April 18th to June 1st, 2013
535 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 627 3930

Keith Smith’s small, mostly monochrome images at Bruce Silverstein trigger a refreshing, animal sensation of quiet intrigue that’s rarely experienced in art nowadays—something that neither requires critical context nor resort to shock for immediate engagement.

Keith Smith, Alan Undressing, 1978. Gelatin silver print with sheet film and stitching, printed c. 1978, 7-1/8 x 4-7/8 inches. Courtesy of Bruce Silverstein

The show of brings together, for the first time, a large group of works from Smith’s earliest years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with photographs that combine sewing, drawing and painting from 1960 to 1980. In 1978 he was included in the Museum of Modern Art survey of American Photography since 1960 alongside William Eggleston and Lee Friedlander; although his mixed-media, irreverent approach to photography does not follow the path of his then peers, his works maintains what the press release for that exhibition had exalted as the “pursuit of beauty, that formal integrity that pays homage to the dream of meaningful life”.

Smith is also known for over 200 artist’s books (one of which is on display in this exhibition) that employ the three-dimensionality of the book and a meticulously guided reading experience to incorporate the dimension of time. The individuality of each page competes with the book’s overall progression.  A comparable energy is found in this show of photographs. Smith works from highly selective source images, consisting mostly of ears, eyes, his home and men he loved but could not express his affection towards. Continuity zigzags through each image’s mixed media surface and throughout the show as the motifs are explored repeatedly over 40 years, each time in a different medium and under new circumstances.

Repetition, for Smith, is a tool for revelation rather than desensitization. In addition to illustrating a surge of movement, his gelatin prints of 8mm film expose a kinetic materiality that only becomes salient whilst their subjects are in motion: when isolated from the rest of the body, the hand in “Untitled” (1966) becomes a simple glove that encloses the human touch, a shifting outline activated by the detection of its surroundings. The unique hand drawn elements add urgency and scarcity, counteracting the comfort of print reproductions and establishing a permanent, conscious attachment between the image as a concept and its physical manifestation. The matrix of 30 pans with fried eggs in Bicycle Seats (1967) is created with print emulsion and subsequently colored by hand. The shadows and shifting handlebars almost form a rhythmic pattern which does not diminish the  sovereignty of each pan.

The most arresting works from the show are probably his depictions of men. Hand coloring, stitching and various printing techniques that supplement conventional photography extend the perceptual depth and presence of the dimension of time demonstrated by his book projects, allowing Smith to convey an incredibly intense, nuanced and ordered collection of sensations. A haunting negative (the chemical opposite of reality captured by photographs) of a man removing his shirt, Alan Undressing, (1978), arises through an image of a toned torso whose hand is halfway inserted behind his belt. Fantasy and reality intersect as Alan’s piercing white eyes and a rim of stitches reinforce the image’s tangibility. Another standout picture is 1971 for Book 22, (1971) a collage of a nude young man with surprised eyes curled up in bed. The right side of his body is a darker exposure of the overall image, furiously sewn on with bits of thread that resemble sharp spikes. They are like stitches that close up a rugged surgery wound, needle by needle, uniting Smith’s desires and the young man’s flesh as if they had always belonged together.

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

April 25 to June 8, 2013
53 East 58th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, (212) 832-0208

James Walsh, Black Bottom, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Collection of Spanierman Modern, New York

James Walsh is an artist in mid-career who is still not as widely known as he deserves to be, despite the fact that he has participated in more than 50 group exhibitions since 1974 (when he was still an undergraduate at Rutgers) and has been the subject of five solo shows since his 1985 debut at Galeria Joan Prats, New York.

His latest show comprises just seven small paintings (24 by 18 to 36 by 26 inches) judiciously selected and installed in Spanierman Gallery’s project space, Spanierman Modern Library.  I find the paintings very handsome, with a clear, vivid palette and sophisticated color combinations.

These paintings also differ from almost any other abstract paintings in town by virtue of the fact that their paint rises above the canvas surface in swoops, blobs and swirls. Practically every other abstract painter who has attracted critical attention this season is painting with thin, flat layers of paint, but Walsh’s paint is mixed with molding paste so that it has to be scooped out of a bucket and spread onto the canvas by hand. Then it is manipulated with blades of wood, steel, or cardboard, and sometimes with a large commercial brush designed for smoothing wall paper. The final effect falls somewhere between thick cake frosting and the foaming waters in the wake of a giant cruise ship.

Clement Greenberg is supposed to have said that flatness should be a characteristic of modernist abstraction. Walsh’s painting challenges this apparent dictum (possibly because he concurs in my belief that Greenberg was merely describing what had been done in the past, not advocating what should be done in the future).  Here is yet another mass of evidence that painting is better done by instinct than by theory.

James Walsh, Colorbook: Paularry, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Collection of Spanierman Modern, New York

I have not always been enthusiastic about Walsh’s exhibitions:  the last time I wrote about his work at length, I felt that he was exhibiting too many paintings that combined too much paste with too many colors, but in the current show, in each painting he either limits his color schemes or the amount of paste he uses, achieving much more satisfying results.

Jolts (2012) is an example of holding back on colors and lavishing on the paste, with the left hand yellow side scraped clean down to the canvas surface, but a giant blob of on the right edge of brown, green and white, and both sides held together by a central, medium-thick area of brown and yellow.  Black Bottom (2012) goes the opposite route, with a fairly thin sea of blacks and blues on the lower side of the canvas, a sky of pink and yellow above, and a cruising inward form on the upper right that could be either a comet or a fish in the Hungarian national colors of red, white and green.

Occasionally, in Colorbook: Paularry (2012) for instance, Walsh seems to depart from his newfound restraint, to ladle on both a hefty quotient of paste and what appears at first a full range of hue (though it isn’t).) The image is built around three fat vertical sweeps of predominantly blue paste on a flatter blue field. The two side sweeps swoop downward. Both have white tops, and the right hand one also has a pink underbelly. The central sweep swoops upward, with blue feet, brown head, and a daub of white in its middle.  This painting forced me to accommodate myself to it. At first, I felt it excessive, but in the end, I found myself thinking that it might be the best painting in the show.

click to enlarge

The 24-hour montage of clock, watch and other timepiece film clips screens at the Museum of Modern Art through January 21, both during regular museum hours and also, at special screenings, including one on New Year’s Eve, in the original synchronized day-long version.

Click the clock to read the review.

Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010. Single-channel video, 24 hours, still. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery

Details of screenings of The Clock at the Museum of Modern Art this coming month.

Paris-Delhi-Bombay: India through the eyes of Indian and French Artists at the Centre Pompidou, 25 May – 19 September 2011

Subodh Gupta, Ali Baba, 2011. installation, found materials, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist

Hal Foster’s extremely influential anthology The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture (1983) argued that art breaking down the traditional modernist distinction between verbal and visual experience provided aggressive cultural critique. No longer, he urged, could or should artists make merely seductive visual artifacts. Taking up that way of thinking, this ambitious exhibition of almost fifty Indian artists and French artists who are interested in India, deals with six grand themes: politics, urbanism and the environment, religion, the home, identity and arts and crafts. A weighty French-only catalogue (a much shortened version is available in English) presents the context for ORLAN’s Indian and French flags made from sequins, Krishnaraj Chonat’s recycled waste electronic materials, N. S. Harsha’s playful contemporary reworkings of Indian miniatures, Alain Declercq’s photographs of the militarized border between India and Pakistan and Sunil Gawde’s garlands of flowers, made from painted razor blades. There are essays on Western ideas about India; about the role of the sacred art in that country and its museums; and about Indian modernism. And one section is devoted to a variety of points of view about Indian culture, and its relationship to the West. Seeking to learn “qu’est-ce que l’Inde aujourd’hui?,” the curators seek to promote a dialogue between France and India, developing “new and lasting links between our two cultures.”

Pierre & Gilles, Hanuman, 2010. Model: Thomas Tabti. Painted photograph, 200 x 145.5 cm. Courtesy Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris © Adagp, Paris 2011

I was amused by Jitish Kallat’s Ignitaurus (2008), a hybrid motorbike-bull sculpture; by the painted photographs derived from popular Indian images by Pierre & Gilles; by Atul Dodiya’s Devi and the Sink (2004), a painting derived from a Bollywood cinematic comedy; and by Ravinder Reddy’s Tara (2004), a large scale golden sculpture of an Indian woman, mounted at the center of the display. I enjoyed Stéphane Calais’s large Indian ink drawings referring to the Thugee sect that robbed and strangled travelers; Riyas Komu’s Beyond Gods (2011), a massive wood sculpture of eleven footballers’ legs; and Pushpamala N’s photographic take-offs on nineteenth-century French painting. And I was intrigued by the erotic art of Tejal Shah, of Kader Attia and of Thukral & Tagra, who set classical Indian erotic sculptures in contemporary bourgeois bedrooms.

But to be honest, everything here seemed obviously and hopelessly derivative, too much so to inspire sustained interest. I sometimes ask myself: what would I take home from the exhibition? From this show, nothing. Subodh Gupta’s Ali Baba (2011), a dense overflowing display of stainless steel tableware, is a version of Allan McCollum’s 1980s exercises in repetition; the photographs of urban waste by Vivan Sundaram and Atul Bhalla’s documentation of water distribution in New Delhi a variation on familiar political themes; and the sculptures of Anita Dube which link blood and sexual identity, tropes on clichéd Chelsea displays. Joseph Masheck’s Point 1: Art Visuals/Visual Arts. Smart Art (1984), a lively, now too little known survey of Lower East Side art, which deserves the attention of art historians, summarizes in more visual detail than Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic the state of trendy American art of that period. These Indians and their French colleagues have uncritically adopted this now dated Western style. This is stale art that has not withstood the test of time.

Sometimes you learn a lot about an exhibition by going to other nearby museums. A short walk East from the Pompidou Center takes you to the Louvre. The aesthetic paintings of Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin provide a varied, but surely not comprehensive image of old regime France. Why believe, then, that these contemporary works of art at the Pompidou which all are so self-consciously indebted to Western precedents can provide the best way of understanding present day India?  Can the multifaceted cultures of Delhi and Bombay be adequately presented by this exhibition? I think not. But here we get to the inescapable political problems.  The well intentioned, politically correct Pompidou curators seek to represent India on its own terms.  They want to tell us how the Indians (and sympathetic French visitors) think about economic inequality, politics, and sex. And they seek to identify the distance between art in that distant culture and in the West. But how is it possible to do that when in this exhibition all of the art borrows so transparently from contemporary Western visual culture?  How, I am critically asking, can the Indians represent themselves? Can the Western museum show the Indian women and men as they really are, without reductively reducing employing Eurocentric ways of thinking? This ambitious exhibition posed but did not answer that question, which I hope that other curators in other cultures inside and outside of the West will take up. But here we get to the inescapable political problems.  The well intentioned, politically correct Pompidou curators seek to represent India on its own terms.  They want to tell us how the Indians (and sympathetic French visitors) think about economic inequality, politics, and sex. And they seek to identify the distance between art in that distant culture and in the West. But how is it possible to do that when in this exhibition all of the art borrows so transparently from contemporary Western visual culture?  How, I am critically asking, can the Indians represent themselves? Can the Western museum show Indian women and men as they really are, without reductively employing Eurocentric ways of thinking? This ambitious exhibition posed but did not answer that question, which I hope that other curators in other cultures inside and outside of the West will take up.

click to enlarge

click to enlarge