May 9-June 18, 2005

Neo Rauch is a prolific artist whose skill is put to the service of his imagination.  His large-scale, often mural size paintings at David Zwirner might seem to employ the usual grab bag of tricks other painters use, but Rauch sets himself apart with his jarring and unusual sense of space and forced perspective.  He leaves areas deliberately unrefined so that the paintings bear a real physical relationship to the act of painting and paint itself—an odd mixture for someone whose project rests so firmly upon allegory.  Shifts in scale and fragmented spaces collide.  He intuitively understands the function of these traditional devices and deliberately subverts them in an affirmation of the senses.

Rauch reinforces the disconnect his characters play in his works by bringing attention to the disjuncture between narrative representation and narration.  His coolly removed figures, prisoners, revelers, red-coated soldiers, children, and various other assortments and breeds serve as a sort of syntax in these arrangements.  He supplies us with a language and through his peculiar interpretation of painting’s classic tenets dismisses any conclusive story.  The pieces come off as highly idiosyncratic yet familiar, simultaneously loose and rigid and almost always appealing.

All of Rauch’s nearly fatalistic narrative structures are possessed with the weight of history, demise and decay.   Much has been made of his origins in Leipzig and that city’s past and influence on him and a whole new hot generation of artists.  While the legacy of East Germany and failed Communist regimes surely plays a hand in the nostalgia of some of these works, there remains a sense that this artist is not defined by borders and boundaries built from socio-political histories. He has transcended these events, these places.  He is caught in a whirl of ideas, concentrated yet unattached.  While there is an ease with which he paints, one continually gets snagged on something in his pictorial inventions.  His comic style is infused with an affected naturalism.  This affectation may well be just a shorthand the artist has developed, which, one assumes, helps him in being so productive.  Given this, it is surprising how unpredictable his paintings seem.

Whatever their source—Soviet-era propaganda or circus sideshow—all these pieces are situated in specific landscapes.  Chosen locations reverberate the function of the scene.  Rauch brings mise-en-scene to a head in his chosen medium.  This device also alludes literally to the land, a sort of grounding of all the confusion and dreams.  His compositions are elegiac, anticipating the somnambulist’s awakening.  Rauch’s imagination is the site of agency that propel these latest works into a deeply interconnected world.  It’s hard to claim that someone with so much recent success can be in any way outside of a system, an outlaw.  Yet he demonstrates that artistic power resides with those who can dare to invent and think and dream and reinvigorate our senses from a hazy and image-weary sleep.

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As Marx claimed, in the introduction to his Critique of Political Economy, consumption is production. Taking this as his premise, Bruce Ferguson, Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, has curated a show which is at once understatement and spectacle at Mary Boone .  In the world of art and leisure, commodity and concept collude to leave behind artifacts, treasures, objets d’art.

In this group show, the aesthetics of interior design expose the world of exchange contemporary artists find themselves compelled to compete in.  The logic is simple: people buy things.  Lamps, chairs, pots and various vessels, et cetera, even art.  It’s clear that, despite their initial appearance as everyday items, these are Artworks, meant to be appreciated for their application of skill and judgment, but not used in any functional sense.   They are precious.

In the gallery, one feels the splendid quality of what money could buy.  Art, here, reflects the domestic object, taking its outward appearances, such as table or bench, but dispensing with its more bodily functions.  The discourse on the found object comes to a grinding halt and we wallow in the allure of style itself.

Everything fits snugly into a decorator’s paradise.  Ken Price’s erotically charged clay pieces are colorful in a ruinous way.  It is Rodin by way of Ren and Stimpy, their forms spotted with a sensual leper-like skin of paints. Sachio Hitare’s immaculately lacquered “Obi Bench” is an orange form curving and bending along the floor recalling the luxury of custom car culture in its precision and ease.  Josiah McElheny’s “Total Reflective Abstractions” lingers in the ether of decadent pleasure: mirrored objects on a mirrored tabletop, pristine and perfect to the point of fascination, which is arguably what the obsession is all about.

These items are selling themselves.  The rich surfaces and studied arrangement excite desire as they mimic the representations of actual objects, objects whose use value has been omitted, art objects by default.

Two artists stand out as voices of clarity in the muddle of desire.   Tom Friedman’s school chair, drilled into skeletal oblivion, sits dolefully on the edge of the gallery.  It seems unconcerned about attracting buyers (though a $95,000 price tag and subsequent sale does affirm the position of the artist and gallery).  It’s a morbid irony that the violence he inflicts on an ordinary chair has been trophied to such a degree.  The addition of Lee Bontecou’s work seems odd at first.  Bontecou’s rough-hewn formalism spits in the eye of décor yet in this setting becomes theatrical prop, adding a dose of agitation to the ether of opulence. The work is subject to adoration and adulation, hung on the wall as a symbol of deeply felt sentiment coupled with the ethos of the struggling artist.  It’s meant to anchor the mood and tenor of a room that is otherwise too clean, too surgical, too meticulous.  Its inclusion transforms it to an object of subjugation, effectively transforming Bontecou’s work into an interior design device, retro-fitted to the same rigors of fashion, seasonal tastes, and charms.

The show is great for those seeking an affirmation of values based on exclusivity and the attainment of “high” goods.  Ferguson has definitely exemplified the sense of slippage that exists today between art forms and craftwork.  That alone could be the most redeeming quality of the show.  But this is a manipulation of the senses, a filling of the void of unease and uncertainty created by the slippage we experience, with objects of desire.  This is what commercialism is largely about, but not necessarily art.  The show does not provide a forum for the contemplation of ideas on objecthood or the function of art versus, or in dialogue with, functional design.  With the exception of Friedman and Bontecou, whose works do address the fundamentals of form and our expectations of functionality, the show exemplifies a marketplace where the tools of production satisfy the accumulated tastes of the elite.  Not many people would posses such finery, even in today’s luxury-oriented market.

This is what exposes and undoes the potential strength of the show, what Kant refers to as a lack of “delineation”.  What does it mean to curate if not to pass judgments on taste?  What does it say of taste, or judgment, when we find the purely sensational on parade? There is simply no interrogation to be found.  The exhibition presents art as decoration without challenge.   Which seems rather flip. One hopes that the overseers of the art world retain the gumption to engage us in our consumption of the beautiful in a meaningful way, rather than merely purvey fine goods.  We sit in awe of the exquisite but undergo a loss of power; it is grist for the slippage, however neatly organized.

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Maybe it’s my age. Perhaps it’s the intimacy of experience I’ve shared with an irreverent aesthetic found largely in underground comics and zines, music and mayhem as I grew up in America. In any case, it’s overabundant in the work of so many rising artists today. Most of it, whether found in the halls of ivy league graduate studios, or galleries foaming with the waves of incoming emerging artists, is schlock; imitations crashing on the shores of imitation. Comics become a bore and a chore to digest when they originate from an unimaginative place.

Raymond Pettibon’s show of new work at David Zwirner in Chelsea this month lays to waste all the copycats and wannabes. It’s a big show with perhaps too many drawings that support much of the artist’s writing, or musings. He scribbles on walls above and below his drawings like a tired device meant to elicit a sense of freshness and directness to his brash drawings, and yet it still works. Pettibon has left behind the pen and picked up the brush with a sense of material bravado that reflects his prolific nature, or compulsion, to do drawings. He has not outgrown his roots but has cultivated instead a facility of expression that begins to literally transform the viewer through a derangement of our own knowledge. Is this literature? Poetry? Is it painting? Is it political? It is an alliteration of all of these artistic gestures.

Pettibon plumbs the extremes for imagery: the mundane, racism, evolution, religion, violence, sports, pornography, nature, beauty and, with a wink, Abu Ghraiib. He gives us carnivalesque baseball, mangy animals that howl for the Second Coming, noir scenes ripped from the movies. He peels back through all of this to what he finds to be bits of our true natures, often chaotic and unforgiving. The video piece, a fusion of drawn images and computer animation, is itself somewhat of a misanthropic addition to the show. In it the question comes forth on a wave, “Was he a cynic, an enthusiast, or merely and esthete of rough seas?” Pettibon is all of these but manages to stay clear of the role of the artist as hero. Throughout all of his choices the constant echo of his hand dipping into the ink comes forth steadily and with such a grace that a suspension of disbelief is achieved. The medium has been transcended.

Unlike so many of today’s artists that grapple for some street credibility, Pettibon’s work comes off as honest. The real danger in all this, however, is whether or not it all becomes too routine, if all the campy play turns into kitsch. If somehow, despite all of the crudity and force of will being splayed out in one of America’s most expensive cultural proving grounds, Pettibon becomes a caricature of himself, and the work along with him. But the ethics in that equation remain unclear. What cuts through the grime is Pettibon’s willingness to make work that dares our notions of all we consume. It’s a bit tough at times and bites. Take your time, chew slowly, and enjoy the flavor.

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