Will Corwin: Mt. Zion at George and Jørgen; Pascual Sisto: FILL_IN_THE_BLANKS at Seventeen; Trisha Baga: Rock at Vilma Gold

Installation shot of William Corwin sculptures (all 2012, hydrocal plaster, from left) Blue Boy, Ugly Duchess, King and Termites. Courtesy of George and Jørgen Gallery, London

Three recent London solo shows by American artists emphasize a heightened engagement with animism and subjectivity in contemporary art. Although never explicitly centered on the problematics of labor, there is a cumulative anthropomorphism in these artists’ work that registers art making within a symbolic regime imprinted with the logics of cognitive capitalism. By this I mean the kinds of commerce that commoditize attention, affects, and relations alike.  Different as these artists are, one from another, each animates objects and images to trace what are becoming increasingly perforated distinctions, in our volatile aesthetic-political condition, between human and inhuman agencies. Their work constitutes an ongoing questioning of what might or might not serve as a stable support for subjectivity.

Will Corwin’s exhibition, Mt. Zion, at George and Jørgen [May 4 to May 27, 2012; 9 Morocco Street, London SE1] presents sculpture as a conjunction of indexicality and portent. The show takes nomination candidate Jon Huntsman, Jr.’s Mormon faith as its starting point and then correlates the religion’s origins with a salient moment in evolutionary anthropology. According to the Church of Latter Day Saints, founder Joseph Smith was led by an angel named Moroni to exhume invisible golden tablets inscribed with the history of an ancient community speculated to have resided in upstate New York. Synthesizing interests in the social and natural sciences, Corwin posits Lucy – the anthropomorphized, fossil remains of several hundred pieces of bone derived from a female Australopithecus afarensis – as an unwitting saint venerated as an icon of evolution.

Cast hydrocal approximations of our hominid ancestor’s jaw, ribs, and skull are meticulously ordered to “ape” the conventions of museological display. By contrast, roughshod, purpose-built MDF supports lend his works a willful faux-naivité that brings them closer to the aesthetics of science fair exposition than to those of archaeological vitrines. As a result, Corwin’s work offers stark reminders of the thin line between rubble and reliquary.  They reify the power relations and institutional protocols thought to render fact from faith. Additional sculptures and watercolors on view refer to the artist’s recent residency at The Clocktower in New York, where Corwin’s installation Auroch’s Library (2011) presented a chess board actually played by a pair of American masters.

Pascual Sisto, 28 Years in the Implicate Orders, 2005. Single channel video, looped. Courtesy of Seventeen Gallery London

Pascual Sisto’s first exhibition at Seventeen, entitled FILL_IN_THE_BLANKS [March 29 to May 5, 2012; 17 Kingsland Road, London E2], translates the imagery and operations of theoretical physics into the foundation for an artistic practice that thrives on theoretical and perceptual speculation, with reference points that stretch from chaos theory to cosmology. Curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini, Sisto’s exhibition of sculptures, videos, and prints employ the gallery’s ground and basement levels to stage questions regarding the divisions between order and entropy. Tasked both functionally and formally, Untitled (crate) (2012) merges the structural stability of a shipping container with the resistance to containment inherent to mathematical aperiodicity. The work’s internal beams are arranged on the basis of Penrose tiling – a pattern whose rules potentialize indefinite expansion without repetition. Centered on slippages interpolated by successive layers of mediation, adjacent works (each 2012) include hand-colored silver gelatin prints of collaged found images, which are obstructed with reductive incisions in their monochrome matt boards – permitting only glimpses of their original source material.

Sisto is adept at drawing attention to instabilities within seemingly static compositions, drawing friction from oppositions. Included here, the single-channel loop 28 Years in the Implicate Orders (2005) has become a classic of video pacing. The setup is simple: evenly distributed within the forlorn scene of an parking lot emptied by the evening, 28 red balls bounce in place propelled by unseen forces. Beginning with a cacophony of dribbles, the balls’ rhythms align but briefly only to retract once more towards their isolated logics. Given its economy of means, the work’s meditation on the order resident in disorder and the ephemerality of resolution proves unnervingly affecting. In No Strings Attached (2007) Sisto wrangles his work’s abjectness into a singularly downbeat humor. Here, a chair is thrown into the frame, is pitched violently and repeatedly by unseen forces, and eventually achieves a point of stasis. Animation proves inextricable from abuse – suggesting a sinister side to anthropomorphism.

Where Corwin channels the human figure into icons, and Sisto filters humanity through a spectral index, Rock, Trisha Baga’s current exhibition at Vilma Gold subjectivizes the inanimate through a heterogeneous significatory system [April 5 to May 19, 2012; 6 Minerva Street, London E2]. Taking its name from the speculated Massachusetts landing site of the Mayflower Pilgrims, her video installation Plymouth Rock (2012) articulates the artist’s sympathies with a tattered landmark. Comprising a casual aggregate of images and objects that serve as the supports for two mutually interpolating video channels, Baga alludes to the rock’s dubious history as a site of colonial passage, and the literal fracture, reconstruction, and erosion occasioned by its migration and piecemeal commodification. A take-out menu from a Chinese restaurant, a seemingly sand-speckled boombox, three acrylic on canvas abstract paintings, an abundance of haphazardly strewn electrical wires, and other props proposing a theatre of artistic production at once rebuff and embrace myriad narrative formations. Though the objects may seem quotidian, there is nothing ordinary in Baga’s video-making, where bird’s eye views, beach scenes, slapdash screen effects, TV outtakes with mock-Arabic subtitling, and shadows entering from outside the frame, speak to illusiveness, competing literacies, and an unstable sense of origin shared by Plymouth Rock and contemporary forms of American subjectivity.

Less frenetic in pacing but no less committed to phenomenological inquiry, the scattershot, low-lying objects in a second video installation, Hard Rock, (2012) play dual roles as projection surfaces and the sources of silhouettes. A cardboard tepee, baseball mug, frosted Jack Daniels bottle, and similar makeshift icons of Americana cast craggy shadows against a video backdrop comprised of a 3-D animation of computer rendered box, rock formations, and a color shift from cyan to orange evoking the day’s passage in a Technicolor Western. A series of convulsively gestural abstract paintings on lenticular supports sustain Baga’s complex dialectics between still and moving image, further destabilizing distinctions between subject and object.

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February 17 to July 1, 2012
225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street
New York City, 212-685-0008

Dan Flavin, some colored options for a Whitney Annual Exhibition, 1970. Ballpoint pen, 8-1/2 x 11 inches. Collection of Stephen Flavin (c) 2012 Stephen Flavin/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Graham S. Haber, 2011

When we think about the work of Dan Flavin (1933-1996), his drawings are hardly the first thing to come to mind. Instead, it is the fluorescent light sculptures that had the enduring impact on 20th- century art, making him one of the most significant minimalist visionaries.  But his works on paper remain little known. Curated by Isabelle Dervaux, this elegant, concise yet comprehensive exhibitionit reveals that Flavin cherished drawing, embracing it as a daily practice. This first drawing retrospective comprises over one hundred sheets from each phase of Flavin’s career.  By also presenting drawings by others artists from the artist’s personal collection, this excellent show allows the audience to recognize the extent Flavin to which found inspiration in both the act of drawing and in viewing examples by contemporaries and predecessors.

Flavin equally valued literal and abstract depictions of a subject. Over the years, his stylistically eclectic drawings ranged from abstract expressionist watercolors completed in the 1950s to pastel renditions of sailboats made in the 1980s. Some of his more traditional drawings date from the 1960s and 1970s. Usually made outdoors from observation, these depict the Hudson River landscape or the Long Island shoreline, places where he lived or spent much time.Realistically capturing the scenery with its waterscapes, rock and tree formations, they prove Flavin a fine draftsman. Though their inherent vocabulary differs strongly from his abstract sculptures, these drawings reflect the artist’s ongoing quest, through attention to detail, to establish a distinct sense of atmosphere based on nuanced observations of light and shade.

And yet, compared to his sculptures, which remain groundbreaking in their transformation of industrial materials into installations that contemplate notions of transcendence, most of Flavin’s drawings are surprisingly conservative, particularly in their use of materials. There are no experimentations with collage, for example. In fact, in many of Flavin’s drawings, his radicalism seems replaced with an affinity for classicism.

Dan Flavin, Paul Cézanne, 1959. Charcoal, 8-7/8 x 12 inches. Collection of Stephen Flavin (c) 2012 Stephen Flavin/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Graham S. Haber, 2011

Flavin’s traditionalism in drawing might spring from insecurity. He was self-taught and never received a traditional art education. His sketches from nature and portraits tell of his passion for the act of drawing, but they also indicate a need to prove his skill. He had a deep appreciation for artists who could capture transcendental ideas through the mere use of line and light. Though he achieved the same in sculpture, his works on paper lack such higher aspirations. Instead, many of his drawings were products of an ongoing note taking. He usually carried a notebook and ballpoint pen to be able to jot down thoughts quickly and wherever he was at the time. These sketches do not embody finished renditions of original ideas, but rather appear as extensions of thought, often including written notes, numbers and dates.

Some of Flavin’s most accomplished works on paper refer to his sculptures. In these, fluorescent tubes are depicted as colored lines on plain grounds or else use words to designate color. They are characterized by a unique delineation of space through a minimal use of line and occasional color accents. They differ from Flavin’s “final finished diagrams”, which he began in 1971 as visual records of each installation. These records, made with colored pencil on graph paper, are distinctly less inspired and less immediate. In fact, later many of them were not done by him, but by his first his wife Sonja and their son Stephen, following his instructions.

Flavin’s personal collection illustrates how much he appreciated skill and draftsmanship in drawing. Above all, he found it in Japanese drawings, as well as nineteenth-century American landscape drawings. His interest in the latter began during the 1960s after he moved to Cold Spring, in the Hudson River valley, and continued through the late 1970s when he acquired a large number of works by Hudson River school artists on behalf of the Dia Art Foundation for the purpose of displaying them at a planned but unrealized Dan Flavin Art Institute in Garrison, New York. Flavin also collected 20th-century drawings: there are stunning examples by Piet Mondrian, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt in the exhibition.

Flavin became famous for works that did not reveal his hand: using factory-made fluorescent tubes, his sculptures were assembled by electricians. This exhibition, however, gathers works that show direct mark making and document the artist’s thought process when observing a subject, providing unprecedented insight into Flavin’s creative inspiration. For all that he is considered a minimalist, an abstractionist and even a conceptualist, in this not-to-be-missed display we encounter a different, private side of the artist, a man who was moved by romanticism and aspired to develop craftsmanship.

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April 26 to May 26, 2012
558 West 21st Street at 11th Avenue
New York City, 917-226-3851

Carol Szymanski, HIM, 2008-2012. Brass and copper, 48 x 11 x 24 (approx). Courtesy of Guided By Invoices

On December 12, 2008 in her ongoing Emailed text piece, “Cockshut Dummy,” Carol Szymanski quoted one of her French banker colleagues as saying “in this climate don’t go pissing against the wind.” This man added, “That’s not an easy one for a girl to understand.” Szymanski admitted, “they had me on that one.” Then, she added, “I said, ‘Oh yea now I get it.’” That conversation gave her part of the title for this exhibition. A visual artist who deals with the literal meanings of language, Szymanski originally was concerned with the smallest units of linguistic meaning. Her charcoal drawings from 1996 contain variations on the word “stand.” And the three brass horns in Him (2001-12) form the shape of that word. More recently, she has expanded her concern to larger units of language, to texts. To understand and describe a way of life, you must understand how people compose their sentences. And because she is interested, specifically in how bankers present themselves, she became a political artist.

When Szymanski started exhibiting, in the late 1980s, Marxist-based art criticism was all the rage. The only legitimate goal of art, so we were told endlessly, was to critique the social order. But since the galleries and the artists who exhibit in them are a very peripheral part of that system, it was always superabundantly obvious that studying art galleries is not the best way to teach you how capitalism functions. To learn that, you need to enter the financial world, which is what Szymanski did. When she became an upscale banker in London, she wrote about that experience, sending to a few lucky friends a series of texts and images (mostly taken with the camera of her mobile phone), which was transmitted by e-mail every evening at the end of her working day. Walking in The City, London’s equivalent of Wall Street Szymanski noticed the Evening Standard form of advertisements, which had catchy and ironic phrases on them to get people to buy the newspaper. “I always enjoyed reading these placards . . . .They were an odd form of poetry for me.” Hence the origin of the name “Cockshut Dummy”: “for the word Evening, I chose cockshut which means evening twilight and dummy for the word Standard.”

Szymanski’s We Want We Said Wanted More (2010-2012), taken from “Cockshut Dummy,” includes many fragments of conversations from her banker-colleagues. (No image accompanies this text.) Like the words in Stephen Mallarmé’s prose poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard” (“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance”) or in Jacques Derrida’s Glas (1974), with its juxtaposition of quotations from Hegel and Jean Genet, hers are not easy to decipher. Szymanski’s banker’s world is opaque to us art writers as, no doubt, our concerns are to them. If you want an account in plain English of what bankers are doing, then you should read The Nation. We Want We Said Wanted More is a work of art, which is to say that its relationship to the economic and political history it draws upon is elliptical, subtle and indirect. To fully comprehend Szymanski’s achievement, you need to read and view “Cockshut Dummy.” Soon that cumulative work of art will be completed and published, and so that will be possible. Meanwhile, this marvelously suggestive mini-retrospective, which speaks in deeply original terms to our present aesthetic and political concerns provides a good introduction to the ambitious oeuvre of a great mid-career artist, whose art deserves (and soon will surely receive) close sustained discussion.

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May 1 to June 16, 2012
32 East 69th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, 212 794 4970

installation shot, Science on the back end: Artists selected by Matthew Day Jackson at Hauser & Wirth New York, May 1 to June 16, 2012, with works by Rosy Keyser, Eve’s First Confusion Between Penises and Snakes, 2012, left, and Ray (x-ray), 2012. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

If you don’t already know about it, Pinterest is a website acting as virtual pinboard where users can compile and share inspirational images. The compelling group show, Science on the Back End, is artist Matthew Day Jackson’s Pinterest page writ large. This is not the first time the five artists he selected have been brought together. While each artist’s work inhabits a separate room of Hauser & Wirth’s uptown space, the eclectic forms in various media share the easy dialogue of a one-generational family reunion. The discussions are about poetic gestures, engaging experimentally with materials, seeing things with fresh eyes, the provisional, the quotidian, and how we intersect with the history of just about everything.

Much of the work here is consciously indebted to Arte Povera and related historic moments none more than the altered classical statues of Nick van Woert. Dissect (2012), a sliced statue, is filled with a urethane and garbage filler much like the sliced detritus of Jedediah Caesar (coincidentally currently showing at D’Amelio Terras). Van Woert’s other statue Disappear (2012), having had translucent urethane dripped on it while face down, looks like a mishap in the Met’s classical wing with a Lynda Benglis paint pour. Haunted by Arman’s accumulations of everyday objects, History (2012) is a circular sampler of tools that could be weapons and vice versa. However, these are not readymade, mass-produced hammers, hooks, and chisels from Home Depot. Reaching way back to the dawn of human ingenuity, they are artisanal sand castings flawed by the renegade run-off of poured white bronze.

Larry Bamburg, Bone Stack #31 Shown at 60in center, Frozen, 2012. Bones, bespoke display freezer, 136 x 42 x 42 inches. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Other ur-moments can be found in Rosy Keyser’s slapdash, shanty-town, string-and-burlap abstract paintings, Marc Ganzglass’s galvanized steel Wheel (2011), and Larry Bamburg’s precariously stacked animal bones. Bamburg’s works are particularly well situated in the only room in the gallery with a white marble floor and skylight, both of which cast mausoleum sanctity on his resuscitory efforts. In Bamburg’s most complex piece, Bone Stack #31 Shown in at 60in center, Frozen (2012), the natural history museum, the supermarket freezer case, and Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963-65) come together in a monolith glistening with moisture, a monument to cycles of life.

Ganzglass offers the most reductive gestures, especially in his metonymic Shear Pin (2010), a cast of an actual shear pin the artist found on train tracks in Brooklyn. Used to connect train cars and designed to break in the event of an accident, this homely little object speaks to sacrifice in general, small losses preventing greater ones. And if you look very closely at the black fabric of his Wiper (#1) (2010), another poignant encounter with a found object, you can see the ghostly imprint of dollar bills, a Shroud of Turin of our current god.

Erin Shirreff really digs into the nitty-gritty of vision in a deceptively simple video, Lake (2012). Depending upon when you walk in on the silent loop, the projected image of a picturesque landscape can appear to be a realistic painting or a postcard reproduction. It is in fact a found snapshot from the artist’s family archive which she manipulates in real time with lights, shadows, and colored gels; that’s right, no Photoshop. Playing with assumptions that everything today is digitally manipulated, Shirreff conjures an array of moods: sepia tone nostalgia, spiritual bursts of light, somber overcast skies. Slowing things down with very gradual shifts, sustained looking is richly rewarded by action taking on new meaning and associations running the gamut from prehistoric glaciers to family outings.

Bringing things full circle, Jackson even included a work of his own in response to the show, a high-polish stainless steel ruler hanging on the wall titled Nothing More Than the Cumulative Sum of My Experience (2012). The piece reflects both his attitude toward art in general and a sliver of anyone standing before it. Jackson’s reminder that an artist’s vision can extend to satisfying curatorial efforts recalls Robert Gober’s presentation of Forrest Bess at the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

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The Whitney Biennial, arguably, is an academy of the moment.  But New York hosts two venerable, national visual arts institutions that boast the word academy in their title: The National Academy of Design and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Their annual exhibitions don’t garner the press and attention of the Whitney, or even the raucous, spirited Brucennial for that matter, but the academies have a singular advantage over most institutions and festivals: selection processes (for invitationals and membership alike) rest in the hands of living artists.

Works by Rebecca Smith on view at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2012

The National Academy has dropped the confusing “design” from its day-to-day name—to its 19th-century founders, design meant disegno in the renaissance sense, but today most people think of teapots.  And it has been experiencing a veritable renaissance itself since the start of the 2011-12 season when its stunning program of renovations was unveiled.  Suddenly, the old warhorse looked sprightly.

Tomorrow (May 17) Arts and Letters, as it is colloquially called, will open its none-too-catchy titled “Exhibition of Work by Newly Elected Members and Recipients of Honors and Awards”.  It follows on the heels of the annual invitational that opened the same spring week as the Whitney.  Make no mistake, however: this is a show of artists more likely to persist in the consciousness of connoisseurs than many in the flashy, headline grabbing, portentous museum surveys that eclipse such an event.  In place of themes that professional curators come up with are individuals of quality selected by revered peers.  The award selection committee at the American Academy consisted of Lois Dodd, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Malcolm Morley, Thomas Nozkowski, Judy Pfaff, Dorothea Rockburne, Peter Saul, and its chair, Joel Shapiro.

Among cash prizes of $10,000 each, to be distributed at a ceremonial at which Chuck Close will deliver the keynote address, are the Jimmy Ernst Award for a lifetime achievement, picked up by sculptor of zany furnishings and decorations Forrest Myers; the Merit Medal for Painting, awarded to Joyce Pensato; other awards to John Newman and Rebecca Smith;  prizes earmarked for young artists going to Nathlie Provosty, Elisa Soliven and Nicole Wittenberg.  The exhibition also includes artists in the invitational from whom works were purchased on behalf of American museums, among them Cora Cohen,  Suzanne McClelland and Ann Pibal. New artist and architecture members inducted this year (the academy also elects writers and musicians) include Lynda Benglis, Elizabeth Diller, Kenneth Frampton, Robert Gober and Kara Walker.

It is a matter of some pride to me personally to note artists on these lists who have also featured in the pages of this magazine, received attention at The Review Panel, or were subjects of shows that I helped organize.  I will also mention having written for the catalog of Wittenberg’s debut New York solo show opening at Freight & Volume Gallery in Chelsea next week.  Critics don’t go out of their way to cultivate academic tastes, but it is validating to find commonality with an academy as august as this one.

American Academy of Arts and Letters, 633 West 155 Street at Broadway, New York City, 212-368-5900, open Thursday to Sunday, 1 to 4 pm (closed Memorial Day)

Nicole Wittenberg, from May 24 at Freight & Volume Gallery, 530 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212-691-7700

Nicole Wittenberg

Growing up in small town Virginia, neighborhood children of Jewish, Armenian, Greek, Irish, you-name-it descent did everything from making mud pies, building forts in the woods, sledding, and trick-or-treating together.  We were inseparable.  Like other ethnic communities, my family also tried to assimilate: pancake dinners, the country club, carpools, leaving out cookies for Santa, etc.  I was even baptized in the local Methodist church, despite both my parents being of Druze ancestry. Unfortunately, I wasn’t taught the Arabic language and I only know the names of food and curse words as a result.  We still managed to travel a few times to Lebanon as a family and I have vivid memories of those fascinating visits.

Souhad Rafey in her Manhattan kitchen

For Arabs, hospitality lies at the heart of who they are. My father owned restaurants and nightclubs (one after another).  Number two was called The Shiek and it had a Middle Eastern theme.  My mother was known for the delicious desserts she made for this establishment.  I have fond memories of listening to great live music at my dad’s club with everyone from Chubby Checker to Fats Domino, and of meeting celebrities like Frank Zappa and the Herman’s Hermits. Pre-rocker Pat Benatar made up part of the house band along with someone accompanying her on a grand piano.  She belted out slow, beautifully pitched songs while guests dined on exquisite Italian cuisine.  On breaks from college, I enjoyed bartending, hostessing, and waiting tables at The Farmer’s Market, my father’s last restaurant.

My mother was an amazing cook and she helped plan the menus throughout my father’s career.  At home, while our neighbors were chowing down on TV dinners and tuna casseroles, the Rafeys were happily trying out the many recipes my mother had gathered from Julia Childs and others.   And my parents entertained often, which had a huge influence on me. It’s always rewarding to share food with friends and family, who appreciate my joy which is a big part of it all.

After I moved to New York in 1984 to complete my degree in Museum Studies, I began taking in my baked goods to share with colleagues at The Hispanic Society and the Cooper Hewitt Museum, where I had internships.  After 30 years, I continue to make the same chocolate cookie crusted cheesecake with its hint of Crème de Menthe and Crème de Cacao, for staff, artists, and art handlers at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Along with new artist friends, I’ve added many new recipes to the mix, exchanging recipes with artists who have come in over the years to help install their work for the Academy shows. Bob Yasuda, for instance, is one of the most inventive and adventurous cooks I have encountered.  Justen Ladda gave me a simple recipe for delicious cheese filled popovers that I continue to use; and, in exchange, I gave him seeds from my terrace for the public garden that he designed and maintains on the Lower East Side.  Just last year, Robert Chambers and Mette Tommerup, both having been included in Academy exhibitions, gave me a most unusual cake pan before they returned to Florida.

Following is the simplest recipe for a Middle Eastern dessert I know.  Some call it, Kanafa, while others say, “Kanafi”, or Knefeh…and its origin can also be disputed. Whatever they call it, everyone agrees that it’s delicious!

Ingredients

Kataifi (frozen shredded fillo dough)

2-3 bars butter

orange blossom water

sugar

water

ricotta cheese (2 small containers)

Photo courtesy of arabic-food.blogspot.com

Directions

Thaw the Kataifi for an hour.

In a bowl, pull it apart and pour melted butter on top, making sure it soaks through entirely.

Heat ricotta cheese for 5 minutes in a saucepan, on low.

Add 2-3 tsp. orange blossom water and stir

Grease a glass dish or metal pan

Place one layer (1/2) of the buttered dough on the bottom.

Put the ricotta mixture over this

Place the rest of the dough on top of this

Bake at 350 for approximately 40 minutes

To crisp the top, place under the broiler for a short time

For the syrup:

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup water

1 teaspoon lemon juice

2 tsps. orange blossom water

Just as it boils, stir in the lemon juice (which prevents coagulation)

Reduce heat and stir for 5 minutes.

Pour syrup over the layered dessert.

(I like to serve this with ground pistachios on top and mixed berries on the side.)

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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Excerpt from "Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama" by Alison Bechdel. Copyright © 2012 by Alison Bechdel. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Alison Bechdel’s engrossing new graphic memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama is a worthy successor to the work of Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, William Steig, and Bill Watterson. Bechdel’s book follows by six years her widely acclaimed Fun Home, which memorializes an aesthetically absorbed, emotionally constricted, closeted gay funeral director—Bechdel’s father—who putatively committed suicide when Bechdel was twenty.  This synopsis, however, conveys nothing of Bechdel’s originality and erudition, her meticulous drawing, her sensitivity to suggestive design.

Fun Home opens with a young Bechdel perched on her father’s upended feet for an airplane ride she calls “Icarian.” Casting her father in the role of Daedalus, she cherishes this game because, in the “arctic” gloom of their gothic Victorian mansion in rural Pennsylvania, it provides her with rare moments of physical contact.  (Her mother stopped kissing her goodnight when she was seven.)  At the end of the book, Bechdel draws herself as a slightly older child in a swimming pool with her father who holds out his arms as if to catch her. She ponders what would have happened if instead of plunging to his death (like her father, who fell under a truck), Icarus had lived and inherited his father’s talents? A coda to the Daedalus-Icarus myth—not mentioned by Bechdel—explains that Daedalus was involved with a talented young apprentice called Perdix of whom he was jealous and whom he managed to drown for fear of being surpassed.  His own beloved son’s subsequent fall to doom, therefore, can be read as a punishment visited upon Daedalus. This silent back-story shadows Bechdel’s art.  For in her personal fantasy, her father doubles as craftsman-perpetrator and victim.

Are You My Mother? is a title borrowed from another pictured quest for a parent published in 1960, the year of Bechdel’s birth.  In this now classic children’s book by P.D. Eastman, available even on YouTube, a newborn bird goes in search of its mother who has left the nest to forage.  With no idea what to look for, the small bird wanders off; after a string of zany and dangerous mistakes, it eventually finds her. In Bechdel’s case, the finding involves not her mother per se but an understanding of her.

Excerpt from "Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama" by Alison Bechdel. Copyright © 2012 by Alison Bechdel. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Through her unsparing pictorial narration, we see, hear, and swallow the struggles that lacerate every childhood.  (Not by accident does a mirror adorn this book’s jacket). This is American life at its most candid.  It stops mattering very much that the author hails from a Catholic family, that Bechdel is a lesbian, or that she has created this work while her mother is bristlingly alive and cognizant of the project.  Bechdel’s journey—backward in time—brings her in contact with a host of non-mothers (including a famous psychoanalyst, a pair of warmly caring women psychotherapists, and lesbian lovers) — but also iterations of her actual mother, who proves beautiful, highly literary, self-disciplined, and who morphs repeatedly according to decade fashions.  However, Bechdel’s mother remains enduringly remote:  “’I can’t help you. You’re on your own,’” she announces tersely when told about her daughter’s need to do the Fun Home memoir.  A child hearing such words knows with a pang that he or she is actually chained to the parent who says this.

Smarting like a slap, her rebuff occurs in an exchange so dreaded by the artist that, anticipating it, she almost crashes into a truck.  “I hope that in time you’ll come to understand,” she imagines herself saying as she steers along a road with a background sign that reads: “No Shoulder.”  The ensuing letdown foreshadows much that is to come. But unlike authors of smarmy bad-mother diatribes who in retaliation sharpen knives of resentment, Bechdel achingly wants not to fight but to understand:  what has her withholding mother not withheld from her? Sharing each hard-won insight, she welcomes readers to re-think their own less than perfect parents.

Generous without sacrificing honesty, Bechdel twins herself with her mother by drawing both characters with strikingly matched jet-black hair, a color code she accentuates by making all the other significant women blonde.  This twinning holds even when Bechdel’s mother turns gray, for in those images her short bob mimics her daughter’s boyish cut.  Like so much else, the visual pairing performs its effects subliminally.

Chapters begin with pictured dreams. The first of these appears transparently birth-like in that the artist must escape through a tiny window and plunge in fetal pose into turgid water.  Icarus comes readily to mind.  Each chapter’s title, moreover, cites a theoretical premise by the late British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, the artist’s adoptive intellectual mentor. She even resuscitates Winnicott in imaginative scenarios as she does likewise Virginia Woolf.  Interlarding well-chosen snippets of literature and psychoanalytic theory with the wrenching details of her life, she offers transferable interpretive insights. The book itself becomes a teaching tool.

Several times Bechdel informs us of her mother’s spider phobia and, elsewhere, of her own childhood horror of vomiting.  In a riveting page, she connects the two in a session with her first therapist. Awakening her mother in the middle of the night, Bechdel (age 10) vomits a mess that uncannily resembles a spider.  Her mother’s affect is uncharacteristically kind, but a phobia ensues.  The principal link concerns unconscious aggression and rejection, for a mother’s most primitive function is to feed her child, and vomiting reverses this completely.  Children feel shame and sometimes even terror as their bodies lurch out of control.  As for the spider, it condenses every constructive and destructive maternal impulse into one irregular black shape.  Louise Bourgeois’ Mamans materialize as we read. Bechdel, twinned with her mother yet painfully distant from her, eventually learns that she cannot find her in this book, but she can recreate her.

A paradigmatic scene constitutes the book’s climax, and it occurs twice.  Needing special shoes to correct her arches when she was small, Bechdel was taken for repeated visits to a hospital where she witnessed severely crippled children and found herself envying them just as Bemelmans’s Madeline is envied by the other little girls because of the attention won by her appendectomy.  In Madeline, Miss Clavel silences them, but Alison Bechdel enjoys a superior fate.  Bidding hard, she pretends to be a crippled child herself.  With bated breath we watch as an amazing scene unfolds.  Her mother joins in, makes believe with her, offers her imaginary leg braces, even pretends to lace up a pair of special shoes.  What Bechdel comes to realize through this re-animation is how her mother actually gave her some of what she needed to become an artist.  The mother-spider cripples you but also helps you walk.  The family’s background, in which a mother is sexually sidelined by a husband who preferred young men, a mother moreover who was taught long ago by her own mother to favor sons over daughters, begins to fade.  What matters is that she plays!  And that Bechdel can use her now, in Winnicott’s sense, of discovering that, no longer compelled to experience her as a need-gratifying object, she can recognize what has been offered all along as well as what was denied.  And the book closes with measured gratitude and the words: “She has given me the way out.”  This “meta-book,” as Bechdel’s mother called it, is a masterful meditation on growing up.

Are Your My Mother? A Comic Drama By Alison Bechdel. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Illustrated. 290 pages, ISBN 0618982507  $22.

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A work by Andrea Zittel (AZ Aggregated Stacks #7, 2012) on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery at Frieze Art Fair New York, May 2012. Photo: artcritical

I guess it is time to eat some words.  In a welcome extended to Frieze Art Fair New York that was measured to the point of being somewhat surly, in which as it happens a culinary comparison figured, our editorial promised that “artcritical will do its duty and report on what it finds.”  Well, what was found is, simply put, the best art fair this writer has visited in America.

At least, that is, in terms of creature comforts.  The general level of art on show was respectable, in relation to other fairs, but not significantly or demonstrably higher than such rivals as the Armory Show or Art Basel Miami. And, by and large, this was not a fair of seriously high-end, blue-chip offerings.  Instead there was a focus on younger artists, with an emphasis on collectible objects – with a predominance of painting and domestically scaled sculpture and not much by way of installation or video.  Frieze seems to attract a classier, savvier average exhibitor perhaps on account of the very fact that it settled on a leaner roster of participants than its humungous, sprawling rivals; under one roof, it was in more than one sense contained.

And beautifully managed. The snaking tent is a triumph of design, affording a blessing rare enough alas in museums and almost unheard-of in North American fairs: natural, diffuse, overhead light.  (This was perhaps a tad over-augmented the Sunday of my last visit with harsh artificial light to compensate for an overcast start to the day.)  The curved layout  avoids the oppressions of the grid so that as the viewer moves through the space there is a sense of progress, of arriving at a new bend in the curve.  Spaces are neat but individualized and sight lines nicely varied.  According to David Nolan of David Nolan Gallery, the organizers managed to “get rid of the politics” that is the art fair norm.  The management told him “not one gallery complained about placement.”  There is ample space between sections, booths are big, the floor is strictly a uniform, gray wood paneling – rather than the oppressive concrete, cheap carpeting and pretentious cacophony of individual booth flooring solutions that mar the fair going experience at convention centers and armories.

And because they had struck out with their own temporary structure at Randall’s Island, Frieze didn’t have to work with the catering contracts and intransigent unions of these venues.  This meant invitations to top-notch eateries like The Fat Radish and the late Leo Castelli’s watering hole, Saint Ambrœus, and it meant relaxed, friendly staff.  The perceived remoteness of the location and the steep entrance fee of $40 meant an absence of crowds.  Exhibitors I spoke to do not regret the selected volume of attendees as it meant a more committed (read “likely to spend”) kind of viewer had a better time of it.  According to Frieze exhibitor Alexander Gray, of Alexander Gray Associates, who has never exhibited at the rival Armory Show but has had challenging experiences shepherding collectors around the piers, “Art is an aspirational market; if the surroundings fail to inspire and engage, then some people are not going to bother.”

Other dealers I spoke with were candid about sales.  A mid-level class of collector was identified who might have “blown their wad” for the year at the March fairs.  Sales were “decent but not great” according to another trusted source.  As word gets out of the superior visitor experience (for collectors and professionals if not the average enthusiast) that might change in 2013.  But there is no question, whoever comes out top in sales figures, that the British invaders have raised the bar in the fair going experience.

Frieze continues Monday, May 7 through 6pm, with reduced tickets from 1pm (last entry at 5pm)

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