February 13 to May 26, 2013
235 Bowery, between Rivington and Stanton streets
New York City, (212) 343-0460

Felix Gonzalez Torres, Untitled, 1993. Courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley

NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, currently on view at the New Museum, examines the art scene in New York over the course of one year and attempts to chart a lineage connecting the city’s artists working today with the major players of twenty years ago.  Of course, many of the featured artists are still active in the New York scene, and it’s a falsehood to suggest that this group of artists was the first to engage in robustly political art.  The insinuation that these artists were the first to tackle such historically broad issues as race, gender, economic concerns and sexuality is one of the many frustrations of the exhibition, and while the works on display are some of the most visible of the period, one senses a missed political opportunity on the part of the curators.

The show is certainly prolific in scale, the first in the New Museum’s history to span all five floors and take up every gallery space.  The wall text and catalog essays (much of it written by curator Massimiliano Gioni and the New Museum’s director Lisa Phillips) stress the notion of “capturing a particular moment.”  This moment, according to Gioni, saw the rise of relational aesthetics—in his view a product of a global recession—as well as a critique of consumerism, and an emphasis on art as a basis for community building.  But why turn to 1993 as a time capsule for these problems?  On the same day as the press preview, the brilliant critic and theorist Amelia Jones was featured on a panel at the College Art Association Annual Conference titled “Art Criticism: Taking a Pulse.” In her talk Jones brought to light the enormous debt that Rirkrit Tiravanija and others working directly within Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of relational art owed to the feminist artists of the 1960s and ‘70s.  I bring this up to illustrate that what Gioni terms a “new conceptual climate” seems much more influenced by the art of twenty years prior than is made public in the text for the show. The missing historical link is the broad adoption in the 1970s of postmodern theory in academia and MFA programs across the country, and the guidance of artist-teachers who were deeply invested in feminist and relational politics.

While much of the work in NYC 1993 is rooted in institutional critique and questions of gender and race, the wall labels and curators’ comments in the catalog are no match for the intellectual rigour of the art on display.  Furthermore, many of these works would be greatly enriched by a reading that steps outside of their historical contingency. David Hammons’s quietly shocking In the Hood consists of the hood cut from a green sweatshirt, hung on the wall.  The work recalls decapitation, the suspicious image of the hooded black man so often seen on facial composite sketches, and even evokes the Ku Klux Klan.  If the curators were to initiate a conversation that relates the art practices of 1993 with the political landscape of today, the shooting of the black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 would have been an obvious parallel to draw with this piece.  Hammons’s simple work is imbued with suspicion, fear, and the simultaneous concealing and exposure of identity: issues that are far more nuanced than the translation of “hood” as black lexicon for “neighborhood,” which the wall text offers.

With that being said, many of the works on display are incredibly powerful, and, for me, aesthetically representative of the time period the show examines.  Two understated pieces by the Mexican-born artist Gabriel Orozco on display in the second floor gallery fell under this category. Yielding Stone is a clay ball of the artist’s weight, which he rolled from his studio on Broadway to the New Museum in 1993.  The sculpture resembles a boulder, and though its surface is constituted by the grit and grime of lower Manhattan, the art object more closely resembles an organic form found outside the city.  Isla en la Isla (Island within an Island) is a small photograph taken next to the West Side Highway of a miniature Manhattan skyline made from garbage and wood debris facing the real skyline.  This “gritty” work, in which the city plays a lead role, is characteristic of the overall aesthetic of the exhibition. The rough simplicity of Orozco’s work shares an urban poignancy with the enormous, yet equally subtle, Félix González-Torres billboard Untitled, on the fourth floor. In marked contrast, the filmmaker Larry Clark’s multimedia installation revels in the same “downtown” aesthetic without the conceptual or emotional weight.

David Hammons, In the Hood, 1993. Athletic sweatshirt hood with wire. 23 x 10 x 5 inches. Courtesy of New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley

An arresting work to see in person was Janine Antoni’s installation Lick and Lather consisting of fourteen self-portrait busts deformed either through Antoni bathing herself, as she did with the busts carved from soap, or gnawing and licking away at those made of chocolate. The work was originally displayed at the ’93 Venice Biennale, and this show along with the ’93 Whitney Biennial were touched upon numerous times within the exhibition.  Glenn Ligon’s contribution to the 1993 Biennial catapulted him to art superstardom, and while his Notes on the Margin of the Black Book was absent from NYC 1993 (perhaps because he started working on the piece in 1991) his Red Portfolio was an ingenious addition to the exhibition.  The work exists as a series of framed descriptions, white text on black background, of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs as penned by the Reverend Pat Robertson in a 1989 letter for his constituents in an effort to describe government-funded works.  “A photo of a man in a suit exposing himself” refers to Mapplethorpe’s Man in a Polyester Suit (1980), an image that is a subtle and tender a commentary on the fear of black masculinity this is possible in the presence of an enormous black penis.  The culture wars of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was certainly burned into the public consciousness of the time, and Ligon’s work brilliantly displays the attitudes of the religious right without judgment or commentary, allowing the slippery relationship between art images and language to be laid bare.

My experience of NYC 1993 was one of equal parts frustration and fascination.  It would have been impossible to include every revered work from that year in the exhibition, but the selection of art chosen by the curators was extraordinary. It must be noted, however, that a majority of the work was rooted in the political or institutional critique of its time.  The frustration thus lies in a reticence on the part of the New Museum to examine more closely the historical and social contingencies of the art on display, and the ways in which it differentiates itself from art being produced in 2013. Instead of taking up these thorny issues, the curators have presented a neat time-capsule exhibition that seemingly functions no differently today than it would have in 1993.

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September 6 to December 8, 2012
New York University
100 Washington Square East
New York City, 212-998-6780

Frank Moore, Birth of Venus, 1993. Oil and silkscreen on linen mounted on wood, in antique gilded frame, 51-1/4 x 73-1/4 inches. Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

Ten years after the artist’s death from AIDS complications, Grey Art Gallery celebrates the work of Frank Moore with the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date.  Accompanying the exhibition is an illustrated catalogue edited by Grey director Lynn Gumpert containing essays on the artist by Klaus Kertess, Susan Harris, and Gregg Bordowitz.  The catalogue also compiles a collection of Moore’s own writings on his work along with reproductions of his paintings and works on paper.  The book is a very well crafted glimpse into the artist’s life and art, with a particular emphasis on his interest in the body as a site of “Toxic Beauty.”

A skilled painter trained in abstraction, Moore turned to representation in the early 1980s for its narrative capacity.  In her catalogue essay, abstract painter Susan Harris points to the artist’s archive, The Frank Moore Papers, now housed at NYU, to trace his professional history and search for clues about his subjects.  Poignantly, she is stricken with a luminosity evidenced by Moore’s spirited journals, which she relates formally to an effulgent quality in his work.  There was something hopeful about Moore’s endeavor, his countless books, articles, and journal entries evidence of his searching for answers about how our lives are reproduced through visual culture.  Moore moved to Paris after graduating from Yale in 1975 to study at the Cité Internationale des Arts.  By the early 1980s he had already exhibited in numerous group shows in New York, and upon his return to The States struck up a relationship with Choreographer Jim Self for whom he worked as a set designer.  The dreamlike quality of Moore’s work from this time has its roots in surrealism, in particular the American surrealist Paul Cadmus, evidenced both by the artist’s formal use of color and the iconography in his work dealing with gender and sexuality.

Frank Moore, Emigrants, 1997–98. Oil and silkscreen on canvas mounted on featherboard, in artist’s frame (various moldings), 68 x 104 inches. Private collection, Italy. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

Gregg Bordowitz, an artist and activist himself, was a close friend of Moore’s, and his essay “Battle Lines” very carefully contextualizes the artist’s work surrounding identity, HIV/AIDS, and the environment within the socio-political climate of 1980s New York.  For all of its poetic subject matter and delicate narrative structure, Bordowitz sees Moore’s work as inherently tied to conflict.  Be it conflicts been the AIDS activist community and the policy governing their treatment, or a metaphysical examination of conflicts between the living and the dead, there is a tension in Moore’s work which is offset by his delicate forms.  His most captivating inquiry deals with Moore’s 1997 work Emigrants, a painting which is included in the catalogue but not on display in the exhibition.  The piece depicts two young gay art handlers who carry an upside down painting of a flag, á la Jasper Johns, collaged in newspaper clippings, one reading “Prostitutes and AIDS.”  These visual hints insist that the viewer look closely at the painting within the painting for clues about the narrative.  Our view of the flag painting is obfuscated by transparent packing material that protects the fragile work while also, perhaps, acting as a symbol for safe sex.  Regrettably, an interrogation of the work alongside that of Jasper Johns is markedly absent from Bordowitz’ commentary.  Johns, a gay artist practicing during the Cold War, was forced to used carefully placed iconography within his paintings to allow for a queer reading of his work without having outing himself to those outside his circle.  Moore, of course, was openly gay throughout his career, open even about his HIV status, and this working through of his personal life—the deepest part of himself—is evident in his work.

Dream-like as they are, there is something distinctly literary about Moore’s paintings, each a tome with layers of information to be read and discovered.  In his essay in the volume, curator Klaus Kertess speaks to Moore’s interest in myth and allegory, a trend, he sees in late 20th-century American art.  He points to Kara Walker’s witty, and often grotesque, reworkings of master/ slave narratives, and the dreamlike fictive universe of creation, destruction and rebirth that Mathew Barney creates for his Cremaster series.  Kertess highlights Moore’s hilarious 1993 work, Venus in particular.  Venus is an allegorized portrait of New York drag queen Lady Bunny portrayed as a mermaid lounging languorously on the beach, her erotic gaze designed to meet and challenge the viewers.  Littered on the sand around her we find used condoms, hypodermic needles, pill bottles, and evidence of sperm swimming ashore.  Bunny’s penis is featured front and center in the work, for which Moore insists he used himself as a model, painting with his pants down to get the perfect view.  Moore is equally interested in issues of sexuality as he is in topics as wide ranging as genetic engineering, addiction, and the sublimity of nature.  He is able to bound effortlessly both in tone and in subject matter from one work to another with either a wink or a turn of the knife, his oeuvre a testament to his wide range of interest.

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March 16 to July 8, 2012
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, New York (718) 638-5000

Keith Haring (American, 1958–1990). Untitled, 1982. Sumi ink on paper, 107 x 160 in. (271.8 x 406.4 cm). Collection Keith Haring Foundation. © Keith Haring Foundation

This exhibition of Haring’s early work focuses on the artist’s emergence as part of the New York underground, chronicling his evolution from SVA student and club-kid to the year of his SoHo debut at the prestigious Tony Shafrazi gallery.  Keith Haring: 1978-1982 is the first survey of its kind dedicated to the artist’s beginnings, and offers an in-depth look into his evolving process with some striking, never before seen works.

The exhibition aims to trace what curator Raphaela Platow calls the artist’s visual vocabulary—namely his dynamic figures, swirling forms, phallic objects, and instantly recognizable line drawings.  Interestingly, his early work features a more literal manipulation of language, specifically his use of cutting, pasting and collage of found text to create new meanings.  A selection of these experiments from 1980 is on display, and one untitled text collage from 1980 reads: POPE KILLED FOR FREED HOSTAGE.  These works were reproduced using a Xerox machine and pasted around New York City, an early example of Haring’s interest in making art accessible to the masses.  This same experimentation with language is evidenced in Haring’s SVA-era films on display, Phonics (1980) and Lick Fat Boys (1979).  For these videos, Haring and his friends manipulate and rearrange phonemes (“art fat lick” “boys lick fat”) to produce similar effects of his collages through oral recitation.  These remixed language pieces are complimented by a collection of 25 red gouache-painted shapes with which Haring experimented to create abstract forms.  In limiting himself to this specific geometric vocabulary, the figures form a sort of visual alphabet, their shape hinting at Haring’s later, more figurative work.

The exhibition features many small-scale works on paper, produced rapidly for friends and often ripped out of notebooks.  A standout here is a series of works titled Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks (1978).  Haring had a knack for skirting the line between boyish play and social commentary and his phallic renderings of New York architecture are an excellent example of these slips in identification.  Haring’s more deliberate political works – many produced after the artist reached international heights of fame – are all but absent from the show.  While it wasn’t until the later years of his life that he enlisted imagery promoting safe sex, his early drawings on display are not without his playfully sexual forms.  His line drawing of the twin towers subbed out in favor of two erect penises subtly suggests the interplay between economy, masculine power and gay sex.

Keith Haring (American, 1958–1990). Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks, 1978. Graphite on paper, 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (21.6 x 14.0 cm). Collection Keith Haring Foundation. © Keith Haring Foundation

The beginnings of the Haring’a large-scale ink drawings are displayed in the exhibition’s first galleries and showcase the artist’s facility with line, realized here in brushed sumi ink.  Perhaps most captivating when viewed in series, these early experiments with scale feature Haring’s signature drips, a testament to the artist’s confidence and looseness of production.  Interested equally in the work of the Abstract Expressionists, Jean Dubuffet, and Pre-Columbian design, Haring’s forms speak to a fascination with the gesture as well as a desire to produce forms embedded in his subconscious, seeking always to paint spontaneously and without hesitation.  A journal entry from 1978 reads: “when I can unify my movements so that I can paint consistently at a very high rate of speed on a very spontaneous, natural, spiritual level; then perhaps I will have exhausted the possibilities of the kind of ‘body- involvement’ painting I am currently involved in.”  This notion of performance imbedded in Haring’s works speaks to his emphasis on process: his movements studied and automatic like those of a dancer.

Haring’s early career also saw him as a downtown impresario and fixture in the gay club scene, and his role as a social connector and curator is evident throughout the exhibition.  It was Keith Haring who brought together then emerging artists Madonna, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat at Club 57 and the Mudd Club, where he curated the 4th floor gallery.  Vitrines containing documentary photographs are displayed alongside a projected slideshow of Haring’s subway chalk drawings, photographed in situ by his friend and collaborator Tsend Kwong Chi. The sceney snapshots on display consist mainly of black and white images taken by photographer Joseph Szkodzinski of Haring and his friends partying in downtown nightclubs.   Equal parts nostalgic and uplifting, this portion of the exhibition accounts for the pulsating eighties soundtrack audible in the rest of galleries.

The show closes with a collection of Haring’s much anticipated chalk subway art, drawn on the black paper used to cover old advertisements in the stations. The majority of these drawings are new additions to the exhibition, on loan from a mysterious private collection.  The delicate chalk renderings showcase the artist’s signature gesture, and are presented encased in glass shadowboxes, an effect that amplifies their ephemeral fragility.  The simple figures speak to Haring’s commitment to bringing art out of the gallery and into the streets.  Thanks to his more than fifty public artworks, many of which are still displayed around New York City, we can now have his work in both places.

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Photograph of Mike Kelley by Cameron Wittig. Courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Addressing early-on his distaste for popular culture, Kelley was perhaps an unlikely pioneer of the postmodern movement, yet his penchant for disassembling, appropriating, and remixing has made him a poster-child for the period.  By reconfiguring thrift store finds, Kelley ingeniously played upon the tension between their surface qualities and cultural significance.  Critic John Welchman explained Kelley’s particular style of “aesthetic disobedience” as a political tool designed to expose and reject the social mores inherent to American culture.  This notion was first evidenced by his collaboration with Tony Oursler during the late 1970s for Destroy All Monsters.  Part performance art project part noise band, Destroy All Monsters enjoyed resurgence in the 1990s when Thurston Moore rereleased a collection of the band’s music on his label Ecstatic Peace.

Kelley’s collaborations with fellow provocateur Paul McCarthy throughout the late 1980s and 1990s always felt like a natural pairing. One of the duo’s more hilariously disturbed works was the 1987 video Family Tyranny in which McCarthy demonstratively smushes wet plaster into the face of a crude mannequin, chanting “they’ll remember it, don’t let them forget it.”  Mike Kelley plays an infant for the tape, shown crawling on the floor in a desperate attempt to escape the scene.

The artist’s first retrospective “Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes,” appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1993 before traveling to Los Angeles and Munich, and was succeeded by a survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in 1997. A third survey took place at Tate Liverpool in 2004.  More recently, Kelley produced the installation Day is Done (2005) for Gagosian Gallery, creating a sensory-assaulting environment jam-packed with shrieking voices, a maze of installations, and three hours of videotape.  While Ben David at artnet Magazine called the work nihilistic, Jerry Saltz preferred the term “Clusterfuck Aesthetics.”  The artist’s legacy continues with yet another retrospective of his work slated for the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam at the end of this year, traveling to LA MOCA in 2014.  Just last month, Mike Kelley was announced as a featured artist in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, his eighth appearance in the show, capping off a thirty five-year career embracing a wide host of media.  The skeptic of popular culture is now imbued in the very fabric of our visual world.  He will be sorely missed.

What would Mike Like? Tributes to Mike Kelley by Jane Hart, Dave Kudzma and Janese Weingarten

Mike Kelley, Arena #7, 1990. Found stuffed animals, wood, and blanket 11 1/2 x 53 x 49 inches. Courtesy of Skarstedt Gallery, New York

The tragic news of Mike Kelley’s death reverberated throughout the art world with countless individuals already expressing their grief, shock and – initially  – disbelief that it could be true that an individual so passionate about his art and life could be gone. A tribute concert was held in Los Angeles for him on February 7 with throngs of those who loved and admired him in attendance. A poignant memorial shrine continues to evolve in Highland Park (and a related Facebook page), accumulating a fitting hodgepodge of detritus in an abandoned lot minutes from where he lived and worked.

I met Mike while living in Los Angeles. We had collaborated on a large-scale photographic project for a solo show he had at Metro Pictures in the late ‘90s. His unique vision and dedication to his art were unwavering. I feel so very privileged to have had the chance to get to know him through our varied encounters.

Now living back in South Florida, I had the opportunity to reminisce about Mike with two friends that had both been among his longtime studio assistants: artists Dave Kudzma and Janese Weingarten, both also recently moved back to Miami. We each felt a sense of being disconnected from all of those– his nearest and dearest– back in Los Angeles who have experienced the full force of this loss to the contemporary art community.

Mike had a very loyal circle of close friends who in a sense made up his “family”:former loves, Anita Pace and Emi Fontana; contemporaries Jim Shaw and Paul McCarthy;and many younger artists who had come into contact with him through studying with him or working at his studio compound. He touched peoples’ lives in a very substantial way—through his tremendous sense of humor, unquenchable curiosity of the human condition, and an all-encompassing devotion to his work which spanned so many forms.

Though undoubtedly among the world’s most acclaimed artists, Mike shunned the more glamorous aspects of the art world. Throughout his success he remained very down to earth, although always driven where his work was concerned. He was both accessible and private. Dave and Janese remarked how he enjoyed simple pleasures of life’s daily routines — lunch at a handful of local spots, sharing odd stories of the news of the day, the silly thrill of a cool thrift store find— all the while reveling in the arduous process of putting together his often monumentally sprawling projects.

For those who knew him and/or were touched by his work–life will not be the same. What will be remembered most are his boisterous laugh, rebellious yet tender exuberance and a transformative expression of all that sparked his unbridled imagination.  Jane Hart

Dave Kudzma adds: Working for Mike Kelley could be challenging and difficult as he was so involved in the production of his work, but that said, he was also a really great human being who was inspiring and fun to be around. I went out to lunch with him almost every day and it was always as Mike’s friend. He would never talk about what was going on at work; instead we would usually amuse ourselves by discussing pop culture, music or television and movies. Funny thing about those lunchtimes was that Mike only went to five or six restaurants in the immediate vicinity of his studio.  I would occasionally try to get some other place added to the roster, but the only one I ever succeeded with was Sizzler. I will always remember those good times at those few special restaurants. Lunch with Mike was always the highlight of my workday at Kelley Studios.

Janese Weingarten adds: When I first started working for Mike Kelley I made costumes for his movie “Day Is Done.” Some costumes were made from thrift store clothes that I would modify. At the thrift store I would look for cool, vintage tchotchkes that were inexpensive. When I would show Mike the finished costume I included the tchotchke as a present in order to hear the big laugh I loved so much. Sometimes it was hard to tell if Mike liked the project that you were working on, but, if you got the “big laugh” you knew you were on the right track. So, forever more in life I will always think of Mike when I thrift shop. I will think ….What would Mike like?

October 13th to November 12, 2011
535 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-647-1044

Installation shot of Lynne Yamamoto’s Genteel at P.P.O.W, October 13 to November 12, 2011

Lynne Yamamoto is one of the two female artists with solo-shows on view at P.P.O.W, continuing the gallery’s trend of exhibiting mid-career women this season, beginning with Martha Wilson’s “I have become my own worst fear.”  Katherine Kuharic’s series “Pound of Flesh” showcases her signature collages and oil paintings.  Particularly resonant commentaries on consumerism today, her works recall the pop art of Tom Wesselman and Richard Hamilton.  A smaller, more private gallery is devoted to Yamamoto’s hauntingly austere works.  Born and raised in Hawaii, much of the artist’s oeuvre speaks to the implications of nationality and culture in shaping identity.  Titled “Genteel,” Yamamoto’s minimal and monochromatic exhibition houses only two projects: Insect Immigrants, After Zimmerman (1948) Hawaii, 2009-11 and the sculpture Grandfather’s Shed, 2008-10.

Insects are a reoccurring device in Yamamoto’s work.  Often employed to speak to issues of seriality and taxonomy, they are used here to examine the complexity of Hawaiian nativity.  Insect Immigrants consists of a collection of found white doilies, each hand embroidered with a different insect and displayed to face the wall, making visible the painstaking production of each loop and knot.  Yamamoto’s exposure of her elaborate process speaks to the complex construction of Hawaiian identity with its multi-ethnic population.  Much like the identity of Hawaiian immigrant people, each work in her series is unique, yet forcibly classified, titled with the embroidered insect’s scientific name.

Yamamoto’s handmade pieces are clustered and suspended using black insect pins, originally intended for mounting and displaying real beetles and butterflies.  Here, the pins are used to draw the doilies away from the gallery wall, casting dramatic shadows. The installation almost appears to glow from within, the visual impact of the 78 insect immigrants alluding to the effectiveness of a critical mass.  Within the group, however, there is a painstaking allegiance to individuality, the personal identity of each insect crafted by hand upon a vintage doily, itself imbued with a lengthy history.

Lynne Yamamoto, Grandfather's Shed, 2008-10. Hand finished, digitally carved marble from 3D scan of hand-made positive, 10-3/4 x 11-1/4 x 9-3/4 inches, edition of 2. Courtesy of P.P.O.W.

A statement from P.P.O.W references the arrival of American missionaries to Hawaii in the early 1800s who established plantations that drew waves of immigrants.  This immigrant presence has had a lasting effect on the ethnic diversity, and in turn the collective identity, of the state.  Yamamoto’s title, Insect Immigrants, After Zimmerman (1948) Hawaii, refers to a 1948 scientific volume compiled by Elwood C. Zimmerman, an entomologist who catalogued all Hawaiian insect fauna including over 5,000 insects native to the state.  This metaphor of a native species serves to inform the larger dialogue of nationality in a place with such a complex cultural identity.

The fragility of Yamamoto’s doilies is countered by the stoic impenetrability of her marble sculpture, Grandfather’s Shed.  Displayed on a pedestal in the corner of the gallery, the small relic is a markedly more personal commentary on cultural identity, paying tribute to Yamamoto’s own family history.  The work is subtitled Lana’i City, Island of Lana’I and memorializes her grandfather’s humble woodshop, originally constructed from scavenged materials.  The sculpture was produced through a 3D scan of a hand-made positive, then hand-detailed by the artist from memory.  The shed is rendered in what appears to be realistic detail, with a dented roof and gaps in the siding where the wooden panels have come away from the frame.  The permanence of the material is heightened by the solidity of the work itself– all doors and windows have been closed off, affording no transparency or view of the interior.

By implementing distinctly European methods of construction, both with her embroidery and marble sculpture, Yamamoto makes reference to a western identity, and perhaps her current positioning as an immigrant.  Interested in the visual signifiers that constitute cultural identity, Yamamoto highlights the very slips and contradictions that contribute to the plurality of the self.

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May 26th to September 11th, 2011
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York City, 212 570 3600

Cory Arcangel, Various Self Playing Bowling Games (aka Beat the Champ), 2011 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Hacked video game controllers, game consoles, cartridges, discs, and video, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist; Team Gallery, New York; Lisson Gallery, London; and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg and Paris. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins

Nearly all the 37 works featured in Cory Arcangel’s Pro Tools were realized over the past six months.  The artist’s speed of production mirrors his interest in the rate at which new technologies reach obsolescence, a theme central to his practice.  Equal parts hacker and historiographer, Arcangel’s meditations on authenticity, access, and authorship speak to his politics of open source culture: the exhibition “catalogue” is a downloadable PDF and the artist encourages the viewer to reproduce his works at home.  He approaches his subjects—outdated game consoles, robotic pen-plotters—with an honest, fragile fascination in their inner workings.  Arcangel’s production, meanwhile, recalls the creative process instilled over the course of an MFA: his relatively narrow thematic seems to have been realized in iteration after iteration to the point of exhaustion.  Though accomplished, the resulting show walks a line between comprehensive and redundant.

For his work Volume Management, Arcangel converts an entire gallery into an electronic warehouse, complete with tacky wall-to-wall carpeting and a tower of packaged flat screen TVs.  At one time the pinnacle of electronic advancement, each muted television box is reduced to an infinitely reproducible commodity.  In a reference to Duchamp’s readymades, Arcangel questions the function of the galley space, interpreting the museum as its own brand of showroom.  While the unopened televisions will depreciate over time as their technology approaches obsolescence, Archangel’s art installation will see a continuous increase in value, assuming the artist becomes more marketable by means of his Whitney Museum solo-show.  The tension between these two value systems is revisited in Arcangel’s highly produced Photoshop CS prints, each created with one mouse-click in the software’s gradient tool.  Referencing midcentury color field painting, which sought to minimize the visibility of the artist’s hand, Arcangel supplies the exact coordinates of his mouse, encouraging reproducibility and abdicating authorship.  The images are elegantly printed and quite striking in person, but the appearance of twelve of these works throughout the show quickly became monotonous and speaks to the show’s overall repetitiveness.

Cory Arcangel, There’s Always One At Every Party, 2010 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Video, color, sound; 9:13 minutes. Collection of the artist; Team Gallery, New York; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg and Paris. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins

His 2010 installation, There’s Always One at Every Party, consists of a clunky 1990s television set on a black metal frame with casters, the setup reminiscent a high school AV system.. A series of clips from Seinfeld, one of the more ubiquitous relics of  ‘90s pop culture, plays on the screen.  The compilation isolates and weaves together each instance during the show that Kramer’s coffee table book about coffee tables is mentioned.  This supercut reflects the same formal elements as Kramer’s idea: isolating, splicing and remixing to produce a compilation that serves solely to entertain.  Arcangel ingeniously desegregates two disparate media that ostensibly serve the same purpose.  This practice of isolating, splicing and mashing-up is central to the artist’s practice, but this style of art making has become ubiquitous in recent years and appears in so many different iterations throughout the show that it unfortunately loses its punch.  Arcangel once again showcases his signature remixing technique in the exhibition’s most ambitious installation, Various Self-Playing Bowling Games (aka beat the champ).  Here, the artist creates a virtual bowling alley at the exhibition’s entrance consisting of seven lanes each looping a different bowling simulation.  The furthest left lane features the most antiquated graphics: Atari Bowling from 1977.  Read from left to right, the installation chronicles the technical progression of electronic gaming, ending with a 2001 bowling simulation for XBox. The effect is sensory overload: each game flashes and buzzes at different intervals, the balls never once making contact with the pins.  The result is an endless series of gutterballs.  To create the work, the artist rigged each console with a computer chip that` recorded his actions and repeated them on a loop, a Sisyphean spectacle of failure.  Beat the Champ highlightsthe absurdity of a simulation of the lived experience: the “progress” shown through the increased graphic quality over time is undermined by the virtual players’ inability to move past the first level.

This examination of manufactured renditions of reality emerges again in Arcangel’s masterful work, Paganini’s Caprice no.5. Nicolò Paganini’s virtuouso violin compositionhas been appropriated by countless heavy metal guitarists on YouTube.  In a sort of meta-supercut, Arcangel isolates and splices together individual notes from the different guitar solos to reconstruct the piece in its entirety.  The prospect of personal and artistic expression through technology is of particular interest to Arcangel, who mines the smallest niches of Internet culture for his source material.  Paganini was produced using self-made software, Gould Pro (named for Glenn Gould).  The program was created out of necessity in order to capture and edit content at lightening speeds.  In the exhibition catalogue, curator Christiane Paul affirms that the meticulous work displays mastery on three levels: that of the original composition, the proficiency of the guitarists online and Arcangel’s invention of state-of-the-art software. While Arcangel’s commentary on reproducibility and authorship is inarguably relevant in this cultural moment, these ideas are somehow inextricably linked to 1980s postmodernism.  The show itself is compelling, if not redundant, but the thematic employed by Arcangel comes across as overworked.

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August 3rd to October 16th, 2011
Houston and 2nd Avenue
A New York City Parks Property

BMW Guggenheim Lab. Exterior view from East First Street. Photo: Paul Warchol

August 3rd marked the activation of an ambitious nine-year Guggenheim Foundation initiative: the BMW Guggenheim Lab, an urban installation aimed to investigate issues of sustainability, adaptability, and comfort in the built environment.  The nine-year project has been divided into three “cycles,” each with a separate advisory committee and commissioned structure.  Beginning in New York’s East Village, cycle one will make stops in Berlin and Mumbai in order to examine the theme of Confronting Comfort.

The lightweight mobile structure currently on view on 1st Street was designed by Tokyo-based collective Atelier Bow-Wow, and is nestled squarely into the surrounding urban landscape.  Built on two levels, the bottom half is left open-air, outfitted with a theatrical rigging system displaying flat-screen monitors and spotlights for evening events.  The upper level is swathed in fiber mesh to conceal additional chairs, lighting and supports, creating what the designers call a “traveling toolbox.”  The compact structure is the first ever to contain an internal framework made entirely of carbon fiber.  It stands at a compact 2,200 feet square and accommodates 300 people.

Guggenheim curators Maria Nicanor and David van der Leer conceived of The Lab, partnering with BMW for what they call a “cultural cooperation.”  The cycle-one advisory committee is composed of prominent designers, policy-makers, and artists who are charged with nominating an interdisciplinary team of emerging educators and activists appointed to design the public programming.  The NYC team has embraced a DIY aesthetic, evidenced by the graffiti-covered brick of the tenement next door and the timber snack shack (catered by beloved Bushwick eatery, Roberta’s) across the street.  Any opulence or luxury associated with the Guggenheim foundation or BMW brand has been ostensibly erased for the installation—formally substantiating the project’s commitment to sustainability and localization.  The partnership worked closely with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation who own the 1^st street property.  The once-vacant lot was stabilized and paved for the installation and surrounding sidewalks were replaced.  The project also funded the installation of new wrought-iron gates and fences surrounding the property.

The structure is set to house a series of 100 free interactive programs, video screenings and lectures. A user-activated game entitled Urbanology invites visitors and passerby to build their own city by answering a series of questions that speak to transportation, sustainability, livability, and other urban issues.  Comfort—a theme often associated with domestic space—is brought into the public domain to interrogate the ways in which cities can be most responsive to the needs of a community.  All programs are free and open to the public as well as accessible online at bmwguggenheimlab.org.  The following two cycles will be announced at a later date and will each feature a different structure and set of programming.  After the completion of the first cycle, the Guggenheim in New York will exhibit the findings generated by the Mobile Lab.

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March 10th to June 5th, 2011
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York City, 212 570 3600

Installation view of Glenn Ligon: AMERICA (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 10-June 5, 2011). Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins.

Glenn Ligon’s mid-career retrospective is prolific in both scale and perspicacity, spanning nearly 30 years of work with over 100 individual pieces.  Curator Scott Rothkopf stresses Ligon’s formation as a Whitney scholar and his relationship with the museum beginning shortly after his graduation from the Independent Study Program and an invitation to participate in the 1991 Biennale.  The following years marked a creative partnership with Whitney Department Curator Thelma Golden, who featured Ligon in the seminal 1993 Biennale as well as the ambitious exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art. Always situated at the intersection of black and queer visual representation, Ligon is perhaps most well-known for his text-based works exploring construction and dissolution.  AMERICA, while directly addressing these issues, spotlights the painterly concerns of the artist, emphasizing Ligon’s facility with form and his strength in editing.

Opening the exhibition with paintings realized in 1985, Rothkopf cites Ligon’s graduation from the Whitney ISP as a catalyzing artistic and political influence.  Drawing from the expressionism of Cy Twombly, Ligon’s earliest works with text feature a mixture of enamel and oil paints overlaid with gestural scrawls, quoting gay porn magazines.  The transition to his previously unconstituted “Door” paintings marks a move towards stenciled lettering as Ligon found handwritten text too personal.  Working in black oil stick over readymade white doors, the artist reproduces quotes written by figures as diverse as Zora Neale Hurston, Jesse Jackson, and Ice Cube.  Ligon’s lettering becomes increasingly more smudged, then illegible, as the eye moves down the panel.  Through repetition the letters blend together, losing their literal meaning and pointing to a discursive construction of language and a susceptibility to slips in identification.  The elegant sophistication of these paintings points to Ligon’s expressionist roots while the evocative texts (“I feel most colored when,” “wrong nigga to fuck with”) affirm a deep interest in collective black identity.

Glenn Ligon, Mirror, 2002. Coal dust, printing ink, glue, gesso, and graphite on canvas, 82-5/8 × 55-1/8 inches. Collection of Mellody Hobson © Glenn Ligon. Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

While these notions of identification and typology remains central to Ligon’s work, his quiet meditations on the human body resist the tendency towards the densely theoretical, instead grounding his practice in the intimately relational.  First evidenced by the door paintings, which respond to the scale of a human body, these works reference the self as implicit subject matter.  This notion of artist as subject is made literal in Ligon’s ambitious 1993 installation, To Disembark.  The work cites the compelling story of Henry “Box” Brown, who, in 1849, shipped himself in a wooden crate from slavery in Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia.  First displayed at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC, four of the original nine human-sized crates are on view in the center of the gallery.  From these packing crates reverberates disparate musical recordings dealing with blackness, including Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit and KRS-One’s Sound of Da Police.  The accompanying portfolio, Runaways, is on view as part of the installation.  The series of lithographs imitates 19th-century advertisements for the return of escaped slaves.  For the project, Ligon casts himself as the runaway, employing friends to draft posters from the voice of slave-owners describing their missing property.  Designed as a reminder of the way in which the past lives in the present, the work points to the singularity of individual experience as it relates to a shared cultural history.

Ligon’s first work situated explicitly at the intersection of black and queer visual representation, Notes on the Margin of the Black Book was first displayed at the Whitney as part of the 1993 Biennial.  Realized in the twilight of the 1990s Culture Wars, the ingenious work still resonates as it addresses the complicated aesthetic ambivalence associated with black masculinity and its representation.  For Notes, Ligon dissects Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial 1988 publication, Black Book, which features highly elegant, sexualized photographs of black male bodies.  At its origins, Black Book exists within a visual tradition of fantasy and desire stemming from the western trope of the passive female nude.  Ligon’s Notes places captions from drag queens, conservative senators, and museum curators alongside these images, addressing them within a multifarious cultural framework.  Removed from their indeterminate socio-historic contexts and grounded within larger frameworks of identification, these images allow the viewer’s fears and projections of black masculinity to be played out in their totality, multiplied, registered and refracted through a mirror of social construction.

Ligon’s “Joke” series marks his return to text paintings after an examination of the photo-document.  The devastatingly hilarious 1993 work Cocaine (Pimps) consists of a sumptuously red painted canvas stenciled with text of a Richard Pryor joke, performed during a stand-up routine in the mid 1970s.  When taken out of its spoken context, the reader is forced to repeat Pryor’s lewd words, however silently, gaining a sense of authorship over the message. Within the context of the gallery space, the viewer becomes the silent performer, and is forced to confront and identify with the text before her.  This quality of performance speaks to the construction of race and sexuality that the artist questions throughout his career.  By taking Pryor’s jokes off the stage and into the gallery, Ligon points to the ways in which language is reclaimed through history, and the effectiveness of words in producing group identity.

Before closing the exhibition with Ligon’s most recent series of neon sculptures, Rothkopf devotes a small gallery to the artist’s lesser known works, many of which have never been exhibited.  Ligon’s Self-Portrait at Seven Years Old from 2005 features a young Michael Jackson, pointing to the complexity of black collective identity as it relates to individual history.  2003’s End of the Year Reports consists of a suite of eight screen-prints on handmade paper which reproduce Ligon’s own grammar school report cards.  Mixed in are the grades of Glenn Ligon’s brother, again questioning the notion of authority and individuality within a group.  Though Ligon’s text-based works are far from antiseptic, with their painterly surfaces and evocative quotations, these small nods to the artist’s childhood and personal history were an interesting shift away from the artist’s works dealing with essentialism and collective politics.  Ligon finds his voice in the appropriation of images and text, subverting dominant racist and homophobic ideology by situating himself at the complex intersection of race, masculinity, and sexuality.

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November 18 to February 13th, 2011
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York City, 212 570 3600

Charles LeDray, Mens Suits, 2006-09, installation, variable dimensions. photo courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art

Charles LeDray’s survey at the Whitney resonates with intimate vulnerability.  His miniaturized, idiosyncratic totems are realized in startling detail, each one speaking to a personal history and hidden life.  There is an inherent delicateness to his work, which resists being adorable, despite its diminutive scale.  The careful execution of LeDray’s domestic sculptures speaks to his relationship to artistic process, though the politics behind his practice remain willfully opaque.  Still, a reoccurring interest in typology over his 25 year career is discernable, perhaps as a means to comment on the positioning of individual identity within an arbitrary social system.

LeDray’s installations of miniaturized garments are arguably his most iconic and evocative pieces.  Workworkworkworkwork, the show’s title artwork, introduces the viewer to LeDray’s fascination with the taxonomy inherent to social codification.  The installation is composed of 588 miniaturized objects spread across a small platform on the floor near the exhibition’s entrance.  The work was originally installed in New York’s Astor Place in 1991, designed to mimic the wares of homeless New York street-vendors.  The goods on display are classified in 23 distinct groupings based on an intuitive system of presentability, ostensibly designed to appeal to each vendor’s target consumers.  LeDray’s meticulous attention to detail is astounding, almost disconcerting- the thimble sized heels adorned with minuscule pearl buttons, the inch wide gay bondage magazines with pages that turn- these details speak to a level of mania that demands intense examination.

Charles LeDray, Milk and Honey, 1994–96. 2000 porcelain objects, glass, and wood, 77 × 30 × 30 in. (195.6 × 76.2 × 76.2 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee 96.75a-b

Not all of the LeDray’s works display this same level of obsession, though each piece is imbued with a sense of focused consideration.  The literalization of taxonomy through the action of “pinning down” is the subject of his 1922 installation, Dispatch (#1).  Here, we see an early fascination with the function of individual specimens within a larger system, whether arbitrary or scientific.  The 50 or so miniaturized books are tacked to the gallery wall in a configuration similar to that of a collection of insect specimens for study.  The title of the work can be read on multiple levels: is it a reference to the tiny books “dispatched” to the wall?  Or, perhaps the name speaks to the inability of the volumes to “dispatch” information as their pages are void of content.  It is also possible that the title refers to the books having been “dispatched” (put to death) and left on display for the viewer’s delectation.  These volumes function strictly as decorative objects and their typology is classifiable only by their patterned cover.  This interrogation of presentation is an early example of LeDray’s pervasive interest in the identity of the individual within a group and the ways in which that identity is signified.

Less broodingly existential than quietly political, LeDray’s works dealing with seriality are a highlight of the show. Always restrained and deliberate, his closed, self-contained system of units, Milk and Honey from 1994-96 subtly evokes a temporal-spatial examination.  Each of the 2000 miniscule glazed porcelain vessels speak to different tastes, places and times, from ancient Greece to contemporary Scandinavia.  LeDray seems to be taking from Agnes Martin’s meticulously perfect grid pieces here; like Martin, his emphasis on repetitive manual process hints at an influence of Zen Buddhism.  Displayed to resemble grandma’s collection of prized tchotchkes, Milk and Honey questions the very nature of the art object through its serial reproduction.  By constructing a glass shelving unit, the artist produces different perspectives for looking at the miniaturized works: head on, birds-eye, and peering from below.  This meditation of perception serves to draw a relationship between the construction of the art object and the social construction of group identity.

Mens Suits, LeDray’s most recent work in the exhibition, functions on much the same level as his series’ of ceramic vessels.  Here, LeDray stages what resembles a used men’s clothing store, stunted to knee-height, with each of the hundreds of individual garment displaying the same level of detail as his earlier works.  Referencing and dismantling the motif of industrial production of clothing by implementing painstaking precision through handcrafting, the work highlights the iterative process of artisanal construction.  The suggestion of unknown lives haunts the galleries of workworkworkworkwork, and is nowhere more evident than in this final piece.  There is something inherently human about the installation and its dark silence seems a testament to something that has been discarded, lost, or deceased.  The concentrated size of the objects in Mens Suits serves to heighten their emotional impact as the highly-detailed installation call for the viewer to stoop down and examine the objects from the height of a child.  These objects, while at scale perceived as the effects of the homeless, when miniaturized take on the quality of precious relics.  The size educes a self-awareness that draws a relationship between the viewers and objects on display.  These mementos serve as evidence of the passage of time, and the evocation of personal history tenderly implies that the viewer locate herself within the continuum.

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