January 16 to February 22, 2014

303 Gallery
507 West 24th Street
New York, (212) 255-1121

In Eileen Myles’s autobiographical essay, “Everyday Barf,” the poet writes, “I don’t mind today, but the everyday makes me barf.” For contemporary New York feminist artists like Eileen Myles and Sue Williams, daily life after 9/11 can seem particularly revolting, and, on a bad day, impossible to stomach. Nevertheless, Williams’s new paintings (all made in 2013), now on view at 303 Gallery, felicitously work alongside the hate that breeds disgust and contempt. In her own satirical style, Williams speaks back to the revulsion prompted by the incendiary political climate that followed September 11. The explicit political critique embedded in the work’s content and titles revisits some of the material mined in her 2010 show, curated by Nate Lowman, Al-Quaeda is the CIA, and her contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an all-too convincing pornographic puddle of vomit titled The Sweet and Pungent Smell of Success. In the abstract paintings of WTC, WWIII, Couch Size, the push-purge impulse is no less present, as Williams addresses fears of flying debris, dizzying nausea, and the urgent, unexpected libidinal sparks that occupy post-9/11 life.

The most dazzling painting of the six large color-saturated canvasses, Philip Zelikow, Historian (titled after the executive director of the 9/11 commission) expands upon Williams’s career long preoccupation with violence, astonishment, and flight. The painting, a cascading flood of variegating intensities, moves from varying shades of sea-foam, spring, and blue-greens; as these colors gush from some invisible sphincter across the canvas, they precipitate what one critic referred to as “Pepto-Bismal pinks.” The painting also calls to mind Mary Heilmann’s Pink Trance (2010). Unlike Williams’s Philip Zelikow, Heilmann’s Pink Trance  embraces the sleepy slow-motion drag of a drug like Dramamine whereas Williams’s pink tones carry an inflammatory charge designed to arouse and excite; in Philip Zelikow, these erratic pinks verge on magenta, and seem especially explosive as they jump alongside contrasting shades of electric teal and popping peony yellow.

Philip Zelikow revels in the fact that fascination can be an anchor, a way of connecting to political history, or the alienating televisual spectacle of those two flaming icons, the Twin Towers. These paintings animate through abstraction the aura of wartime tumult as they dramatize the violent collisions between the personal and the political. How does anyone internalize a historical event on the global scale of 9/11? Williams’s paintings inhabit this zone of lingering stupefaction as she revisits the World Trade Center and the disorienting swarms of historical precarity which surround it. Departing from her previous and more condensed, comic abstractions, her new paintings have dropped the sharp contours that separate shape from action, intent from effect. Trauma renders rage and distress by refusing to distinguish between them. In Retire in Fla., smoke from a firework, or an explosion dissolves the edges of emotions. There’s a recognizable heart at the matter of such queer emanations, but the roiling matter that moves out of the frame is fugitive, and evades capture. Recalling September 11 in the presence of these works, one may immediately remember that the event and its aftermath was a mess, to put it lightly. To consider the catastrophe in hindsight as WWIII, as the title of the show suggests, is not a hyperbole, for the circumstances and the stakes were real, but, at the time, abstract. Who was it even happening to? New Yorkers, or the United States? Ten plus years later, Williams’s new works reflect the anticipation of impending war while transposing it into the present moment, without sentimentality or patriotism.

Amid the melting streams of candy-colored arcs, there lies an intuitive and hard-won set of tensions exhibited in every canvas, most quizzically reflected in Otis. The bending buildings in the background scattered among dildonic shapes in the foreground coalesce in a frenzied landscape where dimensions, as in Wackyland, give way to jet streams of frothy colors whose chafing in turn produces even stranger monuments. Otis, presumably the teal moose in the middle, opens his eyes wide, but not necessarily as if he were taking it all in; his gaze suggests the quagmire of just being, especially when you’ve lost track of your emergency exits, and you can’t find the bathroom.

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Michelle Kuo, Mark Stevens, and David Levi-Strauss joined David Cohen to review Mike Nelson at 303 Gallery, Joan Jonas at Yvon Lambert, Anya Kieler at Rachel Uffner Gallery, and Robert Ryman at PaceWildenstein.

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Ken Johnson, Elizabeth Schambelan, and Joan Waltemath joined David Cohen to review Peter Doig at Michael Werner Gallery and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, R H Quaytman at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Hiroshi Sugimoto at Gagosian Gallery, and Mary Heilmann at 303 Gallery.

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MERLIN JAMES: Paintings of Buildings
Sikkema Jenkins & Co until January 12
530 West 22nd, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212-929-2262

Merlin James and Thomas Demand – whose current solo shows face each other on West 22nd Street – might seem as different as two contemporary artists can be: One a poetic charmer, the other an austere, highly cerebral photo-conceptualist.

But a coincidence of means begs a comparison between shows of overtly contrastive mood and artworld temper.  For both artists make their final images  — small-scale easel paintings in acrylic in the case of Mr. James, a photographic installation in the case of Mr. Demand – from models of their own making.  And both use buildings, though neither is concerned with architecture per se. The way models play a role in the precarious interchange of perceived reality and encouraged artifice constitute a specifically contemporary attitude towards subject matter.

Mr. Demand’s installation is titled “Yellowcake” after the colloquial term for the enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons. His subject is the “Nigergate” affair that undermined a casus belli for the invasion of Iraq, when the authenticity of paperwork that was considered proof of Sadaam Hussein’s attempts to procure the minerals from Niger was brought into question and related to a robbery of stationery and seals from the embassy of Niger in Rome.

Mr. Demand’s modus operandi entails recreating physical places with paper models with considerable exactitude – though not disguising that they are indeed models. He then photographs in large format images with willfully bland, neutral, lighting. His procedure, in a way, is a pun on “documentary” as the models are made of paper, from which documents are often made. In this case, the politics of the situation adds a further spin to the artist’s habitual concern with the exchange between fact and artifice.

For Mr. Demand’s show, the 303 gallery has been painted an institutional gray, and the photographic tableau printed so that the depicted spaces are effectively life-sized. The Niger embassy is situated in a Fascist-era office building located between the Vatican and the 1930s Olympic Village. As befits a Thomas Demand project, it exudes non-descript generic modernism. The photographs, like the models and the source of inspiration, are at once elegant and austere.  Mr. Demand is clearly influenced by Bernd and Hilla Becher, the serial photographers of typologies of building structure, who taught at the Dusseldorf Academy where Mr. Demand studied sculpture. The C-print “Embassy II” (2007), for instance, mixes conceptual art’s matter-of-factness with consummate artistry in the way it crops the composition of a banister, the glimpse of hallway, and the entrance to the embassy premises. The image both services a sense of place, and, at the same time, creates a near-abstract arrangement of planes.

Other images depict the depopulated offices as they might have appeared on the day of the historically momentous robbery, with shots of the national flag hanging on the exterior balcony or in the lobby, and the disheveled desk from which the stationery was stolen. The images, however, only really start to become sinister when you know the backstory. Left to their own devices, they would simply be bland, in a cute, dinky way.

Unlike the central, causal relationship between final image and constructed model in Mr. Demand’s work, the relationship of model to painting in Merlin James is incidental and occluded. In fact, the viewer might only know that some of his paintings of buildings are modeled on the artist’s own dollhouse-like constructions from the gallery poster that shows the artist alongside a table of them in his studio. But what the viewer does pick up is a marked sense of artifice within the painted image, if not the source or the artist’s perception of it.

Mr. James’s exhibition is his third in New York in the last two years: He was the subject of a retrospective overview at Sikkema Jenkins in 2005, and earlier this year the New York Studio School presented his transcriptions of old master paintings, a show (organized by this critic) which also included work dating from the outset of his career. Even the present, thematically-focused show includes old work. An evident aversion to a concentration on new work is of a piece with the artist’s refined sense of slow deliberation, and of art that feeds on different pasts – the artist’s own, the medium’s, and, in this case, the lived-in weather-worn buildings themselves.

Mr. James’s paintings are loveable in their quirkiness, but nonetheless willfully difficult: he wants to paint in bright, cheery colors, but insists on working unwieldy acrylic paint and various textured materials to get there. His palette is often muted to the point of muddiness; forms are obscured; the handwriting perfunctory. He is the kind of artist who lives his oxymorons — surfaces are painstakingly spontaneous, images are tortuously slight.

Rather like Mr. Demand, Mr. James pays attraction to generic modernism as a loaded motif. Mr. James prefers vernacular buildings over landmarks, but with a poignant attachment to them as specific places — one painting, indeed, is titled “A House in my Mother’s Hometown.” In some works, “House” (2008), for instance, a simple box-like structure denoting a modern house is filled in with childlike primary colors as if the motif is demanding a more modernist solution to the construction of the painting than in, say, the more romantic or impressionist approaches to older buildings and landscapes. It is as if Modernism itself is a subject of nostalgia.

A difference between Mr. Demand and Mr. James might come down to their individual mix of intention and temperament, but neither is a caricature of the hot romantic or the cool conceptualist.  Mr. Demand’s precise, calculated coldness has political pertinence and its own kind of poetry, while Mr. James’s warm expressivity is no less cerebral, deliberated, or concerned with what it signifies.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 13, 2007 under the heading “Model Agencies”

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John Goodrich, Stephen Maine, and Deborah Solomon joined David Cohen to review John Currin at Gagosian, Lucian Freud at Acquavella, Maureen Gallace at 303, Marilyn Minter at 94 and Fiona Rae at PaceWildenstein

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Daniel Kunitz, Barbara Pollack, and Irving Sandler joined David Cohen to review Laurie Anderson at Sean Kelly, Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner, Bruce Pearson at Ronald Feldman, and Sue Williams at 303.

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