November 5 to December 22, 2012
32 East 69th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, 212.794.4970

British artist Phyllida Barlow is something of a speed freak: her site specific projects thrive on tight deadlines and a sense of immediacy. Taking her cue from Arte Povera, she works with humble materials readily available in city streets and construction sites. She focuses more on process than final product, and has a history of cannibalizing supposedly finished works to create new ones. At their best, her outsized objects and unstable arrangements intentionally overwhelm and clutter their exhibition spaces. The body-consciousness they elicit induces a deeply felt maneuvering through often awkward, occasionally menacing, and ever-protean urban environments.

As soon as you walk in the door of Hauser & Wirth’s relatively modest Upper East Side townhouse you are confronted with one of Barlow’s teetering hulks sliding off a clumsy stack of shipping palettes. Notions of monumentality, permanence, and ownership are clearly and comically at stake. Tiled haphazardly with what seem like shoddy monochrome paintings, this tooty fruity tower reaches from floor to ceiling and almost wall to wall. Visitors have to squeeze by one another to get past it. Navigation is further complicated by what appears to be a slab of cement (it’s not, I gave it a tap) bisecting the body of the piece and jutting out about head height. Made of the same material, a zigzag shape suggests a staircase to nowhere on the opposite side. Called untitled: upturnedhouse, this piece immediately brought to mind Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (1933), Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts from the 1970s, and House (1993) by Rachel Whiteread, who was one of Barlow’s many students during her forty-year teaching career.

Emerging in the 1970s, much has been made of Barlow’s slow cook time (as defined by our youth-obsessed culture) in terms of high-profile exhibition success. New York audiences may have encountered her work for the first time just this past summer in her New Museum show, siege. Born in 1944, Barlow is old enough to have experienced post-war London with its lingering piles of rubble. Looking at images from that period, I can see how impressions of devastation and recoveryled Barlow to embrace a provisional aesthetic and “crap materials,” as she calls them—as well, early on, as financial necessity. Now, Barlow’s work is a timely reflection of our many recent challenges—pace Hurricane Sandy—as well as the cyclical nature of things.

Consequently, it’s little wonder the rest of the gallery’s ground floor feels like a staging area; whether things are being built up or torn down is unclear. After passing a thick, wall-mounted stack of what looks like burnt wall slats, a series of Barlow’s chunky “lumps” and a tubular “block” hang from rubber umbilical cords like pockmarked planets. Here, the ghost of Eva Hesse looms large. Standing beneath these heaving meteors feels like a bad idea, like walking beneath a suspended piano or a wrecking ball. Adding to the sense of menace, because it impedes access to the gallery’s staircase, is a lumpen sewage pipe-like form sitting heavily on a loose pile of floor-bound lumber. Reminiscent of “outsider” artist Judith Scott, Barlow obsessively wrapped individual planks with colorful, bandage-like strips of fabric make this one of the more anthropomorphic pieces in the show.  (Another is a torso-like lump upstairs called untitled:holedwall). It’s clear to me where Angela de la Cruz, another of Barlow’s students, found inspiration in such deliberate distress.

As for Barlow’s surfaces, they are mostly crud-encrusted, looking ancient and unearthed. The layers are built up from things like polystyrene, expanding foam, wire netting, paint, cement, and fabric. Like Jacques Villeglé’s ripped and peeled accretions, they act as a temporal record, reflecting an interest in the urban patina produced by smog, grime, pigeon poop, and rapid turnover—use, hasty repair, and reuse.

On the whole, the exhibition is less successful when the work doesn’t take up enough space, when it doesn’t get in the way or threaten. This is the case with the three ten-foot tall columns of foam, felt, cardboard, etc.—many more of them were needed—and with the three stand-alone objects in the gallery’s front room. More powerful was a row of densely packed “awnings.” These gray, visor-like roofs draped festively in layers of colored fabric, with threads hanging from ripped edges, invite visitors to duck beneath their partial protection.

The way these pieces are made from a patchwork of monochromatic wood scraps is reminiscent of a Rachel Harrison sculpture. Like Harrison, Barlow also has fun with a convention of sculpture: the display pedestal. In a separate room upstairs, she created a maze of wonky, taller than average pedestals brushed with an energetic, scatological stucco of paint, sand, and cement. Among the lumps and coils—signifying art—precariously perched atop these intentionally irregular plinths are a few cartoony, somewhat recognizable objects from the generic artist’s/worker’s studio such as anvil, chainsaw, projector. Barlow literally places making (or process) on a pedestal giving it equal footing with what’s made. These sloppy objects could also easily be at home in Claes Oldenburg’s The Store (1961). So is this a touch of commodity or institutional critique? Is this a questioning of artistic authorship? Maybe. Suddenly, Barlows are in demand, which must feel strange for an artist accustomed to breaking things down for what comes next.

The post The Cannibal: Phyllida Barlow at Hauser & Wirth appeared first on artcritical.

September 6 to October 27, 2012
533 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212.714.9500

When it comes to word count, literature hosts such extremes as Marcel Proust, notoriously, on the high end, and Yasunari Kawabata on the opposite end.  The pithy vignettes of the latter, written as early as 1923 and collected in the volume Palm of the Hand Stories, possess a concise, subtle profundity beyond what ordinary structured storytelling can often deliver.  It was Kawabata’s impressionistic economy and his gift for poeticizing the unexceptional that came to my mind while watching Jesper Just’s three recent videos on view at James Cohan.

Just has also been compared to some of cinema’s mood masters from Alain Resnais to David Lynch, and these influences are still present but less obviously. Many New Yorkers may have been introduced to Just’s work in 2008 with his four-video exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. For the Cohan show, however, Just has ditched the highly theatrical, daddy-complex-noir of earlier works for a more naturalistic and therefore, for me, far stranger vision of ordinary weirdness. Fittingly, the exhibition’s title, This Nameless Spectacle, is a line pulled from a poem by William Carlos Williams. The quiver of a lip, a glance, the color of a dress; for Just, these nuances carry weight.

So too do each of Just’s locations. The New York-based Dane chose two American and one French site to serve as more than mere backdrops. A fan of the anticipatory tracking shot, Just picks up the action in Sirens of Chrome (2010) with a clunker cruising through a desolate Detroit. But this is no slick advertisement (I had the contrasting memory of Josephine Meckseper’s 0% Down (2008)), no Hollywood chase scene. Having witnessed the passage of its Motor City glory days, everything associated with America’s love affair with the automobile, our historical move out of the industrial age, and the socio-economic reverberations of these phenomena are insinuated here.

This kind of cyclical shift in an area’s function is also found in the other two videos. This Nameless Spectacle (2011) begins in Parc des Buttes Chaumont, which was part of Haussmann’s transformation of Paris from a medieval city into a modern one. An attractive, put together, middle-aged woman (whom some might call a cougar) travels by wheelchair through the park’s grotto, which was once a quarry mined for building materials. After being followed by a monkish hipster, she returns home to one of many sterile contemporary apartment buildings. Conversely, the camera roams the decrepit California desert remnants of a failed, early twentieth-century Socialist colony in Llano (2012) seemingly ‘kept alive’ by a fake rain machine—filmic artifice unveiled.

And what happens in these loaded landscapes? In keeping with his love of the erotic undertone, Just includes quite a bit of writhing. In the car in Detroit, four African-America women take a slow drive to an indoor parking lot where a fifth rolls around on their hood. At first it seems she’s pretending to be hit, but the mood changes from concern to jouissance. This feeling is mirrored in Paris, when the woman rises from her wheelchair only to have what appears to be an epileptic fit. Induced by light flashes from the stalker/hipster’s window, this writhing feels like religious ecstasy. The light’s downward angle and the woman’s open-mouthed smile suggest Bernini’s swooning, sculptural nun in Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1645 –1652). And so what happens in these videos? Not much, and certainly no dialogue or Just’s signature off-kilter crooning. The pleasure is in associations, conjecture, curious details, and loose conclusions.

All this tantalizing, plotless ambiguity is brought to life by Just’s usual technical virtuosity in run-times—ranging from seven to thirteen minutes—perfect for standing in an art gallery. In the case of the Paris video, This Nameless Spectacle, viewers are sandwiched in the midst of the action by Just placing two projection screens facing one another on opposite sides of the gallery’s main space. You can situate yourself in the center or on the sidelines catching simultaneous glimpses of a character’s point of view as well as her face or a wide shot. Throughout the show, Just’s camera lingers lovingly on fingers and toes, rusty tin cans and wet rocks, on emotions born of wondering what is going on and what is to come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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March 4 – April 15, 2012
103 Norfolk St, between Rivington and Delancey
New York City, (212) 967-2260

Almost a century ago, a small group of Russian Jews migrated to Israel’s Jordan Valley. They named their new home Tochka—’dot’ or ‘point’—because they thought it wouldn’t last. But it did, growing around an intense work ethic and powerful communal bonds, like other kibbutzim, and is known today as Kibbutz Afikim. In 1976, it would also be the birthplace of artist Oded Hirsch. Even though he left the kibbutz and now lives in New York, he has profound connections to the land and people of his formative years.

While Nothing New is Hirsch’s first New York solo exhibition, his work has already made an impact in the U.S. and abroad, perhaps most notably in The Workers at MASS MoCA and The Young Israelis at Lesley Heller Workspace. It is only at Thierry Goldberg that Hirsch’s video trilogy—50 Blue, Tochka, and the show’s eponymous piece—finds completion. This third video, based on a story by Amos Oz, The Way of the Wind, foregrounds differences between generations of kibbutzniks, between tradition and change, between ideology and practical action. These themes, all set against the embattled but stunning backdrop of Israel and its history of utopianism, are threaded throughout the show.

In each of these impeccably produced documentary-style videos, Hirsch stages seemingly pointless physical ordeals sharing some of the kooky compulsion depicted in Werner Herzog’s film, Fitzcarraldo. Hirsch doesn’t gather a cast to pull a steamship over a mud-slick mountain, but the dream behind that effort—to bring opera to the Amazon—is not unlike Hirsch’s desire to unite people for the purpose of making art; both put art under scrutiny while locating it outside traditional comfort zones.

In each case also, the earth is both help, and in the form of mud, hinderance. In 50 Blue, Hirsch’s brother struggles through the muck-thick obstacle course of rural hill and dale as he pushes their wheelchair-bound father to a watchtower. Once there, he’s hoisted up to appreciate an anticlimactic view. Likewise, in Tochka, workers wrestle with a giant, mud-encrusted spool en route to the construction of a rickety bridge over a barely perceptible ditch. And in Nothing New, a parachutist caught on an electrical line is brought down to earth, but not by a ladder. Instead, a frenzied tug of war with the electrical towers slackens the lines enough so that the trapped man’s feet reach a mound of dirt piled beneath him; a roundabout solution but the only one seemingly accessible to the people on hand. With such dubious end results, especially under such absurdly strenuous conditions, the drive to achieve is called into question.

Like other task-oriented artwork, process is the priority. Precedence for this can be found in the performance, participatory, and video art of late 60s, early 70s America. However, unlike Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Richard Serra, or even a contemporary like Kate Gilmore, Hirsch does not focus on hermetic, individual efforts. He makes everyone pull together both literally (on ropes) and metaphorically (as a support system), but the actions are so stiffly stylized and methodically choreographed that aspersions are cast on the ties that connect but also bind. Of course it is exactly those bonds of faith and place that enabled Hirsch to recruit the volunteers essential to his artistic endeavor. This feat is mirrored in the clever projection of the trilogy. A specially built triangular screen, centered in the back space of the gallery and showing a video on each of its sides, gathers gallery-goers around it like kibbutzniks at a campfire. Even the intermingling of soundtracks creates a simultaneity which enhances the experience by injecting recollected content from one video into another.

In fact, it is never entirely clear what time it is in this work. The bland, utilitarian clothing does not reflect contemporary fashion while intermittent dips to black and apparent continuity errors in the sky’s shifting light confuse a straightforward reading of real-time progression. In some cases, things even come to a standstill. Not only do workers seem locked in a freeze-frame when they stop to rest or contemplate, but the parachutist and man-in-the-wheelchair are so inert it’s possible they are ‘no longer with us.’

There are actual photographic still images in the show serving mostly as production souvenirs, but a richer stillness is given voice in a fourth video, Habaita, fittingly situated in the passageway between the gallery’s front and back areas. Here, a group of men and women stand in a motionless rowboat  as though posing for a photograph. This is not the intergenerational mix in Nothing New; it is an exclusive group—all over sixty—which includes Hirsch’s parents. Although the itinerancy suggested by the boat is incongruent with its immobility, these cultural sentinels exude a stalwart dignity. There is no dialogue in this piece or in any of the work, but the exhibition speaks volumes.

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February 16 – March 24, 2012
533 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 714-9500

Yinka Shonibare MBE (this royal honorific, standing for Member of the Order of the British Empire, has become integral to his artistic moniker) is a master mixologist of historical allusions. His nuanced syntheses of significant moments in global and artistic histories reflect his own hybrid Nigerian/British identity. The Dutch wax fabrics that have become his artistic signature, for instance, have a complex pedigree. Inspired by Indonesian batiks, they were first produced by the Dutch, and yet, oddly, have come to symbolize African authenticity. Infusing Shonibare’s work with an implicit critique of empire, these textiles frequently find themselves fashioned into exquisite period costumes outfitting headless, toffee-toned mannequins mimicking classic scenes from art history.

And who is clad in Dutch wax for Shonibare’s latest exhibition? Lord Nelson and his estranged wife, Fanny. While they serve as types, the importance of their specificity is made clear by the titling of their costumes displayed in the central room of the gallery. On the surrounding walls hang photographs of ‘grand exits’ called Fake Death Pictures. Here, Shonibare complicates Nelson’s one-dimensional identity as a celebrated naval leader who famously sacrificed not only an arm and an eye for Empire but also his life: “England expects that every man will do his duty.” As carefully staged as the old European paintings upon which they’re based, these photos invite comparison with the original works of art, perceived historical fact, and Shonibare’s overall oeuvre, not to mention Cindy Sherman’s deconstructive role-play. But goofy, myth-busting theatricality of this order —the compositing of deaths (and lives) – can end up more convoluted cocktail than illuminating palimpsest.

Standing in for other white men whose deaths were immortalized in paint, a live actor plays Nelson. By making him flesh and blood rather than static statuary, Shonibare offers different perspectives on Nelson as both flawed individual and metaphor. Fittingly, other things shift in the photos, from Nelson’s bodily integrity to the races, genders, and ages of surrounding figures and the environment itself. For example, in the shot of a seemingly legless Nelson dying as Leonardo da Vinci, Shonibare makes the king black while the Borghese Gladiator in the background morphs into an angel’s wing. This sculpture was actually discovered after da Vinci’s death; its inclusion by the painter of Shonibare’s source image, François-Guillaume Ménageot, was an exercise of  artistic license. Visual and historical hiccups like these draw attention to the power of representations; they ask us to look twice.

Likewise, Shonibare’s video of an aria from La Traviata benefits from sustained viewing. Having accumulated diverse shot coverage, typical in moving image production, Shonibare made several versions rather than simply looping the same sequence. These subtle differences make the labyrinthine repetition seem all the more inescapable, a technique mirroring content. Fanny’s story of dutiful deprivation is intertwined with Violetta’s pre-death lament, Addio del Passato [“So closes my sad story”] from Verdi’s opera performed here by a black singer. Awaiting Nelson’s return from his perilous missions and even from his mistress, Lady Hamilton, Fanny had a penchant for socially prescribed sacrifice. This she shares with Violetta, who gave up her lover because her checkered past threatened the social status of his family. Violetta, however, more closely resembles Nelson’s mistress, both of whom improved their lot through sexual relations. Shonibare jump cuts in and around an aristocratic residence to give the sense that this mash-up of a woman is everywhere all at once, all fettered despair. Unfortunately, the gorgeous camerawork is intercut with computer-generated moves on the Fake Death Pictures and schmaltzy live action shots of Nelson, and so we say farewell to the elegant economy that might have been.

On the sidelines of so much anticlimax and overwhelming intertextuality, three fetishistic table-top objects steal the show. With its gears and pistons set off by a timer, the Anti-Hysteria Device is a locomotive-inspired sex machine with a Dutch wax upholstered dildo thrusting ever faster until an orgasmic whistle sounds. The frigidly restrictive Anti-Masturbation Device looks like the inverted spout of a teakettle while the Fetish Boots, with their high curving heels, are an incapacitating set of stilts. Crafted in a Victorian, industrial era style, these pieces get at power relations—sexual and otherwise—with a comic stealth absent from the rest of the exhibition. For while Shonibare successfully demonstrates that no historical moment or player is too grand or too insignificant to be examined afresh, the results serve best as an invitation for further inquiry; not the worst outcome, but not the most visually compelling either.

The post Yinka Shonibare MBE: Post-Colonial Mixologist appeared first on artcritical.

November 3 to December 23, 2011
31 Mercer Street, between Howard and Grand
New York City, (212) 226-3232

For her first solo show at Ronald Feldman, Simone Jones claims Marshall Berman’s book, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, as thematic inspiration. Through diverse examples, from Goethe’s Faust to Robert Moses’ public works, Berman articulates modernity as “a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal.” This duality causes an uneasy split—you can’t have ‘the good’ without ‘the bad.’ Otherwise, creative energies are snuffed out with destructive ones. Berman’s modernity is a balancing act and always on the move.

Jones’s video installation, All That is Solid, is an exercise in perpetual motion. Projected onto four screens propped against the wall, computer-generated 3D cubes, spheres, and reductive architectural models tumble vertiginously over film noirish photos of hallways and staircases. These uninhabited transitional spaces—facilitating movement from one thing to another—have the generic, institutional feel of school/office/hospital. Even if glimpses of this ‘real’ world did possess any distinguishing features, attempts to identify them are frustrated by the shapes, which continuously expand and contract, burst on the scene and disappear just as suddenly. While the photos of old, ossifed modernity pan horizontally back and forth, the geometric avalanche only moves one way: right to left. There is, however, an exceptional moment of resistance: a small cube makes a slow break but quickly succumbs to the leftward momentum. Is this the maelstrom of modernity at work in our digital age? If so, it takes time and attention—both uncharacteristic of the current moment—to catch the breach. Accompanied by a sinister soundtrack, this piece is distinctly dystopic despite trading in a techno-pastoral currency.

End of Empire is also sinister. While this 14-minute video mimics the conditions of Warhol’s eight-hour film, Empire, times have changed since 1964. Both pieces depict the Empire State Building, but Warhol’s locked-down lens fixates on (what was) an emblem of enduring glamour and success. Jones sees the Machine Age icon differently. Her camera pans up the landmark while her crane-like robot tilts the projected image onto the ceiling. In this position, it’s possible for viewers to assume the position of tourist—feet planted, head back—a stance rarely taken by locals who do not gawk at what they take for granted. The projector then tilts back down to the wall while the camera pans down to a murky, architectural thicket. Here, the grainy base of the city’s tallest building melts into air. Supposedly, this Toronto-based artist isn’t referencing 9/11—an impossible leap for any New Yorker. Rather, Jones shares Warhol’s sentiment, “I like old things torn down and new things put up every minute.”

Representative of quick, visually explicit turnover, Jones’s piece does not illustrate Berman’s split, it embodies it. When the video makes its second upward migration, the building is gone without a trace. Even Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire (1836) left some remnants in the ravenous, vegetal wreckage. Jones’s End of Empire is neither that literal nor is it as symbolically complex as Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 (2002). Jones’s modernity—today’s modernity—is digital dematerialization; it is both good and bad.

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