Maccarone
September 7 to October 19, 2013
630 Greenwich Street
New York City, 212-431-4977

Carol Bove does not consider her art in terms of its site-specificity, which might come as a surprise considering her recent projects for institutions such as the Highline and the Museum of Modern Art.  Hers is a more holistic approach to site specificity as a call-and-response between a sculpture, its materials, and the surrounding environment. In an interview with Art in America in May 2012, Bove explains: “My sculptures can and must be taken apart and then put back together. Disaggregation is important. Therefore, each element needs to maintain its individual identity, its autonomy.” This is why I find it particularly worrisome that the press releases and texts in situ introducing two of her ongoing sculpture installations in New York City, Caterpillar at the Highline Park (through May 2014) and Equinox at MoMA (through January 2014), recommend allegorical interpretations of the art based solely on their material or textual components.

It is Bove’s solo show at Maccarone, her second with the gallery, titled RA, or Why is an orange like a bell? that most thoroughly escapes this trap of over interpretation. The work in all three exhibitions share materials: concrete, brass, cast steel, and powder-finished steel; unlike the outdoor installation on the Highline and the show at MoMA, the gallery pieces are not physically bolted down and hence not corralled by a specific space and its host of references. RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?  confounds traditional notions of artistic authorship and object category. Only six of the twelve works listed are attributed to Bove herself, who regularly folds the works of others into her own shows in what she calls “forced collaborations.” Among Bove’s six works, a large percentage of the materials were industrially fabricated or found, and their identity as “artworks” is complicated by this sense of previous history. Just past the gallery’s entrance is one of Bove’s simplest and most eloquent works—an untitled sculpture in the round, made in 2013, in which a slab of petrified wood is fastened to one edge of a steel beam towering almost a dozen feet tall. Here, the support structure is an essential armature, and the fossilized organism an animated protagonist in comparison.

One of her most virtuosic displays is Peel’s foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep (2013). The work consists of delicate brass open cubes and rectangles screwed into intricate formations and woven into the openings of a concrete pillar. Even though not all the shapes implemented are regular cubes, the edges of both materials contribute to the contours of a regular grid when viewed straight on. As one walks around the piece, however, the tidy geometry ebbs into formal chaos before straightening itself again. The same could be said of her two white powder coated steel sculptures, Solar Feminine and Hieroglyph (both 2013), whose forms yawn and contract when observed in rotation, and I-Beam Sculpture (2013), which is set low to the ground and becomes nearly indistinct from it at certain angles.  In all these works, Bove’s aforementioned notion of disaggregation is not merely a physical phenomenon, but an optical one.

The remaining works in the presentation were made by Lionel and Joanne Ziprin, Harry Smith, Richard Berger, and other unnamed members of their Lower East Side bohemian circle from the 1950s and ‘60s. Their contributions include a glass vitrine of anonymous doodles, scraps, and more complete works on paper (ca. 1951-1955). These, the list of works informs us, are not meant to be scrutinized for their content, but to be “illustrative of the creative atmosphere of the Ziprin circle”—much in the way the books in Bove’s iconic George Nelson shelf sculptures operate as cultural indicators rather than texts.  The centerpiece of the show, if such a work exists, is Harry Smith’s Design for Qor Corporation (ca. 1960), a diminutively sized painting on cardboard sporting a brash red and green grid-like pattern with Celtic affinity. It is suspended high between two large panes of glass—a two-dimensional vitrine—such that one can’t look at the Smith painting without seeing other works in periphery. In a brilliant multi-dimensional play, this work is at once a motif, a shadow, and a physical intervention, imprinted upon the show without leaving an actual trace.

The artist does not make explicit why she chose the Ziprin circle’s works to feature alongside her own. The choice was certainly not incidental or merely aesthetic; in conjunction with her Maccarone show, Bove co-curated with Philip Smith a reading-room of Ziprin and Harry Smith ephemera a few blocks away at 98 Morton Street. In this appendix-like exhibition are works from the duo’s short-lived design company Qor Collective and other eccentric commercial projects like Inkweed Studios. When Lionel Ziprin passed away in 2009, he left behind an epic volume of poetry, which included the autobiographical lines: “I am not an artist. I am not an / outsider. I am a citizen of the / republic and I have remained / anonymous all the time by choice.” Nine years ago, Bove offered a companion statement in an interview with the curator Beatrix Ruf: “It has to be apparent that the piece was put together for this particular occasion, in this particular space, which exists in a particular cultural context at a particular moment in time. […] The objects are assembled from non-art objects and my fantasy is that they could return to a state of non-art.”

The show probably leaves room for an essay to be written about the link between Ziprin and co.’s Kabbalistic undertakings and the spiritual inflections in Bove’s titles, but I believe that it is unwise to give too much emphasis to cross-interpretation. Rather than looking at either body of work as an index, allegory, and appendage to the other, we should regard RA as a staged meeting of kindred objects that we are invited to observe before everything disbands again.

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On the back cover of Phaidon’s new Chris Johanson monograph is a close-up of I AM CLEAR NOW (2004), a vignette featuring two reclining figures on a green expanse of urban lawn, painted with acrylic and latex painting on paper. One says to the other, “I AM REALLY GLAD THAT WE TOOK THE TIME TO COME AND BE TOGETHER HERE. I HOPE THAT YOU KNOW YOU ARE REALLY IMPORTANT TO ME. OH, I ALSO WANTED TO GIVE YOU THIS. OH BY THE WAY I AM ON THESE NEW MEDS AND I FEEL REALLY GOOD NOW. I HAVE COMPLETELY STOPPED OBSESSING ABOUT THE HOLE. I AM CLEAR NOW.” This little ramble, which spills out past its thin corral of a speech bubble, is the perfect window into Johanson’s career to date.

Chris Johanson first rose to prominence in the 1990s in the San Francisco Bay Area music scene, skateboarder circles, and underground art communities. His early visual output was influenced by the stimulation of living in San Francisco; leftover paint from jobs as a house painter and the fruits of dumpster diving provided his first art materials. Now in his 40s, Johanson has distinguished himself among contemporary artists, and accordingly has received increasing institutional attention, including recent participation in shows at P.S. 1 and a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2009, and two San Francisco Museum of Modern Art survey exhibitions in 2010 and 2011.  His particular visual vocabulary is a mixture of text, simplified representational forms, geometric abstraction, and a Technicolor palette. Johanson describes his early works as fueled by dark moods, but declares in an interview found in these pages that recently, “I’m seriously into peaceful art. That’s it. I’m only doing that from now on.”

In keeping with the formula for Phaidon’s Contemporary Artists series, Chris Johanson presents the artist to us with a recent interview, a career overview, an essay on a specific subject in the artist’s oeuvre, and finally texts selected or written by the artist. This format is worthy of praise for keeping the texts closely tied to the artist’s own words and choices, but there is room for such a recipe to go awry. The opening interview with Hammer Museum curator Corrina Peipon, for example, served as a poor introduction; it was edited in a way that veraciously preserved Johanson’s trailing remarks and circumlocutions, but without necessarily bolstering a deep understanding of his practice. Critic Bob Nickas’s survey essay, on the other hand, was excellent in its breadth and provides a solid thematic foundation for the other writing in the volume. Nickas’s important feat was to wrest Johanson from the clutches of the Pop Art label and the bipartisanship of figuration and abstraction, finding instead that the artist’s “inspiration comes from […] vernacular ramblings and the pulse of his emotional life.”  I only wish that Nickas could have addressed in greater length Johanson’s curatorial and critical ties with Outsider Art—due in equal parts to his self-education and his guileless aesthetic—a label the artist uncomfortably side steps, but continues to play a role in his reception.

Noticeably missing in Chris Johanson, and other Contemporary Artists volumes, is an introduction by the editors beyond the dust jacket copy. Though Phaidon succeeds in illustrating Johanson’s achievements and significance, it has not explained the publication’s timing—why is a critical perspective crucial at this point in Johanson’s career? A peaceable answer might be found in one of the excerpts selected by Johanson, from Jonathan Raymond’s 2004 novel The Half-Life: “He felt resigned to the fact that the pattern of his days had already gone full circle, and that everything ahead of him was likely just a variation on what had come before. […] At times like this he actually believed he had achieved some wisdom in this knowledge and that some strength was to be found in his abiding passivity.”

Chris Johanson (Phaidon Press, 2013)  160 pages, 200 color illustrations, ISBN-13: 9780714856940. $59.95

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May 10 to June 22, 2013
526 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York City, (212) 463-7777

Greene Naftali’s presentation at the Frieze Art Fair in May featured a new sculpture by Gedi Sibony that exhibits all the quint  essential traits of the artist’s work. Humorously and enigmatically titled, The Sleeve Lifter (2013) is a free- standing wood plank roughly the size of a narrow door, pinned to a curl of brown paper. In this simple construction, Sibony makes the plank and the paper seem serendipitously coupled, their respective curvature and rigidity becoming illuminated in the presence of the other. In works such as this Sibony shows himself to be a master formalist in three dimensions, one that regards chaos as coincidence. In speaking about his working process in a 2005 interview, he explained how he “liked having an object that was incomplete or broken, because it relieved me of having to succeed with an object. So, I could play, look at relationships, and orchestrate something more broadly, concentrated in the spaces between objects.”

Sibony has established a distinctive oeuvre of lyrical and plaintive objects assembled from typically utilitarian or industrial materials. Recurring members of this unassuming cast include insulation board, carpeting, garbage bags, sticks, MDF, packing tape, and plywood. In the hands of Sibony, raw materials become earnest protagonists not quite forceful enough to be heroic, but with a specific gravity and elegance. For these reasons, critics and curators have discussed his work in relation to Minimalism, Arte Povera, and process art. In his current solo exhibition at Greene Naftali, however, Sibony moves into an unfamiliar visual arena. The 21 new works feature representational imagery and often a painterly sensibility not present in his previous iconic bodies of work.  My efforts to retrace his mental steps only became fruitful once I remembered that Sibony was an abstract painter before he was a sculptor, and that as an undergraduate, studied semiotics with a particular fondness for Ludwig Wittgenstein. Armed with this knowledge, the cryptic epithet atop the exhibition’s press release, an excerpt from a Beatrix Potter nursery rhyme about a mole, becomes a keyhole through which to see these new works: “He digs and he delves. You can see for yourselves. The mounds dug by Diggory Delvet.” In this exhibition, digging is Sibony’s act of revealing semiotic and linguistic structures, and their foils.

Through this lens, the centerpiece of the exhibition starts to cohere. Ceaseless Episodes of Blossom (2013) is a monumental triptych suspended on the backsides of dark, dully gray carpet, on which Sibony painted a non-sequential pattern of five white icons signifying the seasons.  This work embodies both order (in the uniform semiotic system, performed in a grid) and anarchy (in the arbitrary correlation between five signifiers and four signified concepts, in unpredictable repetition) with impressive succinctness and simplicity. The same could be said of a slightly earlier work All Ants Live in the Wild (2011), a swath of carpet containing the alphabet scrawled out of order, with the first 13 letters in white paint and the last 13 in red marker.  Both Ceaseless Episodes and All Ants corrupt autonomous systems, and in doing so, reveal their construction while opening them to alternative applications.

Much of the exhibition thereafter unfolds in word play. In spite of the gravity of his preoccupations, Sibony has always had a wry sense of humor that is most evident in his peculiar title choices.  I chuckled at First There Was This (2013), a freestanding light box with an abstract cutout that, during my two visits, was not illuminated, and is thus poised forever in that biblical moment just before light was cleaved from darkness. Sibony makes a cheeky pun in Migratorius (2013), a framed Audobon-style print of two birds that have been uprooted from elsewhere and settled now in Sibony’s visual landscape. By drawing a line between appropriation and migration, Sibony not only pokes fun at his own action, but also delivers a light jab at the conceptual practice of re-appropriation.

The works making the most powerful implications about the limits of language in my opinion were, ironically but not surprisingly, those in which Sibony performed the simplest intervention. In a small room near the gallery entrance hangs a suite of nine framed works on paper (all 2013), which we assume were once prints or drawings. We cannot be sure because Sibony has reversed the paper, revealing sun-bleached outlines, glue-stains, tape scabs, cardboard and mats. These hidden marks made visible are beautiful in a shy and haphazard way. As we come to understand more sides of the object, as it were, we simultaneously experience a slippage in distinctions of front and back, finished and unfinished—By what name do we call the side we are looking at, and can these works still be classified as “drawings” or “prints”?

That I experienced difficulty writing about and ascribing language to Sibony’s work proves to me the success of his undertaking (and of taking us underneath, that Diggory Delvet!). Even as he robs us of our immediate descriptive powers, Gedi Sibony offers us glimpses of the sinews of our vocabularies, and proffers poetic examples of its potential.

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Above and Below: Gordon Matta-Clark at David Zwirner

April 2 to May 4, 2013
519 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York City, (212) 727-2070

The introduction to Gordon Matta-Clark’s 2007 Whitney retrospective catalog muses that “in many ways, an exhibition of [Matta-Clark’s] art is an oxymoron.” That’s not an inaccurate or infrequent assumption. An artist best known for his architectural modifications (called “cuts”) on now demolished structures, Matta-Clark exists to his contemporary audiences primarily through photographic documentation of his work. His enigmatic career also loses some of its tangibility because of its tragic brevity; Matta-Clark was active for less than a decade before he died from cancer at the age of 35. Still, the idea that Matta-Clark’s oeuvre is at odds with a traditional art exhibition—an idea that the Whitney ultimately flouted—overemphasizes the transitory quality of his work, at the expense of appreciating his cross-medium interest and foresight. Matta-Clark made sure to find multiple ways to present each of his projects, in part to give his ideas longevity through material. Lest we forget, he was the author of the vast body of photographs, films, drawings, artist books, and sculptural objects that serve as the base of his scholarship and these exhibitions.

David Zwirner’s current exhibition of Matta-Clark’s work, its fifth since taking on representation of the artist’s estate in 1998, is devoted to some of the understated parts of his career and goals. It presents work from the last four years of Matta-Clark’s life with a particular emphasis on his films and film-based photographic collages. The selection of work, according to curator Jessamyn Fiore, has been chosen to demonstrate the artist’s frequently overlooked idealism, and anticipate what would have been the new pursuits in his career. “At that point, he wanted to be known as more than the guy who cuts buildings in half,” Fiore said. “He was ready for the next thing.”

Above and Below follows Matta-Clark’s interest in the structural layering of cities, and architectural possibilities both above and below ground. The show’s title refers to the lateral theme that unites this particular selection of works, and the exhibition’s diminutive king pin: an eponymous photo diptych from 1977 featuring a topical and subterranean view of a city street. This work, coincidentally, doubles as a map for the exhibition’s layout. The first room is devoted to his works on and above street level, anchored by the iconic Conical Intersect (1975) and Office Baroque (1977)—in which Matta-Clark cut a series of tapering circles to create a monocular shape across two uninhabited seventeenth-century buildings near the Centres Georges Pompidou, and sawed concentric tear-shaped holes through five floors of an office building in Antwerp—are present in the form of photo collages made from disjointed and tunneling sequences of film frames. The next room features two black and white 16mm film projections, Substrait (Underground Dalies) (1976) and Sous-Sols de Paris (Paris Underground) (1977), which document the artist’s exploration of manmade underground tunnels. His expeditions took place in labyrinths that ranged broadly in use and historic origin, from the catacombs beneath Paris to the underbelly of Grand Central Station in New York. These works were markedly different from those in the preceding room, from earlier years, because they were envisioned as film projects in themselves, not as documents of an action or performance. The films and a number of drawings and sketches that offer context and alternate views of Matta-Clark’s formal interests, finely demonstrate a medium-specific dexterity and a mastery of both space and two-dimensional representation.

The exhibition then proceeds like a dialectical argument to rise up into the air with two lesser-known Matta-Clark works: An installation for Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany, called Jacob’s Ladder (1977), a beautifully delicate aerial structure suspended fifteen feet off the ground, rendered all the more poignant when we learn that visitors were too afraid to use it, and a series of sketches for the never-realized Sky Hook (study for a balloon building) (1978), a network of houses that would float above an urban environment, buoyed by a city’s radiating heat. These two projects, envisioned in the final two years of Matta-Clark’s life, perhaps best articulate the show’s thesis by suggesting the artist’s positivist vision of urbanism and architecture. It underscores a sometimes neglected but hopeful notion, that Matta-Clark left Cornell University not having forsaken architecture as a practice, but in search of new approaches to constructing spaces for society.

Additional Programs:

Guided tour with curator Jessamyn Fiore. David Zwirner (519 West 19th Street, New York) on Saturday April 20, 11:30 AM. RSVP required, contact Jill Smith (jill@davidzwirner.com or 212-727-2070 x 100).

World premier screening of Sous-sols de Paris (1977) and Q&A with curator Jessamyn Fiore, and filmmakers Jane Crawford and Robert Fiore. Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue, New York) on Sunday, April 21, 7:30 PM.

A tribute to FOOD, the legendary SoHo restaurant opened in 1971 by Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden in collaboration with other artists. Frieze Projects at Frieze New York (Randall’s Island, New York), Friday May 10 to Monday May 13.

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