Bessma Khalaf

STEVEN WOLF FINE ARTS
2747 19th Street, Suite A
April 20–May 19

Bessma Khalaf, The Long Goodbye, 2012, still from an HD video, 12 hours.

Those who give credence to the Mayan eschatological prophecy that the world will end this year can shop nearly until Christmas to prepare for the apocalypse. This sort of humorous and mundane magick is the sly subject of Bessma Khalaf’s mostly monochromatic photographs, videos, and sculptures in her latest exhibition, “Re-Enchanter.” The show reveals an intoxicating mix of tonal ingredients, not the least of which is a base of witty theatricality. Take the self-descriptive, elegantly composed black-and-white photograph Still Life with Le Creuset (all works 2012), which repurposes a pricey Dutch oven as bubbling cauldron (with a web of unruly hair seeping out the side). It’s anyone’s guess what this dish will invoke. Iraq-born Khalaf is inspired by ancient Chaldean traditions of witchcraft, but she adds pinches of postmodern thought (à la Suzi Gablik) throughout, along with pop-cultural nods to mainstream cinema, fiction, and heavy metal.

As with her previous video work and photography, Khalaf merges sight gags with durational performance. In the twelve-hour video The Long Goodbye (titled after the Raymond Chandler novel), a hand tips a lit candle that drips wax into the bottom of the frame, slowly accruing into a crinkly, painterly surface that eventually fills the entire frame, as if the artist is ritualistically interning herself. Khalaf, wearing a hoodie, performs the grim reaper in several works, most humorously in the projected video Plein Air Drifter, in which a theatrically ominous figure silently glides through verdant forests on a Segway scooter, a tongue-in-cheek gesture with an artistic sleight of hand that infuses dark arts, and dour times, with a little light.

— Glen Helfand

“Manitoba Museum of Finds Art”

WILL BROWN
3041 24th Street
April 28–June 2

View of “Manitoba Museum of Finds Art,” 2012.

It’s a bit incredible: From 1974 to 1978, the Manitoba Museum of Finds Art (MMoFA) held exhibitions, acquired a permanent collection, commissioned artworks, hosted performances and fund-raisers, and maintained a membership program, all just outside the office of then San Francisco Museum of Modern Art director Henry T. Hopkins. Alberta Mayo, who was the executive assistant to Hopkins and Deputy Director Michael McCone, ran the museum from her administrative office in Room 305 in the War Memorial Veterans Building (which was SF MoMA’s first home; exhibitions continued after Mayo moved to the San Francisco Art Institute). The museum’s collection and ephemera are now on view at Will Brown gallery, a new exhibition space operating in the vein of Philadelphia’s Triple Candie, if the venture’s first three projects are any indication.

The museum’s collection is displayed on two shelves on one wall of the gallery, mimicking Mayo’s original installation just behind her desk, with works also hung on the opposite wall. The collection grew organically over the years, mostly through gifts from artists, and is accretive, idiosyncratic, and mnemonic in the way that the pinboard aesthetic of a personal archive is, even one on the cubicle wall. Here, Henry Hopkins’s Rolodexes share space with Stephen Kornhauser’s glass jar of cotton balls used to clean the museum’s Jean Arp sculpture, a pot holder printed with a mushroom cloud, and all manner of moose-themed collectibles (a favorite of Mayo’s). Ephemera for MMoFA exhibitions featuring George Herms, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sol LeWitt, and many others appear throughout the gallery, which also features an extensive gift shop. One notable event was the Bruce Conner look-alike contest and bake sale, the judges for which, the flyer tells us, have seen Conner many times. Mayo’s intention was to show artists not included in that “other museum.” “I’m not official,” she once said, “I’m unofficial. Unofficially, they let me indulge myself.” Not only does this unofficial endeavor inflect current calls to occupy museums and problematize standard definitions of institutional critique in one fell swoop, but it also demonstrates the importance and affect of alternative archives, particularly when so closely aligned with institutional ones.

— Tara McDowell

Rineke Dijkstra

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
151 Third Street
February 18–May 28

Rineke Dijkstra, The Buzzclub, Liverpool, England, March 3, 1995, color photograph, 18 7/8 x 13 3/4".

The sociological output of Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra appears simple enough on the surface. Yet, as this retrospective emphasizes, her enigmatic work is continually strengthened by what it eloquently conceals. Since the early 1990s, Dijkstra’s subjects have been mostly young, “ordinary” people from around the world, whom she captures in the middle of a transition of some sort—joining the military, or having a baby, or merely changing from childhood into adulthood. While the casual poses and environments in which Dijkstra captures her subjects evince their everyday realities, there is nonetheless an austerity to the figures as they are fixed within her neutral frame. This tension that the portraits craft between the natural and the composed subject is exaggerated in some of her most celebrated images, namely her series of adolescents on beaches. The unaffected approachability of Dijkstra’s subjects renders them at once common and stoic, which also explains why these works in particular have so often been compared to the portraiture of Dutch Masters such as Rembrandt and Vermeer.

The ample supply of pieces on view in this show make it clear that Dijkstra’s exclusion of personal, bespoke backgrounds and her focus on physical traits imbues these portraits with both an immense human fragility and an air of restraint. This duality is perhaps best summed up in a wall label adjacent to two images taken in 1995 at a nightclub in Liverpool, which describes her subjects as, “perform[ing] for her camera and for themselves.” It is precisely Dijkstra’s key ability to parse the overlap between one’s performance for others and one’s performance for oneself that heightens the intriguing discord that lies beneath her simple surfaces.

— Courtney Malick

Jean-Luc Moulène

DIA:BEACON
3 Beekman Street
December 1–December 31

Jean-Luc Moulène, Météo (Weather), 2009, plastic hoses, 14 x 25 1/2 x 10 1/4".

Jean-Luc Moulène’s yearlong exhibition “Opus + One” comprises three distinct modules dispersed throughout the vast building. The most beguiling of all is the large gallery of objects titled “Opus,” 1995–. Resting on the floor, hanging from the ceiling, and placed on tables that are so delicate they nearly float in space, thirty-five sculptures––made across the span of sixteen years––fill the cavernous space. The materials, though crude, never quite give themselves away; Lycra resembles liquid glass, water hoses twist and torque into perfect ellipses, and fiberglass takes on the appearance of dehydrated cartilage. No bigger than the human body, or what the human body might be able to cradle, these opuses are propositions rather than determinations, each with its own unique set of terms and conditions. The +1 suffix in the exhibition’s title alludes to this endlessly additive equation, which not only begins at zero, but replicates at the most comprehensible pace possible.

The other galleries take on unique strategies. Two adjoined rooms house Moulène’s photographic series “La Vigie” (Lookout Man), 2004–11, in which two stacked rows (totaling nearly three hundred images) snake around the walls. They picture the same rogue weed––sprouted from a Parisian sidewalk in front of the country’s Ministry for the Economy, Industry, and Employment––as it blooms and retreats in a hostile environment over many years. In the back gallery, a large, opalescent aluminum sculpture, titled Body, 2011, stands alone. Built to order by Renault, the piece takes a smaller opus made by Moulène and enlarges it to the power of several hundred. While its leguminous figure and hyper-glossed surface are sexy, the overall slickness of the form is counterproductive to Moulène’s project: His art is most successful when the work teeters at the brink of potential and failure, as structural models that will never quite be realized.

— Carmen Winant

“State of Mind”

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE (BAM/PFA)
2626 Bancroft Way
February 29–June 17

Bonnie Sherk, Portable Park II, 1970. Performance view.

There are perpetual rumblings about ballot initiatives to split California in half, somewhere in the middle of this vast landmass. It’s exactly the kind of crackpot idea or pipe-dream hyperbole that makes the Golden State (and its residents) so appealing. “State of Mind” is the only exhibition of the Getty-sponsored, Los Angeles-centric “Pacific Standard Time” lot to migrate north, and it serves the vital function of expanding the program’s geographic purview to include NorCal artists. Perhaps even more important is that it demonstrates (as the title asserts) that there is indeed a broader mindset in this part of the country. Curators Constance M. Lewallen and Karen Moss note the inadequacy of any codified regional aesthetic, yet they use a tight historical window—in and around 1970—to illustrate California’s unique confluence of conditions: youth culture, political activism, feminism, a focus on the body, film, and the freeing sense that, at the time, no one bought art here.

The exhibition focuses primarily on Conceptual practices, which had a more whimsical and confrontational flavor here than East Coast brands did. John Baldessari’s California Map Project Part 1, 1969/2009, serves as an emblematic work, both crunchy and smart, in that it literally surveys the entire state: For the work Baldessari made giant letters (out of rocks, paint, and sand) on the landscape where they fell on a printed map. The show also wisely includes well-chosen works by not quite as iconic but equally notable artists: James Melchert, Gary Beydler, Stephen Kaltenbach, Bonnie Sherk, and pranksterish collectives like Asco and Sam’s Café give the show its real cerebral kick.

With its numerous videos, slide shows, and films displayed alongside ephemera, performance documentation, installations, and reconstructed sculptural works, “State” makes a case for California’s enduring influence on contemporary art, particularly social and relational practices. Forty years ago artworks taking the form of urban farms (Sherk), flash mob activism (collectively Joe Hawley, Mel Henderson, and Alfred Young), lengthy walks (Bas Jan Ader), and performative occupation of space (Lynn Hershman Leeson, Allen Ruppersberg, Linda Mary Montano) existed on the margins, but as the show demonstrates, these West Coast impulses were way ahead of their time.

— Glen Helfand

Sreshta Rit Premnath and Matthew Metzger

TONY WIGHT GALLERY
845 West Washington Boulevard
April 20–May 25

Sreshta Rit Premnath, The Last Image #4, 2012, photographic C-print, 45 x 30".

A property developer in Bangalore named M. S. Ramaiah purportedly believed that he could stave off death with endless site construction, a conceit that, along with the figure of Ramaiah himself, haunts Sreshta Rit Premnath’s solo exhibition “The Last Image.” The silhouette of a bronze bust of the magnate undergoes a layered process of construction and destruction in a series of three-and-a-half-by-four-foot C-prints on view, also titled “The Last Image.” The Last Image #4, 2012, is a photograph of a photographic print into which the contours of the bust have been slashed, revealing slivers of the blue screen beneath. The ripples in the buckling, glossy paper darkly recall the volume of the absent memorial. One scrutinizes these palimpsests in an attempt to match the detritus of destruction and loss (the scars of the artist’s cuts and scrapes) to the process of building and creation (the pictorial data of gloss and flatness) visually rehearsing Ramaiah’s quixotic belief.

It is easy to imagine footprints in construction-site dust tracking from “The Last Image” to “Backdrop”––Matthew Metzger’s adjacent solo show. The exhibition features five paintings from his ongoing “Guard” series, which depicts the rubber mudflaps that hang behind truck wheels. These paintings are records both of chance—the spraying, caking, and dripping of the dirt that accrue on the rubber in transit—and of precision, in the exquisite illusionism in oil and acrylic of the surface textures of rubber, oil, dust, and rust. The descriptor trompe l’oeil comes to mind when observing the “Guard” series or his other masterfully conjured textures, such as the shiny brass panel depicted by Kickplate, 2012. Yet this fails to account entirely for Metzger’s practice, which does not trick the eye into seeing illusory depth, but rather pushes paint’s illusory capacity to the surface.

— Julia Langbein

“Feast: Radical Hospitality in Art”

SMART MUSEUM OF ART, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
5550 South Greenwood Avenue
February 16–June 10

Ana Prvacki, The Greeting Committee, 2011–, performance view.

“Feast” greets its visitors with a photograph by Laura Letinsky: Untitled #8, Rome, 2009, which shows the aftermath of a sumptuous banquet: a lace table cloth, scattered ornate dishes, a stack of empty cockleshells so crisply in focus one can almost hear them clink. It’s a smart appetizer for an exhibition that considers the shared meal as medium, because viewers will find they are often early or late to the feast and must imaginatively reconstitute it through documented projections or aftermath. The show displays instructions for meals such as Filippo Marinetti’s 1932 Futurist Cookbook and Alison Knowles’s Identical Lunch, 1969, a Fluxus “score” for a tuna sandwich like the one she habitually ate at her local diner. Just as often, “Feast” showcases crusty remnants, including Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Pad Thai, 1990, which features a battered wok, unwashed since Tiravanija prepared the titular dish at Paula Allen Gallery in New York in 1990.

The exhibition invites viewers as if to a party: “Enjoy your time here, with this art and with each other,” exhorts the wall text. One is primed for communal enjoyment by Ana Prvacki’s The Greeting Committee, 2011–, a station just outside the show’s doors (a literal hors d’oeuvre) where staff offer a teaspoon of slatko, a sweet jelly with traditional symbolic meaning for Serbians, from humble mason jars arranged around a tarnished silver tray. The Greeting Committee disarms by communicating simply and directly through the sensory, delivering an experience of Prvacki’s Serbia in a sweet zing on the tongue. The conceit of the meal-as-medium swings between these poles of an immediate appeal to perceptual enjoyment and a heightened demand on the critical and imaginative faculties that must re-create the meal––in the future or the past.

— Julia Langbein

“This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s”

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
220 East Chicago Avenue
February 11–June 3

View of “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s,” 2012.

“This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s” examines artists’ responses to that decade’s cultural upheavals, including the rise of gender politics, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cold War anxieties, and President Ronald Reagan’s malign indifference to the AIDS epidemic. Spanning the years 1979–92, it features approximately one hundred artists’ works, which are grouped into four thematic sections, each addressing a different area of cultural conflict: “Gender Trouble,” “Democracy,” “Desire and Longing,” and “The End Is Near.”

This framework successfully vivifies major thematic concerns of the ’80s: The impassioned calls for gender inclusivity and HIV/AIDS action expressed through posters and bus billboards made by groups like the Guerrilla Girls and Gran Fury are amplified when assembled alongside other like-minded works in “Democracy.” Conversely, when two, typically large, neo-expressionist paintings by Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl—each depicting an attenuated male figure—are placed within the feminist-themed “Gender Trouble” section, they gain fresh relevance as signifiers of “masculinist” culture’s decline in the ’80s and of the American male’s diminishing economic prospects today.

In her catalogue introduction, guest curator Helen Molesworth of the ICA Boston summarizes the standard rap on ’80s art: too bombastic, too ideological, all in all “too much.” Yet the exhibition shows that those same “excessive” qualities also infused the decade’s best art with lasting vitality. A case in point is David Hammons’s How Ya Like Me Now?, 1988, its title crudely spray-painted across a blonde, blue-eyed, light-skinned portrait of then presidential candidate Jesse Jackson hung behind a flaccid American flag and a fence formed from sledgehammers and wire. The piece is just as aggressively provocative now as it was then, but it has also grown richer in complexity over time.

— Claudine Ise

“Utopia/Dystopia”

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON
1001 Bissonnet
March 11–June 10

Joel Lederer, 200804012143, 2009, ink-jet print, 24 x 30".

With over one hundred photo and photomontage works from the past 150 years assembled in a single room, “Utopia/Dystopia,” taken as a whole, is as much a study in jarring ruptures and envisioned continuities as the images and objects displayed are. The Kunstkammer-like installation ranges across modern political aspirations and private reverie, as well as their darker complements, in various cut-and-paste styles. The cartoonish critique of John Heartfield’s rotogravure German Natural History, published August 16, 1934, in the magazine AIZ, in which the heads of Weimar Republic leaders are superimposed over metamorphosing pupae, meets the Surrealist cinematic beauty of Toshiko Okanoue’s little-shown collages like Falling, 1956, in which a headless female torso parachutes through the open floor of a rat-infested locker room to a cityscape below. Rare archival documents, such as Esaki Reiji’s proto-Photoshop advertisement of a multitude of infants, Collage of Babies, 1893, mix with contemporary fantasies like Josh Bernstein’s triptych After Four Days, 2011, a reimagining of imperiled Gulf Coast conquistador Cabeza de Vaca through mixed-media self-portraiture.

The unabashedly synthetic approach, both on the level of the exhibition and the individual works, emphasizes the paradox of separating utopian and dystopian vision. Often the difference is a matter of (historical) perspective or mutually dependent proximity. Throughout the exhibition, the promise to remake the world is never far from the threat of undoing it, and often these impulses appear, juxtaposed, in the same work. The timely inclusion of Arata Isozaki’s ink, gouache, and gelatin silver print Re-ruined Hiroshima, project, Hiroshima, Japan, Perspective, 1968, shows haunting remedial architectural constructions that simultaneously seem to emerge from and return to a postnuclear Japanese landscape. Even the most idyllic views, such as Joel Lederer’s digital compositing of Second Life greenery in the ink-jet print 200804012143, 2009, take on cautionary undertones in the close company of other images that reveal, and perhaps once helped conceal, tragic realities.

— Kurt Mueller

Jennifer Bartlett

LOCKS GALLERY
600 Washington Square South
April 20–May 25

Bartlett, Jennifer, 5725 East Ocean Boulevard, 1977, enamel over silk-screen grid on ninety-nine baked enamel steel plates, 77 x 350".

The titles of Jennifer Bartlett’s large-scale paintings on square plates of baked enamel steel—from Rhapsody, 1975–76, to the more recent Song, 2007, and Recitative, 2009–10—undoubtedly intend to invoke music and melody. Critics have also described these and similar works in terms of speech and syntax, calling them “novelistic.” Her latest exhibition, “Addresses (1976–78),” comprising four major plate works supplemented by notes, sketches, and drawings on graph paper, shifts the focus to a subdued but ubiquitous theme in Bartlett’s work: location.

Throughout her career, Bartlett has offered generalized images of bodies of water (oceans, lakes, swimming pools) as well as schematic renderings of trees, mountains, and houses. The ninety-nine plates of the nearly twenty-nine-foot-long 5725 East Ocean Boulevard, 1976–77, does not literally depict the artist’s childhood home in Long Beach, California; instead, it enigmatically presents eight versions of the same archetypal house—a horizontally oriented rectangle topped with a triangular roof—that has appeared in her work since 1970. This singular structure, formed by smooth, thickly translucent enamel paint, may not offer biographical clues, but Bartlett provides effervescent pleasure by charmingly combining, in each section, four related hues—such as banana yellow, sunflower, tangerine, and blood orange—using brushstrokes that resemble brisk snow flurries or darting schools of fish.

Another lengthy piece, Falcon Avenue, Seaside Walk, Dwight Street, Jarvis Street, Greene Street, 1976, represents major phases of Bartlett’s life in Long Beach, New Haven, and SoHo, but you wouldn’t know that from her five treatments of that same house. On the left side of 27 Howard Street: Day and Night, 1977–78, named for the Manhattan address where a friend lived, what looks like ribbed vaults or fireworks soar above a dotted building; on the right, a sky full of trestles reigns over a house whose underlying colors are nearly covered with smears of black paint. Such is the mystery of Bartlett’s conceptual portraiture.

— Christopher Howard

Spencer Finch

MUSEUM OF ART - RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN (RISD)
224 Benefit Street
February 24–July 29

Spencer Finch, 8456 Shades of Blue (After Hume) (detail), 2008, 28 watercolors on paper, dimensions variable.

As a graduate student at RISD, Spencer Finch copied Claude Monet’s Basin at Argenteuil, 1874, on a dare. The replica is now on view several paces from the original, in “Painting Air,” an exhibition staged by Finch that features his own work alongside pieces from the university’s collection. His choice of Monet is telling, reminding us that Finch—a maker of minimal and often abstract watercolors, photographs, and installations—is in fact a conceptual landscape painter. Like Monet before him, Finch probes his optical experience of the natural world—and the subjective limits of his perceptions. To describe the sublime qualities of atmosphere, light, reflectivity, and color is to wrestle with paradox; the poignancy of Finch’s work lies in his steadfast aim to quantify these phenomenological conditions at once fugitive and singular.

In the first of the show’s two sections, Finch has arranged others’ pieces—ranging from Peruvian textiles to Willem de Kooning abstractions. The grouping is unusual and provocative, and the connections to the artist’s own practice are not immediately apparent. The second space houses Finch’s own work from the past five years. His wall-size 8456 Shades of Blue (After Hume), 2008, comprises twenty-eight sheets of twenty-two-by-thirty-inch paper. In making the piece, based on a thought experiment posed by philosopher David Hume, Finch diluted blue inks one drop at a time, creating with every drip a unique shade that he then applied to each successive panel. The resulting grid seems as straightforward as it is unfathomable. The exhibition shares its title with the largest and perhaps most ambitious work on view: a site-specific installation of over one hundred square sheets of glass, hanging from a grid in the ceiling, and surrounded by a mural of colors based on Monet’s garden in Giverny, France. One person walking by is enough: A zephyr gently orbits the pieces of glass on their axes, and their surfaces swell in turn with reflective color. With “Painting Air” Finch not only describes the intangible quality of light, but transforms it into substantive material.

— Carmen Winant

Colby Caldwell

HEMPHILL
1515 14th Street NW, Suite 300
March 24–May 25

Colby Caldwell, blind (2) [fall], 2011, waxed archival pigment print, 28 1/4 x 34 3/4".

The southern gothic is a trope in American photography, and it has a long history in Washington, DC, well beyond the many exhibitions bearing the theme that have appeared in the capital, such as shows by William Eggleston, Sally Mann, and William Christenberry. Colby Caldwell, with his latest solo exhibitions at Hemphill and Civilian Art Projects, strives to prove that dilapidated antebellum structures still constitute a relevant subject and an integral component of the American photographic canon.

Caldwell’s series “spent,” 2009–12, divided between both galleries, presents oversize, highly detailed photographs of spent shotgun casings. At Hemphill, an untitled, roughly seven-foot-tall image of what appears to be a dead Baltimore oriole’s wing looks, under Caldwell’s theatrical lighting and backdrop, like a heraldic banner—a vanitas treatment of the hunter that upends the South’s hazy visual vernacular through electric, even credulity-straining color. Elsewhere in the gallery, Caldwell shows his latest images from an ongoing series, “how to survive your own death,” 2001–, in which he captures stills from a corrupted photo file; though these accidental abstractions bear no relation to his larger concern with southern still lifes, they demonstrate his range with color. (Caldwell prints his own work.) At Civilian, the shotgun-shell prints take on a different connotation. Several are presented without Caldwell’s handsome custom spalted oak frames. His photographs emphasize the impossible physics that leaves shotgun shells splintered and blistered—to the point that they look altered by biomorphic decay. In these works, every shell is impossibly individual.

Out of both shows, it is Caldwell’s landscape shots of Maryland that shine––these photographs, on view at Hemphill, are detailed to the point of appearing three-dimensional. Perhaps that is his solution for how to keep the southern gothic alive: Locate within it the brightest bandwidth of color.

This exhibition is also on view at Civilian Art Projects, 1019 7th Street NW, until May 5.

— Kriston Capps