martha only partially obscures her masculine physique suggests that femaleness is something to be tried on or played at, to perform or hide. In this way, and as she poses for Yefman’s camera, Martha objectifies herself.

— Zoe Larkins

“September 11”

MOMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue
September 11–January 9

View of “September 11,” 2011. Top: Fiona Banner, Black Bunting, 2001.

For the past ten years, the meaning of September 11 has been elastic, its tension easing and straining to encompass mournful impulse and a desire to forget. Peter Eleey’s unhurried exhibition of works by forty-one artists treats 9/11 as a lens through which to consider collective trauma––even though the majority of pieces here were made before 2001. Although the show opened on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, its poetic, melancholic demeanor is less concerned with memorializing than with presenting an introspective and political acknowledgment of the ambivalence that surrounds that fateful day––namely, the art world’s consistent difficulty in responding to the attack on its own urban center. Time changes everything.

A number of works, for example, point to muted patriotism. Fiona Banner’s funereal Black Bunting, 2001, is strung throughout the hallway. The work, while partylike, evokes lost innocence and a consequent inability to unequivocally express national pride. Jem Cohen’s Little Flags, 1991–2000, a film that ominously depicts a Gulf War victory parade, does something similar, by showing the Financial District’s streets covered with white debris. Jeremy Deller, however, makes the point most boldly with his re-creation of George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner. The pre-9/11 works resonate most deeply, as much for the fact that they’re lesser-known selections by noted artists as for the idea that the cultural undercurrents they express are fairly constant––we just require major events to sear in their meaning. There’s a formalist violence, for example, to the mid-1970s offerings by Mary Lucier and Gordon Matta-Clark, each almost surgically remaking the New York cityscape long before Al Qaeda did. Eleey’s astute arrangements amplify such allusions.

The show also wisely addresses the World Trade Center from its literal and metaphoric interior rather than its iconic exterior. John Pilson’s office cubicle photographs, shot between 1998 and 2000 in the nearby World Financial Center, speak to the ordinariness of lives inside those buildings, of cubicle dividers isolating workers in a nearly comical manner, while Stephen Vitiello’s World Trade Center Recordings: Winds after Hurricane Floyd, 1999/2002, is here mounted in PS1’s spooky basement space, allowing the moans of the WTC buildings to express some communal pain in abstractly elegiac terms. The show visually (and tonally) marshals intangibility, particularly the momentousness of 9/11’s cultural impact––yet also dynamically embraces the impossibility of neat resolution.

— Glen Helfand

“Signed, Sealed, Delivered”

ZACH FEUER GALLERY
548 West 22nd St
December 2–January 14

View of “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” 2011.

This lively show features nine artists whose work references or engages directly with various systems of correspondence, such as telegram, FedEx, and e-mail. The pieces range from illustrated and collaged envelopes to handmade postcards to an abstract interpretation of a Twitter feed. The selection, which spans the past six decades, reveals the impact of technology on written communication and also demonstrates the influence of mail art, the genre Ray Johnson is credited with fathering in the 1960s, on artists who wrestle with issues of temporality, intentionality, and authorship.

The earliest piece on view is from On Kawara’s 1968–79 “I Got Up” series. The postcard sent to New York from Mexico is dated August 26, 1968, and carries the simple typed message I GOT UP AT 10:44 AM. Various temporal markers—typed date and time, postmark, transit wear and tear—highlight the gaps between the moment the artist got out of bed and sent the postcard, its overseas journey, and, finally, its reception. More recent work by Walead Beshty flaunts the physicality of delivery. Here Beshty presents SSCC 139751 REV 10/05 “FedEx® Large Box,” Priority Overnight (Los Angeles-Chicago trk#837549197959, Chicago-New York trk#865651051269), 2007, one of a series of works in which he sends glass cubes (custom designed to fit snugly inside a FedEx box) to various recipients. The final artwork, an unofficial collaboration with FedEx, is the semishattered cube displayed alongside souvenirs from its formative journey—the opened box replete with waybill, time stamps, and dated forms.

In addition to art that bears physical and temporal scars from the postal system, this show also explores the emotional aspects of correspondence. For instance, Sophie Calle’s “Take Care of Yourself” project (first presented at the 2007 Venice Biennale) represents the artist’s attempt to recover from a breakup (transmitted to her via e-mail). Take Care of Yourself. Journalist, Florence Aubenas, 2007, consists of the letter Calle received from the French newspaper Liberation rejecting her request to have her breakup e-mail published, framed next to a photograph of the artist, on her knees, reading this second rejection.

— Mara Hoberman

Antoni Muntadas

BRONX MUSEUM OF THE ARTS
1040 Grand Concourse
September 29–January 15

View of “Antoni Muntadas: Information>>Space>>Control,” 2011. Antoni Muntadas, On Translation: Celebracions, 2009, video transferred to DVD, 9 minutes 33 seconds.

Barcelona-born, but a longtime New Yorker, Antoni Muntadas figures among a first generation of artists investigating the social and political significance of information and broadcast media. This thirty-year retrospective, first seen at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, includes several videos from the pre–fiber optic era, such as Video Is Television?, 1989, which magnifies and distorts images from a host of appropriated sources, including several Hollywood films (Poltergeist, Network). Backed by a plunking score, the nearly indecipherable TV images are overlaid with captions such as CONTEXT and FRAGMENT: blunt reminders of mass media’s partiality and its constitutive power. An even earlier interactive installation, On Subjectivity, 1978, invites visitors to comment on media images divorced from their original context and therefore—a critical “therefore” for the artist—shorn of their original meaning.

Muntadas’s newest work, the installation Alphaville e outros (Alphaville and Others), 2011, fills one of the museum’s larger galleries with ads for gated-community apartment complexes, huge banners with slogans in Portuguese, and a video shot partly in a São Paulo–area development that shares its name with Jean-Luc Godard’s sci-fi dystopia. (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster explored the same Paulista Alphaville in a 2004 project.) Starting with scenes of Anna Karina and Eddie Constantine in the hypermodern Paris of 1965, Muntadas intercuts footage from this Western-hemisphere Alphaville, while a Portuguese-speaking narrator extols the glories of the “exclusive” urban enclave: pristine swimming pools, manicured gardens, and unrivaled security—thanks to high walls and constant surveillance. In this moment of BRIC ascendancy, Muntadas’s installation is a welcome corrective for exhausted gringos gazing longingly southward: The realities of contemporary urban life, there or anywhere, can make Godard’s Alphaville seem almost idyllic.

— Jason Farago

Jeff Wall

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY | NEW YORK
24 West 57th Street
December 9–January 21

Jeff Wall, Boxing, 2011, color photograph.

Jeff Wall’s photographic production of recent years is encapsulated here, reflecting the culmination of an interest in contemporaneity as evolved by the artist over several decades. The exhibition—which includes two installations, one featuring a series of expansive landscapes taken in 2007 and another of genrelike depictions of banal yet idiosyncratic details of contemporary life dating from the past two years—suggests a nuanced and continuous engagement with historical conventions of representation. Perhaps for this reason, Wall’s newer pieces may initially seem simply to revisit his earlier work, which drew inspiration from the trajectory of modernist painting. These recent images, however, show the continued relevance of Wall’s project, which, rather than simply quoting tradition, speaks fluently from within the metalanguage of the art-historical discourse in order to further capture a Baudelairean sense of heroism in the banal.

In Boxing, 2011, for instance, two adolescent boys are seen within a sterile beige interior, clad only in boxing gloves and shorts. The theoretically heated act in which they engage contrasts with the scene’s dispassionate portrayal, as one boy throws a punch that his aggressor easily dodges. As well, the obvious affluence of the setting—indicated by its pristine conditions and the presence of numerous seemingly original works of art—alludes to the boys’ upper-class status and, in its genteel appearance, belies their pretensions of toughness. The photograph’s uniform tonality, carefully arranged composition, and deadpan approach combine to produce an image that is primarily about capturing the momentum of modern life and the conventions of representation. At the same time, however, the obvious staging and deliberate ennui of the image offer a nod to postmodern practice. This synthesis yields images that are perpetually relevant, amusing, and engaging—a body of work committed to the lessons of neither the present nor the past.

— Britany Salsbury

Billy Childish

LEHMANN MAUPIN
201 Chrystie Street
November 4–January 21

Billy Childish, Lt. Sydney A. Cloman, First Infantry, on His Horse on the Wounded Knee Battleground, 2010, oil and charcoal on linen, 60 1/4 x 96”.

Foreboding skies, strange foliage, and shadowy figures are busy with swirling and knotted brushstrokes in “I Am the Billy Childish.” The whorls of unrealistic colors on these canvases unmistakably recall van Gogh, but Billy Childish’s sincere embrace of the post-Impressionist’s gesture is assimilated into his distinct, punk-painterly economy: The swaths of taupe in Lt. Sydney A. Cloman, First Infantry, on His Horse on the Wounded Knee Battleground, 2010, are unpainted linen; his dandy palette of avocado, robin’s-egg blue, and hot pink in the bramble of Russian Shepherd Boy, 2011, is very much his own, and so is his cryptic selection of historical subjects. Alongside the paintings of the shepherd and the desolate site of the Lakota Sioux massacre hang landscapes of erupting volcanoes as well as portraits of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and the mountaineer Toni Kurz.

The paintings fill the gallery’s ground floor, while above, an impressive grid of mounted record covers flanks vitrines of Childish’s books and zines. The collection demonstrates the prodigious and varied output of the artist, who, in his thirty-five-year span of work, has become a legendary underground character—as a painter and a writer, but particularly as a musician. A lifelong resident of Chatham, England, working with little mainstream attention, Childish has nevertheless enjoyed far-reaching influence. Cultish interest in his bands, such as Thee Headcoats (1989–2000), with their proud amateurism and raw aesthetic, informed the sound and ethos of blues-punk, indie rock, and grunge music.

While Childish’s paintings, like his songs and writings, are characterized by emotional intensity, social revolt, and unprecious execution, they have been less recognized—perhaps because, in the context of contemporary art, his spiritualism and guileless adoption of past styles have exiled his work to the perplexing margins of the art world. He’s hardly naive about this realm (he knows enough to object to its values), yet he is an unironic and steadfast practitioner of his teenage preferences: Three-chord compositions and figurative expressionism spoke to him early, and he has spoken through their forms ever since. Standing on a crate at the opening reception, he read from one of his poems: “i am a desperate man who loves the simplisity of / painting / and hates gallarys and white walls . . . also i am vincent van gough/ hiroshige / and every living breathing artist / who dares to draw god / on this planet.” For one who has cultivated an outsider position for decades, Childish played off the apparent contradiction of his performance in his beautiful exhibition with charm, and is likely satisfied by any confusion his oeuvre inspires.

— Johanna Fateman

“The Birdwatchers”

BITFORMS
529 West 20th St, 2nd Floor
December 8–January 21

View of “The Birdwatchers,” 2011.

At this gallery, which is devoted exclusively to “artists who embrace new media,” one might expect to discover work that at least partially falls prey to the swarm of clichés commonly associated with digital art: fast-paced, sexualized homages to the cyborg, for instance. Laura Bardier, however, with her curation of “The Birdwatchers,” has managed to create an approach to the genre that is refreshingly slower, subtler, and––if it can be said––more natural than any cyborg-obsessed stereotype.

Every piece on view displays a moment in nature serenely perverted to create something decidedly, but unsettlingly, other. Marina Zurkow’s Mesocosm (Northumberland UK) (all works cited, 2011), for example, purports to be an “animated landscape portrait” of a Northumberland man sitting on a stump in the woods of northern England, watching the seasons pass while visited by a steady stream of native animals. All mutable subjects in the scene are governed by a probability equation unfurling on a 146-hour cycle that corresponds to a 365-day year, with each minute of the work representing one hour of real time.

The most overt “cyborgs” of the show are also those subjects most directly taken from nature. In Moving Plant #24, Colombian artist Adriana Salazar makes her US debut. The piece features a pilfered branch from the backyard of an American friend. Placed upright, flagpolelike, in the center of the gallery, the rotting branch recalls Frankenstein, as it is reanimated by a set of sequenced, custom-made electronics, all connected to the foliage by impossibly thin nylon. Nearby thrashes the corpse of a different character in Bird #2: a taxidermied bird, brought “back to life” in the same manner. Its wings and tail furl and unfurl––a dance for the naturally dead, in the corner of the emerald-green room.

— Chloé Rossetti

Trisha Brown

SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO.
530 West 22nd Street
December 9–January 25

Trisha Brown, Untitled (Montpelier), 2002, charcoal on paper, 130 x 106 3/4”.

Imagine Jackson Pollock’s toe prints in the midst of one of his most epic drippings. Viewing Trisha Brown’s works on paper instantly brought this image to my mind. Such a thought is not intended to suggest that every female artist needs a male precedent to garner relevance, but rather to ask how Brown’s practice might productively raise questions that complicate the received wisdom about the works of Pollock and other such “greats.” The show features Pollock-size vertical sheets of paper that contain black and gray charcoal and pastel markings—the inscriptions of a dance performed on each surface. Among other Abstract Expressionist parallels are the formal properties that are produced by a loss of authorial control that, contradictorily, relies upon very controlled movements, entirely dedicated to a square field. But there are also striking differences: Besides the aforementioned toe traces is the occasional rupture in the paper that must have resulted from the friction of bodily mass against the fragile surface. I craved seeing the choreography that made these striking compositions, but, cleverly, the gallery did not indulge, including instead a film Brown had recorded from the wings of a theater during one of her paperless choreographies (Shot Backstage, 1998). Though visually withheld, the body is of structural importance here and may offer some important pointers toward a feminist reading of artistic production. The AbEx boys’ relinquishing of deliberate mastery relied on a belief that such liberation could be freely obtained and, moreover, that the producing body did not matter. Brown’s innovation of the choreographic tradition, on which these traces depend, offers an important corrective: While it is possible to challenge the restraints that previous artistic conventions made on the body, broader social and cultural constraints—the stubbornly gendered codes of walking, talking, and gesticulating, for example—will necessarily limit its range of motion and, thereby, everything that body does.

— Sarah Lookofsky

Massimo Vitali

BONNI BENRUBI
41 East 57th St, 13th Floor
December 8–February 4

Massimo Vitali, Porto Miggiano, Italy (#4520), 2011, color photograph, 76 x 91”.

Massimo Vitali’s large-scale photographs of beachgoers in Turkey, Greece, and Italy are, in a word, lighthearted. The title of the show hints at a pastoral other-place, loosely mapped onto the locations of the photographs themselves. What remains of this Arcadia, however, is a humorous yet fragile assortment of backpack-wielding, rock pool–squatting, parasol-opening, color-coordinated tourists, in various hues of bronze.

The scale of the coastlines in Vitali’s enormous, saturated C-prints dwarf their fleshy inhabitants, creating a Where’s Waldo–type effect; a patient viewer is handsomely rewarded with a smorgasbord of candid moments between unknowing participants. The prints line the walls of the gallery on all sides, encircling a seating area that invites a leisurely look. It takes time to pick out what one might consider to be the “stars” of these scenes. In Les Catedrales, Low Tide, 2011, for example, a row of four intertwined visitors walk away from the knotted crowd, turning their backs on a pristine sea—three are dressed in identical white, flanked by an individual in a blood-red shirt. In Porto Miggiano, 2011, a white-haired man in neon-blue swimming trunks squats awkwardly on a rock. An inflatable blue mattress leans precariously on a nearby outcropping, out of place in the flesh-and-limestone landscape.

It is interesting to compare this work to another piece of Vitali’s, which is not technically part of the exhibition but is on display in an adjacent room. Hubbubs of fluorescent jumpsuit–clad skiers brave the elements to chairlift up a groomed ski slope. As the skiers line up to ascend the little mountain, the presence of their bodies in nature implies a fragility entirely different from Vitali’s beach-dwellers—in the former, man attempts, awkwardly, to triumph over nature, while in the latter, man is happily subsumed by it.

— Chloé Rossetti

Joel Sternfeld

LUHRING AUGUSTINE
531 West 24th Street
January 6–February 4

Joel Sternfeld, New Jersey, (#12), May/June 1980, color photograph, 8 1/2 x 12 3/4”.

The arc of photographic history is a mean and subtle thing. Subtle, in that the line between the picture taken by a competent amateur and one taken by a consummate artist is often razor-thin; mean, in the way in which our rapacious, churning image culture can transmute even the most innovative image into an utter banality overnight. As such, mounting a show of historic pictures—particularly pictures that lack the kind of visual pyrotechnics that have become de rigueur for photographs that have aspirations towards art—is an enterprise haunted by the possibility of critical derision, or, worse, complete indifference.

However, Joel Sternfeld’s current exhibition “First Pictures,” which comprises never-before-shown 35-mm slide photographs dating from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s—all which predate his seminal American Prospects, 1987—manages not only to make a case for a reconsideration of his place in the history of American photography, but also to remind us of the unique photographic pleasures that can be derived from the work of an artist who has mastered the difficult art of seeing the world well. In these early pictures, which are grouped here into four separate projects though could just as easily be seen together, there are hints of the expansive, cinematic quality that would become a defining feature of his work. Simultaneously, the pictures also lay out a constellation of significant historical references—past, contemporaneous, and future—with which Sternfeld must now be associated: Garry Winogrand is here, as are William Eggleston, Bill Owens, and Henry Wessel, and so are intimations of Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s partially staged street photographs. But perhaps most present as a reference point—particularly in the collection of images in the gallery’s back room that are the show’s tour de force—is Robert Frank’s The Americans. Like Frank, Sternfeld turns an acerbic eye toward America, with attention paid to the gestures, environments, and modes of self-presentation that fill the stock houses of the country’s psyche. Yet Sternfeld also blunts his criticism with affection, a thing that Frank—ever the dour expat—found difficult to muster. Despite our faults, Sternfeld seems to say, there was something essential about the America he pictured that was worth saving—and, perhaps, there is still.

— Chris Wiley

David Brooks

THE LAST LOT / ART PRODUCTION FUND
46th Street at Eighth Avenue
November 22–February 5

David Brooks, Desert Rooftops (detail), 2011, mixed media, dimensions variable.

There’s a housing crisis in New York City. On a touristy theater district block behind a chain-link fence, an assembly of asphalt-shingled rooftops pokes up from the ground. No windows, doors, or signs of inhabitants are visible at street level, but the distinctive peaks summon up the negative associations of suburban sprawl. At first glance, the odd perspective—confronting roofs head-on instead of from below—is pleasantly disorienting, offering Midtown pedestrians a Jack and the Beanstalk moment.

David Brooks’s Desert Rooftops, 2011, is the first installation to grace the Last Lot, an otherwise vacant lot that Art Production Fund will transform with temporary public artworks until its short-term lease ends in August 2012. The startling, incongruous landscape of Brooks’s five-thousand-square-foot sculpture presents a timely political commentary on two crises—the collapse of the US housing bubble and global climate change. Though it is ambiguous whether the symbolic subterranean homes are rising from ground (the burbs are invading!) or being swallowed up (homes are disappearing!), either way the implication is ominous. The current economic situation makes it impossible not to see Desert Rooftops as a damning portrait of the subprime mortgage scandal and resultant devastating numbers of foreclosures.

Brooks is known for his ecological commentary in works such as Preserved Forest, 2010, wherein he “preserved” a sampling of trees indigenous to the Amazon rainforest in concrete and presented the slowly decaying mass in MoMA PS1’s 2010 “Greater New York” show. With Desert Rooftops, Brooks makes his agenda clear by including multiple plaques explaining the concept of desertification: the process by which once fertile land becomes desert as a result of humans overusing the earth’s natural resources. Seen in this light, the undulating rooftops evoke a cautionary postapocalyptic landscape.

— Mara Hoberman

“Nature Morte”

THE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK
148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor
December 7–February 10

View of “Nature Morte,” 2012.

Curator Chris Murtha’s tightly packed exhibition handles with grace what might seem to be an unimaginative enterprise: displaying still-life photographs in a horticultural society’s gallery. Of the three artists presented here, only Sharon Core is primarily identified with the genre, though her painstaking re-creations of and riffs on earlier artworks simultaneously engage other artistic lineages, chiefly appropriation art. In recent years, Core has expanded from a detailed exploration of nineteenth-century American painter Raphaelle Peale’s compositions to a sampling of still-life paintings that leaps across centuries. Most of the arrangements are made with flowers, fruits, and vegetables that she grows and tends herself. The remarkable metaphoric expressiveness of these materials hinges, in part, on her control of their state of ripeness or decay.

Corin Hewitt and Miranda Lichtenstein stray somewhat further from the genre’s pictorial conventions, refreshing it in ways distinct from Core’s work. Lichtenstein’s moody untitled series of Polaroids, 2002–2005, depicting flowers and plants in front of painted shadows has an atmospheric pull that belies the works’ small size. The disconnection between foreground and background morphs into a smart meditation on presence and absence in her recent photographs of shadows on backlit paper screens. Hewitt’s newest still lifes are inspired by ikebana flower arrangements, but likewise draw from a visual language of sharp edges and colorful backgrounds familiar from advertising and design. (Iranian photographer Shirana Shahbazi has created similar looking photographs.) Each composition contains objects—logs, stones, metal wires, flowers—used during a recent performance in Miami. Here, isolated against seamless bright red or dull gray, Hewitt’s unexpected combinations come off like fetishes or relics from an inexplicable but enticing ritual.

— Brian Sholis

James Nares

PAUL KASMIN GALLERY
293 Tenth Avenue
January 5–February 11

James Nares, Untitled (Pendulum and Gravity Drawing), 1976, pencil on paper, 8 1/2 x 11”.

Manhattan is an odd tabula rasa. In the press release for his latest exhibition, James Nares is quoted as saying that Lower Manhattan “nurtured the talent of a generation inspired by its vast emptiness.” While his statement of course misconstrues the centuries of building and demolition that preceded this artist’s arrival to the metropolitan site, such a willful denial of precedent is not uncommon in an emerging generation of makers. That said, the citation has a certain resonance with the works on view, which include drawings, photographs, diagrams, and objects that depict a Lower Manhattan nearly absent of inhabitants and vehicles—most notably, the 1976 film Pendulum, in which the artist hung a wire with a lead concrete sphere at its end from a footbridge on Staple Street. The length of the suspension allows the ball to swing almost the entire span of the alley. Though there is a scientistic pretense here (mass, energy, movement), the groan of the wire, combined with a multiplicity of almost expressionist shots that include some dramatic angles featuring the artist’s body and shadow, result in something totally anathema to physics class.

With this exhibition, the pendulum is swung into our present, and it necessarily picks up new connotations along the way. September 11, which would become an ideological “blank slate” that denied the consideration of precedents and justified a general clampdown on public space, came to mind. When looking back, however, it is important to stay wary of idealizations of 1970s New York; the city teetered on bankruptcy and large sections of the population lived in poverty. Nevertheless, given the current ubiquity of security guards, surveillance cameras, and cops in Lower Manhattan, this document of scaling a city structure, suspending a ball, and letting it swing freely may generate, as it did for me, a kind of magical thinking in New York now.

— Sarah Lookofsky

Michael Snow

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY
513 West 20th Street
January 7–February 11

Michael Snow, The Viewing of Six New Works, 2012, seven looped video projections. Installation view.

Michael Snow’s latest exhibition finds the artist on familiar thematic terrain, playing with abstraction and perception through shifting, tautological strategies. La Ferme (The Farm), 1998, is a photo-based work depicting eleven successive frames of 16-mm film cut apart, blown up, and horizontally arrayed. As in the final moments of Snow’s seminal Wavelength, 1967, the moving image becomes still. Film reverts to its structural components, the vertical vector of the filmstrip recomposed along the horizontal axis of the spectator, her left-to-right gaze recapitulating the camera’s. Snow’s nearly twenty-three-minute looped video In the Way, 2011, proves similarly literal. A series of continually panning tracking shots of the ground, shot from above and projected onto the floor, the work invites the viewer to realize its title, as the footprints clouding its surface make clear.

Snow’s most recent installation, titled, with typical self-referentiality, The Viewing of Six New Works, 2012, furnishes the show’s conceptual highlight. Seven projectors cast monochrome geometries onto seven whitewashed walls, each figure a stand-in for a wall-mounted piece. Stretching, rotating, and contorting in motions more organic than mechanical, the forms variously sweep and crawl across the wall, cropped by unseen frames and marked by subtle inflections. Now rectangle, now trapezoid, now rhombus, these endlessly evolving shapes mimic the act of viewing: the scans of the eye, pivots of the neck, and twists of the torso that make up the so-called art of looking at art, here performed using an interactive technology named TouchDesigner. Moving nonsynchronously, the figures, hypothetically whole yet visible only as fragments, affirm the avant-garde insight that objects are not as they are, but as they are seen. Never manifest in full, they preclude gestalt sensations—those all-at-once comprehensions of form championed by Snow’s peer Robert Morris in his “Notes on Sculpture.” The frame, here as in so much of Snow’s work, trumps all.

— Courtney Fiske

Roy Lichtenstein

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
October 6–February 12

Roy Lichtenstein, Detail from Three Landscapes, 1970–71, still from a three-channel color film in 35 mm, 1 minute.

An installation of three silent, one-minute films by Roy Lichtenstein gives a rare glimpse into the Pop artist’s experiments in 35-mm moviemaking. Created during a two-week residency at Hollywood’s Universal Studios special effects lab in February 1969 and filmed primarily in Montauk, the works extend Lichtenstein’s interest in commercial landscapes to imagine a Pop seascape. Each looped film’s split of sea and sky is bisected by a tilting, animated comic-book horizon. The first screen shows a static sky of blue Ben-day dots; underneath the bright pattern a body of water is filmed lapping, lit as if illuminated in red neon. In the second film, white clouds are scattered above a group of tropical fish, and the black horizon line that divides sky from sea rocks like a ship’s deck. The last features a single white seagull in a cartoon-blue sky above a sunlit, vacation postcard–ready seascape. The images play simultaneously against the ticker-tape hum of reel film, which one can see circling through pizza box–size film casings behind the three suspended projection screens.

Shown together for the first time, the three films develop formal contrasts between sky and water, stenciled dots and thick contours, motion and stasis. Yet these lo-fi holidays in the sun also provide a distinct contrast to the more famous Pop movies of Andy Warhol, created during the same decade. Where Warhol shot stars with a scopic investment heightened by the grainy, ambiguous, and “inexpert” quality of his productions, Lichtenstein brought together filmed and animated elements to create pastiche landscape pictures born of special effects in which the real becomes a prop to the unreal. Made after Lichtenstein’s iconic comic-book paintings of the 1960s, the films all feature limitless horizons reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818, or any of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes. If the subject matter of Pop art has been called banal and impersonal, this work is instead transcendent: a Pop sublime.

— Maika Pollack

Matt Hoyt

BUREAU
127 Henry Street
January 8–February 12

Matt Hoyt, Untitled (Group 18), 2006–11,
wooden shelf with ABS support, clay, putty, acrylic, tempera paint, 1 x 8 1/2 x 4 3/4”.

Minutely arranged on a number of unobtrusive shelves, Matt Hoyt’s sculptural works appear as art as if by incidence: Each seems to resemble cast-off flotsam one might typically kick about while wandering through a train yard or a former industrial lot. This may lead an inattentive viewer into mistaking Hoyt for a rarified variant of the urban archaeologist, classing findings according to a cryptically individuated set of aesthetic criteria.

Yet close scrutiny soon reveals these works as the product of an immersive craft. Amalgams of putty, clay, paint, plaster, resin, and a number of mercurial materials (Plasti Dip and liquid electrical tape, to note two) come together as assemblies of qualities that just slip past familiarity. One could liken them (as mentioned above) to fractured artifacts or even lilliputian architecture, but such feats of metaphor and metonymy only manage to kick up a flurry of linguistic dust about this art and its irreducible material processes, evoking the philosophical joke of consciousness’s bungled attempt to ambush the thing itself in order to understand it.

In this sense, Hoyt’s work continues the tradition of sculpture as a spatial event unfolding in time. As a presence offered through the contemplative folding of matter and form, Hoyt’s works assume a surprisingly quiet tongue for contemporary art—a cultural apparatus whose hypertrophic discourse has reached such a point that it is not uncommon to find the leased goods of a Hollywood prop house articulated as artistic product. This is not to imply that such a cultural condition is one for great social concern; rather, it is a useful context to appreciate the elusive techniques through which Hoyt’s objects come into being. Skirting just below the facets of the known, this exhibition offers the average consumer of contemporary art an instance of presence that discloses only the limits of its intelligibility.

— Sam Pulitzer

“The Displaced Person”

INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
14A Orchard Street
January 6–February 12

Ron Athey, Foot Washing Set w/ Blonde Hair Towel, 1996, wigs, wool, metal pipe, stone, wood, crystals, blood, 50 x 23 x 10”.

Alienation, it would seem, can be a creative force for inclusion. And, as each of the artists in “The Displaced Person” proves, one is rarely found without the other. Freud viewed alienation as the by-product of a cultural divorce between man and his natural impulses. For the artists exhibited, it’s in the very gaps between body and ideology that one finds reconciliation between the two.

Performance artist Ron Athey’s installation Foot Washing Set w/ Blonde Hair Towel, 1996, typifies the artist’s melding of religious and BDSM rituals. A nod to the Christian practices of foot washing (see Luke 7:44), Athey’s twist on the tradition includes a handwoven towel made of hair, and a bloodstained cactus-spine brush. Here the body, or rather its sanguineous traces, becomes a symbolic site on which, as with Christian theology, dogma supercedes the physical. In Sue Williams’s My Oeuvre, 2005, the presentation of the body in fragments lays bare perceptual attitudes towards it. A cartoonish bioamorphous mass of sphincters, orifices, and bulbous mounds, Williams’s anatomical fantasy points far less to any recognizable specific sex organ than to collective impressions forced upon them.

With Walt Cassidy’s The Weeping Tower, 2011, the artist examines structures that impose both conformity and alterity on the body. Carbon photographic prints of idyllic male youths, framed within hand-drawn structures, reflect an eroticization of, and dislocation from, the male form. Tellingly, Cassidy’s choice of settings includes New York’s Jacob Riis beach—honoring a man who documented the blight of the industrial era’s downtrodden. Each of the works in this exhibition reminds us that those on the fringe often find themselves center stage.

— Joseph Akel

Peter Fend

ESSEX STREET
47 Essex Street
January 8–February 12

View of “Über die Grenze: May Not Be Seen or Read or Done,” 2012.

The question of whether art is capable of changing the world continues to spark polarizing debate. Common arguments against art’s capacity for such change usually do not make explicit the underlying directives of such pronouncements. If art cannot change the world, a typical subtext runs, it should withdraw from social and political arenas altogether. Peter Fend, known for melding the spheres of Conceptual art and science since the 1980s, situates himself squarely in the opposing camp, fermenting the link between saying and doing, and thereby providing a test case for the relationships between modeling in the art world and carrying out in the real world, and between doing something momentous versus doing nothing at all.

Fend’s latest show consists of a sequence of twelve large sheets of paper, hung simply on the wall, as if torn from his sketchbook. Each details in diagrams, photographs, and a surfeit of text several of Fend’s plans, among them producing satellite imagery of contested sites for global mass media and citizen uses; growing and harvesting giant algae for biogas purposes; and drawing global maps based on shared saltwater bodies rather than nation-state boundaries. As each piece outlines, these projects were never actualized due to lack of funding, corporate obstructions, etc., thus raising the question: If an artistic project does not manifest the change it intended, is it a failure?

Such a mechanistic criterion for success is problematic, not least for overemphasizing production in an ecosystem that is already strained, as many of Fend’s works detail, by way too much stuff. The exhibition proved for me that to expect the lone artist to single-handedly change the world is an absurdly tall order; joining with other fields of practice is a necessary course of action. Within art-world confines, however, Fend makes an important case for sketching as a process of thinking big in a realm where an uphill battle is commonly interpreted as an instruction for keeping calm and carrying on.

— Sarah Lookofsky

Gerald Ferguson

CANADA
55 Chrystie Street
January 7–February 12

Gerald Ferguson, 50 Ft. Rope, 2000, enamel on raw canvas, 28 x 21”.

The late Gerald Ferguson, a revered fixture of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, was included in the foundational 1970 “Information” exhibition at MoMA, and his work—remarkably—didn’t appear in New York again until now. This survey, curated by Luke Murphy, includes eleven stenciled and frottaged paintings that bear all the marks of Ferguson’s consistently matter-of-fact approach.

In the 1960s, Ferguson made drawings with typewritten text, spray-painted stenciled grids of letters and punctuation marks onto canvas (three of which are on view here), and eventually assembled The Standard Corpus of Present Day English Language Usage arranged by word length and alphabetized within word length, 1970—a self-referential index of fifty thousand words (inspired in part by the poems of Carl Andre). In subsequent work, Ferguson’s aesthetic investment in the rugged Halifax landscape (he became an expert on Nova Scotian folk art) met his tendency for procedural remove. This rough-hewn combination comes through in his frottage paintings, which he produced—from 1992 through 2009—by rolling black enamel onto canvases (or, in a few cases, onto leftover housepainters’ drop cloths) that were stapled over domestic and utilitarian objects from clotheslines to drain covers, doormats, and the bottom of his studio trash can. Implements of manual labor here rub up against abstraction’s often lofty claims, and though steeped in associations—from Hans Hartung’s prints to Richard Serra’s paint stick “Rounds” and “Solids”—Ferguson’s frottages act as foils for overdetermined extrapolation. These paintings record object and action at once, just as the materials that Ferguson chose practically embody functionality in their very names (as nouns that, for the most part, connote their use when read in verb form—rope, fence, hose, etc.). The works’ deadpan impressions also register their relatively mechanized yet rudimentary process on the bare canvas in ways that recall the basic grounds on which Ferguson’s practice, and those of many of his Conceptualist peers, began—the typewritten page.

— Annie Ochmanek

Taylor Mead

CHURNER AND CHURNER
205 10th Avenue
January 12–February 18

Taylor Mead, Fairy Tale Poem, sheet 8 (They both lost!), 2012, ink and acrylic on paper, 28 1/2 x 20 5/8".

A skull-sized dent in the canvas of Andy as the Odalisque, 1994, is just about level with Warhol’s head in Taylor Mead’s portrait of his influential friend and collaborator (Mead starred in a number of early Warhol films). But the painting loses none of its camp or neo-Expressionist charm to this accidental feature—Warhol’s dashed-off form is a rosy, abstract bulwark with a soup can and flowers perched nearby. His signature mop of hair is rendered in greenish iridescent plumes applied straight from the tube. The other paintings made between 1974 and 1994 grouped in the gallery’s back room—portraits, landscapes, and wild animals—share the humor and flamboyance of Mead’s Andy, as well as its poor condition. The discoloration and telltale speckles of roach infestation are credited to decades of storage in his Lower East Side apartment. Mead, eighty-seven, a poet as well as a painter and veteran of underground cinema, asked the audience at his extremely brief reading during the show’s opening reception to wish him luck—his landlord is trying to evict him, he said, on the grounds that his extensive personal archive is a health hazard.

In the front room, in contrast to his battered paintings, Mead’s recent illustrations for his ever-evolving Fairy Tale Poem sparkle in their bright white frames. The black ink drawings and hand-written text are executed with elegant haste and sparingly colored—with daubs of red, for example, in the death-match between prince and monster (“THEY BOTH LOST!”). The pages of the nihilistic story also pose as a storyboard for a film or a play, the final drawing displaying the actors’ credits. Mead has given the role of the castle, left vacant with the demise of its owner, to Donald Trump; the tragic princess put up for rent at the story’s end is played by Ellen Barkin; the prince can be “whoever.” It’s perhaps no surprise that Mead, a character so gracefully hilarious across disciplines, should be a genius of casting as well.

— Johanna Fateman

Sebastian Black

C L E A R I N G
505 Johnson Avenue #10
January 13–February 19

Sebastian Black, untitled, 2010, oil on canvas, 9 x 12”. From the “Puppy Paintings,” 2010.

The cascading alliteration in the title (“Period Pieces, Puppies Paintings, Prototype, Placeholders”) of Sebastian Black’s latest show suggests that a comprehensive selection of his work will be on view, but in fact the show is quite spare. A single instance from Black’s series of “Puppy Paintings,” 2010, graces one wall, and on the floor are several angled mirrors—the kind that one sees in the upper corners of elevators—affixed to concrete. Another wall is covered in white plaster patches that disappear in direct daylight but are visible in shadows. The restrained atmosphere of the show demonstrates a measured decision to decline mere plenitude in favor of a rigorous, almost philosophical investigation.

What unites Black’s show is a continuous inquiry into the nature of abstraction, and each piece on view investigates different possible meanings of that term. The “Puppy Paintings”—composed of abstract shapes that form what could be either heads of dogs or women’s torsos—play deftly at the edges of abstraction and figuration, and moreover reference early modernist appropriations of African masks. The show’s most accomplished piece—Untitled (Plaster Patches), 2012—seems to posit a subtle proximity between abstract painting’s picture plane and the random marked and stained walls that one encounters walking around New York.

Rather than being coldly logical, Black’s investigations are rooted in the lived experience of the city. His thesis could be that abstraction is the language-game that allows art to appear in the midst of everyday experience.

— John Ganz

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

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

“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

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

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

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