Etel Adnan

CCA WATTIS INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS
California College of the Arts, 360 Kansas Street
April 17–June 29

Etel Adnan, Five Senses for One Death, 1969, ink and watercolor on paper, 11 x 25".

“Words and Places: Etel Adnan,” organized by the graduating class of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts, is an impeccably timed exhibition, a gift to those of us who wanted to learn more about Adnan after encountering her paintings and tapestry at last summer’s Documenta. Painting is only one of Adnan’s many talents, which have led to a storied career as a poet, novelist, playwright, and journalist. The Wattis exhibition argues for the imbrication of word and image in Adnan’s work, and includes many of the artist’s vibrantly colored, jewel-box landscapes and abstractions as well as prominently placed vitrines housing leporellos, accordion-like artists’ books across which word and image sprawl.

While the precise nature of the relationship between verbal and visual remains underdeveloped, place—in all its specificity and elusiveness—is established with sensitivity. For Adnan, there are primarily three places: Northern California (consolidated in the figure of the majestic Mount Tamalpais, which she calls the most important person in her life), Beirut, and Paris. Interspersed with Adnan’s work are videos by Chris Marker, Rabih Mroué, and the Otolith Group—documentary media set in contrast to painterly marks—that the curators chose to contextualize the artist’s practice. Each video occurs in one of Adnan’s formative places: Marker trains his camera on junk sculptures that formerly populated mudflats in the Bay Area, Mroué edits footage of a collapsing building in Beirut, and the Otolith Group films Adnan reading poems from her volume Sea and Fog (2012) in her Paris apartment. The Otolith Group only depicts Adnan from behind, her orange sweater and a caramel wooden table adding to the glow surrounding her light-flecked silvery bob. Like the places she paints and writes, Adnan herself is at once present and absent, the still center of the exhibition. She turned eighty-eight this year, but the vast majority of paintings, when dated, are relatively recent, from the 1980s to the present. Her paintings are vividly present, but so many are undated and progression is so emphatically denied that aligning them with a life’s work as an unfolding narrative is impossible.

— Tara McDowell

William Pope.L

THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY
The University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Cobb Hall #418
April 28–June 23

View of “Forlesen,” 2013.

The day that “Forlesen” opened, the shiny black helium balloons of Ellipsis (all works 2013) bobbed in the rafters, moored to washers. A few weeks later, they had sunk to the ground and the worst of them looked like rotten grapes, molding with static dander. “Forlesen” rewards repeat viewings: William Pope.L’s riddle-like assortment of objects inhabits the space differently as the show ages. For instance, Curtain is composed of a pressboard wall facing the entrance and is covered in an orange-brown ketchup compound, buckling and cracking as it festers. Its acid waft, like some mysterious breath, animates the space between the objects in the gallery, but with no hint of a secure identity. “Forlesen” is also the title of a short story published in 1974 by the American science fiction author Gene Wolfe about a man who cannot construct a future.

Even if Wolfe’s prose weren’t itself symbolically coded and ultimately ambiguous, text would be no reliable legend. Pope.L’s “Skin Set” series (which began in 1997 and currently encompasses over a thousand drawings) is here represented by fifty-two works. The drawings portray the space between the lines of the first edition of Wolfe’s story and are made in an indecipherable bubble-script drawn in ballpoint pen. The area of the drawing only clips the letters’ edges; in one, the pate of an “e” crosses the lower threshold, and just a curve and a comma enter at upper left. In the interstices, paint, ink, correction fluid, and other substances signal a bodily presence: the evidence of fingerprints in some, applications that recall organic processes like bleeding in others. A few glued-on curly hairs comically answer the squiggle of Pope.L’s ballpoint pen drawing.

Throughout the show, the body, marked by race and available to stereotype, has been removed, but it breathes, coalesces, leaves traces, and disappears, often playfully. “Forlesen” is a homonym for the German word vorlesen or “to read aloud”: Distorted moans echo throughout the exhibition space from slowed-down spliced porn that flickers from a bank of video monitors within a wood and Masonite spaceship-like structure. When one gets enough distance from the structure to grasp its form or else gets the hint from its title—Quarter Structure (penis)— the absent body looms largest.

— Julia Langbein

“Byzantine Things in the World”

THE MENIL COLLECTION
1533 Sul Ross Street
May 3–August 18

View of “Byzantine Things in the World,” 2013.

In this exhibition, Byzantine functions less as a historical or stylistic category than as a gambit for interacting with the material world: To be Byzantine is to allow things—not necessarily artworks, but all manner of objects—to be affecting in new ways, and to alter how one relates to things inside and outside the museum. The 159 works on view range broadly across time and media, and their presentation is resolutely eclectic and ahistorical. Each gallery houses items that date from various centuries and range in scale from miniature to larger than life size. This curatorial approach is meant to be transformative; by encountering the pieces divorced from their staid place in the Western art canon, a viewer may come to see these things anew.

No doubt the deliberately promiscuous curatorial choices will be frustrating for some viewers. For instance, it may feel necessary to shed otherwise crucial notions of historical specificity or cultural politics in order to contemplate the juxtaposition of Kiki Smith’s visceral 1992 intaglio print Sueño (Dream) with an animal-shaped Boli power object containing organic sacrificial materials, including possibly blood, and George Dawe’s 1810 oil on canvas rendering of A Negro Over-powering a Buffalo—A Fact Which Occurred in America in 1809. The implications of this particular passage in the exhibition seem hazy, but the visual, almost bodily impact of their combination here lingers. Easier to grasp are those items that offer aesthetic pleasure, and there are plenty of these. Shiny surfaces punctuate the galleries––from delicately gilded and stylized icons to the fabulously bejeweled Box No. 27, 1965, by Lucas Samaras. These, coupled with the more earthly, figurative objects, facilitate a viewing experience that wavers between transcendence and corporeality.

Perhaps such wavering is what makes this exhibition worthwhile. A Byzantine frame of mind embraces contradictions and ambivalence. These objects exist together here more to show us how our present time has trained us to think than to retrain us according to any specific ideology.

— Chelsea Weathers

“Plaisance”

MIDWAY CONTEMPORARY ART
527 2nd Ave SE
April 19–June 22

View of “Plaisance,” 2013. Foreground: Willem De Rooij, Bouquet VI, 2010. Background: Sven Augustijnen, Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles, 2008.

Contrary to its pleasant title, this exhibition presents an array of troubling histories. For example, the legacies of Belgium’s colonial past feature prominently in Sven Augustijnen’s series of photographs “Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles,” 2008, while Henrik Olesen’s A.T., 2012, engages with the life and suicide of Alan Turing, whose homosexuality, once discovered by authorities in 1952, precipitated a fall from war-hero fame to government-controlled “treatment.” Riddled with demonized desires and illicit pleasures, these histories revolve around power: the power to control resources and bodies, representations and collective memory.

Curated by Fionn Meade, the show also compellingly questions how visual modes of representation have served as means to construct difference and to legitimate abuses of authority. From the roots of phrenology, poignantly pictured in eighty 35-mm slides of Charles Le Brun’s seventeenth-century drawings of human faces resembling those of animals, to appropriations of August Sander’s 1929 photographs of German people in Florian Zeyfang’s single-channel video Introduction of a Small History of Photography—Formalist Heady Pattern Version, 2008, “Plaisance” looks at the problematic nexus of authority, power, and visual representations. Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s The Microscope, 2006, locates this line of inquiry in biology, ostensibly the most objective of sciences. The modified microscope emits an oddly ominous vocoder version of “Every Breath You Take” and is paired with a brochure featuring an interview with science historian Evelyn Fox Keller, who explains the danger of “dead metaphors”: words that no longer register as figurative language but effectively masquerade as factual.

“Plaisance” suggests that when we mistake mere representations for facts we not only deceive ourselves but court disaster. Looking is never innocent, representation always an intervention. Gareth James’s untitled prints from 2011 underscore this point: Here, geometric patterns interrupt black-and-white portraits of Edward Curtis and Claude Levi-Strauss, arguing against any conflation of figurative and factual. Yet “Plaisance” does not get lost in purely intellectual pursuits; the show has a heart. Willem De Rooij’s Bouquet VI, 2010, a black vase on a white pedestal holding one hundred white and one hundred black tulips, installed adjacent to Olesen’s A.T., suggests a tribute to Turing. Such gestures imbue “Plaisance” with an affective charge that situates the very act of looking at art in the history of representation the show investigates.

— Christina Schmid

“Painter Painter”

WALKER ART CENTER
1750 Hennepin Avenue
February 2–October 27

Sarah Crowner, Ciseaux Rideaux, 2012, oil and gouache on canvas, fabric, and linen, 60 x 44 x 2”.

Modesty is not a word commonly associated with the history of abstraction, but in this exhibition, curators Eric Crosby and Bartholomew Ryan have gathered work by a group of up-and-coming artists—nearly all born in the 1970s—who largely eschew grand gestures, illuminating their own painterly processes in a manner so humble that it sometimes borders on self-deprecation. In Charles Mayton’s diptych Blind Ventriloquist, 2012, for example, a rough roller-made painting is paired with a more delicately painted canvas that’s almost entirely obscured by a stained rag and a silkscreened image of the artist’s accidentally painted studio wall. In We lead healthy lives to keep filthy minds, 2013, the multimedia artist Jay Heikes shows an eclectic wall-mounted array of sculpted tools—sticks, paddles, scrapers—that might conceivably have been used for the application of paint in his studio, though in this piece they weren't.

Other objects—treated somewhat more violently—also appear in The Failure of Contingency, 2012, by Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, in which a long spaghetti-cut drop cloth is strewn over the floor, with one end culminating in a matte black globe under two foldable chairs. Part of the globe’s northern hemisphere has been scalped, and its convex skin is incorporated in an entirely different work (The Impossible, 2012) installed on a nearby wall. Here, the radial detritus of one work becomes the genesis of another.

While most of the pieces in this show suggest an inward (or even downward) gaze, the work of Sarah Crowner is an exception. The boldly colored blocks of canvas in Ciseaux Rideaux, 2012, were stitched together by the artist in a manner that takes inspiration both in method and in composition from the worlds of fashion and design. Crowner implicitly suggests that an occasional glance beyond the confines of the studio walls is liberating and does painters—and painting—a world of good.

— Jay Gabler

Lynda Benglis

LOCKS GALLERY
600 Washington Square South
May 16–June 29

Lynda Benglis, Pink Lady, 2013, tinted polyurethane fountain, 95 x 30 x 27".

“Everything Flows (1980–2013)” is a small but dramatically staged exhibition that traces Lynda Benglis’s exploration of form via seventeen of her human-scale metal, ceramic, and polyurethane works made over the past four decades. Folded, ripped, and cast works are positioned on the ground and walls of this gallery as well as on plinths the height of cocktail tables. The exhibition’s limited palette of metallics, earth tones, and pale yellows encourages a focus on Benglis’s wide variety of surface textures and the works’ close parameters leave each with less space to breathe, effectively emphasizing their dynamism, which is further teased out with careful lighting. Megisti II, 1984, is a pleated bronze and aluminum knot measuring just over six feet that appears ready to take flight from the wall. Across the room, five smaller ceramic works have been placed atop a rectangular table. A pewter-glazed ceramic Querechos Knot Hat, 1993, looks like it has been scorched by a waffle iron and the blistered exterior of Terracotta Helmet, 1993, contrasts with its smooth, round core. Positioned so closely to one another, these works seem to jostle and fight for space.

On the floor sit Nugget I and Nugget II, both 2010–11, which seem utterly fetishistic and feculent. They comprise dull patinated bronze mounds of wormlike curls topped with polished squirts of silver and gold. Amidst the gallery’s towering columns, high-top plinths, and wall-bound sculptures, these works feel especially low-lying, not only in physicality but also in status. Small plastic hoses poke out underneath each Nugget sculpture, indicating that they potentially are fountains, though not the spectacular sort. Outside, a fountain of the spectacular sort, Pink Lady, 2013, gleams atop the gallery’s roof, water cascading down fuchsia-flushed polyurethane. Reaching nearly eight feet into the air and given a space all to itself, it seems the most exuberant celebration of action.

— Becky Huff Hunter

Scoli Acosta

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO, DOWNTOWN
1100 and 1001 Kettner Boulevard
February 3–June 23

View of “ELEMENTALISTHMUS,” 2013.

“ELEMENTALISTHMUS” is a paean to geography. Amalgamating film, percussive instruments, and atmosphere, Scoli Acosta’s audile sculptures depict landscapes of unworldly places. In Field recording (elements), 2012, a media assemblage trails the artist’s trek through Morocco as he captures winds, murmurs, and music on 45 rpm. In an accompanying video, a kite glides amidst rugged hills; tethered to the needle of a portable recorder, its towline transfers vibrations caused by wind onto vinyl, yielding the breezy sonance heard echoing through the gallery. In concert, an overhead speaker emits traditional North African melodies with interrupting clamors of a busy bazaar and 1930s tunes adverting to exotic travel. From this auditory affray, a lurid portrayal of scenography emerges.

The constellation of five-sided Moroccan tambourines in Mars Triptych, 2012, models the solar system; the instruments also evoke a 1967 protest at the Pentagon wherein Yippee leader Abbie Hoffman aimed to telepathically vibrate the building with drum beats and psychic force in order to end the Vietnam War and shake its occupants out of what seemed to be a hypnotic penchant for endless war and ecological decimation. During Sissyeyes, 2006, a video compilation, bucolic clips from Terrence Malick’s 1973 film, Badlands flash between close-ups of Sissy Spacek, whose doe eyes peer out from an Islamic headdress. A fuzzy score again serves as accompaniment. Drawn from deep-space probe Cassini-Huygens’s radio transmissions, the track reveals an unbroken chain of particles around Saturn, exposing the planet’s trompe l’oeil rings as extensive dust fields.

— James Eischen

David Askevold

ART GALLERY OF NOVA SCOTIA
1723 Hollis Street
April 13–June 23

David Askevold, Two Beasts, 2007–10, digital video, color, 14 minutes, 7 seconds.

If there remains any doubt that a goofy sense of humor and amateurish enthusiasm—alongside a reliance on rational systems and a dry self-referentiality—underpinned much of the conceptual art produced in the 1960s and ’70s, this retrospective of work by the late Halifax-based artist David Askevold should convince even the most committed skeptics. Curated by David Diviney, “Once Upon a Time in the East” brings together sculptures, installations, films, photographs, and computer-generated images made by Askevold over his forty-year career, offering a portrait of an artist whose work seems to knowingly wink at both his collaborators and viewers.

Askevold is perhaps best known for his pioneering work as a teacher at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he initiated the Projects Class in 1969, inviting artists such as Sol LeWitt, John Baldessari, and Lawrence Weiner to send textual instructions for his students to execute. A set of vitrines near the entrance to the exhibition highlights the cue card–size “lessons” submitted by these guest instructors, including an assignment telexed by Robert Barry that wryly asks students to develop a project in secret, with the caveat that “the piece will remain in existence as long as the idea remains in the confines of the group.” With no documentation of the finished project, the viewer is left to speculate on how students would have realized this invisible and perhaps impossible artwork.

This interplay between appearance and disappearance is echoed in two of Askevold’s later works. “The Poltergeist,” 1974–79, a suite of seven photo- and text-based works produced in collaboration with Mike Kelley, meditates on the hokey yet haunting characteristics of both nineteenth-century spirit photography and the use of the medium by conceptual artists. “The Nova Scotia Project: Once Upon a Time in the East,” 1993, on the other hand, presents a Becher-like typology of 293 aerial photographs of the region’s small-craft harbors, creating a massive archive of a vanishing fishing industry that had long shaped the economy and mythology of the artist’s hometown.

— Gabrielle Moser

Elizabeth Zvonar

DANIEL FARIA GALLERY
188 St Helens Avenue
May 15–June 15

Elizabeth Zvonar, Marcel Meets Judy, 2013, ceramic candy dish, 10 x 5”.

“Banal Baroque,” Elizabeth Zvonar’s current exhibition of sculpture and collage, riffs on themes of bodily and sexual excess, recontextualizing mass-produced objects, magazine advertisements, and mannequin parts to animate the uncanny treatment of the human figure that lies dormant in this source material. While her juxtapositions might recall the psychically charged scenes of Surrealist and Dadaist collage (particularly Hannah Höch), in Zvonar’s work the human body is truncated and interrupted, broken down into a series of useless but fascinating objects for visual consumption.

Marcel Meets Judy, 2013, for instance, features a mass-produced pink seashell candy dish. Turned upright so it is no longer functional, and mounted to the wall, the work is a cheeky homage both to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and to Judy Chicago’s porcelain vagina-flowers in The Dinner Party, 1974–79. The fictional meeting of these two art-historical figures suggests a sexual undertone to this banal form of domestic decoration.

In Zvonar’s series of collage works, the artist manipulates imagery from art history textbooks, contemporary fashion magazines, and Conaissance des arts, an antiques and luxury goods magazine produced in Paris in the 1970s. In one of these large-scale collages, The Spectre, The Serpent, The Ghost, The Thing, 2012, body parts act as supplements, functioning as literal supports for the two-dimensional image. Featuring a reclining female figure being eerily surveyed by a ghostly creature, Zvonar’s handmade collage is made stranger by its frame: A pair of gold-plated high-heeled shoes, fused with casts of two human thumbs, physically holds the image upright, leaning it against the gallery wall. Here, as in the rest of the exhibition, body parts are always at risk of being transformed into the kind of kitsch consumer objects that the artists uses as her sources.

— Gabrielle Moser

Cécile Bart

GALERÍA DESIRÉ SAINT PHALLE
Colima 25A, entre Cuauthémoc y Morelia, Col. Roma
April 9–July 27

View of “Interferencias” (Interferences), 2013.

Cécile Bart’s “Interferencias” (Interferences) offers a seductive spin on post-painterly abstraction. For her first exhibition in Mexico City, the French artist presents a series of in situ wall paintings overlaid and interspersed with semitransparent paintings on metal stretchers. Framed between columns within the space, these four mural works consist of broad hard-edge bands of perfectly uninflected blue, yellow, orange, and mauve meeting and crossing at irregular angles and intervals.

If the slants of these bands of color were not sufficiently odd, their surfaces are complicated by the stretcher-based paintings, reminiscent of used silk screens and which bear similar cross-hatchings that hover in the center of the wall works. If we view them directly, the palimpsest-like conjunction of the two paintings creates a geometric imbrication of abstraction in which it is hard to say what frames what. Indeed, effectively interfering with and complementing one another, the two planes engender a scenario that is at once strangely harmonious and aggravating—a paradox that is also reflected in the warm creaminess of their coolly explosive palette. It is as if the elusive but palpable tension of these works has been sublimated into the paint’s strict, nonexpressive application and unusual spectrum. Ostensibly full of the so-called openness and clarity of Clement Greenberg’s post-painterly abstraction, Bart’s works nevertheless refuse to completely reveal themselves. They do so by being so taut with tension and by eschewing the mappable logic of Sol LeWitt’s wall paintings, their most immediate art-historical antecedent. It is precisely this virtuosic penchant for paradox that begins to account for and justify the voluptuous beauty of this exhibition.

— Chris Sharp

“Las apariencias engañan: los vestidos de Frida Kahlo”

MUSEO FRIDA KAHLO
London 247, Del Carmen
November 30–November 15

View of “Las apariencias engañan: Los vestidos de Frida Kahlo” (Appearances Are Deceiving: The Dresses of Frida Kahlo), 2013.

Given the never-ending interest in Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and her work, it would seem almost impossible to come up with anything new and meaningful to add to the interpretation of her oeuvre. On the other hand, devising an exhibition that focuses exclusively on the striking wardrobe that formed the basis for her exotic image, while disregarding her highly recognized pictorial work, would almost seem an act of curatorial suicide. Nonetheless, the exhibition “Las apariencias engañan: Los vestidos de Frida Kahlo” (Appearances Are Deceiving: The Dresses of Frida Kahlo), curated by Circe Henestrosa, is a revealing attempt to unravel what lay behind Frida Kahlo’s exuberant way of dressing and of literally turning herself into art.

The exhibition is structured around two themes, or more accurately, biographical narrative clusters—“disability” and “ethnicity”—that shed light on the consistent and seductive public image that Kahlo built alongside her artwork, an image that enshrouded her more intimate reality: a mutilated and chronically ill body.

It has often been thought that Kahlo’s wardrobe—which was largely based on combinations of items taken from traditional Zapotec attire—was a bold act of ideological-aesthetic appropriation designed to heighten the visibility of the celebrated couple that she and Diego Rivera formed. The selection of never-before-exhibited objects and garments in this exhibition, however, is evidence that Kahlo, in her attire, was attempting to meet a much more basic and practical need. The exhibition shows us, for instance, that Kahlo adopted the structure of indigenous Oaxacan clothing—her mother was of Tehuanan descent—because it enabled her to cover, in a manner both efficacious and beautiful, her wounded body (broken pelvis; uterus and spine that required countless operations; right leg mangled by polio and an accident). The huipil with its elaborately embroidered geometrical front, along with striking jewelry, drew attention to the upper half of her body while hiding the rest. The exhibition offers interconnected and precious clues about the different ways that, in her attempt to keep herself in one piece, Kahlo became an enduring point of reference in fashion history. Indeed, her influence has proved so great that the exhibition ends with an impeccable selection of garments inspired by the “Kahlo aesthetic,” by major designers like Rei Kawakubo, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Riccardo Tisci.

Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.

— Marcela Quiroz