May 10 to September 2, 2013
225 Madison Avenue
New York City, (212) 685-0008

Matthew Barney, Ancient Evenings: Ba Libretto, 2009, ink, graphite and gold leaf on paperback copy of Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer, on carved salt base, in nylon and acrylic vitrine 15 1/2 x 13 3/4 x 14 3/4 inches. Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman, Dallas, TX. Copyright Matthew Barney.

Visitors to the Morgan Library & Museum this summer will glimpse more than two decades worth of drawings and small works related to Matthew Barney’s better known performance and video projects. Subliming Vessel inserts Barney’s manic cross-referencing machine into a library overflowing with cultural treasures. “What am I looking at?” two older visitors queried as we stared at RIVER ROUGE: Djed (2011), a study for Barney’s current performance and video project River of Fundament. Knowing Barney’s work I blurted out “body parts.” The gathering of potbellied forms in this pen drawing on red paper reminded me of similar ones in a Max Ernst collage that, on closer inspection, were illustrations of guts lifted from a medical text. Barney’s pear-shaped pots also resemble blast furnaces, and in fact the drawing serves as an instruction for a performance in which the artist had actual molten steel poured from furnaces in a revived Detroit steel plant. Though the title Fundament might be related to the Latin word fundere, to melt or pour, fundament in English is actually the buttocks or anus. A pithy answer to the couple’s question would have been: “the armpit—sorry, asshole—of America bleeding hot metal.”

The adjacent Djed: The Case for Saving Detroit (2010) is a glass vitrine in the middle of the room. It contains one of J. Pierpont Morgan’s votive figures of the Egyptian god Osiris, along with a bundle of Time magazines with the 2008 cover story The Case for Saving Detroit. Osiris is the deity associated with the regeneration of the soul, but the god’s likeness does not quite touch the electrical wires strung around the magazines—suggesting that Detroit’s resurrection is not imminent. Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings (1983), about a trip through the Egyptian afterlife, is both message and medium in these works, with two actual copies appearing in the work Ancient Evenings: Ba Libretto (2009). The books lay open in a pair of vitrines, their pages covered with drawings, adorned with gold leaf and embedded in salt. Most impressive are the cases themselves, made of clear acrylic framed by gray nylon and fastened with screws whose heads are flush with the edges. Attention to such details is evident throughout the show, with every part in dialogue with its neighbors and with the overall context of the library. Barney drew RIVER ROUGE: Djed on red paper and framed it in red steel. Red-toned paper feels right at home in an institution that shows toned-paper drawings from centuries ago; so too do Barney’s cases, which mimic library conservation and display techniques.

Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 20, The Morgan Library & Museum, 2013, weights, pad, buckets, graphite powder, chalk, petroleum jelly. Photography: Graham S. Haber.

The entire exhibition, in fact, feels like a maelstrom of references and counter references: River Rouge refers to the river Nile, Osiris’s province. Osiris appears in Mailer’s book, which appears in Barney’s display cases, which appear in a library full of cases. The cases’ industrial edging connects to the industry of Detroit, and Detroit’s resurrection (or lack thereof) parallels that of the Egyptian soul which takes place on the Nile.

A black arc on the gallery wall reminds the viewer that Barney’s latest performance of Drawing Restraint also took place here. The restraining force here was a large barbell which the artist charged with a paste of charcoal dust and Vaseline, then rolled over the wall in semi-circular fashion. Barney bisects his arc with gridlines that mark the way-stations of the Egyptian afterlife, but also mark the accomplishment of his weight-training goals. This approach circles back to the artist’s early performances in the Yale gymnasium, which situate the intimacy of personal toil within the cold calculation of sport’s science. It shows up in early drawings such as HYPERTROPHY: Incline (1991), in which a curved line of graphite and Vaseline meanders across a Cartesian grid, apparently to show cell enlargement from a vigorous workout. Barney’s heartfelt investigation of bodily experience and love of the physical universe hold out the promise of solid ground in the work. Too often that hope is lost in a funnel cloud of sacred and profane oddities.

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May 5 to June 16, 2013
133 Orchard Street, between Rivington and Delancey
New York City, 212 598 3012

Maria Petschnig, Petschsniggle, 2013. HD Video (color, sound), 7 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and One Stellar Rays

Winding through the airtight spaces of Maria Petschnig’s video installation gives you a sense that you’re entering the artist’s body. Multiple close-up views over her shoulder or hip, expanses of soft-flesh-colored material and self-referential subject matter create an engulfing interiority that is both disturbing and funny.

The fake paneling and drop ceilings that greet you at the door make you think you’re visiting a plumbing supplier rather than a gallery. Tawdry images in the exhibition’s first video, Vasistas (2013) adds to that sense. A suited, mustachioed man sits behind a desk, while in the foreground a trench coat-wearing Petschnig performs an exhibitionistic dance. Figures in another scene lie on gray shag carpeting, and in a third, the artist stands in front of stacked boxes, her body wrapped in packing tape.

The artist’s back is almost always turned toward the viewer while the material she is facing is blurred. What you see, in fact, is not full-fledged video but footage of the artist superimposed on still photosby green screen. It’s as if you are tagging along on Petschnig’s daily routine, but instead of seeing the world through her eyes, you view a parade of backdrops she has assembled for her own amusement.

Maria Petschnig, Holdmetight, 2012. Wood, polyester, pantyhose, padding, 11 x 8 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist and One Stellar Rays

As you proceed through a labyrinth of paneled corridors, the feeling of being absorbed into the artists’ physical being becomes palpable. Light levels decrease toward the interior of the building and colors are rendered more uniform. The tan sheets of Mycroft (2013), a mattress plastered on one wall, cover bulging forms that vaguely resemble body parts. Holdmetight (2012) has more bulging forms made of stuffed pantyhose that hang at waist level through the ring of a towel rack. The bulbous material resembles insect larva although thanks to the stockings’ flesh tones it is also penis-like.

Nowhere is flesh more abundant—and more uncomfortably close—than in the final chamber of the exhibition. Here the video Petschniggle (2013) shows figures in various states of undress and of interlock. Two women lather each other up in a tiny tub, their bodies partly sheathed in plastic. The same pair appear later in a tiny shed whose wooden walls resemble the paneling from the gallery walls. With bodies partly cropped it is not clear exactly what the couple is doing but their position is suggestive of “69-ing”

It is shocking but strangely fitting to learn that Petschniggle stars the artist and her twin sister. The installation coalesces as Petschnig’s personal echo chamber. She casts herself in dramas whose other actors are either still photos that she selected or persons whose DNA matches her own. She even titles the work using made-up, self-referential language. What is a Petschniggle, if not a dance done by people named Petschnig? After wandering through this flesh-colored universe of a gallery of ultra-close-up bodies shot in closet-like spaces, you emerge as if ejected from someone’s insides. Fortunately Petschnig’s humor—from the choice of déclassé materials to the Seussian terminology—saves this installation from being angst-ridden, pornographic, or simply grotesque.

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April 5 to May 10, 2013
600 Washington Square South
Philadelphia, 215-629-1000

Jane Irish, Yellow Room, 2012. Egg tempera on linen, 48 x 54 inches. Courtesy of Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Decoration provides an occasion for superimposing one reality on another. Unlike paintings, wall hangings or vases don’t attract notice when they carry images that disagree in scale, viewpoint and level of completion. Jane Irish’s paintings, drawings and ceramic vases on view in Sông H’u’ong: Withdrawing Room at Philadelphia’s Locks Gallery take advantage of decorative tropes to boomerang the viewer from pastoral pleasantries to the horrors of war.

The images, colors, and materials with which we surround ourselves express beauty, but also power, as they allow us to order space according to our wishes. Irish’s works draw their inspiration from the chateaux of the corsairs of St. Malo from France’s colonial era, who incorporated loot from the world over into their rococo interiors. Irish has spent ample time studying the hôtels particuliers of this quiet Breton town, and her beautifully colored works would serve as a tourist guide to this regional style—except that her own decorating choices are different from the seafaring oligarchs’.

A typical strategy for the muralist is to bring the outside in. A series of ceiling height egg-tempera panoramas in the exhibition’s namesake, Sông H’u’ong (2013) fill the gallery with sky, and seem to invite the viewer to step into another reality. Vignettes of temples and picturesque cityscapes from Vietnam’s Sông H’u’ong, or Perfume River, crowd each panel. Although its colors beckon, the painted egg-and-dart molding at the mural’s base reminds you that you are looking at wallpaper. This tension between encompassing and repelling the viewer is evident throughout Irish’s work.

Irish’s St. Malo interiors lead us, Alice in Wonderland fashion, from genteel interior straight to the conquered lands. In her tempera painting Yellow Room (2012), for example, a doorway on the left opens into another Asian panorama with river, temple and brilliant-hued sky. The painting veers from strict two-point perspective to collection of vignettes, with no clear dividing line between rational and irrational space. The right side opens into a completely different Far East exterior space, and a third opening is visible through a window in the room’s distant corner. It’s as if the chinoiserie jumped off the walls and ambushed the home from three different angles.

Jane Irish, Thousand Yard Stare Urn, 2012. Low fire whiteware, china paint, luster and underglaze, 15½ x 8 x 8 inches. Courtesy of Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Vietnam in particular has been a concern of Irish since she organized the Operation Rapid American Withdrawal show in 2005 at Philadelphia’s Crane Arts Building. The exhibition united artists, Vietnam veterans and antiwar activists in a multimedia event that commemorated a 1970 protest march through New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Since that time Irish has often made the veterans’ poetry a part of her work

Irish’s ceramic pieces, modeled after Asian pottery, flank Yellow Room. The vignettes on these pots are less than benign. Amidst the brilliant red hues of Thousand Yard Stare Urn (2012) are black and white images of men who suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome as a result of their service in the war. On display in the upstairs portion of the gallery is a drawing, also titled Thousand Yard Stare (2013) that combines ornate interiors with the writings and faces of activist Vietnam veterans.

As a point of comparison, David Salle’s work from the 1980s also juxtaposed flat patterns, interior views, linear illustration, and objets d’art from colonized lands. Whereas Salle’s combinations had the randomness of a Mad Libs game, Irish’s seem to have point. The Vietnam War was a Franco-American collaboration, started as the War in French Indochina.  Some would argue that American war profiteers have plundered just as eagerly as their French predecessors. Rapid withdrawal from violent conquest everywhere can release us from the miasma of bloody vignettes that fill our minds and living rooms.

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The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making their World  at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, November 17, 2012 to April 7, 2013.

Ann Agee, Birthing Class, 2001. Porcelain, china paint and gold luster, 15 x 15 x 24 inches. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

In his now notorious remarks in the New York Times,  Ken Johnson invited anyone with a theory about the kind of art “women tend to make” to test it out by visiting the exhibition, The Female Gaze, at the Pennsylvania Academy.  My 13-year-old daughter, who has attended many contemporary exhibitions, revealed her theory when she quipped, “Dad, are there going to be a lot of vagina paintings in this show?”

In fact, the sole match for her particular view of women’s art was an untitled test plate from Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1976).  The works in the show might fit any description or label that has been applied to art: abstract, representational, conceptual; personal and political; militant and conventional; academic and outsider. Anyone who attends this show with theories—or better put, stereotypes—of women’s art in mind is bound to be disappointed.

The Female Gaze celebrates an inspired addition to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ venerable holdings. Collector, philanthropist, and artist Alter Linda Lee Alter has donated over 500 works in every style and medium imaginable. In the same gallery one finds Daisy Youngblood’s gorilla sculpture; Barbara Takenaga’s swirling, jewel-like abstract painting; Catherine Murphy’s hyper-real painting of a gun target stapled to a tree; Kara Walker’s silhouettes of antebellum figures; and an enameled metal sign by Jenny Holzer.

The bequest is all the more important when understood side-by-side with the Academy’s existing collection, enshrined next door in its landmark Furness building.  Despite efforts to tout a 200-year history of friendliness toward women, the Academy’s past accessions are rather one-sided, and might just as aptly be called the Male Gaze.

During an interview, Alter explained to me that most of the institutions on the short list for this bequest were male-dominated. She believed, however, that her gift to the Academy would be transformative. The size of the existing collection meant that the donated works would be visible, and the bequest came with a commitment by the staff to take care of them and display them alongside existing art.

While Female Gaze reveals no clear tendency among women artists, it does evince the collector’s preferences. The persistence of painting, and especially figure painting, is deeply felt in this selection of work. Greeting us very directly at the entrance are Diane Edison’s painted Self-Portrait (1996) and pastel Nude Self-Portrait (1995). In this second piece the artist gazes down haughtily at the viewer from between her pendulous breasts.  The African American artist is known for her intense portraiture, and in this case gives us a rich expanse of brown hues rarely seen in museum nudes. Alice Neel’s palette is quite different in Claudia Bach Pregnant (1975), with contrasting pinks and greens representing flesh and fabric. The painter keeps the eye busy with a lively cadence of curved lines and culminating black tresses falling over the sitter’s shoulder.

Diane Edison, Nude Self Portrait, 1995. Pastel on black paper, 44-1/4 x 30 inches. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, courtesy of George Adams Gallery, New York.

There is also a strong interest in art which turn old idioms to new uses. Judith Schaechter’s stained glass works, for example, project nightmares of the contemporary urban world through the colors and graphic styles of this medieval medium. Like a cathedral window image of the baby Jesus, Child and Toy (1989) is organized according to the decorative geometry of its frame, with figures in the central space and a chain of symbolic elements on the periphery. The artist uses brilliant red and yellow glass to depict a doll-like child menaced by toys: candy and stuffed animals on the one hand, and the more adult amusements, money, drugs and guns on the other. Looking at an entirely different reality, Ann Agee uses the style of the ceramic tabletop knick-knack to commemorate a middle-class ritual in Birthing Class (2001). Colorfully dressed pregnant women listen to a demonstration by a nurse while their hipster-ish husbands look on with excessively cheerful smiles. Glints of light on the glazed surface underscore the overwrought optimism of the scene.

With the emphasis on representational work, the exhibition shows a clear bias toward the retinal and away from the conceptual. There are the occasional objects, however, that raise questions about the boundaries between art and life, image and representation. One is the 1993 painting Target by Catherine Murphy. Easily mistaken for a photograph, this bullet-ridden image brings an object into the gallery that, particularly amidst current debate over gun control, we would rather not see. It also offers a connection to the Academy’s nineteenth century collections, which include a section of tromp l’oeil painting, and a focus on the science of collecting and categorizing lived experience.

Finding other points of connection to the Academy’s historic collection will determine whether Women Artists Making their World is indeed transformative.  If the displays in the old gallery had a subtitle, it would be “Male Artists Making the World”—for the artists there, like Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, George Inness, John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins, have taught us how to see. The question for me, then, is not how women artists create their own world, but how they complete our picture of what the world looks like.

One indication of how this might be done is in Female Gaze’s inclusion of works from the Chicago art milieu of the late 1960s and 1970s. This radical scene saw the participation of men and women in collectives like the Hairy Who, and spawned the careers of artists such as Nancy Spero, Christina Ramberg and Suellen Rocca, alongside of men like Roger Brown, Ed Paschke, and Jim Nutt.  Ramberg’s painting Hereditary Uncertainty (1977), exhibited in Female Gaze, contains the jagged shapes and colors found in work by Roger Brown. Yet Ramberg’s subject, the straightjacketing of women’s bodies through clothing, is distinctly feminist. Significantly, this painting was also included in a 2012 Academy exhibit on the influence of famed Art Institute of Chicago teacher Ray Yoshida. It was displayed in the historic Furness building, only footsteps away from Thomas Eakins’ monumental surgical scene, The Gross Clinic. On that occasion, the female gaze revealed to us a way of hacking up a body that Eakins overlooked.

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Installation shot of the exhibition under review, Mr.: Metamorphosis: Give Me Your Wings (2012) at Lehman Maupin Gallery. Courtesy the Artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York

In an eerie augury of Hurricane Sandy’s onslaught, Chelsea galleries in October 2012 were full of art about disasters. Three separate exhibitions put viewers face-to-face with the calamities, natural or man-made, of recent years. Although widely varied in their tone, each beckoned viewers to consider themes of fragility, vanity, and culpability.

At Lehman Maupin, the Japanese artist Mr. used a room full of clutter to depict the horror and chaos left by his country’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The installation Metamorphosis: Give me Your Wings packed the gallery’s center with furniture, toys, books, boxes and chattering television sets. The artist covered the surrounding walls with graffiti and canvases painted in the Manga style. Teen magazines, thick with soft-focus photographs of adolescent girls, were piled and strewn everywhere.  With the focus on aspects of Japanese culture that fascinate Americans—the magazines and the Manga illustration—the installation seemed quite like an alternative comic book store that had been run through a centrifuge. Rather than mourn, I felt I was being asked to browse.

Not far away, Thomas Hirschhorn’s room-sized display Concordia, Concordia at Barbara Gladstone commemorated the recent cruise ship sinking off the coast of Italy. Entry to the main part of the gallery was blocked by floor to ceiling wreckage. With paintings on the ceiling, flat panel televisions on the floor, and lamps hung sideways from the wall, the whole scene was topsy-turvy. Skeins of unwound videotape cascaded over piles of orange life vests, and in a reminder of the film Titanic, heaps of broken plates. Seen under the glow of unshielded fluorescent lamps, the installation’s tawdry materials—brass, Styrofoam, fake wood paneling—were a poignant reminder of cruise ships’ paper-thin luxury. That Hirschhorn took a stand on his subject’s banal materialism made his pile of clutter more effective than the previous one.

Ejecting myself from the airless nightmare of the Concordia, I found momentary relief in a serene and spare arrangement of curved metal bars at Mary Boone’s Chelsea Gallery for Ai Weiwei’s installation, Forge. A quiet interplay of form and void focused thoughts on the granularity of matter and how, viewed from a distance, disconnected bits add up to solid forms. Little did I know that the bits I was looking at were actually rubble from the deadly 2008 Sichuan earthquake.  Ai’s two-part installation, which continues at Mary Boone’s midtown location) featured twisted rebars recovered from concrete school buildings that had collapsed on their young occupants’ heads.  The artist’s orchestrated recovery of the rebar, depicted in a video shown in the back of the gallery, brought dozens of volunteers together to painstakingly collect, clean, transfer, and hand-straighten thousands of pieces of the material. His bold maneuver was at once performance art, craft, political defiance. The undertaking’s communitarian ethos effectively condemned the enforced communitarianism of China’s overlords (who use the word “harmony” as a euphemism for censorship). It also, of course, helped land the artist in jail.

By making disaster art that was not itself a disaster, Ai captured his subject the more effectively. Whether his approach differed from those of Mr. or Hirschhorn as the result of artistic sensibility or culture of origin I cannot tell. Regardless, this multi-national array of disaster exhibitions—and the recent horrors of Sandy—remind us that disaster does not respect nationality. Where human beings presume themselves to be invincible, nature is there to show them otherwise.

Exhibitions discussed in this article:
Mr.: Metamorphosis: Give Me Your Wings at Lehman Maupin Gallery, September 13 – October 20, 2012, 540 West 26th Street;
Thomas Hirschhorn: Concordia, Concordia at Gladstone Gallery, September 14 – October 20 , 2012,  530 West 21st Street
Ai Weiwei: Forge at Mary Boone Gallery, October 13 to December 21, 2012, 541 West 24th Street/745 Fifth Avenue

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