previews September 2005

“Robert Rauschenberg: Combines”

When Robert Rauschenberg is finally recognized as the Walt Whitman of late-twentieth-century America, the Combines will be his Leaves of Grass. They will stand, like Whitman’s masterpiece, as a moment synthesized, an all-inclusive, promiscuous embrace of America in its first, riotous, postindustrial bang. So we should never forget that the Combines came into the world as rowdy, impudent rough trade, and if they no longer seem as mute and brute as they once did, it’s only because we have invented words to defend ourselves. Today, we speak casually of art and life

previews May 2005

Tom Wesselman

Tom Wesselmann began his career with a joke too good to go unpunished. When he began painting his stylized odalisques in the early ’60s, he called them Great American Nudes—of which, at that time, if one excepts Eakins’s nubile boys, there were exactly none. Unfortunately, Wesselmann’s insistence that our experience of modern art is grounded in eros and intimacy would be sneered away by the “isms” of the ’70s, along with his American vogue. It is altogether appropriate, then, that this thematic survey of some thirty canvases and free-standing works (most made since 1987)

print November 2004

“Beyond Geometry”

I have no doubt that Lynn Zelevansky’s “Beyond Geometry” began as a labor of love, because blurred but still visible in the midst of this desultory extravaganza there is a smaller, more original exhibition trying to get out. This embedded exhibition examines the cosmopolitan flowering of geometric abstract art in the years following World War II. It expands the canonical framework and “de-Americanizes” the art history of that period. It could have done more. If its curator had not been so anxious to rush forward into the comfort zone of post-Minimal tedium, that smaller exhibition might have

books December 2000

The best books of 2000

Linda Nochlin

Molly Nesbit’s Their Common Sense (Black Dog Press) isn’t exactly an art book—it’s not exactly a book even, in the usual sense. But in the unusual sense, Nesbit’s tome is a marvelous document, swinging briskly between the teaching of mechanical drawing in French schools and the arcanery of Duchamp & Co. It begins in very big print with Antonin Proust’s proposal that all French schoolchildren learn to draw and ends with a memorable still from Pabst’s Joyless Streets. In between? Children’s drawings (not the cute, creative ones, but disciplined, drafting lesson productions), some

print October 2000

TOUCHÉ BOUCHER: JOHN WESLEY’S GALLANT SUBJECTS

Long a cult favorite, painter John Wesley receives an overdue first U.S. retrospective on view through November at New York's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. To mark the occasion, Dave Hickey offers an appreciation of the pop eccentric's wry and whimsical four-decade career.

WHEN POST-GLOBAL-WARMING anthropologists begin paddling through the streets of Manhattan in search of visible evidence that this republic was, in its tone and temper, the cosmopolitan democracy that it purported to be, one can only hope that the earnest scientists will stumble across a trove of John Wesley's paintings in some

print January 2000

“Clemente”

Let me confess at the outset that I was genuinely disappointed by Francesco Clemente’s exhibition at the Guggenheim, but not, perhaps, for the right reasons. Certainly, I was disappointed not because one expects better from the Guggenheim (one doesn’t) or because we deserve better (we don’t), or even because I expected to see a serious retrospective exhibition (I didn’t). What I expected was a fragrance, an essence, as advertised by the exhibition’s trademark title, “Clemente”—as if murmured by one of those Euro-teens who trip up to you in Bloomingdale’s, squeeze an atomizer, and becloud you

print December 1999

Dave Hickey

1. “Robert Gober” (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1997) Gober’s installation, with its penetrated Virgin, subterranean tide pools, and waterfall stairwell, is my icon of the decade. In its intellectual rigor and plangent availability, it’s as close as we’re likely to get to the refinement and generosity of a seventeenth-century sculptural occasion. We may speculate on its wry deconstruction of Duchampian aesthetics, or we may, as one of the museum guards did, make a gesture indicating the flow of experience through the pipe and through the Virgin, and simply say, “Clemencia, Señor.”

print December 1998

Dave Hickey

1. ROBERT GOBER (The Geffen Contemporary, Los Angeles) The one-night-stand aspect of museum installations has never been dramatized more poignantly than in Robert Gober’s magnificent tableau at the Geffen. The experience of seeing the piece (which combined aspects of a Bernini fountain with a gorgeous, Thoreauvian Etant donnés) was quite literally haunted by knowledge of its transience. Upon arrival, you immediately wanted to return, and then return again. Leaving the museum, I felt like Bogey watching Bergman fly away into the fog.

2. RICHARD SERRA, TORQUED ELLIPSES (The Geffen Contemporary,

print October 1998

Christopher Wool

Confessions first: I am not a “pure” critic. I routinely purchase works of art with the money I earn by writing about them. In my youth, I actually owned a gallery and sold art for a living. As a consequence, I never stroll through an institutional exhibition, in my role as art critic, unaccompanied by my two unfashionable alter-egos: the low-end collector and the ex–art dealer. These guys usually feel marginalized on such occasions, since present fashion dictates that we look at art the way we listen to songs on the radio—looking for the two-minute stand—the short-attention-span bang of the

print December 1997

TOP TEN x 12

print December 1997

Dave Hickey

1 Ellsworth Kelly (Guggenheim Museum, New York): An interesting moment: Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns passing like ships in the night. Kelly’s French-kissed Hudson River-Pop never looked more relevant or more refined than in this splendid retrospective—especially in Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda, where Kelly’s sense of geometric nuance effortlessly recruits the willful perversity of the architecture to its own subtle purpose. The space will never look better. So why take it down?

2 “Spot Making Sense” (Grand Arts, Kansas City): A bright show in a sleek space with no angst and very little reading.

print September 1997

Open Charms

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE is a corny and annoying movie, for sure, but like a lot of corny and annoying movies, it’s grounded in a solid premise: that the fabric of the social world is so seamless and closely woven that individual contributions to its texture and configuration are perceptible only by imagining it without them. So try this little trick with me: Stand up here with the angel for a moment and look down on the ’50s and ’60s in the United States and Europe. Now (a snap of the fingers!), envision that same world without Robert Rauschenberg. Note the immediate visual deficit; the sudden