April 21 to June 23, 2012
502 and 526 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-243-0200

Brice Marden, first famous for accomplished monochromatic works from the heysday of minimal art, later made interesting, but also to some extent naive, cultural appropriations of Chinese painting. Searching for a tradition through which he could find a way out of the reductivism of Western thinking, Marden based paintings on Chinese calligraphy and ink works. His calligraphic canvases and works on paper are certainly beautiful, but when one takes into consideration that the art he was inspired by comes from such a different place, it proves hard to envision his paintings solely as graceful meditations on Chinese painterly art. It is particularly dangerous, I think, when someone reaches so far across cultures and epochs for imagistic support. I am not suggesting that Marden is a dilettante—he is far too accomplished to be given that label—but it is relatively easy to see the body of work as an act of borrowing, undermined by the attempt to take on too much.

Brice Marden, First Square, 2011. Oil and graphite on marble, 15 3/4 x 9 7/8 inches. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery

So it was with a certain degree of wariness, even pessimism, that I made my way to Matthew Marks’s two gallery spaces on 22nd Street to see his latest, and again Chinese-inspired shows. But I found much that was stunning. At Number 502 there was a fragment of Ru ware, a Chinese ceramic marked by a slate blue color, that served as a measure of hue for the nine smallish panels—Ru Ware Project (2007-12)—done by Marden after he had seen a show of the ceramics in Taiwan, where he had gone on a trip in 2007 (following a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art). The press materials indicate that he painted the colors of the 11th-century ceramic glaze from memory; nine canvases, each 24 by 18 inches, make up the piece. Lined up across the wall, the colors are mostly blue, with the exception of the fourth panel from the right, which is a dark tan. These monochromatic panels effectively join Marden’s interest in historical Chinese culture with his minimalist work done two generations earlier. The painting exquisitely makes use of colors that come from a thousand years ago, in ways that dazzle through subtlety. And because the work refers both to a specific Chinese cultural production and to Marden’s earlier efforts, we fully understand the motivation behind the piece.

Then, at 526 West 22nd Street, there is a group of new works done on marble, which inevitably refer to the six-year period, 1981 through 1987, during which he painted on marble and bridged the minimalist paintings with the calligraphic ones. In the new group of paintings, it is possible to see how inventive the artist is; First Square (2011) looks like a transformation from the ancient to the very new. Two bands of color, first blue then white, sit atop a yellow triangle whose lowest side is met by a triangle of two stripes, one white and one green. A dark smudge (the graphite in the piece) cuts across the middle of the painting, rising up on the right-hand side. The work is particularly successful for the way Marden paints the idiosyncratic surfaces of the marble. We see much the same happen in Joined (2011), a narrow, vertically aligned slab of marble marked by pigment and graphite. The top two-thirds of the marble is painted a light green, while graphite is randomly applied, filling in hollows and creating abstract patterns of their own. Here we see Marden’s remarkable versatility adapting itself to the materials at hand, and creating lovely, subtle paintings on the stone. The results are so successful it makes one rethink the calligraphic paintings, which admittedly can be seen as a late revision of abstract expressionism. But little matter the past, for Marden has created a fine body of work now, in the present.

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May 6 to June 9, 2012
1 University Plaza, Brooklyn
Hours: weekdays 9am to 6pm, weekends, 10am to 5pm

Installation shot of work by Elana Herzog in the exhibition under review

The exhibition [B19] The Psychic Life of Objects invites artists to mull over the architecture, furniture, and overstuffed décor of Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud’s Vienna office at Berggasse 19, that meth lab of the modern psyche.  The results are smart, absurd, elegant, and wacky –– and sometimes eerily coincidental.  The very photographs, for example, that first documented this shrine and underlie many works in the show were taken by the father of a professor now at Long Island University, where [B19] happens to be mounted –– so the curators Matt Freedman and Laurence Hegarty discovered in medias res.  But read their poignantly hilarious essay (posted on the Romanov Grave website) for particulars about this and other visitations of the uncanny.  There, one also learns that Freedman’s father was a consulting psychiatrist at the trial of John Wayne Gacy.  This murderer of 33 boys was too charming, it seems, to be ruled unfit by insanity, and was ultimately executed –– which may inform one’s encounter with Jude Tallichet’s cast of the requisite analyst’s couch from Professor Dr. Freedman’s office.  Tallichet’s vivid red rubber mold is propped up with fragile struts –– fragile premises? –– and perhaps transmits, infinitesimally, Gacy’s lounging impress.

In all, 19 diverse and lively artists (a coincidental number, no doubt) steer a course between Eros and Thanatos.  Alan Wexler intertwines the misbehaving legs of a pair of chairs of subtly different hue, which reads as libidinous transference.  Francis Cape bends his more solemn, deadpan carpentry to an atypically modern prototype, a therapist’s chair, while referring us to an auto accident that confirms there are no accidents.  (It was en route to therapy.)

Jane Irish, Winter Soldier in 1971 Urn, 2012. Low Fire whiteware, china paint, underglaze and luster, 15 x 11 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

Rob de Mar models the hanging plants of B19 minus the dirt and pots, exposing root structure with a flourish that handily maps the subterranean to the subconscious; while Kyle LoPinto turns Freud’s cigars into gnarly rawhide turds, or maybe dried foreskins.  (Sometimes a sculpture is just a sculpture, but assuredly not in this case.)

Bill Morrison has made a stately video from archival science films and text that tells the story of his great-grandfather’s rivalry with Freud in the race to exploit the new wonder drug, cocaine.  (Another coincidence: the Morrisons lived across the street from the Freedmans.)  Elana Herzog vivisects Persian carpets with shag sunbursts, telling a story of –– as one of her titles indicates –– Civilization and its Discontents.  David Humphrey’s madcap figurine-assemblage and paintings epitomize free association, libido, and the pleasure principle.  Here he pushes the clutter on Freud’s desk to a cacophonous weirdness zone; while Jennie Nichols’ take on the same subject is somber, orderly, and brown with mock-antiquity –– by way of chocolate bunnies.

Jane Irish’s critical role in [B19] is to remake Freud’s collection of Greek urns as Meissen porcelain, adding an up-to-the-minute anti-war message.  In John Huston’s movie Freud (with an uncredited script by J.P. Sartre) Monty Clift as the father of psychoanalysis is unble to pass through the gates of the cemetery where his own father lies buried, a eureka moment in his derivation of the Oedipus Complex.  Dramatically compressed or not, it’s true that Freud never went six feet under: his remains are on permanent display, as Irish’s proleptic ceramics remind us, in one of his urns.  Fine contributions from Joe Amrhein, Matt Blackwell, Peter Drake and others round out this seriously irreverent exhibition, one in which a seemingly familiar totem brings forth abundant new taboos.

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March 29 to May 5, 2012
529 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-439-1700

Peter Howson, Hades III, 2011. Oil on canvas, 71¾ x 96¼ inches. Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Peter Howson has found religion.  To longstanding students of this Scottish brutalist-realist the news will be a matter of some surprise, or not.  He has dealt with apocalypse for most of his career, and it is clear from often harrowing imagery that here is a man with his own demons.  But he is a painter who takes such relish in the underbelly of humanity, dealing out cruel satire, that one wonders how he could paint salvation or bliss.

Howson belongs to the generation of realists who established Glasgow as a significant center of figurative revival in the 1980s.  While Adrian Wisniewski and the late Steven Campbell brought respectively fey and fogey twists to the Italian transavanguardia, Howson, with fellow fiery man-of-the people Ken Currie, represented the more social realist side of the Glasgow Boys.  Less party line than Currie, who tended towards murals celebrating labor leaders of yore, Howson came to specialize in an extreme mannerism that married a veneer of Renaissance/Old Master technique with moral excoriation of social dystopia.  He tapped the mood of anger at economic polarization in a Britain under Margaret Thatcher even if the stylistics seemed a half-century out of date: Satanic mills on fire,  street fighting mobs, depraved scenes worthy of Hogarth’s Gin Lane.  Stylistically, he is a sort of cross between Thomas Hart Benton and John Currin, but without the humor of either of these Americans.  Not that Americans reject him for that—Madonna and, it was reported, Sylvester Stallone became loyal collectors.

Starting out at the legendary Glasgow School of Art in a fully-fledged neo-expressionist style, his work matured through the 1990s from cartoonish “bovver boy” National Front-supporting thugs with bulging neck muscles and bull terriers who looked like their canine twins to sprawling, brooding, hysterical and riotous crowd scenes with lighting to recall the operatic Victorian John Martin and allegory of a neo-medieval sensibility redolent of Bertolt Brecht and early Fritz Lang.  His eight-foot wide frieze, Age of Apathy (1992) massed his bull-necked pot-bellied, wife-beater and baseball-cap sporting yobs, many sieg heiling in the general direction of condemned men strung-up on poles.  The only female admitted to this mayhem was a dazed, voluptuous blonde lolling her beefy thigh over a pedestal and gazing nonchalantly at the doomed scene.

Peter Howson, Outcast, 2011. Oil on canvas, 48¼ x 36¼ inches. Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Later in the 1990s, Howson was picked by the British army as an official war artist and sent to cover Bosnia.  What he found there largely confirmed his already resolutely misanthropic worldview, but according to a sensitive if somewhat sensationalizing recent documentary from the BBC, the experience precipitated a nervous breakdown.  He was eventually to receive a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome.  Religion came with recovery from acute alcoholism.  The BBC film recounts his struggle to fulfill a commission from Glasgow’s Roman Catholic cathedral (Howson is a Protestant and Glasgow is still a city with a sectarian divide) for a mural of the reformation martyr St John Ogilvie.  What was to have been a massive crowd scene was eventually delivered as focus on the victim awaiting his noose.

His present show at Flowers Gallery in Chelsea, the New York outpost of his longstanding London dealers, shows a series depicting the harrowing of hell and other scenes of massed damnation in a show optimistically titled “Redemption.”  Most of Howson’s stock characters are here in trumps, though in a concession to the timelessness of ecclesiastical imagery, the thugs have lost their singlets, if none of their meanness.  Males continue to dominate the scene (the women one hopes are in heaven) though there are occasionally buttocks and thighs to continue tempting the damned.  Stylistically the artist has graduated to adventurous compressions of space and imaginative liberties with scale, making his paintings feel more old-masterly, although the expressionist treatment of distant architecture, one of his more potent tropes, remains.

The problem for Howson is how to depict the saved, not to mention the Savior, when his figural vocabulary remains so resolutely binary. His murky mannerism only admits two types: the siren and the ghoul.  His uncouth Christ doesn’t merely conform to Gothic norms that would perfectly make sense of an artist of northern sensibility: no one would expect Howson to deliver an effete, Italianate beauty for the Man of Sorrows.  But the Christ in his Outcast (2011) seems only distinguishable from the gargoyles tormenting him thanks to his crown of thorns.

Everyone should be happy for the artist that he has found consolation in religion.  But blessedness is still banned from Howson’s canvases-spiritual or alas aesthetic.  In pictorial terms, the convert remains happiest in Hell.

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March 22 to May 5, 2012
529 West 20th Street, 2nd floor
New York City, 212-366-6939

Installation view, exhibition under review, of Beryl Korot, Text and Commentary, 1976-1977. Five-channel video installation, black and white, with weavings, drawings, pictographic video notations, 30 minutes, stereo sound. Photo by John Berens. Courtesy of bitforms gallery nyc.

The three installations in bitform’s Beryl Korot mini-survey, incorporating no fewer than six different media formats to capture our attention, exemplifies Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated dictum that “the medium is the message.”  One of Korot’s original motives, over thirty years ago, was to get us out of our homes, away from our TV sets and into a public space for viewing multichannel video work of intriguing complexity.  In this age of instant messaging and Twitter, it is refreshing to encounter a video artist whose labor-intensive use of the computer as an extension of her hand slows us down so that we can more carefully observe what is before us.

The show begins with Korot’s signature installation, Text and Commentary (1976-77), first shown the year it was made at the Leo Castelli Gallery. In this multi-modal piece she first prepared a handloom and then made a series of geometric weavings, simultaneously videotaping this rhythmic process.   The installation includes five delicate black, grey, and beige weavings hung vertically from the ceiling across from video screens that document their making.  On one wall at the entrance to the gallery are soft-edge geometric pencil drawings on graph paper of the central portions of the weavings.  The pictographic notations on another wall are used by Korot to choreograph the minute-by-minute coordination of the five different yet related 30-minute videos.  Some of the pictographs resemble a blend of computer bar codes and American Indian petroglyphs.   While these weavings and the drawings are finished works in their own right, at a deeper level they correspond to César Paternosto’s insight, proposed in The Stone and the Thread (1989/1996), that the Pre-Columbian Andean textile patterns are not merely decorative but served as a carrier of coded information in the absence of a written alphabet.  Quite literally, the medium was also the message.

Through her use of weaving as a medium, Korot links information processing and communications systems both past and future. She recognized how the Jacquard loom, which made modern weaving possible through the use of punch cards to guide the hooks and harness for the weave’s design, was a kind of proto-computer.  Focusing on the importance of line as the organizer of information across time, Korot has observed how “we read line by line, weavers create their patterns line by line, (and) electronic cameras read an image at 30 frames per second”.  This can be extended to computers, which use lines of data to perform their operations.  Korot stimulates us to see how an object—the weaving—can both encode the history of a culture and reflect the personal mark of the artist, something she herself accomplishes even in technologically based work.

Beryl Korot, Yellow Water Taxi, 2003 (video still). Single channel video, 2 mins, stereo sound, edition of 10. Courtesy of bitforms gallery nyc.

Yellow Water Taxi (2003, 2 minutes) is a visual treat of video mastery. We watch a ballet of bright yellow water taxis pass us by at different speeds.   At one point, the taxis stop and park on the right and left edges of the small screen.  But the water continues to move with the five blue bands of water becoming fewer as some of them are overtaken by white ones. Although devoid of a specific narrative, the variety of visual elements is more than sufficient to sustain our interest as it massages our sensory-motor system.   The video has a hand-made feel.  The backdrop is a piece of woven canvas whose texture is plainly seen and felt.  Learning later that Korot conceived of this work while taking a walk along the Esplanade where the Twin Towers had recently stood and watching the taxis ferrying people back and forth from New York to New Jersey added a layer of poignancy.

The final video, Florence (2008, 10 ½ minutes) is concrete poetry with a definite narrative structure.  The backdrop is another weaving, although this time without the threads. There is a black and white grid of snowstorms, waterfalls, and boiling water stitched together on the computer.  Superimposed over the visual grid and the sound track of driving rain is a visual display of actual words of Florence Nightingale, creating a haunting sensory experience.  The words enter the large screen at the top and move vertically downward at different speeds and in different sizes, pooling at the bottom.  The viewer is swept up by the challenges faced by Nightingale in caring for wounded men on the battlefield with no medical provisions. The power of Nightingale’s words bombarding us against a backdrop of darkness and rain is so compelling that we also empathize with her suffering.   Nightingale used her religious belief to overcome the doubts experienced as a woman to achieve a certain degree of power and autonomy in the male-dominated medical establishment.  Korot’s magisterial video conveys this struggle in a way that is far more powerful than would be possible from a straight reading of her diaries.  The complex combination of cascading words against a stormy background makes the viewer a more active participant in grasping Nightingale’s message.

The three works in this show each view art and mind as a palimpsest as Korot creates layers of organization that must be peeled back as part of an embodied search for meaning.  The result is a high-tech version of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.  As with Dickinson, one sometimes has to strain to hear the artist’s voice hovering just below the surface.  But connection, once made, vindicates the effort.

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March 29- April 28, 2012
508 West 26th Street, 8th Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 463 7770

Jacqueline Humphries, Untitled, 2012. Oil on canvas, 90 x 96 inches. Courtesy of Greene Naftali Gallery

Jacqueline Humphries, who was born in 1960, works quite free of the kind of anxieties regarding post-Greenbergian abstraction that prevailed when I started writing art criticism, in the early 1980s. Robert Ryman and Brice Marden, so almost everyone said, were the last possible abstract painters.  The anti-aesthetic era of installations, photography and video, so we were told, was at hand.  Painting, and especially abstract painting. were officially dead. Humphries paints as if this history never happened. She has eleven paintings on display, all Untitled, all made in 2012, all but one 90 by 96 inches (one is just slightly smaller). They are mostly painted in metallic silver, but there are also touches of blue, pink and red. Humphries’s robust all-over compositions often are broken at the corners by areas of intruding color.  Her limited palette means that gestural activity alone must carry the pictures, which for the most part it does.

Sometimes Humphries creates rough broad vertical silver stripes. In one picture she breaks that field with narrow green stripes coming in from the lower left corner. In another, small dark areas peeking through break the all-over silver covering the canvas. And in yet another patches of bright red are found throughout the canvas and smaller areas of pink interrupt the silver field. Or, and this is a further option, a field of green on the left edge can be set alongside a body of narrow vertical silver strokes. A vigorous, fearlessly energetic painter, she shows how much visual variety is possible within a limited, seemingly confining format. This ensemble of paintings, hung in the marvelous north light of Greene Naftali’s space, high above Chelsea, resonates together, creating a very happy harmony.

Initially it is perhaps most helpful to characterize Humphries’s art in a negative way. She is not a monochrome painter.  A great deal of recent abstraction plays with geometry, often with reference to computer technologies. That is not her interest. Many abstract painters seek to give meaning to their art via references to nature. Humphries does not. Some distinguished abstractionists allude to the rhythms of the modern city. She does not. Often abstract painters lend historical resonance to their art with art historical tropes. She does not. Her vigorous sensuous gestural style owes a lot to Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, but her color-sense is very different. Humphries owes nothing, I think, to the post-modern tradition of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.  Free from skepticism about the capacity of abstraction to convey feeling, her paintings have a promising ‘bigness’.  If abstraction has now lost its supportive genealogy, for her that turns out to be no real loss. Humphries is a million miles away from the curiously tentative art of the Whitney Biennial, for her proudly beautiful abstractions advance no obvious personal or political agenda. They do not aspire to make the world better, except insofar as they contribute to our aesthetic pleasure. Standing on their own, these drop dead gorgeous paintings show how much life there is still in the grand tradition of Abstract Expressionism.

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March 30 – April 24
312 Bowery, between Bleecker and Houston streets
New York City, 212-466-1100

E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler, Untitled 21, 2012. Archival photographic print mounted on sintra, edition of 3. 45 x 60 inches. Courtesy of The Hole

Walking into E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler’s delightfully campy exhibition at The Hole is like teleporting into an alternate reality.  Lines between real and fake are not merely blurred but altogether irrelevant.  The artists, assisted by a grant from Playboy, have transformed the gallery space into a delirious recreation of Monet’s gardens at Giverny.  Day had spent the summer of 2010 at Giverny after receiving the Munn Artist’s Residency from the Versailles Foundation: her only instruction was to be inspired by the gardens.  The Giverny that the artists have constructed on the Bowery is a utopian intersection of art and artifice, where sensory overload is de rigueur and childish delight the only appropriate reaction.

A gravel path winds through the gallery, cutting a noisily crunching swath through AstroTurf knolls and living flowers.  Mulched flowerbeds feature tulips and roses. Goldfish swim in a lily pond spanned by a comically short arched bridge.  The illusion is completed by a Sunday painter working away at an easel, churning out landscapes suitable for a Starving Artists sale at a Marriott.  Day’s photographs are hung on vinyl wallpaper emblazoned with lush weeping willows.  Some of the large-scale works are brightly lit and prominently displayed, while other small- scale works are tucked away in unlit corners, making for delightful discoveries.

E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler, Untitled 22, 2012. Archival photographic print mounted on sintra, edition of 3. 50 x 50 inches. Courtesy of The Hole

Day invited performance artist Kembra Pfahler to join her at Giverny, where she photographed her in character, as the Playboy Femlin-inspired frontwoman of  glam-punk band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black.  Pfahler is naked save for hot-pink body paint, thigh high pleather bondage boots, and a towering wig.  Her painted skin perfectly matches the pink lilies, while her shiny boots reflect in the glimmering pond.  It takes a minute to notice the eerie symmetry of some of the photographs, where Day has digitally manipulated the images into perfect mirrors of themselves like hallucinatory Rorschach tests.  The unsettling effect boldly emphasizes the artifice of their mise-en-scène.

The exhibition’s melding of nature and artifice, human and botanical, history and present, is thoroughly refreshing.  Gallery visitors can sit on the fake grass and smell the flowers.  Curious tourists pop their heads in the door, exclaiming to one another “there’s a garden in there!” and, farther inside, “she’s naked!”  The artists relate an amusing anecdote in the press book at the front desk.  As Pfahler and Day worked alone at Giverny, posing and shooting after the thousands of visitors had left for the day, Pfahler, unaccustomed to the lack of an audience, complained of the solitude.  A solution presented itself when they discovered a group of gardeners spying on them from the bushes.  Invited to participate, the delighted gardeners posed for pictures with the painted performance artist, no doubt appreciating her vibrant colors and exuberant demeanor as much as any of the blooms they tended daily.

Pfaler appears to own her environs like a futuristic wood sprite or a new species of plant-fembot hybrid.  The audacity of Day’s inspiration to transport this doyenne of East Village punk to Monet’s storied garden seems oddly like the most logical choice in the world.  Of course, Monet’s Impressionism once shocked people too.

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March 23 to May 19, 2012
10 Greene Street, 2nd Floor, between Grand and Canal streets
New York City, 646-370-3877

Mary Ellen Carroll, Federal, 10 am, 2003. Cibachrome print, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Third Streaming

The 24 Cibachrome prints on view at Third Streaming feature the same angled shots of the Los Angeles Federal Building, the surrounding sky, grass, trees and nothing more.  They were taken during the filming of Mary Ellen Carroll’s 24-hour, two-screen film Federal (2003) with shots of the same building, viewed from the front and back, over the course of the same day. (The film was screened at the Museum of the Moving Image on March 24th/25th in conjunction with this show.)  Even without the extensive bureaucratic background information, including paperwork about the year-long process of her obtaining permission to film — also on view, practically a conceptual work in itself — the repetitive images of the structure reveal solid formal geometrics that immediately illicit thoughts of power, government, access, surveillance and barriers.

It is significant that Carroll, who is not an Angelino (she was born in Illinois and lives and works in New York and Houston), chose L.A. as backdrop for this concept, as well as for her Kruder and Dorfmeister series (1999-2000), also on display.  The latter is a collection of small black and white photographs of L.A. public libraries that recalls Ed Ruscha’s Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963) except that Carroll moves in a different direction from Ruscha, as instead of ubiquity, “specifics of place and connotations of Los Angeles,” to quote the press release, are central to the work. In both L.A. series here Carroll is seen capitalizing on the outsider’s image of this city as sunny, superficial, and unencumbered by the constraints of history—a land of freedom and reinvention. In one work, by highlighting dull locations that could be Anywhere, U.S.A., and in the other by providing a strict reminder of government power and surveillance, the idea was to create a jarring sense of dislocation between perceptions of L.A. as a special place and realities of American public life everywhere.

Mary Ellen Carroll, Kruder and Dorfmeister, 2000. Four of 66 Polaroids, each 3.25 × 4.25 inches. Courtesy of Third Streaming

I grew up on the Westside of Los Angeles, but that was during the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots, the O.J. Simpson trial, and with a citizen’s general knowledge of bad police behavior (profiling, hogtying) as well as the massive California prison industrial complex.  So to my particular set of eyes, the prints from Federal make a strong yet strangely familiar impact, absent any intentional irony or contrast. They look naked. The Kruder and Dorfmeister series of libraries also shows the Los Angeles that I know. The small black and white images of the fronts of these mostly one-story buildings immediately conjure memories of dusty stacks and microfilm machines, elderly librarians and mild, sunny afternoons. Formally, the small buildings resemble each other more than they differ, creating a repetition in the series of small prints that highlights a contented, perhaps by now outdated, brand of American boredom in the isolated West.

What’s interesting is that even though the Federal building is structurally the opposite of these local libraries, and despite the red tape involved in getting access to film it, there is also a strong element of everyday-ness involved necessarily in the building’s form and what it represents. This is the place you go to get a passport, a building you might drive past daily without ever actively thinking about it; it blends into the fabric of every commuter’s life. But the Federal building, in Carroll’s work, is also like the Empire State Building as featured in Andy Warhol’s 8-hour Empire (1964). Both are symbolic, meant to illicit different things through intensive viewing: for Warhol, the iconic piece of architecture is itself a celebrity, and for Carroll, the political structure embodies the departments it houses, including the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security and LAPD. That viewers are taking the time to look back at these agencies is an intentionally subversive conceptual layer — about as politically effectual as attacking an iceberg with a toothpick, but an excellent lesson in witnessing reality, and done with great visual style.

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March 23 to April 15, 2012
464 Seneca Avenue, between Himrod and Harman streets,
Ridgewood, Queens, (718) 381-2962

Jane Dickson, LV42 (Binions), 2012. Oil on canvas, 24 x48 inches. Courtesy of Valentine Gallery

Jane Dickson’s sunless, shadowless neon casino interiors and exteriors grip your eye with a blunt, slow-burning shrewdness, getting right to the point about matters that have deep roots in the torch-lit hells of Caravaggio, the flickering purgatories of Georges de La Tour, and –– nearer to hand –– the existential roadside mercury vapors of George Ault or Edward Hopper.  It is no special insight of Dickson’s that night-for-day Las Vegas is the punitive afterlife our vapidly apocalyptic moment deserves, but artists who’ve risen to the subject –– photographers and filmmakers by and large –– tend to take the visual spectacle at awestruck face value, while treating its thematics with moralizing condescension.  Dickson’s steady, sober vision strips the distracting fluff away down to architectural bones that show casinos to be a kind of peopled re-enactment of 20th century abstraction at its most positivist –– from Kandinsky to Frank Stella to Richard Anuszkiewicz –– and maybe all the more despairing for that.

Dickson’s hieratics of the everyday made its first impact with sharply lurid shadowplays of the Times Square sex industry in the 1980’s, and has various contemporary affinities, including with the East Village punk realism of Martin Wong and Eric Drooker, the luminous urban structuralism of Yvonne Jacquette, and the visionary deliberation of animator Suzan Pitt.  But it is Georges Seurat’s melting conté crayon studies and his Pointillist artifice that now resonate most deeply in Dickson’s erosion of contour, her sensual treatment of auras of light that simplify figures almost to the point of cartoons, yet short of bruising their essential dignity. For some years Dickson forced the issue by painting on Astroturf, a medium of extreme scatter, honing her rationalizing eye on green and blue noise.  Here she applies the softly brutal lessons-learned to canvas, with a new emphasis on subtle contrasts of surface and paint handling.  One might say that Las Vegas’s neon, in all its hyper-synthetic cheer, does for Dickson what blazing limelight did for Seurat: for him, the circus; for her, it’s Circus Circus.

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February 17-April 21, 2012
Curated by Joachim Pissaro, with Bibi Calderaro, Julio Grinblatt and Michelle Yun
450 West 42nd Street, between Dyer and 10th avenue

Edgardo Rudnitzky, Octopus, 2008. Turntable with four arms, each one with its own speaker, vinyl records. 37 7/8 x 24 7/8 x 24 7/8 inches. Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

John Cage would have considered the location of this show a work of art in itself:  a thoroughly chaotic intersection with buses zooming out of the Port Authority, obstructed sidewalks, a construction site, scaffolding everywhere, and above all, the thrum of noise—or, as Cage would have called it, sound.

Trained as a composer, and notorious for composing a piece consisting of “silence” (4’ 33”), Cage, more than anyone, established sound as an artistic discipline beyond the walls of the concert hall.  “Notations” takes its name from the title of a book in which Cage compiled experimental musical scores, including some of his own but mostly those of others; it is thus a fitting title for a show that celebrates the centennial of his birth by showcasing twenty-eight international artists whose work reflects his sweeping influence.  As parsed by Joachim Pissaro’s erudite essay and the entries in the fine exhibition catalogue—written by Pissaro’s students—this legacy centers around the location of art in natural and “empty” space (as in ambient sound);  the blurring of distinctions between conventional categories of artistic practice (as in the famous “prepared” pianos);  and most importantly, the invitation of indeterminacy (as in what he called “chance operations”) into art.

“Notations” is housed in the Hunter College’s labyrinthine Times Square Gallery, vast enough to dedicate some of its spacious rooms to just one or two pieces, and conveying the feel of an honorific museum, rather than a temporary exhibition.  The first work viewed is One, a subtle, contemplative 90” film by Cage of roving spots of white light.  (The austere soundtrack, 103, is an independently composed work for orchestra.)  Made near the end of its Cage’s career, One is a symbolic as well as a literal “beginning” of this ambitious homage.

The Fluxus movement of the 1960s was a direct extension of Cage’s multi-media performances, and is represented here by Telepathic Music #5, Robert Filliou’s witty Dada-like ensemble of folding music stands that display playing cards and notes inscribed with enigmatic directions.  Contrasting with this silently orchestrated play on “play” are assemblages for the making and/or hearing of sound. Edgardo Rudnitzky’s brilliant Octopus is a retrofitted turntable with four arms that simultaneously play individual instrumental performances recorded on four separate tracks of a vinyl record.   In true Cageian fashion, its automated start and stop play generates continuous reassortments of musical fragments, redefining the concept of the “string quartet”.  In Ears with Chair, Yukio Fujimoto brings attention to ambient sound by using long tubes to amplify and deliver it, in stereo, to the listener’s ears.  Another interactive piece, Leon Ferrari’s Colgante Escultura Sonora/Hanging Sound Instrument, is a curtain of hanging metal rods which, when disturbed, emit a palpable harmonic buzz.

Christian Marclay, Indian Point Road, 2004. Single channel video. Duration: 30 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Others translate Cage’s exploration of sound and silence into visual studies of negative and positive space;  for example, Fred Sandback’s familiar yarn sculpture (Untitled), and Waltercio Caldas’s O transparente (da serie Veneza)/The Transparent (from the Veneza Series), a disorienting exploration of the outlines of everyday forms.  Some works channel Cage via Raushenberg (Liz Deschenes’ Tilt/Swing, reflective photograms of darkness); Warhol (Kaz Oshioro’s Orange Speaker Cabinets and Gray Scale Boxes, an auditory twist on Warhol’s Brillo Boxes); or both (Ushio Shinohara’s Coca Cola Plans, replications of the eponymous Rauschenberg combine).

There are ample videos, including Christian Marclay’s Indian Point Road, visually minimal but with a lush backdrop of natural sound; Felipe Dulzaides’ humorous, inventive short films; and filmed interviews of Cage by Frank Scheffer (From Zero:  Four Films on John Cage).  Embodying Cage’s notion of “instantaneous ecstasy” is Daniel Wurtzel’s marvelous Pas des Deux. In this videotaped performance, a ring of fans propel two lengths of diaphanous, colorful fabric into mid-air.  Minute variations in flow cause the material to twirl and billow, coming together and apart in an exquisitely (un)choreographed dance—an allusion, perhaps, to Cage’s long artistic and personal relationship to the dancer and choreographer, Merce Cunningham.

Seemingly intended to fill out the margins of Cage’s reach is more conceptual work, such as the blank full-page ad taken out in Artforum magazine by Nicolas Guagnini and Gareth James, but its connection to Cage is less compelling.  Similarly, in contrast to Cage’s anarchist allegiance—resolutely couched in the aesthetic—one imagines that an sociopolitical comment is being made by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s amalgam of “prepared” piano and ticker tape, indexes (v. 1), in which software transforms a live feed of international financial information into notes played on a grand piano, but it remains unspecified.

One theme that emerges from “Notations” is the transformation of daily practice—to which Cage was devoted, and related to his deep immersion in Zen Buddhism—into art itself.  A perpetual work-in-progress, William Anastasi’s Sink is a flat steel slab that is “watered” every day, allowing the complex patina to evolve in its unpredictable way. (One of the edition of four belonged to John Cage’s own collection.)  In Window Project, Reiner List creates a light box grid of serial daily photographs of the same Eighth Avenue view from his studio.  And in her moving installation, O trabalho dos dias/Day’s Work, Rivane Neuenschwander covers the walls and floor of a room with sheets of adhesive film, each one stuck with the debris collected from her home in one day;  en masse, this has the strangely elegant effect of travertine marble.  The tension evident in these and other works results from the contrast between their strict rhythmic order and the chance events they document—illustrating just how hard it is to resist our natural resistance to disorder.

Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was given to astronomers who determined that there is no such thing as a vacuum:  even in supposedly “empty” space, forces acting to expand the universe.  Famous for finding art in “empty” space, John Cage was ahead of his time, and remains vital still.

William Anastasi

Lynne Harlow

March 29 to April 28, 2012
138 Tenth Avenue between 19th and 20th streets
New York City, 212.750.0949

Installation shot: Willard Boepple: New Sculpture at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 2012. Photo: Etienne Frossard. Courtesy of Lori Bookstein Fine Art

Willard Boepple has a knack of keeping us at a threshold where a sense of something familiar and utilitarian slides away into mysterious relationships of planes, spaces and colors. In terms of the familiar or the useful he gives us few clues.  The three looming structures in his present show, sparsely and handsomely installed in the main gallery space at Lori Bookstein, make possible reference to radio masts, pylons, towers etc, in much the way previous bodies of work were titled, and related to, ‘Looms’ or ‘Rooms.’ But these apparent references don’t take us far. As for the mystery of planes, spaces, color, rhythm, structure etc, we are faced with a problem – we don’t have much of a language for it, and yet it is clear that this is the real content of the work. It is easier to think about the radio mast as an object because it has a name and a function whereas the sculptures turn us away from this towards that which we know much less about; our more instinctive and unmediated responses to such phenomena as weight, density and scale.

The installation is generous in allowing us to walk around in between the sculptures, to back off to some distance and see them against the plain while of the gallery walls.  There is an invitation to speculate, and to pass in, out and around the works repeatedly, noting differences and similarities. What gives (2011) holds within its slightly tapering vertical grey frame, red panels or blocks, while Heath (2012) has a darker gray frame, and contains more slender, dark gray bars. Ever (2012) has a paler frame and even more attenuated climbing (or falling) bars in it. In each piece rhythms and weights are uneven within the regularity of the tall frame, but each sculpture has these two fundamental elements in dialogue, the frame and the forms that are placed within it. Musical references have been used to describe this sculptor’s work, and Boepple himself says that he wants his work “to be open and clear like a ringing melody”. Here, and in earlier series, one can also think of themes and variations – there is something quite methodical as well as intuitive about the way ideas are explored within a repeated framework. Each piece is a conclusion but also contains the idea of variability and movement.

Installation shot: Willard Boepple: New Sculpture at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 2012. Photo: Etienne Frossard. Courtesy of Lori Bookstein Fine Art

The way each piece has a more or less gray frame that contains elements of a different second colour emphasises the distinction between frame  and elements and also stresses each piece’s individuality.  This simple color coding tells us something about the order of apprehension; first, the single identity of the sculpture (the red one, the yellow one, etc) then, the separateness of its two elements: the framework and its contents. However, the coloring also unites the pieces in a painterly way (there isn’t a sculpture where one element is painted and the other isn’t). The natural connection one makes is to Mondrian’s lines, or strips, of various dark greys, that hold in place areas of color– a framework that is itself an active component. The artist says of these towers that “eventually the framework began to function as a sort of engaged pedestal, a part of and support for the whole”. There is also a kind of freedom in the coloring that I take to be simply pleasurable, which relates to the musicality of the ideas of variation and rhythm, and I think one shouldn’t underestimate the sense of enjoyment of colour, surface, facture and so on, that the works seem to advocate. It is the pleasure of apparently simple things that very rapidly become complex and unfathomable.

Boepple’s work repeatedly stresses that we can see through it, that its space is also part of our space. I don’t know of a completely solid Boepple.  The densest sculptures of his that I know, the ‘Temples’, still have gaps between the elements that form their relatively compacted and heavy blocks, and the more sealed up forms of the resin pieces were made sufficiently transparent to see their interior. Other series are typically open and airy, especially so these towers. They retain the idea that the sculpture holds, or makes or divides spaces within it and around it.  The gaps and openness in his work suggest that he wants his sculpture to be contiguous with rather than separate from the ‘normal’ space and character of the world we inhabit. The Towers presumably reference the ethereal space of radio waves, unknowable to us but for the mediation of a mechanism. This is a nice metaphor for the functioning of Boepple’s sculptures: mechanisms that make apparent mysterious qualities that surround us.

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