When RoseLee Goldberg first published Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, in 1979, she opened the doors for the scholarly study of this medium. Thirty-two years later, Performance Art was in its third edition, with a new chapter dealing with “The First Decade of the New Century 2001-2010.” Importantly, this decade included the advent of Goldberg’s groundbreaking performance biennial – Performa – which began in 2004, and which will see its eighth edition this year. Her latest publication, Performance Now: Live Art for the 21st Century (August 2018) is devoted exclusively to performance since 2000. Departing from her previous monograph, which ruminates on the processes and history of performance art, Performance Now dives into the political and social implications of its contemporary manifestations.

Performance Now is divided into six chapters: “Performance as Visual Art,” “Word Citizenship: Performance as a Global Language,” “Radical Action: On Performance and Politics,” “Dance After Choreography,” “Off stage: New Theatre,” and “Performing Architecture.” The table of contents which outlines these chapters features an image of Pussy Riot in Moscow in 2012 – a powerful, colorful image that sets the tone for the book. Goldberg’s mission is clear: she articulately and concisely investigates how performance “mak[es] us more alert” in a globalized, politicized, “endlessly shifting” society (11). After a brief introductory section, Goldberg follows the same structure in each chapter: an explanation of themes and trends related to its topic, followed by about 50 examples of artists illustrating those ideas, all from the past two decades. Because each section is distinctly separate from those before and after, and they are neither alphabetical nor chronological in their ordering, the sequence of the chapters seems primarily a matter of aesthetic. As almost every page of the book has at least one (usually color) illustration, it would seem to be an image-led arrangement.

Goldberg’s text reads like a call to arms to consider performance in relation to institutions as much as to individuals. Once an outsider art form, Goldberg explains how post-2000 performance art became “increasingly dense with content, and demanded close attention on the part of viewers, [making] the argument that performance was difficult to incorporate into contemporary art history or into the collection of a museum because of its ephemeral nature… irrelevant” (17). With the book’s comprehensive chapter entries, Performance Now acts a record to legitimize performance – helped along not only by Goldberg’s status as an expert, but also from the thorough documentation of performance in the almost-two-hundred pages of example artists and performances (many of which are from various iterations of Performa).

Chapter three (“Radical Action”) stood out as particularly timely. Dealing with themes of war, social media, identity, and capitalism, Goldberg beautifully describes the importance of performance as a way to protest, process, and connect. Earlier in the book she describes performance as “both a way out and a way in,” a claim that fully comes to life as Goldberg describes the “urgent appeals to upend history, to change situations from negative to positive… to imagine reconciliation, to create poetic spaces for personal visions, cultures and rituals” (73, 112-113). Performance, this book says, can bridge outside and in, working from outside systems to make changes, and getting inside institutions to spread a message.

Despite the scope of this undertaking to show the immediate power of live art, Goldberg never lets it get away from her. In elegant, jargon-free prose, Performance Now remains accessible to anyone with a light background in performance wanting to know more, although with the absence of the history of the medium (covered so well in her earlier monograph) it should be admitted that readers with no background on the subject may feel a little lost at times. However, the energy of Goldberg’s text certainly comes across no matter what level of previous familiarity with the material.

My biggest surprise with this book was the lack of a conclusion. The same, however, is true in the earlier study, and it would seem in both instances to be a strategic commentary on the ever-shifting nature of performance as a medium, which remains responsive to its time and place. To write a conclusion would perhaps be reductive, boxing in a form which has always crossed boundaries. Thus, by giving us performance now, Goldberg leaves us tantalized, imagining the range of possibilities of what might come next.

RoseLee Goldberg. Performance Now: Live Art for the 21st Century. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018) ISBN: 9780500021255. 272 pages, 260 illustrations, $45

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Ewelina Bochenska was the winner of the artcritical prize at this year’s alumni exhibition at the New York Studio School. She was selected for the award by jurors Julie Heffernan and Jennifer Samet. This is the second year the prize has been offered at the School; last year it was won by Clintel Steed. An artcritical prize is also offered at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, by faculty vote, for the graduating class of the MFA program. At both institutions, the prize consists of an interview in our pages, of which this article is the realization. NATALIE SANDSTROM was a writing intern at artcritical this summer.

“Liminal” is the word that best sums up the work of Ewelina Bochenska. Neither strictly painting nor fiber work nor sculpture, her objects encompass elements of all three. They are intimately sized, wrapped with yarn, painted, layered with wooden objects or leather or lace, and painted again. The range of textures and breadth of palette imbues each work with unique, almost undefinable, energy which Ewalina herself describes as an “alien substance” with “otherworldly” characteristics.

Similar qualities are to be found in the artist herself – a globetrotter who draws influence from sources as diverse as folk art and music from her native Poland, to the indigenous Aymara people of the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. As Ewelina describes it, for these people “time flows backwards, front to back,” and in her own work the artist often moves between as many as 10 projects at once, listening for them to invite more work or demand to be left alone. She seems to thrill in occupying these thresholds of time and material, acting as the sorcerer for her “alchemical” objects: “I manage to freeze a moment of awkwardness of materials and color and shape and that maybe is when the work is ready – until I break it up again.” She intermittently pauses, listens, adding a new layer, perhaps, to an older piece, playing with their sense of time in creation. She even calls them “artifacts from the future” (artifact, she said, is one of her favorite words).

On the day that I visited Ewelina at M. David Studios in Brooklyn, she was preparing for a group exhibition to be titled “A Montage of Heck” (it was on view from October 12 to November 4th). Little canvases and paper works that she had recently brought from Poland were strewn around the floor, and as we talked about them and her process she began to lift them, one by one. I was surprised to see that the artworks were crafted all the way through – by which I mean that not only do they involve layers on top of the substrate, but that the base material (be it canvas or found thrift shop picture frame) is often covered on its sides and even back. She talked about the looping of yarn and the carving of wooden bits hidden beneath layers of paint – visible only in faint relief when you look closely – and manipulated her work to show me examples of these multitudinous processes. With every new piece handled the works became more sensual and bodily – I was entrapped in Ewelina’s hourglass, my own experience of her work seeming to slow down the pace of the outside world and transport us both away from the noise of neighboring gallery spaces. She continued to turn the objects over – revealing some with secret undersides: lace, embroidery, weaving, a bold signature. “I always want the work to surprise me,” she said, recognizing her process of reworking as well as the experience of others who discover the surprise side to the work, “but it can be subtle, like a whisper.”

She let me handle the objects as well, and I was shocked at their heft. Though some of them were no larger than a sheet of paper, their intricate layering gave them unexpected weight. I found myself holding one work close to my chest, cradling it almost as one would an infant. As I looked around at the abstracted forms – some resembling landscapes, others with sensual curvature that actually seemed bodily – I again thought of their ethereal liminality. Meanwhile, Ewelina talked about color: “The way I experience color – the way I paint – I kind of hear the color or the quality of the material, I kind of feel it, rather than through my other senses, rather than through just sight. So in a sense the color and the texture and all, they become, for me, another dimension.”

This synesthesia was something that I experienced when I first encountered Ewelina’s work at the New York Studio School alumni exhibition this summer, “X Marks the Spot.” Her contribution to this all-female show – a small painting of bright pinks and blues over a maroon carpet, bordered by yellow woven yarn – exemplifies the warm intimacy of Ewelina’s work. The red background implied heat, and the near-neon colored paint strokes drew the eye in a circular motion. I almost felt as though I were watching the Northern Lights from a comfortable old chair, forgetting the white walls of the gallery space in Manhattan.

When I asked about the development of her work, and where she might be going next, she talked about her history: first studying business, living in Ireland and then London, and eventually satisfying her lifelong fascination with art by pursuing a career as an artist. She stressed the word courage – a trait which not only comes through biographically, but also in her  uninhibited play with materials. She said that she has found herself in a moment of transition, and was thinking of heading somewhere in South America for rest and a new spark of inspiration. “I am using the energy of change to catapult myself.”

The post Otherworldly Objects: Ewelina Bochenska discusses her work with Natalie Sandstrom appeared first on artcritical.

“Liminal” is the word that best sums up the work of Ewelina Bochenska. Neither strictly painting nor fiber work nor sculpture, her objects encompass elements of all three. They are intimately sized, wrapped with yarn, painted, layered with wooden objects or leather or lace, and painted again. The range of textures and breadth of palette imbues each work with unique, almost undefinable, energy which Ewalina herself describes as an “alien substance” with “otherworldly” characteristics.

Similar qualities are to be found in the artist herself – a globetrotter who draws influence from sources as diverse as folk art and music from her native Poland, to the indigenous Aymara people of the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. As Ewelina describes it, for these people “time flows backwards, front to back,” and in her own work the artist often moves between as many as 10 projects at once, listening for them to invite more work or demand to be left alone. She seems to thrill in occupying these thresholds of time and material, acting as the sorcerer for her “alchemical” objects: “I manage to freeze a moment of awkwardness of materials and color and shape and that maybe is when the work is ready – until I break it up again.” She intermittently pauses, listens, adding a new layer, perhaps, to an older piece, playing with their sense of time in creation. She even calls them “artifacts from the future” (artifact, she said, is one of her favorite words).

On the day that I visited Ewelina at M. David Studios in Brooklyn, she was preparing for a group exhibition to be titled “A Montage of Heck” (it was on view from October 12 to November 4th). Little canvases and paper works that she had recently brought from Poland were strewn around the floor, and as we talked about them and her process she began to lift them, one by one. I was surprised to see that the artworks were crafted all the way through – by which I mean that not only do they involve layers on top of the substrate, but that the base material (be it canvas or found thrift shop picture frame) is often covered on its sides and even back. She talked about the looping of yarn and the carving of wooden bits hidden beneath layers of paint – visible only in faint relief when you look closely – and manipulated her work to show me examples of these multitudinous processes. With every new piece handled the works became more sensual and bodily – I was entrapped in Ewelina’s hourglass, my own experience of her work seeming to slow down the pace of the outside world and transport us both away from the noise of neighboring gallery spaces. She continued to turn the objects over – revealing some with secret undersides: lace, embroidery, weaving, a bold signature. “I always want the work to surprise me,” she said, recognizing her process of reworking as well as the experience of others who discover the surprise side to the work, “but it can be subtle, like a whisper.”

She let me handle the objects as well, and I was shocked at their heft. Though some of them were no larger than a sheet of paper, their intricate layering gave them unexpected weight. I found myself holding one work close to my chest, cradling it almost as one would an infant. As I looked around at the abstracted forms – some resembling landscapes, others with sensual curvature that actually seemed bodily – I again thought of their ethereal liminality. Meanwhile, Ewelina talked about color: “The way I experience color – the way I paint – I kind of hear the color or the quality of the material, I kind of feel it, rather than through my other senses, rather than through just sight. So in a sense the color and the texture and all, they become, for me, another dimension.”

This synesthesia was something that I experienced when I first encountered Ewelina’s work at the New York Studio School alumni exhibition this summer, “X Marks the Spot.” Her contribution to this all-female show – a small painting of bright pinks and blues over a maroon carpet, bordered by yellow woven yarn – exemplifies the warm intimacy of Ewelina’s work. The red background implied heat, and the near-neon colored paint strokes drew the eye in a circular motion. I almost felt as though I were watching the Northern Lights from a comfortable old chair, forgetting the white walls of the gallery space in Manhattan.

When I asked about the development of her work, and where she might be going next, she talked about her history: first studying business, living in Ireland and then London, and eventually satisfying her lifelong fascination with art by pursuing a career as an artist. She stressed the word courage – a trait which not only comes through biographically, but also in her  uninhibited play with materials. She said that she has found herself in a moment of transition, and was thinking of heading somewhere in South America for rest and a new spark of inspiration. “I am using the energy of change to catapult myself.”

The post Otherworldly Objects: Ewelina Bochenska discusses her work with Natalie Sandstrom appeared first on artcritical.

April 15 to September 3, 2018
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, momaps1.org

While mysticism likely conjures associations of fog rather than clarity, in the Acts of Appearance series by Indian artist Gauri Gill, a merging of myth and reality results in images that are crystal clear. These photographs, the heart of her exhibition at MoMA PS1, are so palpable in their presentness that a viewer feels they might walk into the scene.

The exhibition is #108 in the Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series, established at MoMA in 1971, and comprises 75 photographs, primarily pigmented inkjet prints from her ongoing Acts series (from 2015), along with images from another ongoing series, Notes from the Desert (from 1999). The Acts are colored photos of varying sizes that depict people going about their daily lives while wearing hand-crafted papier-mâché masks. The “actors” are members of the indigenous Kokna community in Maharashtra, India known for their mask-wearing Bahoda festival, in which, over a number of nights, they reenact Hindu and tribal myths through dance and masquerade. Setting out to re-contextualize this tradition within daily life, Gill commissioned local artists Subhas and Bhagvan Dharma Kadu (who are also cast members) to create a series of masks of everyday people, animals, and objects (rather than the usual festival animals, gods and demons), to be worn by volunteers going about quotidian tasks. Through this process, Gill interrogates the relationship between the mystic and the mundane.

These images are accompanied by Notes from the Desert: Smaller, predominantly black and white silver gelatin prints that feature various aspects of marginalized rural communities in Western Rajasthan, this series includes a subset, titled “The Marks on the Wall”, of murals on classroom walls decorated with words and images. The Notes act as a kind of support to the Acts in the show’s overall exploration of community and collaboration.

One of the first images visitors encounter, Sumri, daughter of Ismail the shepherd, Barmer, from the Notes series, is a prologue to the rest of the show. In it, a girl and a goat lean into one another, the girl’s arms wrapped around the goat, her face buried in its neck. The goat here acts like the masks in the Acts series, merging human and animal in a profoundly intimate moment. Across from Sumri hangs a seductive selection from the Acts in which women pose in or near their homes in various animal masks. For instance, a cobra-masked woman in a pink sari lounges on a couch beneath a window that diffuses warm daylight. Another room features a photograph of a male shopkeeper in a blue shirt wearing this same mask, carefully weighing some onions. In an image featuring both human and animal masks, an old woman reclines on a table at a doctor’s office and wears a mask of a worried-looking old woman. Behind her, a man in a rat mask (of the type often found in Indian hospitals) attends her head, standing in front of a white board, while a younger lady wearing a mask of a woman with a surprised expression hangs an IV. Other scenes of transformed activity include a trio of mammals playing a game on the floor, a bird joining two people on a motorcycle, and the sun and the moon walking down a dirt path, lighting their way in a soft glow. These images are cinematic and playful, a puppet show come to life. Although specific identities are hidden by the expressive masks, each actor appears as spectacularly individual in Gill’s compassionate staging and interpretation

Distributed among Acts of Appearance, the Notes feel like dream scenes, their black and white coloration reading like concept sketches. Rooms with writing on the walls appear to wait for a cast to arrive. In one from Notes, in fact, a woman with a mask halfway pulled up her face, covering her eyes but revealing her nose and below, sits on the floor, as if taking a break between posing. Although the Notes are discrete from the Acts, in this exhibition their intermingling creates the effect of frames from one jovial and whimsical film – Wes Anderson with a twist.

A cinematic interpretation was reinforced by a lack of traditional labels. In each room there was a small key that numbered each work and gave the series to which it belonged, and occasionally also a title (only for works from the Notes series). This lack of institutional labeling consistency from a MoMA affiliate was initially frustrating. For this viewer, my craving for narrative structure fought the sparse, commercial gallery-style hang. But after some time in the show, the jewel colored walls (painted deep blue, crimson, and saffron – inspired by vegetable dyes, indigo, madder, henna, and turmeric), together with the inherent playfulness of the imagery, actually left me relieved at the lack of labeling. Recalling Gauri Gill’s prompt to her Appearance actors to simply improvise and think about “what happens when we choose to self-reflexively ‘play ourselves’,” organizer Lucy Gallun refreshingly made the exhibition an exploratory space in which to move back and forth free from a linear, curatorially pre-digested interpretation. This made the warm wall colors and vibrant images seem all the more welcoming: Each tableau, with the unique rasas (emotions) portrayed on the masks, and the actors’ organic posing, were both relatable in their humanity and mysterious behind those beautifully crafted masks.

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August 9 to September 16, 2018
188 East 2nd Street, between avenues A and B
New York City, karmakarma.org

Gertrude Abercrombie (Karma Books, New York, 2018). Essays by Robert Storr, Susan Weininger, Robert Cozzolino and Dinah Livingston, and an interview by Studs Terkel

When I was little and couldn’t sleep, my mother would tell me to close my eyes and imagine meeting her in Dreamland. Over the years this made up place achieved a fully outlined map: Lemonade Lake was my preferred meeting place with Mom. The pictorial world of Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977) feels, to me, like a warped version of my own Dreamland. Her dark palette, cloudy skies, mysterious shadows, and (my personal favorite) ladders leading to the moon are mystical and, indeed, dreamy, though with the exhilarating potential to turn more sinister. On view in New York for the first time in more than 60 years, Karma Gallery’s selection of 70 portraits, still lifes, and landscapes celebrates the work of the woman who famously, and with some justification, dubbed herself the “Queen of Chicago.”

The daughter of opera singers, Abercrombie lived most of her life in Chicago’s bohemian quarter, Hyde Park, where she became a central figure in the social scene. A  jazz lover and herself a very capable musician, she was close friends with Dizzy Gillespie: There is a touching photograph of the two hugging reproduced in Karma’s gorgeous 400-plus page publication accompanying the exhibition. Her large South Side home was always brimful of creative luminaries, and in dubbing herself the “other Gertrude” she saw herself as Chicago’s Gertrude Stein. Within such a dazzling social circle, it is no wonder that Abercrombie’s interior life – her inspiration – would be as riveting. Thinking of herself as rather witchy (even labeling herself a “good witch” to a group of interested children, as recounted to Studs Terkel in the interview from 1977 published in the book), Abercrombie had a mystical way about her, which comes across  in her paintings. Recurring motifs include black cats, haunted-looking women (often herself), shells, moons, and doors. While painted with care, her work always seems a bit misty, ready to be the setting of a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, or voiced-over with “It was a dark and stormy night…”

The show moves chronologically and clockwise through Karma’s two luminous and spacious rooms, opening with the tiny Untitled (Slaughterhouse at Aledo) (1934), and closing with a signature example of her door series, The Door and the Rock (1971). Abercrombie’s subject matter remains consistent throughout her oeuvre, but the variation of composition and her impeccable ability to create an immersive mood even from small objects (paintings here range from one inch square to three feet on the longest side) nonetheless create a dynamic exhibition. With its down-the-rabbit-hole effect, it is very easy to lose track of time in this exhibition.

Ever the jazz aficionado, Abercrombie thought of herself as a “Bop” painter. This style is evident in her 1945 painting Untitled (Blue Screen, Black Cat, Print of Same). Sedate in her typical blue-grey palette, the painting exudes improvisational whimsy. As the title implies, the painting is of a room with a cat half behind a blue screen, and a picture on the wall of the same room – the blue screen, green floor, and little black cat, but sneakily without anything on its miniaturized wall. This rhythmic variation feels like a solo spot: adding distinctive flare to a still-recognizable standard.

Abercrombie once said that she didn’t think of herself as a good painter, but as a good artist. I believe that her artistry came from her storytelling ability. Though she did have a rather naїve painterly style, this forefronted the composite image rather than drawing attention to the intricacies of a delicate technique. Her paintings adopt the language of the music she loved: carefully constructed compositions like twisting and folding melodies; colors like the key signature that sets the tone; textures like a little vibrato at the end of a phrase. Individually the parts don’t make a lot of sense, but together the piece works.

Reverie (1947) exemplified this unique storytelling, and my experience with this painting characterized the show for me. While it was easy to pick out the Abercrombie stamp, here her motif of the bare tree, the more I looked, the more mysterious the piece became. This is odd, as one would think that the more time you spend with an object the more you can grasp it. But I was excited to find so many works in this show that instead seemed to change the more I stared at them. In Reverie, I noticed how the woman’s lounging pose mimicked the languor of the blackened tree branches, the way they both pointed to the strange brick structure in the distance. With no doors, no windows, what is it? I saw the water in the background, the patch of ground illuminated by a pink-tinged moon. I was riveted by a white shape on the ground: a handkerchief? A sheet of paper? The enigmatic scene is an intellectual challenge while remaining captivating in its surreal quality. I could imagine one of Abercrombie’s owls outside the scope of the frame hooting softly, or a line of melody from Miles Davis drifting in.

In an illuminating essay, Susan Weininger quotes Abercrombie on dreams and Surrealism: “Surrealism is meant for me because I am a pretty realistic person but I don’t like all I see. So I dream that it is changed… Only mystery and fantasy have been added. All the foolishness has been taken out.” Although the imagery and intentional anachronism in Abercrombie conjures a plethora of associations with such Surrealists as Max Ernst, René Magritte, or early work by Giorgio de Chirico, one is as likely to think of fellow women artists as these canonical males. Besides such obvious candidates as Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, Honoré Sharrer, another Surrealist, came to mind: Her motifs of birds and use of jewel tones invert Abercrombie’s somber style. As does the contemporary video work, BRIGIT (2016), by Turner Prize nominee Charlotte Prodger, in conjunction with Abercrombie’s radiantly blue depiction of a veiled St. Brigit from 1963.

Abercrombie’s witchery conjures such sisterhood, feeding this viewer’s appetite for narrative imagery from powerful ladies (full disclosure, I’m a student at Smith College.) I wonder, also,   how the context of #MeToo is going to impact the rediscovery of the Queen of Chicago. Indeed the show did feel particularly prescient, and I wondered what this powerful woman would think about the political timing of her renaissance.

The final piece of the show wrapped everything up nicely – by which I mean it left many lingering questions. The placement of The Door and the Rock (1971) has a symbolism worthy of  Abercrombie herself. This modestly sized painting – not even a foot square – of a cracked rock sitting in turquoise water, near a red-orange door resting on the water, or perhaps connected to a wall that blends in to the charcoal sky, accompanies the viewer upon exiting the gallery, leaving me to wonder: Does the door in the painting lead to the watery world pictured, or is it a portal to some other fantastic psychological dreamland?

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June 20 to September 2, 2018
235 Bowery, between Stanton and Rivington streets
New York City, newmuseum.org

Thomas Bayrle is a systems man. This five-decade survey at the New Museum, whose 115 works include paintings, moving sculptures, prints, textiles, wallpaper, video, and more, delves into systems of culture, politics, economics, infrastructure. “Playtime,” is the German artist’s first major museum show in New York. Although hardly a household name in this country, Bayrle is something of a national treasure in his native land.

A preoccupation with repetition and dissemination predated Bayrle’s becoming an artist. Born in Berlin in 1937, he had worked already in advertising and publishing, and was first exposed to mechanization as an apprentice at a weaving company. But don’t picture young Bayrle as a cog in anyone’s machine: He threw himself into the student protest movement of the 1960s. “Playtime” reflects the tension between these dynamic experiences.  

The two floors of this show present such different visitor experiences that it might color your ultimate takeaway. Starting on the fourth floor, I found myself in the company of Bayrle’s signature idioms, the “super forms” and “praying machines,” along with a selection of small portrait prints, and a hanging textile. The “super forms” are images that comprise a large object tessellated from myriad tiny versions of the same. For example, Flugzeug [Airplane] (1982-3), Bayrle’s biggest work in this series at approximately 26 by 44 feet, is a photo collage of more than one million airplanes. At first, these look like small exact replicas of the macro image, but upon closer inspection it is revealed that Bayrle has taken a Warholian approach. Despite the mass, each digit is unique, juxtaposing ideas of mass production with a distinct artist’s hand. These slight alterations mark the difference between a consumer ad and a more interesting art object. As Bayrle says in his catalog interview, “Even in billions, everything is singular and unique. Every cell, every atom, they are singular. I think that’s the richness of art, to define this singularity in the mass.”  

These mammoth collages are set to an odd audio accompaniment at the New Museum, emanating from a selection of four of Bayrle’s “praying machines” in the middle of the gallery. Comprised of car, plane, or motorcycle engines with exposed moving gears, belts, and pulleys, these objects each have their own built-in soundtrack. The robotic sculptures, individualized but inhuman, splice together human voices and mechanical growls. As most feature Catholic prayers, the high-ceilinged gallery takes on a cathedral-like atmosphere, inspiring reverence in visitors. The heavy use of Catholic iconography and symbolism in both this series and other works might incorrectly make one think that Bayrle is Catholic. He is actually Protestant, but from a young age was drawn to Catholicism by the structure and rhythm of its traditions and imagery. In the praying machines, Bayrle unsteadies that rhythm, making the soulless robots recite the rosary (another mechanical process), taking on a human effort to save themselves.

The repetition within the objects is echoed in the space – the neutral colors, the aural buzz from the machines and visual buzz from the repeated super forms. However, this is oddly broken by the inclusion of the only hanging textile: iPhone Pietà (2017). An instance, perhaps, of curatorial tongue-in-cheek anticipating visitors capturing their visit with a photo or video (which, during my visit, was a popular trend with the praying machines), ultimately I thought the piece felt out of place. It’s blue fabric and lack of the traditional super form patterning didn’t fit among the monotone paper and metal. True, it did connect thematically with its interesting contemporary meditation on technology as religion and the worship of the smartphone, but ultimately this break in the organized system of the gallery went too far.

The sparseness of this floor is all but thrown out the window in the near-clutter of the almost 100 objects downstairs. And yet, this part too – with its proliferation of neon-colored wallpapers, prints, videos, and paintings (either still or his “painted machines,” whose small parts move to reveal a new image) – cleverly reinforces Bayrle’s central themes. Going through the space, shocked in my transition from the upper floor, I thought: Where do I fit in amidst this overwhelming repetition?

With his investigation of individualism and early adoption of innovative, pre-digital technologies, Bayrle made his mark. This legacy was explored at a July 19th panel at the museum, “Social Fabric: Thomas Bayrle’s Expanded Network,” which featured artists Jordan Wolfson, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Lena Henke. Moderated by art historian Alex Kitnick, each artist addressed how their work deals with various of Bayrle’s themes, including digital technologies, systems, production, and – most prominently – the relationship between pop aesthetics and politics. This younger generation meditated on how subversion and any definition of “radical” isn’t just about materiality and process – as in Bayrle’s inventive copy techniques, or in contemporary digital video art – but has to include a sense of the artist as witness to change, of art as intervention. For Jordan Wolfson, the contemporary artist has to “make pop and politics subvert each other.”

Bayrle’s “painted machine” Mao (1966) is an early example of just this process of intervention. In this piece, small moving wooden pieces slowly morph the paramount leader’s portrait into the communist star. Bayrle would later witness communism first hand in visits to China in the late 1970s. (Fun fact: His Mao actually predates Warhol’s by about five years.)

Among the plethora of objects on this floor, there was one piece that I kept going back to, placed in an alcove at the back of the gallery, almost shrine-like in its forced intimacy. In Himmelfahrt [Ascension] (1988), crucified Jesus is made of fractured, repeated images of the autobahn, which also constitutes the work’s background. Looking at this piece I was reminded of the voices in the sculptures upstairs – the prayers on repeat in a gallery-cum-cathedral – reset for the road: I could imagine someone praying for traffic to ease up among a chorus of car horns. Standing in front of Jesus on his cross, I kept trying to pick apart the comedy and the tragedy of this contemporary purgatory. I tried to reconcile the image of a monumental religious icon slipping into the scene like a commercial break in the middle of regularly scheduled programming. The geometric energy of the repeated autobahn making up the vulnerable Christ forced me to stop and look and think about the disruption taking place. This experience captured the show as a whole: at once an overwhelming fun house questioning the structures by which we live, and a wake up call to shift my perspective within the routines of daily life. Despite all of the stimuli of the gallery, I felt asked to focus and notice the quirks throughout – the distortions of the tiny airplanes, the not-quite-aligned edges of the autobahn-Jesus shards, the slight shudder of the painted machines’ movements. I left wondering if looking closely at the kinks in the system would become a trend of its own.

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July 10 to August 17, 2018
510 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, pacegallery.com

Fred Wilson’s “Afro Kismet” is seeing its third iteration. Made for the 2017 Istanbul Biennial, it was also presented earlier this year by Pace in London. The installation follows the now familiar strategy Wilson pioneered in his breakthrough 1992 project, “Mining the Museum,” in which he reconfigured the Maryland Historical Society’s collection to focus on its exclusions and thereby illuminate the history of slavery in the United States. “Afro Kismet” expands on this idea, turning attention toward Venice and the Ottoman Empire to consider the African diaspora on a global scale.  

Wilson employs an extensive range of materials and strategies to explore this ambitious theme, exploiting his signature technique of blending the historical and the contemporary to its fullest extent. There are both appropriated historic tribal artifacts, such as a Yoruba Gelede mask, and objects that the artist has created, such as painted museum reproductions or works on raw canvas. Stand-outs – in terms of drama and scale – include a pair of large, opulent Ottoman-style black chandeliers hanging overhead. These not only add needed light to the space, but also, with their hefty chains, a sense of grounding. Black is deployed so forcefully throughout the show that it has the weight of a material in its own right. Historical prints – framed or encased with a sprinkling of cowrie shells – have been altered, as the black figures are spotlit through the near-erasure of white people under opaque vellum. Blackness is both textual reference and color choice in two tile walls emblazoned in Arabic letters with the phrases “Black is Beautiful” and “Mother Africa,” respectively. The African tribal pieces, in scattered vitrines,  are paired with quotes, in black vinyl, either from James Baldwin (who himself lived in Istanbul for a time) or from Othello, Shakespeare’s racially charged play partially set in Venice.

Wilson’s more delicate touches carry their own kind of unique power. Trade Winds (2017), a tabletop plastic globe, poetically and powerfully illustrates the worldwide movement of abducted Africans through criss-crossing black brushstrokes. The vaguest outlines of nations and continents remain visible through some of the thinner strokes, inviting viewers to step closer and see the path of the natural phenomenon of wind turned unnatural through the trading of flesh. Works from Wilson’s “drips” series frame the center of the gallery. These are arrangements on the wall of individual blown-glass elements that the artist has described as reminiscent of oil, ink, or tears. Regardless of what they bring to mind, these glossy black clusters add an elegant, crafted touch to the referential, appropriated objects in “Afro Kismet,” and attune the space to specific emotions. The cascading arrangement of frozen-in-time shapes imbues us with a heavy sense of loss, sadness, and disintegration.

Adjacent to “Afro Kismet” is a gallery of related recent glass works. In contrast to the abundance  of found and created objects next door, the more abstract glass works form a streamlined presentation of three “drips,” three “mirrors,” and Wilson’s most recent chandelier. This latter, A Moth of Peace (2018), hung at eye level in the center of the room, serves as a foil to the other chandeliers. It has a Venetian look, more organic than the Ottoman-inspired geometry of the other two, and is made of white and clear glass that extends upward, antigravitational in its vine-like progression. Wilson’s belief in “beauty in service to meaning and beauty as a seductive material that draws you in” feels particularly vindicated in this captivating work. Upon close inspection, one finds that it is not pure white, but that in fact there are a few small details of the design where a white piece has been replaced with a black one. These black bits prompt the eye to consider the rest of the room. The large, layered mirrors, each titled for moments in Othello, feature an intensely black high-gloss surface. Their dark mirroring allows visitors to see themselves in the work, particularly due to the light provided by the chandelier, which is itself always visible in the reflection as a looming white mass behind the viewer. The considerations of blackness that Wilson explores in “Afro Kismet” are thus distilled in this side of the gallery: whiteness is at the center of the room, and even when one turns away it is always looming close behind. The shadows of imperialism and colonialism remain, and, as “Afro Kismet” explores, they linger not only over the United States, but also above other historically slave-holding areas.

Wilson is not the only artist who uses black as both a subject and a material. His Where’s-Waldo-esque engravings bring to mind Kara Walker’s silhouette cutouts, while Rashid Johnson’s frequent use of black soap resonates with Wilson’s flags of African nations, reduced to black acrylic on raw canvas and hung across the highest point of the gallery walls, reducing people and nations to a few lines rendered in a single color. Kerry James Marshall’s mastery of black acrylic paint has cemented his signature style in his portraits, infusing them with individual personality and collective pride. Wilson’s pure black Murano glass, used in both the “drips” series and mirror works, achieves a similar effect. Such connections place this exhibition in a larger context of ongoing conversations of representation and identity politics.

The hopeful antidote to this legacy seems to come from the joy in Wilson’s pair of tiled walls (Mother Africa, 2017, and Black is Beautiful, 2017). After all, the installation is called “Afro Kismet,” which this viewer read as a redemptive view rather than accusatory history lesson. Like the “drips,” which tie together the two parts of the Pace show in their materiality, these walls can literally be seen in both parts of the gallery – monumentally in “Afro Kismet,” and framed within the doorway from the glass room. At nine feet tall and nineteen feet across, these gorgeously painted walls are more than just a backdrop for selfies (a popular phenomenon on this reviewer’s visit). Wilson adopts a rallying cry from the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States, and brings it face-to-face with a phrase symbolic of the history of displacement and reality of the vastness of the African diaspora. The traditional Turkish floral design of the tiles’ background offsets the almost-neon quality of the huge blue text. The deep purple, blue, and black tones of the walls, illuminated under the chandelier Eclipse (2017), diffuse a rich glow through the space.

Standing between these elegant walls, I felt embraced in the energy of the pattern and the light, causing peripheral thoughts to be subsumed by a profound sense of coming together. This might seem ironic, staged between two walls. Yet still, this space became an open channel for reconciliation, bridging the gap between “selfie” and “other.”

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Artists: Sarah Braman, Maurizio Cattelan, Olafur Eliasson, Luigi Ghirri, Barbara Kasten, Christian Marclay, Adrian Meraz, Abelardo Morell, Heather Rowe, Jean-Pierre Roy, Hiraki Sawa, Superstudio, Jeff Wall, and Louise & Jane Wilson

June 15 to July 31, 2018
88 Eldridge Street, between Hester and Grand streets
New York CIty, /601artspace.org

Many works in this summer group show at 601Artspace deal with distortion. Upon entering the gallery, circular mirrors in Christian Marclay’s Feedback (1994) reflect visitors in endless repetition. Mirrors appear again in Heather Rowe’s mixed media sculpture, The Entity (Red Mirror) (2017). With other artists, mirrors play a part in images construction. In a work titled Niagara o l’architettua riflessa (Niagara or the Reflected Architecture) (1970), the collective Superstudio depicts that natural landmark walled-in by a reflection of the sky, placing clouds parallel with the cascading water. Alberado Morrell inverts the city in Camera Obscura: Manhattan View Looking West in an Empty Room (1996). “You Stand on the Ground Floor,” curated by Jesse Penridge and artist Harriet Salmon,  variously confuse, intrigue, and invite us in through acts of re-imagining. Turning familiar objects and places on their head (sometimes literally), the artists in this group show  ask why t“impossible architectures” are indeed impossible. The viewer sometimes slips into a work by catching a glimpse of herself, or by self-projection into the setting of an image, blurring boundaries between artist and viewer, artwork and life beyond the gallery walls.

The curators artfully exploit the space to orchestrate conversations between works. A set of photographs in the main room is a good example of this. Luigi Ghirri’s Parigi (1978) is an intimately-sized image of a greenhouse taken through a window, a bleary view reminiscent of rubbing sleep from one’s eyes in the morning, as vestiges of dream slip into the pool of sheets. Across the gallery, Louise & Jane Wilson’s much larger Biville (2006) gives off an apocalyptic rather than nostalgic vibe: the low angle, black and white photograph features a large, industrial object partially sunk into sand in an abandoned landscape, resulting in an unsettling picture that is nonetheless slick enough for the set of Star Wars or the pages of Vogue.

The final room of the show features a projected video and a light installation. To the right, Olafur Eliasson’s toxic-feeling Yellow Double Hung Windows (1999) creates the illusion of such convincing depth that you wouldn’t be surprised if someone passed through the light-turned-building at any moment. On the left wall is a projection of Hiraki Sawa’s Dwelling (2002). In this charming nine-minute video, toy planes take off and land throughout a furnished but uninhabited house. It is child’s play come to life; a hypnotic, domestic fleet that exists in a fantasy somewhere between the actuality of nap time and a post-human future.

The gallery’s press release describes the artworks as “constructions born from the attempt to make the visions in our head external,” often “utopian in nature,” though with the potential to be adapted by viewers into narratives and meanings that verge on the dystopian. Has, in fact, the sky fallen in Superstudio’s image, rather than being some convergence of heaven and Earth? Have viewers gotten some version of themselves stuck in the universe of Marclay’s mirrors?

Through juxtaposition, Salmon and Penridge deftly suggest a darker narrative than the airy and playful works they’ve assembled might individually intend – especially with the help of that chemical glow in Eliasson’s installation. But to me the exhibition still manages to read as a funhouse of intersections where tender memories of the past and radical visions of the future can touch, ignoring the reality of the present. If this is the ground floor, as the show’s title implies, the elevator is going up.

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May 2 to June 30, 2018
533 West 19th Street, New York, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York CIty, www.davidzwirner.com

Very loud music greets visitors to David Zwirner’s 19th Street space. The white cube gallery has been transformed with soft, lilac carpeting and acoustic panels. These serve to dampen a multitude of sounds that fluctuate during Jordan Wolfson’s 8’24” video, Riverboat song (2017-2018). There’s also a sense of comfort in these gentle colors and textures – elegant  features that contrast with the disconcerting informality of what comes next: the exposed wires and weights on the back of sixteen screens aligned in a massive four-by-four grid. The doorway to the gallery frames this rear view, shielding the projection. This installation establishes power dynamics that soon become evident in the video itself: the space comforts, but the arrangement controls, forcing visitors up against the back wall (the furthest distance possible from the exit), caught between the screen and two large speakers. You feel small, particularly if, as this viewer chose to, you sit down, sandwiched between these mammoth screens and the wall.

The content of Riverboat song intensifies this juxtaposition of comfort and control. The piece is a montage, for the most part featuring a cast of animated characters. There are two “gay” dressed and acting horses, a naked crocodile, three grunge-styled rats, a Huckleberry Finn meets Alfred E. Neuman boy, and a witch. The boy is familiar from Wolfson’s earlier work,  Colored sculpture (2016). Riverboat song opens with a “down the rabbit hole” moment in which  the boy sinks into a giant teacup. This is followed by a series of vignettes: Finn being chopped up by the witch, Finn dancing seductively in Louboutins to Iggy Azalea’s “Work” (2014), the crocodile dancing, the rodents smoking on an airplane, all of the characters sharing pieces of a monologue narrated by Wolfson, Finn jumping in front of a mirror, more smoking rodents, and finally Finn splashing around in his own golden shower. The video closes with an amalgam of YouTube clips of robots, sensually dancing women, violent video games, and one man mercilessly beating another (this last was the inspiration for Wolfson’s notorious 2017 Whitney Biennial VR piece, Real violence).

Riverboat song is permeated by sexual aggression. Pinned up against the wall, I was both surprised and transfixed – perhaps most by the monologue section of the video, which lasted for about a quarter of the piece. This was the “scene” that most forcefully situated the piece within Wolfson’s recent body of work. The monologue – spread between Wolfson’s animated cast, though predominantly spoken by a pantsless Finn – is about a relationship in which one partner manipulates the other for personal gain. The male voice (Wolfson’s) talks about “you” doing things for him: cleaning, cooking, sexual favors, and staying with him despite his emotional manipulation because of a twisted sense of obligation that leaves “you” completely under his control. While the “you” in the monologue is never specified as female, and could just as easily be male, I read it as very heteronormative  – possibly as a woman myself, possibly due to the current Me Too movement bringing attention to female harassment and assault. The casual aggression in the tone of the monologue, both in Wolfson’s inflection and the blasé positions of various characters (penis in hand, in the bathtub, over brunch), matched the riveting and gut-wrenching spectatorship of Real violence, and the emotional instability of Colored sculpture (tellingly set to “When a Man Loves a Woman”). At first, the off-hand and personal tone of this monologue creates the illusion of lovingness, although this soon melts into distinctive domination, much like the discomfort that emerges out of the initial safe feeling of the installation.

Finn takes a distinct pleasure in himself throughout the video – clearly aroused by his talk of supremacy in the monologue, and later luxuriating in his own urine. He splashes around so much it becomes comical as well as uncomfortably voyeuristic, due the length of the clip. However, even in this moment I am so transfixed as to be unable to simply stand up and walk out, leaving the final, over-the-top clip unviewed. Perhaps this is due to innate human curiosity and the need to know what happens next, or maybe something about the anthropomorphism of the characters results in an uncanny feeling of being watched, and thus somehow known or possessed. For whatever reason, I am strangely comfortable on this carpet, back against the wall, and watch Riverboat song again and again.

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