June 19 to August 4, 2013
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue, between 66th and 67th Street
New York City, 212-616-3930

Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy: Reble Dabble Babble

June 20 to July 26, 2013
Hauser & Wirth
511 West 18th Street
New York City, 212-790-3900

Life Cast

May 10 to July 26, 2013
Hauser & Wirth
32 East 69th Street
New York City, 212-794-4970

Stepping into Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory, currently hosting Paul McCarthy’s multimedia installation WS, feels a little like falling headfirst into a terrarium. That is, if the terrarium has vaguely pornographic, quasi-violent, and definitely not-safe-for-the-kids videos projected on its sides.  WS, which stands for “White Snow,” is loosely based on the story of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Actually, it might be more accurate to say that WS takes liberties with that story. McCarthy’s version, for example, expands the cast to include nine dwarves (some of whom appear to top six feet), three Prince Charmings (compulsive masturbators, one and all, if the video evidence is to be believed), and three Snow Whites. And then there is Walt Paul, a paternal(istic) figure, obviously evoking Walt Disney and subtly suggesting Hitler (it’s the mustache), who either presides over or is subject to the mayhem unleashed during what appears to be a fairly traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

Oh, and then there is you. Whatever else the show is about, one of its most accessible pleasures is the chance to watch other visitors observing the spectacle. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, people ringed the cavernous space, positioned around a platform holding up the half-magical, half-infernal forest that is simultaneously the show’s physical centerpiece and the set used for filming much of the screened footage. These spectators’ attention was split between the screens on either side of the forest and the faces of the other spectators. (Were cameras permitted inside, WS would likely produce some compelling YouTube reaction videos.)

A less stationary delight of the show is the chance to look around its many nooks and crannies. That forest, with its nuclear-neon foliage and flora, its scatological trees, and the three-quarters scale house concealed in its middle—a replica of McCarthy’s childhood home—demands exploration. Within the house, you will find a Christmas tree, birthday streamers, bottles of liquor in various stages of consumption, a spent container of Hershey’s chocolate syrup, and a nearly-exhausted Heinz ketchup squeeze-bottle. (The last two of these have been frequently deployed as material in McCarthy’s work.) There are also various recognizable Disney figurines scattered around the house—a Snow White with a dwarf, a Bambi, and a Prince Charming riding his horse.

The feel-good Americana of all that Disney detritus is juxtaposed with two disconcertingly accurate bodies: The artist himself and White Snow, stripped naked, apparently dead, and covered in what at first glance seems to be blood and excrement, but is actually the aforementioned ketchup and chocolate. (A series of life casts, four of Elyse Poppers, the actress playing the main White Snow in WS, and one of the artist, are currently on view at Hauser & Wirth’s uptown space.) What it all means is well nigh impossible to say. And, at seven hours, it would be difficult to absorb WS in a single seating. It is generally agreed that McCarthy confronts the falsely feel-good pieties of American myths, that he takes on viscerally recognizable symbols and upends them by splattering them with a variety of (bodily) fluids. WS, his largest installation and most ambitious project to date, unfolds with the madcap logic of dreams, and every little bit of content is overdetermined. This is a convulsive form of Surrealism, which, of course, has a certain kind of beauty. That’s the thing about McCarthy. No matter how gross his work—and this is an artist who has never shied away from the grotesque—no matter how disconcerting, how disorienting, there is nonetheless something appealing about his aesthetic, with its visual pungency and sense of humor.

McCarthy’s fairy-tale world is tethered to reality by its references to history: The artist’s childhood, with the inclusion of the house in which he was raised; art history, particularly the rise of performance art, of which McCarthy has been both a student and a teacher; American history and its embrace of kitsch and myth. Striking an odd but effective balance between authentic and contrived, WS has more in common with a reality show than lived reality. Which is to say, if “Snow White” is the partial basis of so many looking-for-love shows, then WS is the looking-for-love show amped up to absurdity.

WS confines its most pornographic bits to the periphery, with the most sexually explicit material playing in rooms off to the sides of Drill Hall. (One of these rooms is also the site of some eerily beautiful footage, tracking White Snow and Walt Paul as they wander, Adam-and-Eve-like, through their polluted Eden.) But it is the most prominent feature of McCarthy’s Rebel Dabble Babble, a collaboration with his son Damon (who also co-directed, co-produced, and cast WS) on view at Hauser & Wirth’s mammoth Chelsea gallery. The exhibit consists of a full-scale two-story house, which visitors may enter, and a facsimile of the living-room staircase from the home of Jim Stark, aka the “Rebel Without a Cause,” from the eponymous 1955 film.  Around these are several video projections, most of which are quite pornographic. Disorienting and unnerving, the show is a reimagining of the psychosexual drama that was said to unfold between the film’s director Nicholas Ray and his young stars, James Dean and Natalie Wood. Like WS, Rebel Dabble Babble relies on our recognition of the building blocks of familiar American narratives. Both exhibitions undo the familiarity of those narratives, folding them over and over on themselves, until they become hallucinatory, at once a joke and something deadly serious, demanding that we tell the story ourselves.

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Tracey Emin: Roman Standard
Installation in Petrosino Square, New York City
May 10 to September 8, 2013

I’ve often thought that what Anne Sexton is to poetry, Tracey Emin is to art: both lance their blisters publicly with the sincere belief that there is no other way. This is a compliment. It is easy to assume that the sort of reckless confession Sexton and Emin are prone to is somehow cheap. Perhaps this is because it makes the audience not simply readers or viewers but judge, jury, and executioner. At least Sexton had metaphor to distract from her abortions and affairs and suicide attempts. Emin’s admissions are literal, naked, and often involve images of the artist literally naked. But, to paraphrase Dolly Parton, it takes a lot of care to look this careless.

In her fifth solo exhibition in New York, at Lehmann Maupin, spanning both the gallery’s Chelsea and Lower East Side spaces, Emin continues to work her calling-card themes. The show is entitled I Followed You To The Sun, after one of the artist’s neon installations, which proclaims as much in a yellow that stops just short of sunny. (Trust Emin to one-up those lovers who would not go farther than the moon.) Featuring over one hundred works, the exhibition reflects Emin’s signature medley of media; besides neon, there are drawings, embroideries, sculptures, and a film titled Love Never Wanted Me, which consists of images of a frolicking fox accompanied by Emin’s plaintive narration, a lament for a lover gone. The installation of the works in relation to each other becomes an important element in making sense of Emin’s narrative. For instance, her film is projected perpendicularly to the neon piece, a juxtaposition that emphasizes how much the artist will do for love and how little it has done for her.

The Chrystie Street gallery is devoted to a series of works on paper (gouaches and monoprints) based on photos Emin took of herself sitting naked on a chair, her legs spread, her face obscured. The blunt titles—“Lonely Chair drawing V,” “She kept crying,” “a Feeling of Past”—contribute to the voyeuristic, confessional mood. In the prints, handwritten text around the image makes the work even more intimate. Sample lines include, “That’s how you make me Feel” and “I fucked up I failed—it was my disaster—my choice—I just didn’t expect to feel so bad.” And here’s literal for you: the first attempt at “failed” is misspelled and crossed out.

If the images and allusions to personal melodrama sound familiar, that’s because they are. Emin has been working with these motifs since the beginning of her career. Her sexual brazenness, self-destructive need to be loved, and constant disappointment in matters of the heart are her great subject. From this place of high-pitch emotion she has produced work that is stunning in its simplicity and its conceit. This is an artist, after all, who made her bed into the artwork My Bed (1998) and received a Turner Prize nomination.

The key to Emin’s work is how surprising it can be even when it repeats itself. It asks of us nothing and everything. Because, the thing is, Emin will follow you to the sun, but you have to be willing to go to the sun first. In her guilelessness, she exposes our guile, our need to look and look and look. She keeps expanding her forms, changing her paces ever so slightly, which in turn keeps her theme of self-involvement compelling to both the new viewer and the veteran. For this exhibition she has created neat little bronze block sculptures painted all-over white with a small animal or bird perched atop. One ostensibly interesting thing about these works is that they were cast at the Long Island foundry where Louise Bourgeois used to make her own sculptures. Emin and Bourgeois famously collaborated on a series of drawings shortly before the older artist’s death in 2010, and the origin story for these statuaries solidifies the connection between the two women.

But to really understand the pull of Emin’s work, you have to visit Petrosino Square on the border of SoHo and Little Italy, where she has installed Roman Standard, a 13-foot pole with a single bronze bird balanced on top. (The artwork will remain in the park through September 8, 2013.) That bird, its wings at rest, its little head held proudly, speaks to the fundamental hope of Emin’s otherwise melancholic vision. What she has been confessing all along is an innocence, an optimism that cannot be undone no matter how many times she is hurt, by herself and by others: she would go to the sun, and it would burn, but it would also be beautiful.

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Editorial Note: Today (Monday, May 13) is the last day of Frieze, and yesterday tickets and transportation sold out: the fair recommends online booking to avoid disappointment.
Some images with this article are awaiting their correct permission and caption details

It’s somehow fitting that this year’s installment of the Frieze Art Fair takes place during the same weekend as the opening of Baz Luhrmann’s 3D adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Luhrmann’s movie has been criticized for its emphasis on excess, its literally in-your-face materialism. But, in the final analysis, under those unnecessary trappings, the story is really pretty damn good.

Frieze, in its second year at Randall’s Island, also tells a great story, even if you sometimes have to look beneath the bloat (and pay a $42 entrance fee) in order to discover it. With over 180 galleries (about half of them from Europe) spread over territory the size of three football fields, it is easy to come down with a case of art fatigue. But the nice thing about Frieze is that it balances excess with the sort of refinement that allows the fairgoer to forget, at just the right moments, that the whole thing is founded on crass commercialism.

For starters, there is the whole middle section of the fair, which features the Frame and Focus selections, the Frieze designation for participating galleries founded less than six years ago (Frame) or in or after 2002 (Focus), each showcasing a single artist whose work has not previously been seen in an art fair context (Frame) or a curated project specifically proposed for the fair. These are the fair’s cool kids, its bathroom smokers: they strike just the right mix of not caring at all and caring a lot, of posturing and earnestness. There is, in many of the Frame booths, a kind of compelling, contagious energy, as if the people involved have not yet had the chance to become jaded, to lose faith, and the results are a little rough around the edges in a really nice way. These aren’t underdogs exactly—one of the Frame artists, Stewart Uoo, showing at New York’s 47 Canal, has a small show at the Whitney, which opened the same day as Frieze, and features his former art school classmate, Jana Euler, who happens to be part of the Focus display at dépendence—but they also have not yet grown complacently satiated by success.

One of the Frame standouts is Julia Rommel at the consistently excellent New York gallery, Bureau. Rommel’s understated monochromes have a stunning simplicity, and they serve in the manner of a sorbet palate cleanser during a multi-course meal: a necessary corrective, a chance to remember why you are there in the first place.

Rommel’s work speaks to a truism oft forgotten in this era of blockbuster museum shows and auction extravaganzas: less is usually a whole lot more. In fact, over and over again, it is the most restrained exhibitors that strike the sharpest at Frieze. One excellent example of this is Cheim & Read’s booth, which includes Pat Steir’s beautiful Birthday Painting. For whatever reason—experience? national disposition? royal decree?—London galleries are especially apt at this. At Maureen Paley, Paul P’s small-scale portraits, suggesting a terrifically depressed Elizabeth Peyton, are wonderful, as is Maaike Schoorel’s painting, Vanitas. And there is something playfully innocent about Birgit Jürgenssen’s Polaroids at Alison Jacques Gallery. An  exception to good London taste is White Cube, highlighting Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets and Tracey Emin’s neons in a rehash of last year’s offerings.

Still, there is at least one point when the axiom invoked above fails to hold up or simply disintegrates in the face of insistent spectacle. At the fair’s North entrance stands Paul McCarthy’s Balloon Dog, courtesy of Hauser and Wirth. Giant and vibrantly red, it suggests an unabashed delight at taking the whole shebang in stride. On Friday afternoon, the sun lighting up the Frieze tent, Balloon Dog practically signaled the coming of spring and renewal.

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