“In the beginning everything was dead,” chanted a voice from Camille Henrot’s mesmerizing video Grosse Fatigue (2013) as it leaps off to 13 minutes of throbbing inquiry. There is something slightly contradictory about this statement: death is the cessation of life, so how could death precede the existence of living things? An attempt to trace the history of the Universe usually leads to a brutal confrontation with the limits of one’s perception and ability to comprehend infinity, and describing the endpoints of a creation story seems essential and grounding. Or perhaps this doesn’t matter so much.

Henrot’s exhibition at the New Museum, “Restless Earth,” is one of the most energetic and rejuvenating installations to visit New York this season. It expands upon her explorations of culture, history and informational systems in her earlier works, deliberately toying with the artificially established boundaries between disciplines of study, research and perception as Henrot masquerades as anthropologist, scientist, librarian, sociologist and artist. She explores how the material world and culture is formulated, acknowledged, recorded, organized and standardized, but more prominently, it demonstrates all the chaos and energy these processes exhale.

A large section of the exhibition is filled with sculptures inspired by various works of literature, guided by Ikebana, the Japanese practice of flower arrangement. In these engrossing displays, Henrot attempts to visualize literature through slightly absurd compositions of flowers, grocery vegetables, other seemingly arbitrary ingredients, such as USB cables, Japanese newspapers, sheet moss — all exposing their physical and socio-economic connotations, their roles as food, decoration or mechanical devices, the stories of their discovery or their taxonomy. Each work is labeled with a quote from a work of literature, as well as detailed, hilariously scientific lists of its components — this interest in cataloguing and factual archiving is noticeable throughout her exhibition. These terse, contemplative canopies sprout from countertops, drape from the ceiling and crawl past the walls (Melville’s epic Moby Dick, 1851, is reduced to a few scattered crescent-shaped palm leaves), to form a little jungle ecosystem of their own, a buzzing room of dialogue. There is something strange and attractive about nature jolted into unnatural juxtapositions, considering these fragrant, vivacious arrangements are of amputated flowers and leaves nearing the end of their lives — “at death’s door” would be melodramatic, but their drying edges and fading color carry a hint of ephemerality and urgency.

Her fascination with appropriation and biological material is extended to another room of the show, containing a long table of neatly arranged pages from a 1995 Christie’s catalogue, Jewels from the Personal Collection of Princess Salimah Aga Khan. Henrot illustrates the descriptions on each page with dried bookmark-like flowers and leaves stolen from residences on the Upper East Side. The magnificent gems and luxury uptown urban herbarium are both deliberate demonstrations of excess, but also, to their owners, decidedly necessary measures that define their social status. The catalogue pages only note estimated prices, rendering the values of the jewelry — and whatever they signify — speculative until juried by the auction attendees. This small sense of instability is perhaps furthered by spare, conspicuous slices of opaque tape affixing immobile and dried leaves to the pages, as if to restrain their plot to escape.

Then there are Henrot’s videos. The exhibition features several earlier videos that study the role of various symbols, practices and material objects across different cultures: Coupé/Décalé (2011) documents the origin of bungee jumping; Le Songe de Poliphile (2011), of the semiotics of the snake; and Million Dollars Point (2011), on World War II materials abandoned in Polynesia and the “cargo cults” that subsequently formed. Grosse Fatigue is the most conceptually ambitious (and probably low-budget) of them all, a series of desktop windows appearing on a computer screen, propelled by a groovy rap song that stitches together various origin myths, scientific presentations and annals of anthropology with the coherence of a surging music video. The deluge of imagery in today’s Internet age is a popular topic for artists, but few successfully conjure much beyond some purposefully collaged frenzy. Henrot’s selection of images (animals of from various phyla, different cultural practices, shots of mundane activity such as a manicured hand rubbing an orange) is not unpredictable, but they provide more than a simple sensation of distress and visual saturation. She consciously demonstrates the gaps and limits that still (and might forever) exist in our already overwhelming knowledge of history, a vault of information that could be more reasonably experienced through the momentum and innate disorder that weaves it all together.

Grosse Fatigue was made at Henrot’s 2013 Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian, during which she collected footage of animal and plant specimens, obscure digital archives, blank hallways and anonymous office workers. She paired that imagery with the unending reach of the digital realm, which, in many ways, is an archive and simulation of the immense universe beyond the monitor, but also feels oddly tangible as it is fully manmade and portable (one shot features an iPhone with a green croaking frog parked on top, held by a hand). This strategy allows her narrative to swell with felt urgency and inscrutable complexity, and also the leisurely nimbleness of aimless web surfing. Queues of browser windows at times pile up like flashing torrents of spam advertisements, but they can be readily clicked shut like full drawers of ghastly, vibrantly preserved tropical bird specimen. In the beginning and end there were both uncluttered Mac desktops.

The post Archive of the Everything, Forever: Camille Henrot at the New Museum appeared first on artcritical.

January 22 to February 22, 2014

515 West 24th Street
New York, 212-206-9300

Photorealist painter Robert Bechtle’s source images are most likely not trending on Instagram. His trademark subjects, when reviewed as a list, sound tearfully forgettable: parked cars, covered parked cars, middle class suburban houses, trees, peopleless streets. Yet, he conjures something moving and miraculous with these ascetic ingredients. The watercolor Six Cars on 20th Street (2007) centers on a beige, empty road that fills the picture to the brim, save for a small glimpse of blue sky in the corner. A few precisely placed, transparent cars are enjoying small patches of shade, leisurely anchored to San Francisco’s hilly street as if casually immune to gravity. It feels as if the very Californian sun it portrays dried off the paint. Bechtle’s nonfiction of the most overlooked moments in life can send viewers to the verge of panic about becoming enthralled by the beauty of sheer banal insignificance.

Bechtle’s current exhibition at Gladstone Gallery provides a much-needed respite in a world serving up artworks constantly growing bigger, louder, and more ingratiating. The artist himself sheepishly peers out from one of the few oil paintings in the show, Bob’s Sebring (2011), next to a silver convertible a bit too snazzy for his outfit, in front of a square garage. Born in California in 1937, Robert Bechtle seems to have arrived at his minimal subjects and technique after carefully rejecting all that was cool. He was exposed to German art while serving as an army private there in the 1950s, and enjoyed Pop art shows at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1962. He purposefully avoided Richard Diebenkorn’s painting courses while studying at the California College of Arts, in fear of becoming influenced by his contagious energy. After some short-lived trials, he found his long-term subject: keenly scrutinized painted portraits of everyday cars and empty streets, based on snapshots. The paintings are furnished from a Kodachrome, sun-bleached palette, and a seemingly interminable supply of time.

Most of the paintings in the show are based off of images taken in San Francisco and the Northern California suburbs in its vicinity, where the temperature dial is locked at 55 degrees and the sun’s simplifying rays expel clouds, distinguishable seasons, and palpable deadlines. The time of Clay Street, Alameda (2013) appears to be just past noon according to its telling, jewel-blue shadows. The supposed subject matter lingers at the edge of the well-measured composition, perfectly skewed to avoid approaching the edge of motion. Car-lined streets extend to the horizon as people patiently await the discovery of worthwhile destinations. Brief, poetic painterly details do not awaken their enervation; rhythmic telephone wires drape past the sky like garlands, and the unevenly trimmed canopies are feathered by brilliant numberless shades of green. A dirty, rectangular blotch in the middle of the street hides an attempt to restore something -– what sort of excitement could have possibly disturbed this neighborhood? Meanwhile, the still sunlight embalms the scene like room temperature formaldehyde, so clear it’s practically negligible. The photographic qualities of this work are apparent, but the shutter’s ability to capturing fleeting moments is irrelevant as time itself seems to be immobile anyway.

For Bechtle, a stationary mobile car is a powerful symbol of ennui. The watercolor Covered Car on De Haro Street (2013) is accompanied by an almost identical charcoal incarnation, Covered Car on de Haro Street II, where every grain of paper is mobilized for expression. This miniature portrait of a parked car, humbly presented in a size befitting the deceptively minor subject, is possibly the most immediately arresting work in the show. In a view reminiscent of that from the spontaneous cropping by a surveillance camera, a shapely cluster of spectral yellow tarp covering a vehicle is suspended on a slanted street, triggering a gentle, engaging instability. There is something weighty and insouciantly sublime about this unmanned outline of a car and its Hopper-esque stillness. Momentarily, this effort to alleviate sun damage assumes the mysterious tick of a filled body bag, but imaginative viewers might be disappointed by its content: it is probably just another Sebring.

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January 7 to February 22, 2014

381 Broadway, 2nd Floor, between White and Walker Street
New York, info@nationalexemplar.com
Hours: Thursday to Sunday, 2-7pm

Compared to words, pictures are the more enigmatic, imprecise mode of expression; consequently, words are (as demonstrated here) often employed to describe and organize interpretations for images. Leo Fitzpatrick, however, attempts to conduct the reverse by subtly motivating the act of painting to service words. His fascinating solo show at the National Exemplar Gallery is comprised of a quiet ring of monochromatic text paintings of uniform, modest scale that outline the rim of the gallery’s space. Black capital letters are painted in the most nondescript, precisely medium-strength sans serif font. One corner of the room feels momentarily warped by five standout canvases set against darker and hazier backgrounds, but most titles come as suites of two or three canvases. The installation does not immediately clarify these groupings or suggest an agreed upon starting point to viewing the work.

The thirty-six year old artist first gained attention as a teenage skateboarder in Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). In addition to his paintings he is also known for his ardent word collages made with old paperback novels, found images, and other cultural debris. He has also published several volumes of poetry, mostly pages of restless, probing free verse lines quite similar to text found in these poem paintings: “a collection of sad hopes and futures dying / a destiny fit for a king.” “MY ANGER IS MY HOME (THE BOY WHO COULD MAKE HIMSELF DISAPPEAR) AND I’M HOME ALONE.” Compared to other artists who work with words such as Christopher Wool, Carl Andre or Jamie Shovlin, Fitzpatrick’s collaboration with language is curiously literal and reverent. These canvases are too large to fit household printers, but the increased typeface retains the proportional familiarity and intimacy of 12 point Arial on A4 paper. Each canvas contains a sparse handful of words, displayed in aesthetically reasonable compositions that are not overdesigned. Lines are never robotically centered or justified, and words are only severed after prefixes and never interrupted mid-syllable. The result is a group of effortlessly truthful still-life portraits of poetry in its essential state.

Painting’s accessible, lyrical physicality does not engulf language’s abstract identity; the verses gain the perfect degree of hyper-articulated visibility without having to materialize their contents as reinterpreted, disenchanting illustrations. Sourced from poems and diaries that Fitzpatrick has been keeping since age eight, these paintings awaken distant feelings that are invisible yet intensely palpable. Memories of unresolved poignancy and angst have long been archived as experience, and the paintbrush fully reactivates their sting. The blunt, black brushstrokes come through like deep trenches and dig into plush layers of white and wintry grays, putting to bed buzzing palimpsests of revised dreams and nostalgia.

One of the most mesmerizing moments in the show is a series of three canvases that begins with “NEVER AGAIN” and ends with “AGAIN.” “NEVER AGAIN” is positioned at the top of the left panel and “AGAIN” at the bottom of the right, conversing like two clearly adjacent pieces in a complex puzzle set. The center canvas reads, “I WAS/IN LOVE/WITH YOU/INTILL YOU/LEFT WITH/HIM.” Intentional or not, Fitzpatrick’s misspellings are immensely engrossing. There is something sinister about the word “intill” that makes it stick and linger – perhaps it is due to the unexpected absence of the friendly roundedness of the shape of “U”? After a lengthy gaze, the brigade of vertical strips here will begin to appear dangerously sharp and spear-like. A delicate frenzy of cracks and wrinkles on the finely shattered surrounding surface confirms their weight.

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May 32 to July 19, 2013
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
534 West 26th Street
New York City, 212-744-7400

In a way, a work of art is always a representation of something else, be it an object, image or idea. In Daniel Lefcourt’s premier exhibition with Mitchell-Innes & Nash, this seemingly intuitive theory becomes complicated by the artist’s employment of simulation techniques associated with theatrical and architectural models. A simulation, by definition, does not attempt to exist independently from or replace its source. Lefcourt’s fascinating use of modeling is not about the efficiency of representation, but is itself a simulation and tangible re-presentation of the very process of modeling, and the roles of the materials and rituals that are necessary to build a convincing visual approximation.

Modeling implies replication to some extent, but Lefcourt’s practice embodies a distinct, satisfying authenticity as his works do not take after anything that can be directly compared to their physical appearance. In this sense they stand on their own, and cannot be marked as counterfeits. Unpainted, machine polished MDF panels line the gallery’s walls and are sometimes used as frames – one piece is even standing alone in the back, like a temporary wall installed for a quick theatre rehearsal. Made by compressing the dusty exhaust of defibrators, the boards, themselves simulating the appearance and function of natural wood, look as finished as they are makeshift. Their presence lends a sense of complementary industrial ruggedness and incompletion to the exhibit, as well as the surprisingly powerful descriptive energy unique to pointedly modeler structures. In relation to the Drawing Board series of relief graphite drawings installed in MDF frames, the panels also question the autonomy of an artwork and, with it, the politics of display and the division between aesthetic space and the reality beyond the gallery. Curiously, through this erasure of a precise physical boundary, the intensity of these works’ conceptual departure from the utilitarian world is pushed into sharper focus.

The paintings in the Cast series have clinical, gently descriptive subtitles such as “Impressions at a Distance” and “Points in a Coordinate System.” Created with an industrial paint pigment called PBK31 (perylene green-black) and urethane, the canvas surface appears to have a mossy texture, put into stark relief by pristine, pale birch MDF frames.  The surface oozes with what could be masses of microscopic life forms or rich, anonymous activity in a magnified drop of viscous murk. However, this evocation of “natural” fluidity and entropy is mediated by a painstaking digital imaging process, which manages these visuals without overlooking the material’s unpredictability. Lefourt makes visible what is invisible by a series of jumps between digital media and physical construction. Images of transient, microscopic activity are captured using a macro lens digital camera, and later recreated through a complex combination of digital 3D modeling, sculptural casting, and a meticulous process of adhering a sheet of calculated relief paint onto canvas.

In the Cast paintings numbers and letters in mechanical fonts interrupt the organic fluidity with the presence of machinery. Familiar shapes appear throughout a field of nondescript, undulating surges of paint, sometimes completely buried by abstract debris. The viewer must actively decide to acknowledge their significance as recognizable signs (and whether or not certain letters, like “S” and “O” are upside-down). In this manner Lefcourt challenges us to think more thoroughly about the regulated symbolic and cultural significance of the alphabet and numeric ordering. The Drawing Board series consists of diptych graphite panels installed in fiberboard panels and framed in thin pine. There is a sense of mathematical harmony to the work that hints at possible structural correlations and continuity between each pair of juxtaposed panels, but no identifiable patterns can be readily detected. Like the Cast paintings, the composition and surface texture of the graphite is abstract, resembling a flimsy blueprint of sculptural terrain. This work is wakefully vigilant of its surroundings – the uneven paint and graphite finish is particularly susceptible to the optical effects of light, which describes the coarse and otherwise dark and somber surface with an ephemeral shimmer that adjusts itself according to the varying lighting and the changing position of the ambulatory viewer.

The overall installation, like each individual work, also obscures the limits of where an “artwork” begins and ends. Meticulously planned frames and panels that extend rather than contain serve to mediate between the paintings and the gallery’s architecture, and the works themselves do not seem to be pointedly interested in asserting strict sovereignty. Throughout Modeler there is a general sense of giving and withholding; the viewer’s curiosity and desire for engagement are met with a rich and complex materiality that hide a stern inaccessibility. Ultimately, Lefcourt encourages surrender and acceptance for the simple energy ignited by well-meaning attempts at thoroughly deciphering a dynamic, synesthetic visual experience, and a reluctant return to the “drawing board.”

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May 8 to June 29, 2013

David Nolan Gallery
527 West 29th Street
New York City, (212) 925-6190

There is something magical about opposing energies ignited by a focused comparison. The simultaneous acknowledgement of two unlike objects, sensations or concepts sets off an endless search for similarities and differences, as well as a burst of curiosity that sustains engagement and triggers vibrant imagination. (The effect is most potent when “but” and “yet” can be appropriately placed; press releases and auction catalogue notes unabashedly embrace this advantage:  “[work title]” is at once [version of ‘magisterial and aggressive’] and [synonym for ‘quaint pensiveness’].”)

The Scottish sculptor and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) addresses the tension between seemingly dissimilar concepts and words. His exhibition at David Nolan Gallery, Ring of Waves, featuring work spanning the late 1960s to mid-2000s, is about the sea – a perfectly vast and untamed companion for Finlay’s terse, cryptic objects. The installation of sculptures and “poem objects” form, although resistant to interpretation at first, a brilliantly paced exposition on the relationship between nature, society and human communication.

At its core, Finlay’s art explores meanings that spring from metaphors, as well as the implication of translating the natural world into language. When a word becomes assigned to an object, a metaphor and its accompanying ambiguity are triggered. For example, the title of his sculpture of a trapped but winged propeller, Chrysalis (1996), immediately evokes a potential for fleshly metamorphosis and cathartic rupture, establishing a parallel between soaring flight and developing life. The dialectic between the work’s title and its presence transports the propeller and absent chrysalis into the artificial universe of culture, albeit at the risk of temporarily belying the work’s physical reality: a lifeless, lonely mechanical device trapped in a “wooden” crate which is actually welded in stiff bronze.

Finlay came to prominence in the 1960s as a practitioner of Concrete Poetry, and his most successful pieces in this exhibition engage directly with words as raw material.  His “poem objects” are extraordinarily sensitive to the politics of reading and viewing and exert a fully controlled execution of the dimension of time. An almost total absence of adjectives forces each word to independently embody the full spectrum of its definition, and typography is always guided by mechanical fonts rather than organic handwriting, thus severing ties with subjective sentiments and demarking an abstract landscape entirely constructed from language and visual tropes. Cloud Barge  (1968) illustrates this quite literally, with the words “cloud” and “barge” arranged in mirroring patterns of blue and green on two layers of Plexiglas, suspended above a kaleidoscopic pasture of their own refracted shadows.

In Wave Rock (ca. 1975), the word “wave” is repeatedly inscribed in undulating lines from the left edge of a field of ceramic tiles, and a bundle of “rock” resides on the opposite end, steadfastly emulating the solidity and earthiness of the surface material. “Wave” and “rock” collide midway, and the poem becomes momentarily inarticulate. Here, physical properties of written language emerge to the forefront: amidst a frenzy of arcs and stems, the word “wrack” (living seaweed) flickers about like a cluster of unexpected growth. Finlay conducts the spiritual, stirring waves of the earth’s shores entirely within the jurisdiction of language in a decidedly tangible presentation, without invoking the impossibly complex physical appearance of the ocean and land. In a way, this work cleverly escapes the curse of what Jean-Paul Sartre terms the “essential poverty” of images conjured by the imagination: always flatter, more inert and less vivid and powerful than sights from real nature.

Another memorable work is Ring of Waves (1968), a simple poem of eight lines inscribed in black Plexiglas, positioned over a searing white background. A diminutive gap between the black glass and the background allows each word an elusive, voluminous physicality.  Each line presents two nouns joined by “of”: row of nets, string of lights, row of fish; they tenderly transform the black “ring of waves” in the first line into a final “ring of light.”  The first words of each line form a ring of their own – an ABCB rhyme scheme achieved by a clockwise journey through the words “ring, row, string, row” arranged in a circle (or square). The last line, however, begins with “ring” rather than “row” to  rush the completion of two full loops, forgoing structural discipline for incandescence, a singular “light” which instantly unifies and sublimates the verse. A luminous string of the word “of,” a tenuous repetition of the immaterial preposition, drapes down the center. Its precarious presence here is almost brighter than light itself.

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April 18th to June 1st, 2013
535 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 627 3930

Keith Smith’s small, mostly monochrome images at Bruce Silverstein trigger a refreshing, animal sensation of quiet intrigue that’s rarely experienced in art nowadays—something that neither requires critical context nor resort to shock for immediate engagement.

The show of brings together, for the first time, a large group of works from Smith’s earliest years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with photographs that combine sewing, drawing and painting from 1960 to 1980. In 1978 he was included in the Museum of Modern Art survey of American Photography since 1960 alongside William Eggleston and Lee Friedlander; although his mixed-media, irreverent approach to photography does not follow the path of his then peers, his works maintains what the press release for that exhibition had exalted as the “pursuit of beauty, that formal integrity that pays homage to the dream of meaningful life”.

Smith is also known for over 200 artist’s books (one of which is on display in this exhibition) that employ the three-dimensionality of the book and a meticulously guided reading experience to incorporate the dimension of time. The individuality of each page competes with the book’s overall progression.  A comparable energy is found in this show of photographs. Smith works from highly selective source images, consisting mostly of ears, eyes, his home and men he loved but could not express his affection towards. Continuity zigzags through each image’s mixed media surface and throughout the show as the motifs are explored repeatedly over 40 years, each time in a different medium and under new circumstances.

Repetition, for Smith, is a tool for revelation rather than desensitization. In addition to illustrating a surge of movement, his gelatin prints of 8mm film expose a kinetic materiality that only becomes salient whilst their subjects are in motion: when isolated from the rest of the body, the hand in “Untitled” (1966) becomes a simple glove that encloses the human touch, a shifting outline activated by the detection of its surroundings. The unique hand drawn elements add urgency and scarcity, counteracting the comfort of print reproductions and establishing a permanent, conscious attachment between the image as a concept and its physical manifestation. The matrix of 30 pans with fried eggs in Bicycle Seats (1967) is created with print emulsion and subsequently colored by hand. The shadows and shifting handlebars almost form a rhythmic pattern which does not diminish the  sovereignty of each pan.

The most arresting works from the show are probably his depictions of men. Hand coloring, stitching and various printing techniques that supplement conventional photography extend the perceptual depth and presence of the dimension of time demonstrated by his book projects, allowing Smith to convey an incredibly intense, nuanced and ordered collection of sensations. A haunting negative (the chemical opposite of reality captured by photographs) of a man removing his shirt, Alan Undressing, (1978), arises through an image of a toned torso whose hand is halfway inserted behind his belt. Fantasy and reality intersect as Alan’s piercing white eyes and a rim of stitches reinforce the image’s tangibility. Another standout picture is 1971 for Book 22, (1971) a collage of a nude young man with surprised eyes curled up in bed. The right side of his body is a darker exposure of the overall image, furiously sewn on with bits of thread that resemble sharp spikes. They are like stitches that close up a rugged surgery wound, needle by needle, uniting Smith’s desires and the young man’s flesh as if they had always belonged together.

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