February 13 to May 26, 2019
235 Bowery, at Rivington Street
New York City, newmuseum.org

This exhibition offers a unique window onto the black experience. Nari Ward is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose career spans twenty-five years. His work is composed primarily of found objects from the street in New York, Harlem in particular, that critiques and subverts conversations around capitalism, poverty, and race. His New Museum retrospective fills three floors with assemblage, sculpture, painting, video, and installation in an exhibition that, in generously embracing and provocative ways explores how crime, justice, care, violence, and economics all have a stake in what it means to be a responsible citizen. Found, humble, everyday objects are shown to contain a web of epistemological and linguistic meanings and connections that can twist and propel the past and the present.  With Ward, nothing is exactly as it seems, as his objects are stripped of original meanings and given new ones. And however much his semiotic disobedience stems from intuitions of questioning and refusal, his creativity nevertheless connects us to his life in Harlem, to social sculpture, and to a variety of folk traditions in Jamaica, where he was born.

I vividly remember my first encounter with Nari Ward. It was at a show of his from 2015 at Lehmann Maupin in the Lower East Side that incorporated a whole series of performances by guest artists that took place on top of his Ground (In Progress), a large square floor piece composed of copper bricks. There were many stunning performances there and the artists involved have gone on to other great things. Sticking in my memory were performances by Niv Acosta and by several of Ward’s former students from Hunter College, Zachary Fabri and Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow amongst them.

At the New Museum, Ground (In Progress) lay inert in the middle of a room, surrounded by stoic guards and grip tape. The walls of this room are filled with a number of large paintings done on copper panels through a process of patina, etching, drilling, and hammering nails. Each work is slightly different, but with a recurring symbol in them all: the cosmogram. The Bakongo cosmogram, to which Nari refers, is an ideographic religious Congolese symbol for the cosmos and the continuity of life that can comprise a cross, a quartered circle or diamond, or a seashell spiral. Describing its importance, Robert Farris Thompson has written that  “a person stands upon it to take an oath, or to signify that he or she understands the meaning of life as a process shared with the dead below the river or the sea…[in Kongolese ritual] the real sources of earthly power and prestige”. These cosmological symbols exist in many other instances around the world such as the Catholic Church, The Klu Klux Klan, the Confederate flag, the Jamaican flag, alchemical treatises, mandalas, etc., and artists such as Adrian Piper and Jean-Michel Basquiat have also been known to also employ cosmograms in their own work. In this exhibition, the cosmogram refers to the transatlantic transfer of this African spiritual symbol preserved in black churches throughout America. In Savannah, Georgia, the First African Baptist Church was a stopping post in the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves. The former slaves would hide under the floorboards in the basement of the church and a breathing hole was drilled for them in the shape of a quartered cross. Imagine hiding below floor decks, pitch black, situating yourself between life and death, and this is the only light you can see. This symbol beams out of each of these paintings as a point of intersection between the ancestors and the living.

During his residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1992-93, the young Ward filled his studio with old ragged baby strollers collected from neighborhood streets, culminating in the installation Amazing Grace, where a large room was filled with hundreds of them.  There is a middle cluster where about a third of all the strollers are tied with fire hoses in the shape of an oval, Virgin mandala, or a ship. The rest of the strollers circle around the center shape in attention while a gospel recording of “Amazing Grace” plays soulfully from the strollers in the middle. The fire hoses on the ground and on the strollers trigger, for me, Civil Rights era riots from the 1960s where black protesters were sprayed down by police with pressurized water from fire hydrants, literally soaking their dignity. I was personally very moved by this room because for me it symbolizes the intimate, existential struggle between black youth, white supremacy, and religion. A journey made from the void of absent young bodies, and for each missing, a fiery potential extinguished. Adjacent rooms evoke similar conceptual and metaphorical themes through a range of assemblage-based street sculpture, such as a wounded lion, shopping cart monuments, and the abject caramelized remains of the drink “Tropical Fantasy”, a beverage widely marketed to black communities in the ‘90s that contained ingredients, believed then and now, to affect male fertility.

If an idea is not sensitive to the poor it can neither be radical nor revolutionary. Several things are known. The planet can no longer sustain capitalism. African-Americans literally planted the seeds of imperial wealth in this country. As an artist creating a body of work that actively works around capitalism instead of with it, Ward creates a voice for those neglected by the system, those forsaken by legislation, history, politics, and justice. We the People offers a walk in another citizen’s shoes. Ward’s evocative readymade conjuring of the human condition teaches us profound lessons about ourselves.

The post Between the Ancestors and the Living: Nari Ward at the New Museum appeared first on artcritical.

September 12 to October 21, 2017
537 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, davidzwirner.com

Perception is a function of rods and cones adjusting in the retina. Waking in the middle of the night, everything is black at first and only slowly more colors begin to emerge. It takes patience and acute attention to make sense of the new reality.

To see Ad Reinhardt’s paintings one must slow down the pace of everyday life. In the Blue Paintings gathered recently at David Zwirner Gallery, dating for the most part from 1950 to 1953, so much medium has been removed from the paint as to provide the opportunity to perceive color directly. These are among the most matte surfaces to be experienced in canvases emanating from the Abstract Expressionist circle in which the artist moved: there is no gloss, there is no reflection on the surface. The paint qualities associated with AbEx are almost entirely lacking in Reinhardt. His use of color is so subtle that it is on the very threshold of perception.

Reinhardt was an oppositional figure: he believed one could find as much meaning in what painters refused to do as in what they actually did do. In relation to the viewer, his void-like canvases inspire trust in the invisible through a viewer’s relationship to their own experiences.. .

Adolph Friedrich Reinhardt, born in Buffalo, New York in 1913, to an immigrant family, attended Columbia University to study art history in 1931. His tastes shifted towards European movements like Cubism and Constructivism. The historical avant garde created new qualifications first of convention and then of institution, through such specific symbolic acts,as when the Russian Constructivist Aleksander Rodchenko presented three monochrome canvases in red, blue, and yellow. In this gesture, he proclaimed the logical conclusion of painting Reinhardt went through several singular color periods in his career, and yet his fidelity to the primaries and, most famously black, actually represents a rejection to Rodchenko’s declaration. Paintings in this exhibition force the eye to slow down and see that there are actually several different hues of blue or green in each work. These elegantly considered paintings act as Rorschach tests for the brain. These somber monochromes — highly considered grids — reward the patient viewer with a site of peaceful contemplation. In a deep negotiation with ourselves, we are seeing rather than looking at art in a gallery transformed into a space of meditation. Experiences that might transcend the normal bounds of what we know through voids, monochromes, and windows could be perhaps paralleled with the revelation and exaltation of a deep spiritual experience. Perhaps this is why such artists as Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko, James Turrell and Anish Kapoor have artworks that double as spaces of spiritual or religious pilgrimage.

Ad Reinhardt was very interested in such spiritual qualities: he sought to purify art and the way we experience it. He also had a desire to keep art and business separate, and while this body of work is hardly a critique of capitalism, he took great pleasure in the fact that these paintings were almost impossible to reproduce photographically. As with most avant-garde art, we must recalibrate our idea of value and redistribute who holds the keys and who does the work. Reinhardt challenges his audience to do more work than the artist, investing forms with their own feelings rather than discovering those of the artist. In this respect, Ad Reinhardt walks alongside Yves Klein as an early instigator of conceptual art. Defying conventions of their times, each produced a kind of determinism for new artistic sensibilities.

The post The Threshold of Perception: Ad Reinhardt’s Blue Paintings appeared first on artcritical.