picks May 17, 2019

Nancy Barton

Nancy Barton’s “Swan Song” is a series in two times. Originally presented in 1988 at New York’s American Fine Arts, Co., this body of work can be located within the trajectory of CalArts’ “Skeptical Beliefs,” with its expectation of ceaseless critique or, at worst, critique reified as “smart” style. This feels like a distant memory, it seems, even though so many significant artists were born of that acidic soil, such as Mike Kelley, Christopher Williams, Carrie Mae Weems, and, of course, Barton herself.

“Swan Song” consists of ten reliefs that pair photo-based images and text. They mimic the look

previews May 2019

“BASQUIAT’S ‘DEFACEMENT’: THE UNTOLD STORY”

Curated by Chaédria LaBouvier with Nancy Spector and Joan Young

This woefully timely exhibition takes Basquiat’s rarely shown painting Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) as its inspiration. Created in 1983 as a response to the killing of the artist Michael Stewart by New York City transit police, after he allegedly tagged a subway station in the East Village, Basquiat painted Defacement directly on the wall of Keith Haring’s studio. In addition to paintings by Basquiat, the exhibition will include works addressing the murder by Haring, George Condo, David Hammons, and Lyle Ashton Harris,

previews January 2019

“PIERRE BONNARD: THE COLOUR OF MEMORY”

Curated by Matthew Gale with Helen O’Malley and Juliette Rizzi

Twenty-one years after the Tate’s last Pierre Bonnard retrospective, the master dauber of the Nabis will reappear at the museum. With one hundred–odd paintings and works on paper, this show should be reliably pleasing, even if the pleasure it offers inheres very much in perversity—chromatically unhinged in a genius way, Bonnard’s female models teeter on the edge of decomposition in his claustrophobic paintings. If ever the word deliquescent were unavoidable in art criticism, it ought to be with regard to Bonnard’s torpid

print December 2018

David Rimanelli

PAT HEARN AND COLIN DE LAND were never professionals. Instead, Hearn, who ran a contemporary art gallery that opened in 1983 and whose last show was in 2001, and de Land, whose gallery American Fine Arts, Co., ran from 1984 to 2003, were explorers. Pat Hearn Fine Art was the most elegant gallery in the most bombed-out zone of the pre-gentrified East Village; de Land’s American Fine Arts later followed Hearn onto Wooster Street in South SoHo; and in February 1995, Hearn’s was one of three galleries to open in then-deserted West Chelsea. But more than pioneers of real estate, they were cosmonauts

picks June 14, 2018

Borna Sammak

Those sectional sofas from a timeless 1970s—meaning you can buy one now at Roche Bobois—that suburban feeling, with a hint of swingers (cinematically, more L.I.E. than The Ice Storm key parties, but still: from the ’70s). Or from the Middle Ages, from the Baroque. In my own memory: a seemingly vast serpentine mountain range upholstered in gray velvet, a barrier reef in the seldom-used living room of the house I grew up in. Mystery and fantasy, science fiction and the hint of as-yet-undiscovered porn: One Million Years BC meets Escape from the Planet of the Apes. So yeah, Borna Sammak’s Not Yet

previews May 2018

“Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”

Sometimes the edgiest, most controversial thing is something very old indeed, and the Met’s Costume Institute deserves kudos for its nerve in mounting this exhibition. Folks have long been fascinated by, or worried about, the blur between the sacred and the merely sacerdotal. Federico Fellini’s 1972 movie Roma includes an ecclesiastical runway show, with models sporting miters and chasubles for an obviously dissipated clerical audience. Fashion is an art, if not Art—though it’s seldom accorded the dignity of a Michelangelo—and has always referenced the Renaissance

picks February 12, 2018

Leelee Kimmel

Leelee Kimmel’s paintings aren’t specifically referential, though there are references to be had: from Miró and Masson to Twombly, Basquiat, Jonathan Lasker. And there’s a strange connection to Philip Guston, too—Kimmel’s abstractions have Guston’s nervous line recrudescences; think of the textures of his forlorn shoes. Kimmel deals in a kind of electrocuted biomorphism that’s descended from Surrealism, but the life’s been polluted by the morph: incandescent amoebas, skittering deep-sea/outer-space/inner-voyage paramecia, flagella, the world of Ernst Haeckel pumped up with unreal colors. Even

previews September 2016

Cecily Brown

When I see a stellar work by Cecily Brown, I feel excited. There’s the audacity of execution—that messy control that courses through so much of the art I love, even among old masters. Brown is frank regarding her references to the great artists of the past, whether Veronese, Rubens, or Hogarth, and no less so about the modernist masters before whom she bends the knee: De Kooning comes to mind, and Gorky, even Picasso. “Rehearsal,” the artist’s first solo museum show in New York, will contain roughly sixty small canvases and a few very large drawings, several exhibited

print October 2015

Tom of Finland

THE ARTISTS SPACE SHOW “Tom of Finland: The Pleasure of Play” presented more than half a century of the artist’s drawings, gouaches, paper dolls, and photocollages made from advertising imagery; together, they set up a narrative described as existing in “dialectical relationship” to a mainstream culture in which both pornography and homosexuality were illegal. And indeed, throughout his career as an advertising executive in Helsinki, Touko Laaksonen (1920–1991) contributed to the ever-expanding lexicon of images representing straight family life in postwar Europe. But after hours, he cut up and

picks March 06, 2015

Alex Da Corte

If the witch’s hovel in Pumpkinhead were a suite in a Collins Avenue boutique hotel during Art Basel Miami Beach, that might give some sense of the flavorings Alex Da Corte has injected into his ambitious and garishly stunning three-story installation “Die Hexe.” Da Corte throws into question what it means to feel fear in its multitudes: fear of mirrors, fear of old ladies, fear of death, fear of life after death, fear of mint Listerine, fear of homosexual men, fear of Miami, fear of appropriation art, or as R. W. Fassbinder so aptly put it in his film title, Fear of Fear.

The scripted journey

previews January 2015

“Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s”

The Guggenheim and the New Museum in New York have both recently examined the art of the 1990s, and “Come as You Are” promises to be a worthwhile expansion of the discussion. Attempting an overview of art production between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11—including some sixty works (paintings, sculptures, prints, videos, and digital art) by forty-five artists ranging from Elizabeth Peyton to Julie Mehretu, Rirkrit Tiravanija to Felix Gonzalez-Torres—the Montclair Art Museum survey will cover all the ’90s basics, such as globalization, digital culture,

print December 2014

David Rimanelli

1 SIGMAR POLKE (MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK; CURATED BY KATHY HALBREICH WITH MARK GODFREY AND LANKA TATTERSALL) This has been rather an annus mirabilis for the Modern, which at one point this summer offered, simultaneously, extraordinary exhibitions of the work of Mike Kelley (at MoMA PS1), Gauguin, Lygia Clark, Jasper Johns, Robert Heinecken, and Sigmar Polke. On my first trip to that last, must-see-time-and-again retrospective, I went at the close of day and had only thirty minutes to look; but even before I reached the first gallery, I was thunderstruck by a single work in the museum’s

books April 2014

Laurence Rickels’s SPECTRE

I CONFESS THAT I have always found James Bond somewhat dull, but apparently that was the idea. Ian Fleming, author of the Bond novels, conceived his hero as a boring character, a cipher, around whom interesting things happened. Indeed, he lifted the moniker James Bond from an ornithologist of the time, for its exemplary blandness. Betraying his own preferences, theorist Laurence Rickels has titled his new study of Fleming’s spy novels SPECTRE, not after Bond or Fleming but in honor of the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion, Fleming’s fictional United

slant March 31, 2014

Like, Totally

MY INSTAGRAM IS BUMMING ME OUT. Early one morning last week, I posted a great van Dyck of Catherine Howard, Lady d’Aubigny; an hour later I foolishly posted a slutty but funny Polke, Modern Art, 1968, which will be in the Modern’s upcoming retrospective. Duh: People liked away at the Polke, and Lady d’Aubigny, while holding her own, isn’t thriving as vibrantly as I believe she ought to—she’s entitled to many likes, as many as Polke IMHO. This brings up a matter that any self-conscious Instagrammer is keenly aware of: Posting an image within close temporal proximity of another image “divides”

print February 2014

Willem de Kooning

I feel like a fool for having asked to review Willem de Kooning—like, what could I possibly say, how could I say something new? All I can do for starters is reminisce. When I was fifteen years old I went with my mother to a de Kooning exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and I asked her to buy me the catalogue. It was the first contemporary-art catalogue I ever got; I had plenty of modern art–type books (on Picasso, Dalí, Mondrian, Ernst, etc.), but this was the first living-artist one. This was the book that set me off on contemporary art.

De Kooning has this effect.

previews January 2014

Oscar Tuazon

Oscar Tuazon has established a position as one of the most provocative sculptors of his generation, taking the legacies of Minimalism, post-Minimalism, Land art, and Conceptualism into fresh, curious territories. Trained as an architect, Tuazon operates deftly between indoor and outdoor space, between the “specific object” and the floorboard. His work is at once complexly referential with respect to art history yet mundane in a challenging way, requiring one to confront myriad disturbances in a three-dimensional space infused with an expressionism wrought

print December 2013

Josh Smith

My hobby: posting artworks on Instagram, sequencing the purity of the monochrome into that endless reshuffling of history that now defines contemporary life. Josh Smith’s two-part exhibition at Luhring Augustine’s galleries in Chelsea and Bushwick balanced a brushy group of monochrome canvases in Manhattan against an Edvard-Munch-goes-to-the-Bahamas grouping of palm-tree silhouettes (and a modest selection of oddball, endearing ceramics) in Brooklyn, requiring the viewer to travel physically as well as mentally. Smith has often mixed unexpected images within a single show—e.g., his 2011

print November 2013

“Punk: Chaos to Couture”

I basically have no real relationship with punk because (a) I was too young for its initial moment of truth, and (b) it’s so not my style. I remember buying those albums from the alternative record store when I was in college. I wanted them, but I didn’t want to listen to them. But punk is so transhistorical now; is it possible to pry punk sensibility, which is essentially timeless, from punk as a music lifestyle with material and historical specificity? Now, if I say, “You’re so punk rock,” I am being derisive—it’s like saying you’re so not punk rock; you’re so bourgeois. This doubling of

print October 2013

Piotr Uklański

Over the past decade, Piotr Uklański has amassed a vast archive of photographs of porn actors who strongly resemble famous contemporary personalities. These Pornalikes, 2002–, are readymades—taken from lowbrow “men’s magazines” such as Loaded and Hustler, and, more recently, websites and blogs. For his solo exhibition at Karma, Uklański assembled a colorful and densely hung pantheon from his vast archive of these images before the unblinking gaze of an enormous stuffed eyeball, whose trailing blood vessels and mucous membranes, crafted from hand-dyed fabrics, recall the ghost of 1970s

previews September 2013

“Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations”

As always, Balthus finds himself in a strange position: His work, long regarded as retrograde from a modernist point of view, now also comes off as unredeemed post-pomo. Even so, many people—sophisticated people too, like me—really dig Balthus. The wrongness of him bubbles up as compensatory rightness; screw modernism, and screw political correctness, à la même heure. Emphasizing the French artist’s recurrent depictions of the jeune fille and the feline, “Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations” includes more than thirty paintings made between