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

George Ortman

ALGUS GREENSPON GALLERY
71 Morton Street
January 14–February 25

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

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

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

— Beau Rutland

Sarah Sze

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

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

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

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

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

— Mara Hoberman

“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

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

Ridley Howard

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

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

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

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

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

— Ryan Steadman

“Campaign”

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

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

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

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

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

— Johanna Fateman

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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