print Summer 2006

PATTERN RECOGNITION: THE ART OF SERGEJ JENSEN

IF “PAINTING” TODAY refers less to material or object than to practice and action, then Denmark-born, Berlin-based Sergej Jensen is a painter. His description of his medium as “painting without paint” suggests that we should forsake an emphasis on the surfaces on and with which he works—burlap, linen, jute, wool, silk, denim—and attend instead to what he does to these textiles: He spreads them over stretchers; sews or irons patches and other fabric remnants onto them; and bleaches, stains, and dyes them, usually with abstract geometric marks and almost always in subdued neutrals or the secondary

print Summer 2006

Jack Pierson

Jack Pierson has already made salvaged-sign-letter word sculptures spelling out ANGST, GONE, HELL, BETRAYAL, DESIRE/DESPAIR, and LOST, so maybe it was only a matter of time before he got around to MELANCHOLIA. Or perhaps it just took a while for him to name the temperament that saturates his work; melancholy turns, after all, on ambivalence and deferral. In his recent show at Cheim & Read, Pierson filled the gallery with twenty-four works in different media that, the press release claims, meditate on “women’s suffering.” But this dwelling on loss extended out from his feminine subjects to

print Summer 2006

Fiona Banner

As if Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) rewound, Fiona Banner’s work of the past twelve years has generally begun with copying and ended with epistemological inquiry. The profusion of words in earlier projects—which have included voluminous transcriptions of films such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Don’t Look Back (1967), and a “totally unedited” thousand-page book, Nam, 1997, chronicling the on-screen action in six Vietnam movies—recalled Gustave Flaubert’s assiduous copyists, who don’t discriminate between “the good and the evil” and “the farcical and the sublime” because, as they conclude, “The

previews May 2006

“Into Me/Out of Me”

Curator Klaus Biesenbach has marshaled a group of more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, videos, multimedia works, and installations (some large-scale) from the past six decades on the theme of corporeal entering and exiting, from metabolism (nourishment and excretion) and reproduction (intercourse to birth) to violence (shooting and—ouch!—impaling).

There’s nothing metaphoric about the title of this exhibition: Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 curator Klaus Biesenbach has marshaled a group of more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, videos, multimedia works, and installations (some large-scale) from the past six decades on the theme of corporeal entering and exiting, from metabolism (nourishment and excretion) and reproduction (intercourse to birth) to violence (shooting and—ouch!—impaling). Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Mona Hatoum, Paul McCarthy, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among many others, probe

previews May 2006

Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History

To gain purchase on the atemporality of the current moment, this exhibition of nearly fifty photographs, videos, installations, and sculptures from the past six years highlights eleven artists who reevaluate historical events and notions of progress.

To gain purchase on the atemporality of the current moment, this exhibition of nearly fifty photographs, videos, installations, and sculptures from the past six years highlights eleven artists who reevaluate historical events and notions of progress. Approaches range from restaging—Jeremy Deller’s reprise of a 1984 strike by England’s National Union of Mineworkers, Allison Smith’s Civil War reenactments—to more allusive sampling, like Yinka Shonibare’s African textiles and Dario Robleto’s alchemical assemblages. Accompanied by a catalogue with essays by the

print May 2006

Les Rogers

What happens to the artist-model relationship when the model isn’t there? The subject of seven new works by Les Rogers is a photogenic eighteen-year-old girl from Austin, Texas, named Lindsey, who Rogers did not meet until after the portraits were complete. He made her acquaintance through the networking website MySpace and painted from the photographs she posted there. One does wonder what a man pushing forty was doing on a website whose average user is two decades younger, but this electronic connection yielded no Law and Order fodder—just a suite of large, whimsically decent paintings.

The

previews May 2006

Knut Åsdam

Knut Åsdam’s projects from the past fifteen years range from work in which almost nothing is hidden to that in which concealment is the theme. The video Untitled: Pissing, 1995, is an up-close view of a man wetting his pants, while Psychasthenia 10 Series 2, 2000–2001, a silent slide projection of anodyne housing projects at night, is screened within a chamber of black felt and summons Roger Caillois’s link between insect camouflage and the schizophrenic experience of urban spatial assimilation. These works, and roughly a dozen others

print April 2006

Matt Mullican

In 1925, reflecting in “An Autobiographical Study” on the hypnotic treatment that he had abandoned in his clinical practice years before, Sigmund Freud wrote that the method had nonetheless proved to be an “immense help,” in select cases, “by widening the field of the patient’s consciousness and putting within his reach knowledge which he did not possess in his waking life.” The persona conjured in Matt Mullican’s recent installation at Christine Burgin Gallery, Five Suitcases of Love, Truth, Work and Beauty, 2005—a figure whose emergence was precipitated by Mullican’s performances while under

print March 2006

Stanley Brouwn

This exhibition was Stanley Brouwn’s first New York outing since 2002, although a clutch of recent European shows indicate his gradual reappearance on the institutional radar over the past few years. Brouwn never really disappeared; he’s just notoriously reclusive (no photographs, no reproductions, no interviews) and, to judge from the international locales referenced in the work on view, always on the move. He continues to make diagrammatic drawings that employ the units of measurement—based on the proportions of his own body—that he developed in the early 1960s, but the fifteen works on view

print February 2006

David Salle

The press release for David Salle’s recent exhibition of his new “Vortex Paintings” is conspicuous in its magniloquence, claiming that the spiral at the center of these ten large oil-on-linen works creates an “unprecedented sense of spatial depth.” It’s temping to attribute this hyperbole to Mary Boone and Jeffrey Deitch, the show’s copresenters, but the work’s overtly formal emphasis ultimately refers us back to the artist himself as its source. The cyclones depicted, the text continues, either “retreat into deep space” or “project off the surface,” and Salle is indeed at pains here to conjure

previews January 2006

David Smith

In 1966, less than a year after David Smith's death, Clement Greenberg reflected on the artist on whom he had pinned his hopes for the “new sculpture”: “His oeuvre, in all its unevenness and sprawl, in all its bewildering diversity, somehow remains open, unfinished.” With 122 sculptures—from the wiry welded constructions of the '30s through the later volumetric totems—this exhibition commemorating the centenary of Smith's birth should mirror that “bewildering diversity.” Dozens of drawings and the artist's notebooks, which suggest their maker's thematic and

print December 2005

Sam Durant

The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, has been roundly maligned since it opened last fall, and the sheer range of critical charges—from insufficient scholarly contextualization and scattershot exhibitions to annoying electronic touch displays and too many gift shops—testifies to the difficulty of addressing Native American history in the nation’s capital. In Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington, DC, 2005, shown recently at Paula Cooper Gallery, Sam Durant offers an alternative commemoration of this traumatic past.

The project

Lisa Pasquariello