December 2, 2021 to January 23, 2022
124 Forsyth Street and 136 Eldridge Street
Both between Delancey and Broome streets,
New York City, highnoongallery.com

These new paintings by Jennifer Coates, like her previous bodies of work, arrive in a headlong rush of invention festooned upon a canny theme, in this case the female body in nature. Previously, Coates made exuberant, punkish paintings exploring dubious episodes in the life of processed food. Now she places groups of nude women –– she names them as nymphs, dryads and goddesses –– into clearings in deep, dark forests, thus activating irresistible tropes of a Western painting tradition that arose with spied-upon bathing beauties (Europa, Io, Venus, Susannah) meant for royal boudoirs. But while this hook induces thoughts about the male gaze, from Titian and Correggio to Cézanne and Matisse –– and about the feminist reckoning with that moribund tradition (Spero, Schneemann) as well as the postfeminist inversion of that reckoning (Kurland, Yuskavage) –– the figures themselves can be all but incidental in Coates’ overgrown miasmas of tree trunks, wildflowers, whiskery stalks and impenetrable leafage. As with the food paintings, where her toxic acrylics performed a kind of transubstantiation into Cheez Whiz and Smuckers, Coates’ forests are indexical floriations: sinuous strokes are branches; spills can be glitters of leaves; spray paint, fog; protruding paint-licks, thorns, ticks or mosquitos. A more occult art history comes to mind in these unkempt, unruly wildernesses, one which begins where the babes-in-the-woods tradition itself, after giving birth to modernism, withers away.

Dryads and Pollinators (Birds) (all works 2021), one of two large paintings with that title in the exhibition, is a swirling chorus of graphically insistent hummingbirds, white blossoms and filigreed stalks that recalls the backyard watercolor raptures of Charles Burchfield. While Burchfield’s glades are uninhabited, Coates’ everyday ecstatic includes luminous beings, spirits of the forest whose spare, archaic profiles float among the flowers. Faces, flowers, birds and weeds are painted with a kind of folk-art zeal while the cerulean forest behind, solidly modeled then dematerialized by dancing layers of sprayed pigment, is appealingly contrary in color, scale and attack.

Coates’ experimental approach to mark-making — thick or thin, macro or micro, tight or loose, brushed, sprayed or sponged –– goes for both forests and figures. In Grieving Woman, a lone woman in a classical pose is incised in white against the mottled background like a fading figure on a krater. Also cut from Hellenic lines, in this case black, are five hollow women in Mystery Cult, who seem to be lost in the (ergot-infested?) weeds, while by contrast, the protagonists in Three Dryads are entangled in a single libidinous squiggle of green and yellow paint that, like flesh according to Francis Bacon, verges on the repulsive. Changing tactics again, Coates gives the golden apparitions in Three Nymphs careful, earthy substance. They gesture with a narrative refinement that suggests, along with their warm, coppery tarnish, the microcosmos of a Sienese predella. Coates, however, putting the brakes on such skillful seduction according to her restless temperament, encloses this exquisite scene in a dark, seething knot of trunks and branches as brut as the figures are delicate.

Nor does Coates forswear outright satire: Bacchanal Before a Herm of Pan ridicules the sublime, if rather stiff, Poussin painting of that title as a girl orgy, complete with two hapless goats. Wry gender critique aside, the painting’s busy, stop-motion scenography seems like an attempt to do the master over again after Henry Darger­­ –– or vice-versa. In any case, thoughts of Cézanne’s “after nature” version of Poussin, his bathers, cannot but come to mind. Poussin’s trees are uncannily naturalistic, his figures –– extricated from sarcophagi –– not so much, and thus there is a certain logic to the way the trunks and limbs of Cézanne’s bathers undergo metamorphosis, like the nymph Daphne, into timber. And thence into Cubism, and all that followed.

The most compelling figure in the show, for that matter, is distinctly Picassoid. Re-engineered for function, the small, reclining nude of Fire Watcher marvelously contains her own bath. Behind her, the fire of the title rages as a preposterously scumbled orange-green goo, barely contained by the jutting blue and purple forms of super-cooled, super-flat conifers. As in all the paintings, however experimental, internal typology is firmly organized: trees are trees, figures are figures –– and in Dryads and Pollinators (Moths), insects are insects. In this second large, ravishing version of the theme, clamorous day has turned to mysterious night. The precisionist symbolism of Odilon Redon and Fred Tomaselli echo in Coates’ crisp ferns and fluorescent lepidoptera, scintillating against a nocturne of blue-violet and black. Yet rogue textures –– icky drips and thorny bumps interrupting the most beautiful passages –– remind us that nature, just like art, is a messy and dangerous concoction.

The post Mystery Cult: Jennifer Coates in a Brush with Mythology appeared first on artcritical.

Tony Robbin wants us to see the invisible in all its actuality. Working variously as a painter, sculptor, writer and researcher, he has come to make his creative home in the fourth dimension, and beyond. In his 1992 book, Fourfield: Computers, Art, and the Fourth Dimension (one of several lucid and singular books to the author’s credit) Robbin, who was born in 1943, offers something of a personal credo in his opening chapter, which is titled “Einstein’s Cave”, a reference to Plato’s well-known parable in which higher-dimensional reality must be inferred from shadows. Robbin writes:

In the caves, we are forbidden by authority to turn and face the dancers directly, but in fact authority has no real power over us in this matter. We have the ability to see the dancers in their full dimensionality –– to accept the cultivated experience of seeing the fourth dimension as being “out there,” and it is our choice to do so. Failing to make this choice handicaps our ultimate understanding of reality. Our ability to apply four-dimensional geometry as a useful template for experience connects us to the multiplicity of spaces and points of view that implode upon us every day. If culture can teach us to see the third dimension as real, then just a little more culture can teach us to see the fourth dimension as real as well.

From Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, to Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, avant-garde artists at the beginning of our epoch took the fourth dimension seriously, but without really sweating the details. Even Marcel Duchamp, who diligently worked through hypergeometry manuals, did so only up to the point of malicious drollery. Tony Robbin, on the other hand, holds a patent on the application of three-dimensional projections of six-dimensional quasicrystals to architecture. His best-known book, Shadows of Reality; the Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought (just translated into Chinese), is a primer for climbing the dimensional ladder, from Flatland to esoterica such as entanglement and quantum geometry. The book also chronicles, from an insider’s perspective, the history of 4-d visualization: that is, as diagrams by mathematicians and pedagogues, and as works of art by literally all the important schools of early Modernism. (So far, historians have ignored Robbin’s scrupulously argued mot juste, that Cubism should properly be called “Hypercubism.”)

Nor was Robbin satisfied with a century of attempts to visualize the fourth dimension. In 1980, after mastering the theory but still hungering, as had so many generations of 4-d obsessives, to see the thing itself, he learned of a pioneering computer animation at Brown University: Thomas Banchoff, a mathematician, and Charles Strauss, an engineer had tamed the morphing 3-dimensional projection–– the solid “shadow”–– of a hypercube. They could rotate it at will in hyperspace. (Please note: time is not the fourth spatial dimension, more like an extra dimension. In the rotation of a hypercube, time is the fifth dimension.) Robbin got his hands on the interactive knobs of Banchoff’s million-dollar computer, as well as a copy of his hypercube film, which he took home and studied on a flatbed editing console frame by frame, back and forth, until it took.

The friendship with Banchoff also took, opening the door to the milieu of professional mathematics. Soon Robbin himself had become a pioneer of computer visualization, having learned to code four-dimensional geometry at off hours in computer research labs, and later on his own first-generation workstation. To visualize a tessellation of hypercubes (in which all four dimensions would be continuously packed, as three can be by cubes), Robbin consulted the most renowned geometer in the world, H.S.M. Coxeter, who was delighted to see what had never been seen. On Coxeter’s recommendation, Robbin was invited to present his research at a mathematics conference. Many conferences later, Robbin’s friends, correspondents and collaborators in the math and science realm have proliferated–– from cyberpunk mathematician Rudy Rucker, author of Infinity and the Mind, to maverick cosmologist Roger Penrose, the recent Nobel Prize winner, whom Robbin has consulted about quasicrystals and twistor theory.

Robbin’s collection of experts also includes art historians, such as eminent Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp, and most profoundly, Linda Henderson, whose book The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983) placed this mathematics at the very foundation of modern art, and of Robbin’s thinking. Of course, Robbin’s Rolodex is mainly filled with fellow artists–– “Held, Al” being an especially well-thumbed entry. When I asked Robbin if Held, a lifelong friend who had been Robbin’s teacher at Yale, was a mentor, he quipped, “I met him in 1965 and we stole from each other ever since.”

A snapshot of this relationship exists in an article for Arts, where Robbin gave his take on Held’s black and white paintings. With their elegant spatial contradictions, the paintings, wrote Robbin, are “exercises in omni-attentiveness, and the viewer’s capacity for experiencing and enjoying them grows with his tolerance for multiplicity.” Forgiving the skunked “his” (magazine standard of the day), few viewers of any gender could have brought as much tolerance for multiplicity to Held’s studio as Robbin. A few years later, Robbin was to be greatly influenced by the paintings he was writing about here; considering the overt spatial ambition of the work that resulted, mutual thievery might well be considered a factor in Held’s richly colored paintings of the mid-eighties with their whipsawing perspectives.

In 1971, at the time of the article, however, Robbin was not yet making pure geometric abstractions. He was, instead, at the center of a growing movement involving, among others, Robert Kushner, Joyce Kozloff, and Valerie Jaudon, who were meeting to discuss non-Western, feminist, and countercultural approaches that might invigorate contemporary abstraction. As Kushner put it in an essay on Robbin, “We were even willing to accept that taboo word–– decoration.” Robbin’s contributions to what was originally called Pattern Painting (which Robbin still prefers for his work) were sweeping abstract rebuses with motifs and textures derived from the artist’s immersion in Japanese and Persian aesthetics (he had lived in Japan and Iran until age 16). One of these, Japanese Footbridge (1972) is included in the exhibition “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985,” originating at LA MoCA, (and slated to travel, after a year’s delay, to Bard College in 2021). On a twelve-foot-long golden cloudscape reminiscent of a Zen folding screen, the painting asserts curving rhymes that suggest Islamic tilework, stenciled kimono fabric, and swooping, supersonic speed.

At any rate, Robbin mentions F-111, James Rosenquist’s epic military-consumerist montage, as an influence around this time, although not for its subject matter but for its abrupt transitions. Increasingly, Robbin, like Rosenquist, divided his canvasses into cinematic sequences that stand apart from the symmetrical, fabric-like flattenings common to the works of most of his P&D peers. In 1974-5 Robbin had a solo exhibition of these aggressively compositional paintings at the Whitney Museum, and for the remainder of the decade exhibited at the influential Tibor de Nagy Gallery. His career path was ascendent.

Ironically, it was an observation in Whitney curator Marcia Tucker’s catalogue essay that set Robbin on a new and, to judge by the artworld’s neglect of his later accomplishments, unfashionable trajectory. In “forcefully architectonic” works such as Tonikuni (1972), in which Shinto temple pillars are concatenated with patchwork and aerial views, Tucker detected that “contradictory visual information suggests the complexity of four-dimensional geometry.” Tucker’s inadvertent prophecy sparked some ready tinder in the artist’s mind. Soon Robbin was engaging a physics graduate student to tutor him, equation by equation, through the authoritative textbook on relativistic gravitation–– which is to say, in the four-dimensional reality of the world we live in.

But at the very beginning of his hyper-awakening, a fundamental change was also happening in Robbin’s paintings on their own terms. Even as the authenticity of the artist’s hand along with revisionist cultural politics had, by and large, come to define P&D, Robbin purged references to the non-Western and the handmade and began to compose, as Al Held had been doing, solely with precision lines, curves and planes.

Robbin’s paintings of the later 1970s superimpose four or five cleanly delineated layers which disagree about space. At first Robbin placed darkly contrasted or fully monochrome backgrounds behind vibrantly colored linework: electric blue squares receding like the bent coffers of a barrel vault, yellow double circles shooting across the screen like bullet holes, green L-shaped gnomons in fisheye view, and plenty more, all moving past each other like the multiple exposures of a Dziga Vertov film. In darkly arresting works such as 1976-6, and 1979-3, we may feel caught inside the celluloid itself, adrift in the unspooling frames. Gradually, however, Robbin brought the color of the orthographic (non-perspective) background patterns into dominance, so as to play games of hide and seek. Where the lines intersect, they interrupt and occlude; cut or join. And often the “wrong” background color fills these Boolean and/or/nor mutations, making for irrational, disorienting jumps back to front. Beautiful works such as 1978-3 and 1978-20 seem to compress deep space like Formica marquetry–– and yet they don’t let the viewer off so easily, in that disparate spatial cues warp past the point of integration in a way quite unlike Held’s black and white works, which crisply hold the picture plane however much sliced and reassembled. As critic Carter Ratcliff observed of Robbin’s work of the time in a 1978 essay in Arts, “The irreconcilability of the spatial systems in these paintings has to be recognized as deliberate; that is, Robbin has generated new intentions.”

Robbin was not yet making explicitly four-dimensional works, but he was upping the ante on the “P” of P&D. (Ratcliff: “Of course, there are patterns, and there are patterns.”) Robbin’s new intentions were not to confuse, per se–– although there is a skepticism of systems in all his work, a subject to which I’ll return. Rather, he was goading the viewer into seeing more, seeing multiply. Robbin compares these paintings to fugues whose dense chords contain a weave of melodic symmetries; listeners can learn to hear the independent voices. Taking this approach to impressive paintings such as 1979-8 or 1979-20, one can begin to understand what the artist was after. Imposing in scale (70”x120” and 72”x166” respectively), the faceted crystal logic of these works suggests the reverberations of a pipe organ in a cathedral. But Messiaen or Boulez, perhaps, rather than Bach; pattern is not so much fugal as fugitive. As Robbin had written of Held’s paintings, his own works were increasingly “exercises in omni-attentiveness” that captivate and disorient in equal measure.

It was in 1980 that Robbin broke through to the fourth dimension. More than a century of geometers, artists and spiritualists (Steiner and Ouspensky, for example, who seized on the fourth dimension as a portal to higher being) had strained to see it for themselves. For all of them, the animation of a hypercube in various rotations by Banchoff and Strauss, made on a supercomputer of the day, would have been a holy grail. And so it was to Robbin, who studied it until he could see the rubbery distortions and weird inversions of the spinning hypercube as 3-D projections, or shadows, of a rigid, unchanging figure passing through a dimension we only infer–– just as anyone would take for granted the solidity of a rotating cube from its distorting 2-D shadow (or for that matter, the full volume of the world from the flat projections on our eyeballs.) One of Oliver Sacks’s last books, The Mind’s Eye, includes a chapter about some extraordinary powers of visualization among the blind. Sightless topologist Bernard Morin solved, with his inner vision, the problem of turning a sphere inside out. Reports Dr. Sacks: he quite literally saw it. Inner or outer visualization, it’s the same neurons. Like Morin (if not, perhaps, to the same extent), Robbin had succeeded in rewiring his mental map, and he was determined to bring that map to bear on the propositions of Pattern Painting.

A square can spin on a point, a cube on a line, and a hypercube… on a plane, as would be obvious if you could see four-dimensionally. As Robbin explained in his 1992 book Fourfield, “to the person accustomed only to observation in three dimensions the properties of planar rotation are mysterious, even paradoxical (shapes appear and disappear, turn inside out, flex and reverse); but these paradoxes become the very means by which we see the fourth dimension.”

For the painting Fourfield, Robbin’s 27-foot long magnum opus of 1980-81, the artist welded steel rods projecting from the surface to simulate the paradoxes of planar rotation. Here is Robbin’s description of his ingenious hybrid technique, from an essay (written 30 years later) entitled 4-D and I:

I went to a lot of trouble to make sure that the painted lines and the painted metal rods look the same to a standing viewer. But as the viewer moves, strange things happen. As in any relief, planes can be hidden behind an edge of that plane (seen exactly edge first), and in my four-dimensional works, one has the sensation that whole three-dimensional structures are hidden behind open cubes. Space spins out of space as the viewer moves.

How much math does one need to know to appreciate Robbin’s paintings? By watching Banchoff and Strauss’s film and others now widely available on the internet, I have become somewhat conversant with the hypercube’s gemlike symmetries, which appear when axes align, and with its inversions and flexions as it rotates across a hidden plane. Sometimes I can recognize these familiar landmarks in Robbin’s works, like red rhomboidal capes waved by matadors. I haven’t, so far, experienced the full higher-dimensional consciousness that Robbin wants to impart, but the fascinating manner in which space spins out of space in Fourfield is something new in the history of painting and sculpture.

In color, rhythm and hybrid technique, Lobofour (1982, 96” x144” x 24”) seems similar to Fourfield at first glance; but it is less regular, non-orthographic, subtly wilder. According to one of Robbin’s collaborators, mathematician George Francis, in Lobofour, “the four-dimensional lattice is no longer constrained to flat Euclidean geometry.” (The painting’s title acknowledges Nikolai Lobachevsky, the Russian pioneer of curved space.) The complications of this geometry are beyond my intuition, but clearly some higher order lies behind the painting’s darting spatiality, constantly in motion like sparkles of reflection on a lake. If you look for space in Robbin’s work, you will find it endlessly.

For Primary Structures artists and the conceptual artists of the 1960s, geometry meant the eternal (if slippery) truths of simple grids, boxes, and counting numbers. For Robbin, the uses of geometry are open-ended and dynamic–– in a word, baroque. Not long after Fourfield and Lobofour, Robbin stopped painting for almost a decade, focusing his efforts on sculpture and research, but when he began painting again in the mid-1990s, this open-endedness became more and more pronounced.

First, however, Robbin committed himself to the implications of the steel rods, making wall sculptures that added curving, wiggly forms and rhomboids of tinted plexiglass to the projecting geometry.  Like Man Ray’s rope dancer, these reliefs accompany themselves with their shadow. When lit by red and blue bulbs, the colors combine into near white except where the metal rods cast pairs of diverging shadows on the wall, one blue, one red, encoding the spatial relations of lights, sculpture and wall. For a viewer wearing 3-D red-blue glasses, the parallax of these shadow lines integrates into a stereoscopic image. Geometry now seems to project into the wall, while the actual projections–– the translucent panels, along with their skewed, tinted shadows, and the metal rods–– hover ambiguously in space. As with Fourfield and Lobofour, movement by the viewer allows for an experience of four-dimensional unfolding, while the interplay of dimensions–– one, two, three, and four; real, simulated and virtual–– glues together and flies apart.

As Robbin’s ambitions for sculpture grew, so did his grasp of cutting-edge research by Roger Penrose and others about irregular space-packing patterns, or quasicrystals. Robbin saw in quasicrystals a way to produce an infinitude of deep, fractal-like patterns–– patterns that exhibit simultaneous 2-fold, 3-fold, and 5-fold symmetry and yet, paradoxically, never repeat. Even better, quasicrystals turn out to be shadows of more regular figures from higher dimensions. How Platonic can you get?

Robbin’s involvement with quasicrystals climaxed with a permanent installation at a technical university in Copenhagen, where Robbin made an assemblage of rods and colored plates to hang from the roof of a three-story atrium. It was precisely engineered to unfold its layers of symmetry with viewers’ movements and to project animating quasicrystalline colors as the sun arcs low through the northern sky. COAST, installed in 1994 with great success, was summarily destroyed in 2003 by a new administration. With mathematician Francis’s help, however, Robbin has made a 3-D digital version of a quasicrystal, full-scale and interactive–– an aptly innovative memorial that compensates, somewhat, for bureaucratic vandalism.

In 1995, after the complex logistics of COAST, Robbin returned to painting, but this time with an eye to the native virtuality of the medium, its built-in dimensional depths. Where his paintings and hybrids, impressive as they were, had tended toward dryness and a certain claustrophobia–– with improvisation concealed afterward or restricted to the cranium–– now Robbin applied himself fully to the flat, unshadowed picture plane, allowing for improvisation to flow from head to hand; and from stencils, tape and airbrush to viscous, semi-translucent colored pigment, at first acrylic and later oils.

Robbin’s geometric paintings between 1974 and 1982 had already seen an evolution toward asymmetry and richly colored backgrounds. The carefully airbrushed minor key blues and oranges of Lobofour, at the end of that progression, seem nevertheless to remain primarily functional, a means of establishing color-coded rules to be embroidered upon by the frontal lines, actual and painted. The saturated pigments of Sol Lewitt’s cleanly abutted illusions of solid geometry (wall drawings begun in the mid-1980s) have, perhaps, a similar informational edge; the more sensuous, the more stand-offish. But by 1999, Robbin’s newly painterly approach had turned the tables on color. In comparison to Lobofour (1982), 1999-4’s chromatic power is tremendously increased, yet the palette has hardly changed. There are additional foreground elements in the more recent painting–– delicate strings of regular polyhedra that dance in space–– but the principle difference is that the background is no longer tessellated, tiled and airtight. Instead, it is thickly gaseous and luminous, with soft, intense spots of color that give off heat as well as light. The painting is impenetrable with colliding incidents and riddles of structure, yet it’s light on its feet, porous: a muted rainbow that fractures into foreground shards plays a dark scherzo all the way back to the farthest cloud of matter. In 1999-4, in a way that is new to Robbin’s paintings, color and space are intertwined–– relativistic, one could say; entangled.

Robbin’s new painterliness has continued to develop alongside mathematical speculations that are by now so far beyond the grasp of most viewers that plain looking is surely what is being called for. Which is not to say Robbin has given up explaining–– as in this technical notation in a peer-reviewed math journal about a computer study of a “a quasicrystal lattice in 5-fold orientation where the acute angles are 72° and 36°; it is a slice through a quasicrystal cloud that was made with the deBruijn algorithm.” There are grids and there are grids.

Later in this article, Robbin explains his artistic method and purpose. For the math-challenged, we may take comfort in Robbin’s assertion here, addressing math-savvy readers, that “Sorting out all these complications is not the point. My paintings are not equations, and it is not possible to read a mathematical resolution in them.” He continues:

Rather they revel in the richness and paradox of higher-dimensional visual phenomena. With a knowing nod to the mathematical possibilities, the paintings encourage an acceptance of such spatial complexity. Further, they encourage a taste for, and even a giddy joy, in spatial complexity.

2006 began a period of tragedy, misfortune and serious illness for Robbin and his family. Giddiness departed; spatial complexity stuck around. Robbin revived the idea of monochrome backgrounds to highlight phosphorescent imagery that recalls the pulsating cathode rays of early hypercube animations. The dark background in 2007-8 (2007 56”x70”), for example, recedes behind polygonal planes nested in blue, green, and orange matrices, a slashing, compressing framework. Unlike the monochromes of the 1970s, where geometry is inscribed on top, here the translucent lines embed themselves into the paint; brushy and stained, the background opens up into inscrutable space and color, a cosmic cave.

Robbin’s backgrounds didn’t stay dark for long, blossoming, for example, into the lustrous reds of 2008-1, the molten golds of 2008-O-6, and the fierce ceruleans of 2010-O-3. These insistent colors are worked and worried into unapologetic expressionism. On the other hand, 2009-7, with its palette of pale pinks and oranges, powdery yellows and blues, and with its feathery precision and buoyancy, is distinctly Impressionist in feeling. One might take it for an homage to Monet–– a unique one, which acknowledges Monet the scientist as much as Monet the painter. In Fourfield, Robbin had written about Monet quitting Paris for “the scientific study of light on haystacks and facades at different times of day and in different atmospheric conditions.” Later in the book, Robbin hypothesized Monet’s water lilies–– in which surface, sub-surface, and reflection are mingled–– as the completion of Cubism: “From this point of view […] it is the spatial properties, not the color and brushwork, that make Monet’s later work so appealing and enduring.” Those words were written in 1992. Robbin’s spatial point of view began to give ground to color and brushwork when he resumed painting a few years later, and with the Monet-like 2009-7, the two viewpoints achieve a kind of stereo integration.

Color and brushwork continue to be on the upswing. Since 2013 or so, Robbin has dispersed his dense, braided matrices more and more, leaving dimensional ghosts in shimmering fields of color and light. In 2013-6, the orange background subtly dominates, like the tarnished gold leaf of a Buddhist screen of fluttering Fall leaves. It has a richly melancholy feel. 2016-4 brings foreground and background into raw, scribbling equilibrium, achieving an almost psychotic gorgeousness reminiscent of Ensor or Nolde. 2019-1 is translucent and provisional, grays floating upon but not quite hiding deeper hues, and above that, light-struck facets like fragments of box kites in vapor.

This viewer has already confessed to being unable to see the higher dimensional spaces where Robbin’s work is embodied, but his most recent Pattern Paintings–– which one could say are less late-Monet than late-Cézanne–– provide guided-tours to the edge of the spatial horizon more expert, and every bit as lyrical, indeed as musical, as any offered before. Robbin wants us to see (as he put it in 2006 to the mathematicians) “all of the spaces in the same space at the same time.” He is speaking the language of Masaccio and Leonardo; of Picasso and Duchamp; of Al Held and Robert Smithson.

Smithson, of course, invoked four-dimensional paradox in his writings and artworks, notably the mirror displacements–– part of a general revival of interest in the spatial fourth dimension in the 1960s. In 1969, Robbin wrote about Smithson for Art News, before Robbin’s own 4-d obsession had taken hold. In that article, his focus was on Smithson’s dismantling of systems, including those of art. “I want to de-mythify things,” says Smithson in an interview which precedes the article proper.

Robbin: “People will be frustrated in their desire for certainty, but maybe they will get something more after the frustration passes.”

Smithson: “Well, it’s a problem all around, and I don’t think we will work our way out of it.”

In the text that follows, Robbin places Smithson in the company of Cage more than Judd, identifying his arrangements of materials as “reconstructions of thought processes” rather than sculptures, per se. He recognizes the originality and power of Smithson’s critique of systems. Yet Robbin doesn’t quite accept the bedeviled state of affairs that Smithson delights in exposing:

Since our perceptions mold us, we ought to be responsible for them. How they mold us, how we can be responsible for them, how we can change what we see … are only implicit in Smithson’s work. For further explorations we must wait for other artists or for other shows by Smithson.

Quite a prediction. The next year, 1970, Spiral Jetty crystallized, figuratively and literally, Smithson’s message about the open-ended nature of mathematics, of systems; in doing so, this celebrated work epitomized the “something more” that Robbin proposed beyond the horizon of certainty.

Robbin continues to believe we ought to be responsible for the way we see, but the extraordinary flowering of his paintings of the last two decades has made it easy on the eyes to do so. Built upon a gamut of restlessly shifting higher-dimensional grids–– not only quasicrystals, but braided lattices, four-dimensional knot diagrams, hyperplanes, and so on–– Robbin’s painterly improvisations constitute their own kind of systemless sytem, an open-ended spiral at whose tip all spaces coalesce. “Something more” is there for the seeing.

The post In Einstein’s Cave: Tony Robbin, An Appreciation appeared first on artcritical.

Like Scheherazade, Matt Freedman kept death at bay for a thousand and one nights, with one story after another. Slowly weakened by illness, he soldiered on with his rambling, brilliant Endless Broken Time performances with percussionist Tim Spelios, the most lasting of his innumerable collaborations, until a few months ago. In the final week of his life he continued to draw a seat-of-the-pants existential comic strip with daily installments on Instagram. In the last few panels, a bear-fish realizes he’s all alone in a watery void, floats on his back and contemplates the constellations in the night sky, then closes his eyes and sinks into the abyss. Yet the protagonist, now underwater, finds that he sees new constellations in the form of his old friends (and to be sure, Matt had as many friends as there are stars). A beautiful ending, except keep in mind that Matt would have had no trouble inventing his way out of that predicament–– while waggishly puncturing any sentiment–– had he been able to draw the next endlessly broken panel. DAVID BRODY

Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal

Artist Matt Freedman’s written and drawn memoir, Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal, is not your typical chronicle of illness and rehabilitation. Neither recovery drama nor tear-jerking tragedy, it’s instead nearer to comedy. Both the tone and the format are semi-comic, with fluid illustrations, diagrams, and panel-like sequences floating on waves of hand-written text. Sometimes Freedman’s drawings take the foreground, with words functioning as captions, but mostly text and image create a hybrid that is surprisingly seamless — and absolutely compelling, since his wit is always to the point, even in extremities of hellish pain, anxiety, or drugged oblivion. Equally sharp is his draftsmanship, honed by the self-imposed mission to fill four notebook pages a day during the two months in 2012 when he underwent intensifying radiation and chemotherapy for cancer of the tongue, neck, and lungs.

If traditional illness narratives tend, understandably, to be lacking in humor, Freedman’s over-analytic mind cannot but go there, even with death looming. (The current health of the author, a beloved friend of this writer and many others, is thankfully vigorous, though still endangered.) At his first radiation treatment, with proton guns firing at his diseased throat, he smells the back of his tongue burning. “I’m cooking,” he realizes. The sting of the observation is eased by the cartoonish rendering of his prone head’s cross-section, a Dristan^® ad gone rogue. Similar images get more anatomically precise yet more gruesomely hilarious as the treatment progresses: razor blades, scissors, and swords through the tongue; a burn pattern on the skin resembling a map of Russia; stripes of loose flesh in his neck, “like from a hot pizza cheese burn.” Color appears rarely but to strong effect, primarily when felt-tip red is used as bitter punctuation to locate this widening gyre of pain. But when associative portals open onto vistas of memory Freedman can wield the same color like a fireballer’s change-up –– as when the number five (a parking stall at the hospital) recalls Joe DiMaggio’s uniform number, and thus a lush image of the Yankee Clipper kissing Marilyn Monroe’s flaming red lips.

“It’s remarkable what a trivial little person is revealed when everything is stripped away by drugs and pain and fear,” Freedman remarks. Sports trivia, at any rate, assert a weird priority in the book, with other hospital parking slots calling forth Ted Williams’s .406 batting average in ’41 or –– more borderline autistic –– Lyman Bostock’s .388 or Rob Deer’s 230 lifetime homeruns, each such jog of memory occasioning a fluent sketch of the player’s trading card apotheosis. Power hitters loom with similar iconic weight above Raymond Pettibon’s punk-erudite obsessions, although where Pettibon is occult, Freedman is communicative, leading us by the hand through the educational zig-zag of his thoughts.

Freedman has often played with academic mannerisms in his performances and collaborative instigations. They are absurd events, such as a recent conflation of the French Revolution and the U.S. Open tennis finals, re-enacted shot-by-shot in real time, with losers guillotined; or live lectures with an easel and Sharpie^®, covering obscure historical subjects, accompanied by a jazz drummer. Even in his primary medium, sculpture/installation, Freedman never loses touch with caricatural literalness, nor with a sense of pedagogical mission. His 2012 solo show at Valentine Gallery in Queens, “The Golem of Ridgewood,”included numerous papier-mâché props, some humble and some lavish. The bluntly beautiful, chromatically rich sculptures helped tell the true story of Jewish resistance to the Nazification of Ridgewood’s German immigrants during the early 1940s, a forgotten local history that Freedman utterly entangled with tall tales, myth, and farce.

Relatively Indolent is full of similar entanglements, side-trips from his daily accounts of inscrutable doctors and protocols. We travel backwards in time to harsh assessments of Freedman’s childhood self; and to the day he met his future wife after accidently cutting off his finger in a sculpture studio. (She drove him to the hospital.) We witness Hurricane Sandy through the lens of Freedman’s exile at a Boston hospital, sharing his frustration and guilt at having to focus narrowly on his own pain.

Still, the unprecedented ravages of Sandy call forth affectingly drawn montages, distilled from CNN videos and news photographs. Not only does Freedman’s utilitarian, seat-of-the-pants draftsmanship manage punchline humor and informational razzmatazz (as with the anatomical cut-aways), but it efficiently captures each of the five stages of grief. Crucially, the publisher’s preservation of the hand-written notebook text –– sometimes scrawled on a bus ride or under the effects of strong painkillers, but always legible –– slows the eye, just enough, from reading to looking. That allows Freedman’s resolutely unstylish drawings to sail past an initial repellency, while we learn to read his distinctive, sketchy line. Even as we become addicted, Freedman bears down, expanding his inky range and power, gaining confidence as the work progresses.

Throughout, Freedman records unsentimental self-evaluations, of his work, his thoughts, and his life. The book’s title refers to the slow but steady growth of his rare form of cancer, but “relatively indolent” also serves as a thematic self-assessment, especially as regards his career. Even as he wonders about his lack of focus and killer instinct, the title’s sardonic pun typifies Freedman’s relentless approach: to milk doubt, failure, and anxiety so as to transcend the pretensions of artistic ego and careerism. In all his activities, Freedman remains a truth teller and a joke teller, a principled dreamer in cynic’s clothing –– never more so than in this brilliantly honest and defiantly funny book.

Matt Freedman, Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014). 240 pages, illustrations, ISBN 978-1609805166. $24

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Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist at the Whitney Museum of American Art

March 13 – June 28, 2020
99 Gansevoort Street, between Washington St. and 10th Ave
New York City, whitney.org

The exhibition of Agnes Pelton’s inwardly inspired paintings at the Whitney, “Desert Transcendentalist,” will inevitably be compared to the Guggenheim’s record-breaking Hilma af Klint show of last year. Both feminist pioneers were trained landscapists whose calling was mystical abstraction; both were neglected until Maurice Tuchman’s legendary 1986 exhibition “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – although the show included only one Pelton, and the fuse of her fame has been, like her paintings, a very slow burn. If you take af Klint at her word, she is simply the medium of the works she is celebrated for, a conundrum of authorship which only adds to her contemporaneity, her moment. Pelton is another matter. Her symbolic abstractions are hard-won and timeless, as impeccably composed and crafted as Renaissance nativities. Georgia O’Keeffe’s equally impeccable paintings have been the usual comparison – to the point of being an eclipsing doppelgänger. Indeed, O’Keeffe trained, a quarter century after Pelton, with the same modestly enlightened American landscapist, Arthur Wesley Dow; both were introduced to the Southwest by Mabel Dodge Luhan and her fabulous entourage, and both thereafter spent their lives painting in the desert – the one to immense popular and critical acclaim, the other in near anonymity.

After seeing the LACMA exhibition, I’d been intrigued by the occasional Pelton sighting in regional museums in the West, often in connection with the Transcendental Painting Group, founded in New Mexico in 1938 (Pelton was by then living in remote Cathedral City, CA, east of Palm Springs). She has been virtually unknown in New York, where she grew up and studied, and where she exhibited in the watershed 1913 Armory Show. The current show and its beautifully designed catalogue originated at the Phoenix Art Museum, where I happened to see it in 2019, increasing my knowledge of Pelton’s corpus by dozens of astonishing works, not a few of them rescued from thrift shops and garages.

Pelton, like many artists of her time (as the LACMA show reminded us), explored every alternative belief system that came her way, chief among them Theosophy, a kind of gateway drug to eastern mysticism and western hermeticism. She copied passages from esoteric texts into her journals and set up a proper meditation room in her studio, in which she seems to have contemplated her own paintings while summoning new visions. Perhaps some of these visions bog down in diagrammatic information, taking occult symbolism almost too literally. The urn which runneth over of Even Song (1934), for example, strikes me as received wisdom rather than firsthand insight, although the ethereal Deco calm of the overflow is transfixing. Memory (1937) has an even more complex schema to work through, albeit a more cryptic one; moreover, as with a number of Pelton’s works, it is almost too skillfully sweet, even cute. With its soft theatrical lighting and choreographic charm, the painting approximates a Disney storyboard. Of course, these qualms are, all the same, full-fledged fascinations.

The earliest and most sugary painting in the exhibition, Room Decoration in Purple and Gray (1917), is the epitome of a transitional work. For a decade, Pelton had been making what she called “imaginative paintings,” inspired by the enervated fin-de-siècle symbolism of Arthur B. Davies and others, in which mysterious, virginal waifs commune with nature. An earlier and murkier such painting, Vine Wood (1913), is reproduced in the catalogue; it was one of her Armory Show works, and the impact of Cubism and Orphism, first seen there by most Americans, is clearly manifest a few years later in the translucent chromatic planes and splintering plant forms of Room Decoration.

In 1921, after her mother’s death, Pelton retreated to a lonely Long Island windmill and painted her first abstractions, dispensing with the waifs while digging deeper into curving, overlapping constructions. With Radiance in 1929 Pelton perfected a fluid, biomorphic shell game in which light and space change places as you look. But with Star Gazer and Divinity Lotus, painted that same year, Pelton found her true voice: serene, tuned in, and heraldic. 

The artist was exhibiting in New York and elsewhere when, in 1931, she chose to move permanently to a village in the California desert, in near isolation from the art world, although closer to West Coast centers of eclecticism like Pasadena and Ojai. Her life among the locals in Cathedral City seems to have been about as passably sociable as O’Keeffe’s in Abiquiu, NM, although in more scorched and humble surroundings. As the last of her family money dried up, she sold landscapes and portraits to support herself (mostly uninspired, even dull, it must be said), while continuing to work on her soaring inward visions. 

As for that family money, it leads us to events before Pelton’s birth – a sensational prologue that might have been scripted by Orson Welles or Paul Thomas Anderson. In prosperous, 1855 Brooklyn Heights, Agnes’s grandparents, the Tiltons, were joined in wedlock by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Theodore Tilton was an editor and worked closely with Beecher, a spellbinding orator of national prominence, in the abolitionist cause, and after the Civil War in support of women’s suffrage. In 1870, Elizabeth Tilton confirmed to her spouse that she had been having an affair with the charismatic Beecher. Theodore reported the confession to the “free love” Presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull, with whom he had been having his own affair, and she publicized the behavior to call attention to Beecher’s hypocritical support of traditional marriage, with its legal and financial bondage of women. The scandal detonated in the burgeoning national press and burned continuously for years with endless claims and counterclaims.

Pelton’s grandparents got much the worst of it. Theodore lost a suit of adultery and exiled himself to Paris (eventually, he was buried next to the painter Jean-François Millet), while Elizabeth, shunned by society, raised their daughter, Florence, in genteel poverty. Florence, who had betrayed her mother’s affair to her father, was later sent to Germany to study music, where she married Mr. William Pelton. After moving around the continent for some years, the couple split, Florence rejoining her mother in Brooklyn with young Agnes in order to support the family by opening a music school. Mr. Pelton remained behind and died of a morphine overdose. Agnes was then nine. 

At age 14, Agnes, always described as quiet, enrolled in the study of art at Pratt Institute. The silent, solitary vocation she fixed upon and followed thereafter was a refuge from the whirlpool of politics, religion, and sex that had swallowed up her ancestors –– among whom we should reckon Beecher and Woodhull. His was an ecstatic, Transcendentalist version of Christianity; she was a practicing clairvoyant who summoned the dead. Thus, spirituality and spiritualism, forces writ large in the era, were particularly mingled in Pelton’s cultural DNA (and perhaps not just cultural, considering that Beecher was rumored to have fathered more than one of his congregants’ children). One last vignette from this prologue: in 1875, the same year as the adultery trial, Madame Helena Blavatsky founded, in New York, a mystical, post-Christian sect she called Theosophy, or divine knowledge. It was a syncretic, inward road map past the gross matter of the here and now, beyond mental shackles like Heaven and Hell, and it was destined to preside at the birth of modernist abstraction.

Pelton’s deeply moving 1933 painting The Primal Wing seems intended to answer the call of one indispensable Theosophist text, Thought-Forms. An illustrated tract by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater first published in 1901, the book asserts that thoughts can be seen by trained clairvoyants. Despite some silly and prudish moments, Thought-Forms opens the door for synesthetic speculations – especially with an epilogue of clouds visualizing the music of Richard Wagner and Felix Mendelssohn. (Pelton’s 1950 premonition of a Lisa Yuskavage painting, Lost Music II, not on view but reproduced in the catalogue, is surely up this alley.) The pamphlet includes a color chart of auras, as well as illustrations of particular thought vibrations. Greed for drink is a grasping brown blob with cartoonish claws wrapping around an absent bottle – and fledgling Theosophists are warned to imagine how lustful thoughts would appear to advanced lodge members. 

With perhaps equal credulity, peace and protection appears as a pair of rose-colored wings, and Pelton’s The Primal Wing must have been suggested by this image – keeping in mind that the authors of Thought-Forms openly invited artistic license by acknowledging their illustrations’ limits. In Pelton’s unforgettable interpretation, peace and protection is a single incandescent rosy wing hovering over a slumbering gray landscape with the tragic grace of a Fra Angelico angel at a Crucifixion. 

Pelton consulted many doctrines, from the Agni Yoga promoted by Nicholas Roerich (whose phantasmal Tibetan landscapes seem to have influenced her dawn-and-dusk palette), to the aphorisms of Carl Jung (who might have noticed Pelton’s early paintings when he attended the Armory Show). Most of Pelton’s symbolism was so fundamental as to be beyond dogma; of stars, vessels, luminous orbs, and fire she was a seer on her own terms. Messengers (1932), with its buoyant, precision-tooled mystery can contend with any O’Keeffe steer skull or af Klint temple painting, any Kazimir Malevich or Piet Mondrian, any Arthur Dove or Charles Burchfield or Marsden Hartley, or indeed any other spiritualist Twentieth Century work of art. I can say the same for Orbits (1934), Alchemy (1937-1939) and The Blest (1941) – as well as The Voice (1930) and White Fire (1930), two incredible paintings that are sorely missed in the exhibition (again, consult the catalogue). In each of these centered, delicately refined compositions Pelton presents us with something very like an icon for a new religion.

This religion has a distinctly feminist lineage – mysticism in the West being re-introduced by lionhearts like Woodhull, Madame Blavatsky and Besant, and patronized by trend-setters like Luhan. The feminine principle, as a Theosophist might say, had long been suppressed but was now re-emerging, and Pelton, for one, perfectly captures and distills it in works of devotion such as Messengers and Orbits. What makes these softly radiant visions unique is that they are actually chipped from diamond-hard philosopher’s stone. Her painterly sleight-of-hand transforms colored earth into sheer light and space. A gossamer 1931 work, Translation, is in every way the antipode of Jess’s alchemical Translations of the 1960s – those impossibly thick, yet precise paintings that seem imprinted by occult, perhaps demonic dimensions. But if Pelton’s beatific vision is not as literally thick as Jess’s, it is, in all its passionate naiveté, equally potent. The two artists might be halves of a whole, yin and yang, the good cop/bad cop of American visionaries.

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April 27 to June 8, 2019
31 Mercer Street, between Grand and Canal streets
New York City, feldmangallery.com

For the seventh time, a Bruce Pearson exhibition fills Ronald Feldman Gallery in Soho with deliberate and emphatic color, convoluted surfaces that verge on sculpture, and cryptic texts which might equally be profound insights or italicized clichés. Pearson has been sifting the airwaves for signals in the noise –– or perhaps  noise in the signals –– since the early 1990s, when he first began to make complex, layered abstractions that derived from the outlines of his titles’ lettering. Fear of Death Hope of Heaven Trip to Disney and Not to Interrupt your Beautiful Moment, (2018) from the current show are typically pregnant phrases the artist has plucked from the spectrum of incessant communication, whether talk TV, Language Poetry, self-help manuals or cultural theory. Pearson also works with more epigrammatic texts which lend themselves to reflexive double entendre, such as “Loophole,” “Already Gone,” “Soon Enough,” “Fat Chance.”

The exhibition includes a number of crisp gouaches, and some intriguing experiments with photography and collaboration, but the main event is a baker’s dozen of remarkable paintings on intricately carved layers of Styrofoam that follow Pearson’s well-established practice. The hand-drawn outline of a chosen text is the germ; to this Pearson adds interfering layers of more text, geometry, and/or traced images, the latter often derived from natural phenomena. Next, Pearson transfers the densely crisscrossing pattern onto Styrofoam sheets, interpreting every line as a fault which thrusts forward while slipping backward. The newly topographical surface that results is, lastly, lavished in acrylic and/or oils with painstaking attention to every bump, sidewall and niche.

Encyclopedia 6 and Encyclopedia 7 (both 2017-18) idiosyncratically obey the constraints of an ongoing series. In these spectacular oils, the lengthy texts (available in the gallery as subtitles) have been fractured into perhaps a thousand curvy cusps and hollows, each of which is lacquered in a different hue. This anti-formula, like an adjacent mapping theorem gone rogue, creates perceptual overload, but somehow also pictorial purpose, particularly in the lush, dappled Encyclopedia 7. The title text of Code Breakers (2018) is disintegrated by swirls of illustrational overlay in a similar manner, but here the color constraint is inverse: all surfaces must be unique variants of a seductive, but unreliable, white.

In some paintings, color defies the corrugations of the surface, creating its own imagistic counterpoint. Pools of consolidated whites, blacks and greens, for example, glide over the fractured text of Shadow Language (2017) –– although Pearson, ever the cognitive dissident, lays on the watery camouflage with an acutely dehydrated touch. More consolidated still, a single high-contrast image of stone buildings from a “legendary” Catholic pilgrimage site (as the press release informs us) meshes with the strange title text in Fear of Death Hope of Heaven Trip to Disney, calling attention to the ageless affiliation of religion and theme park. The true drama of the painting, however, is in the sculptural play of positive and negative projection. “Disney” emerges almost intact at the painting’s bottom, where the word is imposingly stamped like a huge cattle brand into the wobbly, whitish ground. But ultramarine blobs and sprinkles, residue of the image, invade the letters’ tops, flipping these areas meticulously forward like periods and commas on typewriter strikers.

Pearson includes an imageless throwback, Not to Interrupt your Beautiful Moment, (2018) which appears to be part of a grid-and-text series going back at least twenty years. Here the arch, if not contemptuous title is inscribed in a mod, concentric font that disturbs a checkerboard of luminous Albers yellows and oranges, blues, grays and greens like a musical pitch generating harmonic waves in a shallow pool of water. Despite the sobriety of grid and palette, the painting oozes with demented overtones of Op and psychedelia, two much-abused art movements frequently cited in Pearson’s critical response. I’ll add here that a number of Josef Albers’s dispassionate, pedagogical works were included in “The Responsive Eye,” MoMA’s definitive 1965 Op show, and that Victor Moscoso, a founding father of the psychedelic poster, studied with Albers at Yale –– a wonderfully tangled lineage that Pearson knots in a braid.

Some paintings can be read as commentary on their own making, such as Fat Chance, (2018) Trip in Progress, (2018) and A Fresh Pair of Eyes, (2019)  the last rendered as texting acronym and featuring a forensic splatter of red. The intrusion of what might be advisory text on the anxious artwork, of subject on object, calls to mind Sigmar Polke’s hilarious “Higher powers command: paint the upper right corner black!” which ratifies its title.

Yet Pearson’s impeccably realized works are the very opposite of Polke’s anarchic facture. Raphael Rubinstein, writing in Art in America in 2009, identified Polke with “Provisional Painting,” a term with both nuance and legs that the critic coined to account for “works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling.” But Rubinstein himself had put his finger on the counter-trend some years earlier in the same publication. Placing Pearson alongside generational peers including James Siena and Fred Tomaselli (and we could add numerous others, such as Joe Amrhein, Mark Dean Veca, Lori Ellison, James Esber and Charles Spurrier), Rubinstein surmised in 2003 that “By employing often eccentric techniques that are minutely detailed and sublimely obsessive, artists such as these may be looking to establish orders of excellence that don’t rely on old-fashioned formalist criteria.” Instead they looked, in part, to underground aesthetics, not only for subject matter and vocabulary, but for paradigms of non-provisional, anti-modernist craft standards. Psychedelic posters and comics, for all their counter-cultural disruption, tend to adhere to populist “orders of excellence” in which every “I” is dotted and every “T” is crossed.

Pearson’s earliest Styrofoam paintings, before he began to use text, were looming extrusions (some projected two feet off the wall) derived from the artist’s manic, bio-Baroque drawing practice. In these early charcoal drawings Pearson’s line never stops wiggling and digging, and never settles for pattern. A dense graphic texture emerges nevertheless, with visceral forms shimmying forth like specimens of disease that Art Spiegelman or Robert Crumb might have drawn as medical illustrators. Pearson’s lively hand can still be seen, although at a technological remove, in the quivering delineation of letters punched by laser into photographic scrims (in intriguing collaborations with poets Claudia Rankine and Anselm Berrigan, and photographer Zack Garlitos). These experiments put the text forward –– literally, as if the poems were sculptures in a landscape. In doing so, they focus sharply on Pearson’s hand, and on its conceptual constraints. Who knows? This relentlessly inventive artist may one day constrain his hand to disappear entirely, or to go rogue.

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November 16 to December 29, 2018
33 Main St., Torrington CT
fivepointsgallery.org

For some years, Stephen Maine has been making paintings in layers applied by printing techniques of his own devising. In so doing, he focuses attention on color and surface rather than hand-manipulated authorship and control. The recent display in Connecticut of what the artist calls Residue paintings (a genus begun in 2014) constitutes his most impressive exhibition, both optically and conceptually, to date. Five imposing canvasses, all 100 x 80 inches, were spaciously installed in a window-wrapped corner storefront gallery. While the paintings’ luminous crackle of oppositional colors was immediately striking, the gallery’s abundant indirect light slowly revealed, more subtly, the paintings’ shifting interplay of translucency and opacity. Moreover, the serial installation of the five works allowed one to discover that, while diverging radically in chroma and texture, the paintings were uncannily interrelated – each sharing a DNA of seemingly random scratches, pits and puddles, like quintuplets separated at birth.

Maine has published lucid and penetrating criticism for many years, and his concise explanation of his method and intentions is worth quoting in full:

Some years ago, it occurred to me that conveying paint to canvas by means of a system that uses printing plates instead of brushes would save a lot of time and trouble. This indirect, intentionally imprecise production method yields the great pleasure of surprise while providing a concrete way to think about color, surface, scale, seriality, figure/ground, original/copy, and the psychology of visual perception.

Maine implies by omission that the intaglio of gouges and markings with which he incises his Styrofoam plates, while perhaps hands-on, is by no means invested with the mystic graphology of Cy Twombly, or with the elegant violence of Lucio Fontana. Rather, the artist seems to be cultivating the “calculated crappiness” (as he put it in a recent rave review of Ryan Crotty’s process-oriented abstractions) which helps “avoid the slick seamlessness that sucks the life out of so many pseudo-minimalist paintings, and gives reductivist pictorial strategies everywhere a bad name.”

One painting in the current exhibition, P18-1001 (all works 2018), seemed both the shiftiest and the most plainspoken, being the result of a single printing of taxicab yellow over an intensely tinted baby blue ground of varying density. In context, this painting constituted a statement of the theme, the printed yellow image hovering as a coherent layer over the distant blue like a thought experiment.

The other four paintings embroider the image in layers of vibrant, interfering color. P18-0714 comprises a highly satisfying, coruscating variation produced by misregistered printings of harsh green, yellow and pink over a volcanic orange base. Maine pays close attention to the properties of pigment, and the phthalo green dye used here is unpredictably transparent, a kind of anti-color that can amplify underlying layers or go venomously black. The crucial factor in the interaction of Maine’s colors, however, is the “intentionally imprecise” slop in registration, which tends to outline bits of pattern illusionistically, as if they were cut from a wafer and raked with light. The hysterical contrasts of color at these edges is informational and arresting, like computer-enhanced microphotography.

Rather easier on the eyes is P18-0724, a luscious concoction of subdued orange over a ground of bluish-green you might see at an aquarium on a bright day. The opaque orange mass flows in places into sensuous pockets of purple, pink and violet underlayers, blending more liquidly than in neighboring works. A small area of patterned dots along the left side is also distinctive, more visible here than elsewhere. This anomalous patch of regularity seems to be a holdover from Maine’s previous Smoke pictures and Halftone paintings, closer-to-the-vest bodies of work which restricted themselves entirely to nuances teased from cryptic dot matrices.

The Ben-Day associations in those earlier paintings inevitably evoked Roy Lichtenstein’s and Sigmar Polke’s antipodal versions of Pop, while dissolving those associations in an acid bath of what Yve-Alain Bois has called Non-Composition. Maine’s Residue paintings, by contrast, are extrovert dynamos of color and surface whose image-matter is just scratchy enough to goad one’s eyeballs ­­– while steering clear of various camps (including camp). Neither beautiful nor ugly in themselves, the images incised onto Maine’s Styrofoam plates resist symmetry, representation, indexical process, symbolic language, and anything that can comfortably be called “expression.”

Maine seeks the philosopher’s stone of painting by maintaining a nimble skepticism, hedging all bets, and ruling nothing entirely out – not even tactical content. In addition to the patterned dots, Maine distributes several larger, emphatically geometric circles around the image that in several paintings resemble, with their shadows of misregistration, crisp Warholian silkscreens of a typewriter period. Maine places these cryptographs before us as if he were Ishmael describing harpoon scars on the physiognomy of the ineffable. Like the prodigiously erudite narrator of Moby Dick, the artist pleads ignorance, asking, in effect, “How may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.”

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Dawn Clements, who died on December 4th at the age of 60 after a two-year battle with cancer, left behind a magnificent body of work, and alas, ambitious plans that will never be realized. She was as single-minded about drawing as any artist has ever been, and as open minded. A small sumi ink rendering of a wingback chair begun during a residency at Middlebury College grew, by added sheets of paper, into an immense panorama thirty-seven feet long, the size needed to portray her entire surroundings at the same intimate level of detail. In one way or another, she was always drawing her world, from the optical scatter of diamonds to the blunt signage of paper laundry tickets. (Clements liked to point out that jewels and scraps of printed matter had equal value as drawings.) She came to embrace a self-sufficient tautology which all artists understand in their own way, but few with such clarity of purpose. As she put it in a 2007 interview with her gallerist Susan Swenson: “Where I live is my studio and the subject of my work is where I live.”

One day she took a small black and white television into the studio in order not to miss a Douglas Sirk melodrama. She was struck by bits of dialogue and jotted them down on a convenient surface. “All of a sudden,” as she said in the same interview, “the still life seemed to become animated.” It was the beginning of marking her drawings with the wordage of passing time –– thoughts, lists, things overheard, things read. It was also the opening of a window in her studio, a small black and white one, onto fictional dimensions, perpendicular axes awaiting exploration. Soon she was not only writing down dialogue but drawing directly from her television.

Clements studied the semiotics of film as an undergraduate, and she had a sophisticated critical appreciation of the medium, but it was soap operas and weepy “women’s films” that came to occupy her as an artist, culminating in major works such as Travels with Myra Hudson (2004; Saatchi Collection), and Mrs. Jessica Drummond’s (‘My Reputation,’ 1946) (2010). The first is a meditation on a Joan Crawford vehicle with noir overtones, and the second derives from a Barbara Stanwyck society drama as polished as a toaster. Both feature strong, independent women looking for love but trapped in their blandly tasteful décor, their gilded cages. It was these Hollywood studio interiors that intrigued Clements more than the narratives, per se, or the films’ inscrutable, photogenic stars. In her own “studio” she forensically reverse-engineered the sets with as much clarity as she could, via flickering low-resolution video frames, and having to guess at background details that might be in shadow or out of focus. Pausing the playback, Clements found frames where ashtrays and bedspreads, wallpaper and perfume bottles emerged from behind the actors, or were revealed by a new camera angle (often noting the video timecode and dialogue on the drawings). The erasure, for the most part, of the actors as the space they left behind was liquidly unfolded and deciphered, induced a psychologically potent side effect. Their absence allows the viewer to enter archetypal precincts, where scenarios of love, loss and heroic sacrifice are enacted forever.

In Myra Hudson, Clements made her most explicit mapping of film, by representing  — right to left — a fateful train journey from New York to San Francisco. A view out one compartment window shows the plains in daylight, while the next window jumps ahead to a reflection of the train interior at night. The panorama passes  through ambiguous outlines in dreamy blank spaces to lead us smoothly into Myra’s San Francisco mansion, up an ominous staircase, and into the heroine’s study, where cruelly ironic scenes will unfold. This is as close to storyboarding the spacetime of film as Clements got. On the whole, she expanded her film panoramas purely by spatial contiguity –– Jessica Drummond’s bedroom being attached to her bathroom, and so on –– just as she did with drawings of her immediate surroundings, one piece of paper folding under, a new one gluing on until the drawing came to rest. When it would be fully opened for the first time, the joints and folds in the paper would remain prominent.

The TV in Clements’s studio was her portal from domestic still life into ancient mythopoeic saga, which is fair enough, since such stories are a part of life, and always have been –– as real as a turnip on a kitchen table. One comes to realize that reality and fiction flip everywhere in Clements work. Her drawings of film spaces are also, of course, analytic renderings of actual sets and props. As for the artist’s encyclopedic drawings of her immediate surroundings, they trade on the traditional fictions of still life in the way that disjunctive local spaces and times are fused under a continuous skin of illusion. Kitchen and Bathroom, for example (2004; collection Whitney Museum of American Art), is a monumental chronicle in sumi ink of her Brooklyn railroad apartment at gritty, Ivan-Albright resolution. It is a flash-lit snapshot that surely took months. The drawing’s fantastic continuum of cramp and clutter serves as a kind of doppelganger to the palatial bedrooms of Jessica Drummond or Myra Hudson. And from a certain point of view, Kitchen and Bathroom is no less cinematic –– one can easily imagine the drawing as a panning background for cel animation, with characters jumping from chair to stove to bathtub as the camera tracks along.

Clements’s panoramic formats, often wrapping around the walls of exhibitions, would have been enough to merit video-chronicler James Kalm’s description of her work as “expanded drawing.” Kalm, however, was also calling attention to the great variety of formats that Clements embarked on a without missing a beat, from vertical “tiltoramas” (as she called them), which travel from her foot to the ceiling and down the other wall; to a Dürer-like study of a single patch of weedy lawn, drawn every day for a month; to a multi-year collaboration with sculptor Marc Leuthold in which she drew a grouping of his sculptures that had been closely modeled, in turn, on her drawings. In every case, she was just drawing what she saw.

Yet it was still life drawings–– very much in the tradition of that genre, for all their irregularly-shaped, rumpled, and annotated eccentricities–– that increasingly came to occupy Clements in the last years of her life. These watercolor masterpieces feature over-life-size fruit, vegetables, and bunches of flowers, maximal challenges for the artists’ ever-sharpening ability to see and describe. With the introduction of color around 2005 –– returning to her roots in painting, though not without misgivings –– Clements had expanded again. Using careful layers of translucent watercolor, she could now capture the waxy glistening of apples, melons and plums. She could enumerate the chromatic foldings of tulips, peonies, hyacinths and chrysanthemums, and solve the crinklings of their green leaves, the knobby fibers of their intertwining stalks, and their reflections and refractions through curved glass vases full of water.

As with Van Gogh’s sunflowers and irises, Clements’s floral still lifes are demonstrations of an ardent kind of mastery that conventional skill can’t touch. Leo Steinberg, in his 1953 essay The Eye is a part of the Mind, was reminding an avant-garde that had little use for representation about the ways in which fresh looking could fire neurons. Taking the exuberant early Renaissance anatomies of Pollaiolo as an example, Steinberg wrote: “Like all works connected with discoveries of representation, his pictures lack the sweet ease of accomplishment. His images are ever aborning, swelling into space and taking life, like frozen fingers tingling as they warm. It is not facts they purvey; it is the thrill and wonder of cognition.” If both Clements’s and Van Gogh’s flower paintings rise miles above easy sentiments normally attaching to the subject, it’s because one thrills and wonders along with the artists in their rapture of discovery.

Many of Clements’s last works, with and without flowers, also depict the colorful packaging of cancer medications. Just another laundry ticket, as it were. And just another vanitas –– one warning among many about the bittersweetness of passing time. Vanitas, indeed, was in her method. In Peonies (2014), a supremely gorgeous work, Clements replaced, as she often did, an area of the drawing with a fresh piece of paper. In the process, she sliced off the side of a lush red blossom (probably what had displeased her). When she resumed the drawing, apparently the blossom had wilted, falling forward a bit, and there she drew it, leaving the hard edge of the blossom’s previous incarnation behind, embedded in the daily fabric of her practice. This memento mori is echoed in the lower right by the ripe young face of thirties star Sylvia Sidney –– a drawing of a drawing, it seems, which was pinned to the studio wall behind the flowers. Clements told Eve Aschheim in a 2007 interview in the Brooklyn Rail that she was planning to bring figures back into the work, and in Peonies she left us with a transfixing hint about where things might have gone.

In writing this tribute to Dawn’s work, I watched a few of the melodramas lyrically transfigured in her drawings. One thing that struck me in the films was the consummate tact of dialogue and behavior, even during emotional eruptions. Perhaps social relations really were more formal, more beautiful then. John Yau, with exactitude, described the works in Dawn’s final show at Pierogi as “love letters to the world.” (The full review on Hyperallergic is mandatory reading.) Yes, love letters, and –– I hope I may add –– disciplined and gracious ones, as if written by the radiant heroines in the films she loved.

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Justen Ladda, an artist who has lived and worked on the Lower East Side since the late 1970s, has spent endless hours for ten years maintaining a remarkable public garden he helped create (with several New York City agencies) on the Allen Street Mall just south of Delancey Street. Every day Ladda picks up bags of trash and cigarette butts from around a magnificent collection of scholar’s rocks he chose and imported from China, each a world unto itself. He plants bulbs, seedlings and rescued bushes; he waters, weeds and trims; he gently admonishes dog owners and converses with whoever wishes to do so; and he notes with meticulous triumph each new blossom and twig. Ladda designed the park deliberately without fences. Nothing shields the delicate plantings and fresh earth from lanes of heavy traffic and whirring bikes on either side, or from predictable desecrations along the pedestrian path – more of a cul-de-sac – that bisects it. Without Ladda’s unpaid, unrecognized efforts, the place would revert to a wasteland. For now, gentrification in these parts coexists with the homeless population it displaces (gentrification complete with ghetto-chic, a cynic might say), so it is often the down and out that frequent the park’s benches. But Ladda’s labor of love includes his own forms of outreach, pragmatism, and forbearance. Together with his gardening it is enough to nurture a zone of calm and contemplation despite civic neglect, smack in an emblematically dense zone of urban stress.

I spoke with Ladda in early May at the park, as leaves and flowers were emerging, and later in his top-floor loft on Stanton Street –– which until recently was without insulation and unheated (Ladda was once featured in a New York Times article about hardy souls who thrive heatless in winter). I asked him about the relationship between the park and his art practice, which includes exquisitely refined sculpture and painting as well as a series of dazzling, tromp-l’œil installations which, viewed at certain angles, create precisely calibrated sculptural hallucinations (notably Art, Fashion & Religion, his 1986 tour-de-force in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art).

As with an installation, Ladda reminds me, “a garden is a curated space. It creates a certain impression; it does something to people.” But different sculptural modes require different kinds of mastery. “In the studio I’m a total control freak. With an artwork you have a vision, but a garden is ongoing. It’s never done. I am always looking for texture and color, just as with painting. I try to achieve a color balance in different seasons. These nasturtiums, I started them as seedlings and determined where to plant them, but then you just let them go where they want. It will make its own image.”

Ladda’s current studio work involves the painstaking application of more than a hundred layers of photosensitive pigment onto prominently grained wood supports, resulting in patterns of mysterious color that can suggest, as Ken Johnson remarked in a review of an 2010 exhibition in Bushwick, “mountains in Chinese landscapes or leaping flames.” Ladda also creates photo-negatives of uncanny personages –– amalgams of human and animal, portraiture and computer morphing –– which he contact prints in layers of silvery sfumato onto wood grain that the artist describes as “serene.” These almost pure horizontal patterns make the images all the more spectral, like old television transmissions from a spirit world. The time element of this studio work is substantial.

That of gardening, however, is on another scale. “Gardening is an old man’s game,” Ladda says wryly. “Time goes by so much faster now –– it feels like it’s Thanksgiving every three months. If you’re young and you plant something you get very impatient. When time goes faster you can literally watch the grass grow.” Being in touch with larger cycles of time explains, in part, Ladda’s obsession with clearing the ground of every scrap. “I like to be in the soil, in the earth. I know I’m going to go there one day.” Visitors to the park, cheek by jowl with rank exhaust fumes, may not think about the improbable luxury of the loamy freshness at their feet, but the sensation is ineffable –– equally life-affirming and a gentle reminder of mortality.

In contrast with the evolving, seasonal plantings, the scholar’s rocks stand as unchanging sentinels fixed in geological time. “I look on them as an early form of abstraction,” says Ladda. Scholar’s rocks resonated with the artist on first encounter in 1995, in an exhibition of the collection assembled by the brilliant contrarian Robert Rosenblum at the China Institute. “My art education in Germany was basically Bauhaus and Mid-20th century abstraction. I think ‘50s sculpture is the same way of seeing as the scholar’s rocks, that’s why I’m so fascinated by them. The Chinese started looking at abstraction around the year 1000, long before artists in the West. They called scholar’s rocks the bones of the earth, and they used them as inspiration for landscape paintings as early as the Southern Song Dynasty.”

Southern Song “academy” painting had reached an apex of poetic realism equal to anything in the European Renaissance –– but centuries earlier –– after which it was largely superseded by “literati” or scholar-amateur painting, in which the brushstroke itself came to be valued above the artful decipherment of natural phenomena. Scholar’s rocks were consulted by both the realists –– i.e., as bones of the earth –– and by the literati, as calligraphic abstractions. Interest in rocks reached a peak in the Ming Dynasty, exemplified in the 1610 scroll, Ten Views of a Lingbi Stone by the eccentric Wu Bin (currently on exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) that maps a famous specimen from multiple angles with a fanatical, jutting plasticity that is neither realistic nor abstract. There is, evidently, a great deal to unpack in those rocks.

The placement of scholar’s rocks at this site, with their ancient premonition of New York School abstraction, can be seen in dialogue with the upcoming opening of the Pat Passlof and Milton Resnick Foundation in the reclaimed synagogue that Resnick painted in for decades on Eldridge Street. Passlof, who had her own synagogue nearby, practiced tai chi daily alongside Chinese residents in local parks into her eighties –– and of course it is the longstanding Chinese community in the area that the scholar’s rocks primarily address. “I think of the rocks as immigrants, because they come from China,” explains Ladda (himself an immigrant, from Germany). “There was a wonderful Chinese antique shop on Allen Street run by Mr. Wong. He had a hundred or so photographs of rocks sent from China from which I chose these. Each stone has its own character –– it has a habit and a posture.” One low, twisting rock resembles a dragon. A mountainous standing rock with scalloped fins and eroded perforations transforms into a flickering flame as you walk past, with the somewhat dreary cityscape providing a perfect foil.

Ladda is under no quixotic illusions about the civic effects of his unpaid artistic labors. “You learn a lot about people when you are here every day: how little people see, how few people really appreciate this park for what it is. I would say maybe 5%, 3%. Most people are on their cellphone. It doesn’t matter to me. But the people who appreciate parks will find delight in it. It’s a gift, yes, but also a gift to myself. Because how else can I have a garden in the city?”

He gleefully recounts how he finds rose bushes in the excess piles of other parks to plant along the bike paths, which were added after the park was built and which radically altered its situation. His eyes light up as he explains that—someday—bike riders will be engulfed in twin tunnels of roses. A tunnel of roses on the Lower East Side? If that miracle comes to pass, it will be due entirely to Ladda’s unceasing custody. “It’s a labor of love,” he explains. “But, you see, a labor of love is not really a labor at all.”

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February 17 to March 31, 2018
54 Franklin Street at Cortlandt Alley (between Broadway and Lafayette Street)
New York City, postmastersart.com

In Perry Hoberman’s Suspensions, detritus collected from an abandoned town in the California desert is assembled into bungee-corded chains hung from the Postmasters ceiling. Rather like refrigerator magnet poems, each “suspension” conforms to something bordering on syntax in its assemblage of small to medium sized objects: flattened toys and rusty cans, orphaned gears and transistors; shiny round things; jagged, plastic things. A portion of the gallery is given over to hanging, scroll-like digital prints of the same objects in silhouette. Individual chains have mordant titles like Low Credit Risk and Pinched Nerve Jamboree, and do not seem overly concerned with sculptural or taxonomic rigor. But nonchalance flips to obsessive literality when the visitor puts on one of the virtual reality headsets placed around the installation. Each suspension has been mapped and recreated in digital space, with scores of individual objects, each corresponding in shape, surface detail and location to the physical ones in the gallery. Yet the differences are striking: with the motion-sensitive headsets projecting a stereoscopic view exactly synchronous to the turning of one’s head, the viewer notices first of all that one nearby digital Suspension jiggles like a child needing to pee, while others swing slowly like porch hangings in a breeze, naturalistic gravity and bungee bounce having been modeled into the virtual dynamics. In the really real world of the gallery all remains decorously still, but the viewer is likely to remove the goggles again and again in order confirm the fact.

That is only the beginning, however, of this “non-trip to a Non-site,” to use a typically open-ended phrase of Robert Smithson’s, whose ideas about 3-D mapping, displacement, landscape as quarry, the neutral abstraction of the gallery, and much more seem pertinent to both the critical and the visionary polarities of Hoberman’s practice. With goggles back in place, the gallery walls unfold like, well, a white box. The suspensions now hang weirdly from an infinite blue sky, and a stark, barely differentiated desert panorama is available if you spin your view. The ground drops away as you look down, then piles of rock float underfoot and one fears to take a step. Projective geometry hems you in. A stereoscopic slideshow plays haphazardly behind the confabulated digital sculptures hanging in the foreground. You can walk into the slides, towards a recurring giant who traverses the barren landscape and explores the decaying innards of cheap, prefabricated homesteads. The giant is the artist himself, and the strange scale shift an effect endemic to 3-D VR, which fixes the viewer, unlike in cinema, at an absolute location, which in this case is the end of Hoberman’s selfie stick.

Hoberman is an artist/researcher who has been on the circuit-building front lines of a wide range of simulation technologies since the 1980s. He currently teaches and leads study labs at the University of Southern California and consults on the development of VR systems with rival acronyms (AR, MxR, and MEML, et al.). But if Hoberman is an insider he is a dissident one, a skeptical historian of every dropped thread and wasted opportunity of virtual reality precursors, which in modern times can be said to date to Wheatstone’s invention of stereoscopic drawing in 1838. Hoberman has proposed recreating Daguerre’s once-legendary painted and mechanized diorama with digital technology.

Though clearly enraptured by sensory illusion, Hoberman is anything but an uncritical technophile. Previous works have typically programmed computers to malfunction with the banal malevolence of the corporate culture that proliferates with them. A show at Postmasters in 2003 included a digital still from an interactive home screen with a pop-up window reading, “Security forces have been alerted, and will be arriving shortly.” Users could mouse-click on three bitterly hilarious options: “Read Me My Rights,” “Call A Taxi,” or “Surrender.”

The hanging shards in Suspensions are garnered from abandoned homes that were sold cheap to military families from a nearby base that has already featured in Hoberman’s work. His recent multimedia collaboration with performance artist Julia Heyward, 29 SpaceTime, delved into the juju of this same desert Non-site with mesmerizing paranoia.

One thing that is, unfortunately, missing from Suspensions is Hoberman’s expertise at vivisecting image and sound. He began his performance activities in the 1980s, collaborating extensively with Laurie Anderson (he was artistic director on the O Superman video, among others), but at Postmasters the only sound accompanying his piece is incidental: an audio bleed from Jillian Mayer’s adjacent installation fills the void plausibly enough with a soothing electronic score. This imposed mood softens Hoberman’s deliberate rough edges and visible seams, which are intended to show us what VR can’t do as much as what it can, and we may miss how the artist is cackling under his breath at an essential absurdity: after all, what is the point of painstakingly simulating garbage? Garbage, what’s more, which is already right here?

The viewer, contemplating the truth of the illusion, may be all the more awed by VR’s transformative potential, as Hoberman surely is. His decades-long quest for sensory engineering could only have been fueled by optimism worthy of a Quattrocento perspectivist, if not by the fevered Wagnerian dream of a totally enveloping artwork. Of course, whether in fascist or rampantly capitalist regimes, gesamtkunstwerken have a way of ending badly, and few dreamers understand so intimately as does Hoberman the inevitability with which visionary artistic research enables corporate bread and circuses. If dark thoughts of interactive shooting games and their full-metal VR counterparts used in mechanized wars of occupation come to mind when you put on the high tech headsets, you’re paying attention.

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In the Jungle, 2017. USA. Directed by Stephanie Barber. 63 mins.
Saturday, February 17 at 7:30 PM; Sunday, February 18 at 7:30 PM
Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, between First and Second avenues, New York City.

Two feature-length, distinctly personal films are having their premieres in New York this week. Stephanie Barber’s In The Jungle, playing at Anthology, is a lushly imagined artifice in which a botanical researcher — all alone with her obsessively articulate thoughts — gradually unravels. Amy Jenkins’s Instructions On Parting, screening at MoMA, is a deeply moving, tautly poetic diary of multiple loss and transcendence.

Barber is an experimental writer/filmmaker/musician based in Baltimore. Like Daredevils (2013), which premiered at the New York Film Festival, In the Jungle is text-forward and highly formal in its narrative structure and cinematography, though considerably more playful in language and set design than the earlier movie. Here the botanist (Cricket Arrison) types an erudite monologue on an oversized, somewhat funky cardboard typewriter. A cutout animation of a tiger is projected behind, running alternately through a jungle and a succession of suburban living rooms. At critical moments an actual pantomime tiger, perhaps an animus, manifests, as if to lead her astray. Adding a crucial sense of dislocation, Barber’s sound design is a jagged collage of jungle and machine sounds. Several of her moody, self-produced songs also interact uncannily with the narrative mix.

Two stunning 360-degree camera rotations allow for real-time set changes, the second of which ushers in an extraordinary third act in which a short-wave DJ, played with inscrutable magnetism by M.C. Schmid (of the band Matmos), invites listeners to “come and rub your earlobes against my radio waves.” Playing Barber’s songs and taking listener calls he helps get the botanist through the night, finally at home in a jungle, it seems, of her own making.

Amy Jenkins is a multidisciplinary artist primarily known for pioneering installations in which precise, nuanced video projections haunt a sculptural ensemble. With Instructions On Parting, Jenkins presents a harrowing narrative that seems to have arisen naturally from an undaunted practice of documenting her life and surroundings. POV footage of Jenkins’s family, voicemail messages and hand-written diary notes convey the agony, sometimes banal, sometimes profound, of three overlapping deaths to cancer within the passing of a few seasons, even as she gives birth and nourishes a new life. Shot in Utah and rural New Hampshire, the film pays attention not only to intimate autobiography –– a positive pregnancy test; beautifully filmed sequences in which her hands explore the naked bodies of her dying loved ones, or search for their traces on objects left behind –– but equally to landscape, weather, and close-up imagery of the delicate savagery of nature. Accompanied by a fine, stark cello score by Noah Hoffeld, Jenkins’s stoic montage includes, for example, bleak winter snowstorms and a sequence of a spider capturing a butterfly, which comment without apology on the reaping of lives. But the seasons turn, and we also spy on hatchlings in a robins’ nest, a child breast-feeding by a lake, and the exuberant springtime renewal of a garden. Late in the film, Jenkins’s brother speculates that death will be like “taking off a tight shoe —changing costumes,” and this transcendent insight, folded into the film’s rich, rhythmic structure, stays with you long after the ending.

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