February 8 to May 18, 2013
545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor
Between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City

In a variation within our series, A TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES, David Cohen offers his thoughts on a survey of the artist’s cutaway painting on top of his reviews on the same body of work on three previous occasions (the latter originally published in the New York Sun).  Readers new to Harkness will want to read the reviews in order of publication.

Hilary Harkness, Red Sky in the Morning, 2010-11. Oil on panel, 37 x 42 inches.
Courtesy The FLAG Art Foundation. Photo by Genevieve Hanson

2013
The other day I was musing on a profound subject: who will star in the first movie made of a Hilary Harkness painting?

The obvious casting choices for the party-girl warriors who populate, in miniature, her dense, chirpy yet  grotesque scenes are those acrobatically proven in the action movie genre—Angelina Jolie, say, whose assassin or tomb-raiding getup recalls the bikini-booted scanty efficiency of the Harkness babe.

But why would anyone turn an artwork into a movie, you might be asking?  The traffic in contemporary culture is entirely the other way around, with artists raiding cinema.  Hollywood – adapting novels and historic events, regurgitating TV shows, and Broadway musicals, remaking other, old or not so old Hollywood movies – has surely never, in similar fashion, made a film of a painting.  Art history-savvy directors make compositional sense of them in individual shots, but that is a different matter.  There was “Girl with the Pearl Earring,” (2003) but that’s from a novel that spins a yarn around a painting, and is thus at several stages removed.  What I have in mind for Harkness is something more like director Lech Majewski’s “The Mill and the Cross” (2011) but even there the narrative arc takes in Brueghel the Elder, author of the 1564 masterpiece, “The Way to Calvary,” that is the movie’s painterly progenitor.

This is all a rather discursive way of saying two things about Harkness.  First, that there is a narrative logic in her work that compares to literature or movies more than to the static medium of easel painting, at least at the pace that form has demanded of viewers for the last few centuries.  In Harkness, local incident unfolds over time as the eye is obliged to read accumulative detail.  And secondly, “bad girl” transgressive as they remain, these sado-masochistic scenarios warrant big audience attention rather than art world connoisseurship. The ingenuity of Hilary Harkness has (or ought to have) blockbuster appeal.

The Flag Art Foundation has brought together fifteen, which is to say almost all of these labor-intensive and thus rare works from Harkness’s signature idiom, the cutaway babe-infested setting, whether terrestrial or nautical .  As the artist has begun to move decisively in the direction of more traditional, single-scene images staffed by dramatis personae of legible individuality (her Gertrude Stein series), the Flag show affords that first chapter in her work a retrospective sense of closure.  Her newer work dispenses with the assured absurdist humor of her trademark strategy and puts her in uncharted water in which human foible takes over from inhuman gesture.  Meanwhile, the display of her cutaways of battleships, mansions, and even an auction house with their stylized, weirdly good-humored depravity confirmed to this now hardened fan (note the skepticism in the earlier reviews reposted below) her unexpected capacity to build distinct mood within each work despite the seeming ubiquity of her aesthetic and moral world view.

Later paintings within the Flag group witness odd shifts in scale and the introduction of male and animal characters, but still, you might wonder, what would there be for an actress to do, to say, to emote in such emotionally vacuous situations as Harkness offers? Angelina will require adversaries, of course, so step up Milla Jovovich and Charlize Theron.  But how would these players “co star” when casts of thousands are actually rendered equals, each with their deadpan walk-on macabre moment?  I guess it will have to be one of those movies where the star mutates, like the namesake lead in “Being John Malkovich” (1999), and like a comic book-derived action movie all the while regaining pristine calm as they are choreographed from one act of chilled meanness to the next.

In a way the Surrealists would have loved, where one message in my inbox this morning reminded me that the Flag Foundation show is about to close, the next message put Ms. Jolie herself in a headline with news that the actress has undergone a double mastectomy to diminish her odds of cancer. Life is never the jolly game that art can be, snipping the wires between violence, beauty and pain.  If there can possibly be meaning in this bizarre juxtaposition of data (not to force equivalence) it will have to do with second chapters, courage and sparky women.

Hilary Harkness, Pearl Trader, 2006. Oil on linen, 30 x 33 inches. Courtesy the artist and Mary Boone Gallery.

2008
Ms. Harkness, who has been written about in-depth in these pages before, is a mannerist with an unwavering ability to marry perversity and skill. She is a master of kinky scale, packing busy compositions with tiny yet dynamic figures engaged in strange activities that fuse cruelty and pleasure. Their industry — relentless yet dispassionate — mirrors that of their own making, and our viewing. The figures in the paintings, and the paintings themselves, exude a cold, absurdist eroticism.

She paints armies of Barbie doll-like stick-figure women, their tight-fitting apparel, rather like Lara Croft’s, suited equally to the bedroom and the battlefield. Their activities generally involve pleasuring or torturing, but with little emotional involvement in either case.

The scene has a Second World War ambiance, though often with contemporary details thrown in. Her style is a cross between comic book fetishist Eric Stanton and Hieronymous Bosch. She will present a building or battleship in cutaway isometric so that you can see room to room overrun with her women, ant-like in the way they devour space.

“Pearl Trader” (2006) makes the Christies auction house at Rockefeller Center, with its distinctive curved façade and Sol le Witt mural, the locale for a battle orgy surrounded by art. In one room there is a Damien Hirst tank and a Roy Lichtenstein “girl” signaling suitable touchstones for Ms. Harkness’s reductive eroticism and chilled cruelty.

Ms. Harkness shares with Sade not just the pathology to which the Marquis lent his name but also an essential element of style — endless variation, at once exhilerating and enervating, upon an obsessive theme.

In a departure from Ms. Harkness’s normal procedure, “Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas, Paris, October, 1939” (2007–08), painted on copper, increases the scale of individual figures, and is overtly quotational. It is a handsome work, and it is understandable that the artist should look for an escape from her bizarre servitude to the miniature, but it does not yet have the bravura awkwardness that is her essential hallmark.

Hilary Harkness, Matterhorn, 2003-04. Oil on linen, 20 x 27 inches. Courtesy The FLAG Art Foundation.
Photo by Genevieve Hanson

2005
The narrative energy in Hilary Harkness is in a higher gear than in [Elizabeth] Huey [discussed earlier in the same review]: the focus of her sapphic, sado-masochistic orgy scenes, pillages and riots is unrelenting. Her skills are in harmony with her vision: where Ms. Huey paints with an awkward approximation of old master painterliness, Ms. Harkness has the hard, clean, nerdish exactitude of a cartoonist. She can be old masterly, too, but in her case it is the finesse of mannerist paintings on copper that come to mind: paint is transparent, surfaces sealed.

But while a typical Harkness is crowded to bursting point with legions of near-identical figures—willowy, leggy stick figures running around torturing each other and exuding as much individuality and personality in the process as laboratory mice—they actually share with Ms. Huey’s angels and children a vacant sense of alienation. Her cloned cast is a herd of loners.

Less than a year ago Mary Boone presented her first show of this fascinatingly perverse artist: three relatively small panels were given a wall each of her Chelsea barn. Now, in a less precious display, an exhibition ostensibly devoted to drawings, which actually includes new panels and works in oil and watercolor on paper alongside line drawings, is offered at their uptown gallery. Morally speaking, it is business as usual: a massacre on a beach, a shoot out amidst back to the future modernist skyscrapers, a mass ablution in a luxurious ladies room.

As ever, formally speaking, there is an amazing balance of detail and all-overness. “Heavy Cruisers” presents in cut-away cross section the bowels of a ship heavily populated by sailorettes equally busy with the naughty and the nautical. If the title is a suitably unsubtle pun, the handling of different mediums nonetheless reveals the extraordinary touch and control of this weird young woman. The firm delicacy of her line drawing, for instance, which have the legato exactitude of engravings, recall the neoclassical draughtsman John Flaxman. It makes one think: if Flaxman had honed his skills to Sade rather than Dante art history would have had its Harkness two centuries earlier.

2004
Hilary Harkness is a deliciously perverse absurdist in paint who brings together the unemotional nastiness of [Cindy] Sherman and the crowd addiction of [Spencer] Tunick [discussed earlier in the same review]. The somewhat precious display of just three smallish pictures at Mary Boone’s Chelsea barn, Ms. Harkness’s first show with this dealer, is a perfect complement to the masquerades and mass actions explored in these other exhibitions.

Ms. Harkness’s all-female S/M orgies and girl’s own adventures at sea are a chilly marriage of medievalism and the comic strip. In “Matterhorn,” (2003-04) for instance, Hieronymous Bosch and Lucas Cranach team up with Quentin Tarantino, Henry Darger, Balthus and his oddball occultist brother Pierre Klossowski, gay illustrator Tom of Finland, and vintage bandes-dessinées pornographer Eric Stanton. In what reads like a sliced-open doll’s house, she offers cross-sectional, compartmentalized views of an army of skinny young women kitted out in black with sexy boots, hotpants, bikinis, and military caps who in each room torture, abuse, molest, and mortally dispatch sartorially and anatomically similar fellows. In fact, as no discerible emotion is displayed on the perfunctory faces or standarized bodies of any of the participants, it is not too easy to say what criterion, fate, or preference determines whether you are a perpetrator or a victim, although the majority of the latter are wearing white socks, which might signify something. No one registers much by way of pleasure or pain on their cute, dumb faces.

In painterly terms, Ms. Harkness favors a flat, nerdish, swiftly dispatched naïvete, in harmony, some might argue, with her moral maturity. What does actually make these sick, silly pictures interesting beyond the shlock-horror inventiveness of her abuse fantasies, and her nostalgic eye for period charm, is a compellingly crafted ratio of detail to whole, a weird sense of decorative balance and all-overness. Mind you, once you allow so formalist a take of scenes of rape and pillage, the artist’s warped values are obviously working.

David Diao, Double Rejection 1 (MOMA Boardroom), 2012. Acrylic, paper and silkscreen on canvas, 36 x 78 inches. Courtesy of Postmasters

If ever the timing of a show was pitch perfect with the circumstances of its venue, it is David Diao: TMI.  This at once ironic and plaintive show, delving into the cruel vagaries of the art market, is the set-striking event at Postmasters, drawing a close to their fifteen years tenancy at 459 West 19th Street—because their rent is being doubled.

The last day of show and space alike is Saturday, April 27.

TMI is an artist’s considered revenge on the perceived slights of the system.  Diao has made paintings that document the derisory results of an embarrassing dumping of his work in an inappropriate auction house.  One image, for instance, consists of the fateful auction catalog pages, replete with circled,  hand-written under-selling hammer prices.  In another painting he fantasizes a result in the opposite direction, inflating his actual auction record even more dramatically than their landlords did his gallerists’ rent.  High up on a ledge are duplicates in miniature of the devalued works,  for sale at a “correct,” (IE non-market) price in a gesture of what the Chinese call “chutzpah.”  But he doesn’t stop with auction injustice.  Other paintings adapt the graphics of a MoMA Picasso retrospective for an announcement of a fictional retrospective for himself at the same institution.  Another drops one of his own pictures into a painted rendering of a photograph of the old trustees’ dining room to memorialize the moment when curator John Elderfield presented the work to the board for consideration, only for it to be declined.

Installation shot of small paintings in David Diao: TMI at Postmasters, the exhibition under review. Courtesy of Postmasters

A master of “conceptual abstraction,” Diao is no stranger to the theme of indignant loss.  His previous, 2009 outing at Postmasters, titled “I lived there until I was 6…,” delved into family history.  His grandfather had been a well-off official in Sichuan before the revolution when their estate – tennis court and all – was confiscated by the communists.  Diao ingeniously melded architectural plans and state and party emblems into a faux-Suprematist iconography that both told an old tale and affirmed his current artistic values.  But this new body of work has a very different spirit as the focus shifts from family to career, and the foe from party state to art world.

Self-pity, of course, is a familiar theme among artists, but le peintre maudit usually gravitates towards an appropriately romantic style: something fey or expressionist, perhaps.  The jarring peculiarity here is between Diao’s intellectually aloof-seeming, coolly meticulous painting craft, on the one hand, and his only half-self-mocking sense of ruffled entitlement, on the other.  The MoMA announcement, for instance: is it saying that he was due a retrospective there? Is it goading institution and viewer alike to take action or to expect one some day?  Diao may well be forging a novel hybrid aesthetic with this show: Hard-Edge Patheticism.

While other Chelsea galleries, including the old Peter Blum and Sean Kelly spaces, are giving way to condos and boutiques in the High Line-propelled anti-art boom, the fine space that Magdalena Sawon and Tamas Banovich built in Chelsea will actually not be lost to art: it will soon serve as a new home for Leo Koenig Gallery. Postmasters, meanwhile, are retracing their steps downtown as they are set to reopen in Tribeca.  Not the worst place, as it happens, to experience downward mobility.

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February 21 to March 24, 2013
124 Forsyth Street
New York City, (646) 559-5906

Marina Adams, 40 Watt Moon, 2010. Acrylic on Linen, 38 x 38 inches. Courtesy of Hionas Gallery

In her first solo exhibition at Hionas Gallery, in this Tribeca-based gallery’s recently inaugurated second space on the Lower East Side,  Marina Adams confirms her position as a player of significance in contemporary abstract painting.  A baker’s dozen of sassy, sexy, exuberant pictures exude freshness and intelligence in strong and equal measure.

The paintings range in scale from just over six foot square to a diminutive 12 by 12 inches, and in format they bounce around from loosely configured concentric circles to what can be described as close-ups of deflated beach balls.  There are also jigsaws of limb-like forms or of flag-like forms.  Uniting these formats are vibrant color, eccentric geometry, insistently handmade lines, and a kind of good-humored ambivalence between spatial depth and pictorial flatness.  Her relationship to shape is strongly redolent of Harriet Korman but her particular stance as a fuser of soft-edged geometry and angst-free art informel entails a distinct set of pleasures and queries.

Adams has a quietly audacious sensibility.  Her chirpy palette eschews primaries, generally preferring pastels and nursery hues.  While avoiding brash juxtapositions and gently pacing color contrasts across the composition, she enjoys teasing the eye with mild dissonances and skewed tonal shifts.  She has a predilection for games with isolated texture: her surface can get brushy or rubbed in one color segment while remaining smooth in a neighbor, as in 40 Watt Moon (2010).  The combined effect of these tendencies introduces almost trompe l’oeil intimations of perspectival recession at the very instant of enforcing awareness of the support. In Spin, (2010) for instance, two of the six scarf-like triangulated color segments that meet at a center – the pink and the burgundy – each have two tones within them, suggesting forms folding or bending back upon themselves, thus implying flutter (and with it, spatial depth).

Marina Adams, Space Embrace, 2012. Acrylic on Linen, 48 x 48 inches. Courtesy of Hionas Gallery

At ease and optically generous as these paintings are, they are actually radically cropped because gestalt depends upon something beyond the canvas itself.  The edge of the picture, indeed, rarely defines the composition, even less the boundary of an individual shape. This imparts narrative and metaphor to works that would otherwise want to feel present tense and literal.

Adams’ target-like compositions, like Space Embrace, (2011) are almost programmatic in the way they soften, “feminize” even (her bulls eye is difficult not to read as a breast) that trope of modernist hard-edge.  But even in her more personal and complex compositions there are traces of the hard edge softened.  Her use of texture and sgraffito, the way forms are given a shadow, the pentimento-like continuation of an outline beyond the form it describes – in Coming Through Strange, (2011) for instance, the title piece of the show, a Robert Mangold-recalling gesture – all point to a tenderizing of emphatic or clean cut geometric abstraction.  But rather than suggesting Adams as some kind of soft neo-romantic, these strategies come across more as “post hard,” as if her relationships to Mangold, Kenneth Noland (targets) or Ellsworth Kelly are akin to Eva Hesse’s to Donald Judd.

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February 7 to March 9, 2013
529 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-463-9666

Sandy Walker, Mountain Moment, 2011. Oil on canvas, 14 x 18 inches. Courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Although Sandy Walker studied in New York in the 1960s – at Columbia and from its second year of operation at the New York Studio School –and went on to exhibit with some frequency at Grace Borgenicht Gallery through the next decade, his career has mostly centered on the Bay Area where he settled just as his New York career was taking off.  And with the exception of a show of graphic works at the non-profit Wooster Arts Space in Soho in 2004, he has been absent from New York purview ever since.  His current show, therefore, at Elizabeth Harris Gallery has the vibe of a debut, albeit one that pulsates with the accrued energy of a lifelong exploration of his elected idiom, lyrical, representational expressionism.

The show focuses on landscape, but in Walker there is always a triangulation of impulses: the other magnets are the human body in motion and the inherent calligraphic qualities of given mediums (he is equally consummate in ink drawing, oil painting and woodcut).  Just as a typical Walker dancer tends to spawn branches and rivulets, so too his landscapes are anatomical and sexed, recalling the “heaving bosoms and exulting limbs” observed by John Ruskin in the Swiss Alps.

While his exuberantly brushed, improvisatory landscapes veer towards the pantheistic in a generalized evocation of nature, they also seem, and in fact are, rooted in direct observation of actual places to which the artist has deep and meaningful connection, and ecological concerns.  Many, for instance, depict terrain in Washington State, where the artist has a cabin; others were painted en plein air or from sketches in such locales as Arizona. The results nicely balance visceral gusto and pictorial intelligence.

Sandy Walker, Human Nature III, 2010. Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery

In some works in this show the body-land equation is quite explicit, as in the Milton Avery-like Human Nature III, (2010) with its distended hills/torso in black sandwiched by a green foreground field and blank white sky.  More compelling, however, are the landscapes where jagged hatch work clinging to the horizon constitutes a “recumbent figure” of subtler ambivalence, in IJ Bar Song II, (2011) for instance, or in the hand-like form of the smaller canvas, Mountain Moment, (2011) with its chocolate tones and boldly slathered strokes.

The artist is evidently drawn to wildernesses—to mountains aloof from human habitation, to primal forests.   His style, though indebted to an American pastoral tradition that includes Avery, Neil Welliver and Alex Katz – or perhaps because it belongs so squarely to that tradition, fused with classic AbEx bravura and a respectfully focused understanding of Asian aesthetics – has an air of innocence suggestive of another triangulation, between the virgin landscape observed, the freshness of the marks made, and the repeat “debut” of the returning native.

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January 17 to February 9, 2013
37 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212 593 3757

Katherine Mangiardi, Lace Tapestry (16th – 18th Century), 2013. Acrylic on panel, 60 x 72 inches. Courtesy of Bernarducci Meisel Gallery.

In terms of artistic medium, Katherine Mangiardi is a polyglot equally at ease, expressively and conceptually, in the languages of painting, assemblage, photography and installation.  One thing she is not, however, for all the exquisite and penetrating acuity of her perceptual gaze, is a photorealist.  It therefore comes as a surprise that the recent (2008) RISD/Skowhegan graduate enjoys her New York debut solo spot at Bernarducci Meisel, a gallery hitherto (and everywhere else in its sprawling showroom) fixated upon the hyper mimetic. Mangiardi’s focus in this current show is lace, exploring that wondrous material in myriad historic, aesthetic and social complexities.  She “sews” her own (in fact, cuts out, paints and reconfigures) in plaster and canvas; she hides her visage behind imagined identities of anonymous workers of the material in a Cindy Sherman meets Yinka Shonibare-worthy photographic masquerade; and she deconstructs the decorative syntax of lace – its curlicuing back and forth between complexity and restraint, upfrontness and veiling – in an eerily elegiac, painterly tour de force that somehow manages, in the process of fastidious rendering, to also seem like action painting.

Katherine Mangiardi at Bernarducci Meisel was an ARTCRITICAL PICK in February 2013

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Works by John Byam are on view at Andrew Edlin Gallery through March 16 and at the Outsider Art Fair 2013, January 31 to February 3, Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery

After several recent years of rather lethargic instalments in less-than-inspiring surroundings, the Outsider Art Fair received a double adrenalin shot this year with a new proprietor, in the person of Chelsea dealer Andrew Edlin, and a sparkling new venue, the former Dia Arts building at 548 West 22nd Street.

Founded in 1993, the fair took place for many years in SoHo’s Puck Building where aficionados were introduced to the likes of James Castle and Bill Traylor, and a host of novel or familiar images by self-taught and otherwise marginalized individuals.  Startlingly inventive, sometimes obsessive-compulsive, sometimes childlike objects and images would conform to art lovers’ longings for an art of inner necessity implicitly deemed missing in the work of the mainstream professionals.

The whole discourse of “outsider” is arguably turned around in an art world where academic training has largely dispensed with formal skill sets and where artists are encouraged to dwell upon their obsessions or aspects of their identity that makes them “other.”  But this doesn’t make anyone an outsider.  Nor does it seem to rob the genuine outsiders of their authenticity.

Still, the very definition of outsider clearly isn’t what it used to be. Take Vahakn Arslanian.  His “outsider” status is not, apparently, compromised by his attending SVA, nor by his father being an art collector and his coach, from age 5, being his dad’s Hamptons neighbor Julian Schnabel (whose son. Vito, presents Arslanian at the fair.)  The childlike, “visionary” intensity of the deaf artists seems to be what defines him as an outsider.

Winfred Rembert, Candy Soda, 2004. Dye on carved and tooled leather, 35 x 27 inches. Courtesy of Kinz + Tillou Fine Art

Besides Schnabel, the new line up also now includes galleries like Feature, showing tantric artworks by unnamed artists—gorgeous works for sure, but also likely to open a can of worms as a category that is already problematic within western art is applied to works from a non-western religious culture with such different aesthetic criteria.

Theoretical caveats notwithstanding, the fair bursts with color and expressive energy.   Among many exhibits to watch out for are an exhibition of a dozen photographs by Mario Del Curto, curated by art historians Céline Muzelle and Valérie Rousseau, presented on the second floor of the fair; works by African-American painter Winfred Rembert, presented by Peter Tillou and Kinz + Tillou Fine Art; and  exquisite woodcarvings by Edlin’s own recent discovery, John Byam, sometime gravedigger and trailer park attendant, who continues to make work at an assisted living facility in upstate New York.

The Outsider Art Fair 2013.  January 31 to February 3, 2013 at 548 West 22nd Street at the West Side Highway. Continues Saturday, 11 am to 8 pm and Sunday, 11 am to 6 pm.

Bhakti Baxter, Henry Moore in the River (Brace Yourselves), 2012. Inkjet printed wallpaper, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Federica Schiavo Gallery, Rome.

The half-and-half English/French name of New Galerie  signals a foot on each side of the pond, perhaps, of a Paris-based gallery with a presence in the Film Center building in Hell’s Kitchen.  They are exhibiting for the first time at NADA, the New Art Dealer’s Alliance fair at the Deauville Resort, Miami, with a two-person collaboration that extends this binary thing: Danish artist Maiken Bent and Angelino Lizzie Fitch made art together that responded to their conceptions of each other’s work. Bent contributes the conceit of fair-ready art, taut with packing pulleys and bungee ropes; from Fitch, another kind of tautness, with fierce-looking D-rings connecting fused plywood elements, a wax-cast lower leg, flowing printed fabric.  The rhetoric is provisional but the look is finessed, in a Frenchn (or Danish, or LA) kind of way.

Nicelle Beauchene, the Lower East Side dealer, has drawings by Louise Despont of almost outsider artist intensity: heraldic, decorative, made up of geometrically-elaborating architectural elements delivered in a cross-hatched almost obsessive, micrographic hand. Lisa Cooley, a gallerist from the same neighborhood, has a four-person show that includes Alan Reid’s Disco Lyrics, 2012, a portrait at 40 inches high of a young woman, wistful alike in demeanor and colored pencil dispatch, upon whom are superimposed cutout impasto-painted foamcore horns, an homage of sorts to Francis Picabia’s transparencies.

Alan Reid, Disco Lyrics, 2012. Caran d’ache, Foamcore, and acrylic on canvas, 40 x 32 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Lisa Cooley, New York

In similar nod-to-art-history-but-feeling-very-current mode, Cologne’s DESAGA has French painter/sculptor Nathalie De Pasquier’s Purist stiff-life colored wood constructions and creamy flat oil paintings that put me in mind of overlooked Cubist master Amédée Ozenfant in their nursery-hued idealism.  More literally on the subject of classic moderns revisited, Rome dealer Federica Schiavo’s booth was dominated by a full-wall wallpaper installation by Miami-based Bhakti Baxter (he is included in the current show of new work at the Miami Art Museum) in which a 1930s biomorphic Henry Moore mother and child is placed in a tropical jungle, as if to repatriate the pre-Columbian influenced English master’s creation.  In a similar ploy, incidentally, Moore liked to photograph maquette of his figures against rolling hills to reveal their monumentality.

On Stellar Rays, yet another LES dealer has a compellingly-weird animation piece by digital artist Brody Condon.  The artist modifies game technology, inserting figures of his own invention.  A dancing female figure recalls Cranach in her \angular mannerist distortion while the tattooed gawking males are pure frat boy geeks.  The artist finds that the spatial organization of the game technology owes more to the northern than Italian renaissance conceptions of landscape, I am told.

With all the manipulation, obsessiveness, collaborations, deconstructions and hands-off aesthetics at play, it is a miracle to find there is still pure expression that can grab you by the eyeball—like the Viennese Stefan Sandner’s simple, clean yet seismic white lines on chalkboard green/gray, on view at American Contemporary.

American Contemporary, I’m embarrassed on writing up my Nada impressions to recall, is yet another outfit from New York’s Lower East Side. Is this a case, I wonder, of “you can take the art critic out of the ghetto but…”?

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Nancy Grossman, Two Heads – Back and Front, 1968. Pen and ink on paper, 10 3/4 x 13 inches. Collection Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, © 1968 Nancy Grossman, courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY

The historically well-informed Ken Johnson will be aware that critics usually come out nicely from the antagonism they provoke.  The most notorious case of a petition against an art critic (hitherto at least) concerned an earlier New York Times writer, John Canaday, whose dismissal of abstract expressionism led to a torrent of calls for his own.  Forty-nine of the great and the good of the American avant garde penned a letter to the Editor.  Canaday kept his job and earned himself a bestseller book title: Embattled Critic.

Less known on this side of the pond is the case of Brian Sewell.  In 1994, the exuberantly and eloquently reactionary critic of London’s Evening Standard so infuriated the art establishment with his vituperative wit that a roster of celebrated artists and museum curators called for his replacement.  Again, like Canaday, Sewell was gifted a book title that publishers can only dream of in a pluralist era when criticism rarely excites passions: The Reviews That Caused The Rumpus. 

At the time of that controversy I lived in London.  Although few of Sewell’s tastes accorded with my own, and despite the presence of friends and even a professor of mine amongst the signatories, I felt moved to organize a counter-letter with a couple of dozen colleagues who shared my sense that criticism suffers when dissent is stifled. Instructively, however, my letter received no citation in Sewell’s Rumpus volume.

Living in the age of social media, Johnson has managed to dwarf Canaday’s 49 with an online petition that has garnered over 1500 signatures.  The charge in this instance is not mere philistinism, however, but gross insensitivity to issues of gender and race.

Failing, perhaps, to learn a lesson from the Sewell affair, I have determined that artcritical needs to weigh in on the Johnson affair.  While many of our contributing editors and regular writers have focused their thoughts on the core issues of race and sex, my own observations are restricted to more specialist and marginal concerns of editorial process, whether from the writer’s, reader’s, publisher’s or protester’s point of view.

We turn to a newspaper of record for accurate reporting and stimulating analysis.  Journalists in the line of fire get us the latest developments in Syria while a pundit like Thomas Friedman tells us x number of things that are wrong with the world and y easy ways to fix them.  In the visual arts, critics are expected to deliver on both fronts simultaneously: a review of a sprawling museum show that simultaneously identifies and comments on an underlying aesthetic or museological problem.  With varying degrees of skill, the Times critics, who now include a Pulitzer-winner amongst them, manage this feat quite admirably. But in a slew of volatile recent interventions, Johnson has taken on identity issues that some would argue simply do not lend themselves to successful resolution in the cramped quarters of an exhibition review, or – in the case of his inflammatory gender speculations – preview.  With so little room to maneuver and so much potentially at stake, it is hard not to think of the critic as a bull in a china shop.

And, if the critic is consciously courting controversy, another idiom comes to mind: “where angels fear to tread”.  Ken Johnson, as an idealistic child of the sixties, no doubt feels that his own political purity is unassailable.  I suspect that most people in the art world, left or far left (we don’t seem to have a right!) would answer in the affirmative to Johnson’s opening question in his review of a show of Caribbean artists at Museo El Barrio, that it is indeed time to retire the identity-based group show.  While Johnson’s positions on such shows that persist are controversial his underlying motive in making these remarks is clearly positive. He is no Newt Gingrich.  But – to deploy yet another well-worn phrase – an angel does have to consider where the road of good intention can lead.

As to his antagonists, one wonders if they have thought through the wisdom of their chosen format—as dubious, for the settling of a nuanced critical issue, as the exhibition review is for the airing of so emotionally raw a set of historic and political problems as the cultural and economic marginalization of women and blacks.  Petitions are a good way for the average citizen to let polsters and pols know where numbers lie.  But artists and academics and critics have means at their disposal to register consternation and objection that are surely better suited to this situation than an anonymously penned round robin.  If one can’t be bothered to write one’s own response to this issue it is better to leave well alone than to participate in the act of closing down debate.

But that, of course, is already to take a loaded position—that Johnson’s comments weren’t that bad.  And in truth, the way they read when quoted in isolation, the more egregious phrases – “black artists did not invent assemblage,” “the nature of the art that women tend to make” – are indeed cringe-worthy.

So, artcritical’s position is: better editing all round; more judicious, art-historically informed articles; less big ideas latching onto the coat tails of functionalist newspaper exhibition reviews, and way less petitions.  That said, as the responses to our internal inquiry demonstrate, artcritical provides a platform not a position.  Our feelings on the Johnson affair are diverse.

Atsushi Kaga at mother’s tankstation, Dublin’s booth at Art Positions (Art Basel Miami Beach) 2012. (c) artcritical.com

Once again, Positions is the lively corner of Art Basel Miami with its global sampling of solo installations by emerging artists.  We are all used to funky venue names these days, but one booth has visitors guessing about nomenclature thanks to a collision/collusion of exhibit and exhibitor: mother’s tankstation.  These Dublin dealers are showing Japanese-born, Irish raised Atsushi Kaga who’s there in person, with his mom, tailoring cloth carrier bags at a crowded workstation.  In addition to his works in appliqué and apparel, Kaga shows touching little paintings that speak to his upbringing, in which stuffed-toy animé figures populate somber compositions of old-masterly hue.  Other standouts in Positions include Paulo Vivacqua, who brings some beach into the convention center, at Laura Marsiaj, Rio, and LaToya Ruby Frazier, injecting harsh black and white working class realities to Miami’s sunny festive glamour, at Michel Rein, Paris.

First news in of a fine art casualty to chalk up to Sandy is the seriously tragic loss of a major series of paintings by artist Joa Baldinger.  Her series, I want to Talk about You, inspired by scenes from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Beware of a Holy Whore” (1971), were on display in the subterranean bunker-like space of Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert on West 19th Street which got completely flooded Monday night.

Joa Baldinger, I Want to Talk About You, 2010. Oil on linen, from the quadriptych, IV/IV, 74 x106 inches. Courtesy of Klemens Gasser and Tanja Grunert

I wrote about other paintings from the series at The New York Sun website when they were shown in the Hampton’s in summer 2010.  Sad to think of a cursory review outliving such stunning pictures.