February 13 to May 26, 2013
235 Bowery, between Rivington and Stanton streets
New York City, (212) 343-0460

NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, currently on view at the New Museum, examines the art scene in New York over the course of one year and attempts to chart a lineage connecting the city’s artists working today with the major players of twenty years ago.  Of course, many of the featured artists are still active in the New York scene, and it’s a falsehood to suggest that this group of artists was the first to engage in robustly political art.  The insinuation that these artists were the first to tackle such historically broad issues as race, gender, economic concerns and sexuality is one of the many frustrations of the exhibition, and while the works on display are some of the most visible of the period, one senses a missed political opportunity on the part of the curators.

The show is certainly prolific in scale, the first in the New Museum’s history to span all five floors and take up every gallery space.  The wall text and catalog essays (much of it written by curator Massimiliano Gioni and the New Museum’s director Lisa Phillips) stress the notion of “capturing a particular moment.”  This moment, according to Gioni, saw the rise of relational aesthetics—in his view a product of a global recession—as well as a critique of consumerism, and an emphasis on art as a basis for community building.  But why turn to 1993 as a time capsule for these problems?  On the same day as the press preview, the brilliant critic and theorist Amelia Jones was featured on a panel at the College Art Association Annual Conference titled “Art Criticism: Taking a Pulse.” In her talk Jones brought to light the enormous debt that Rirkrit Tiravanija and others working directly within Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of relational art owed to the feminist artists of the 1960s and ‘70s.  I bring this up to illustrate that what Gioni terms a “new conceptual climate” seems much more influenced by the art of twenty years prior than is made public in the text for the show. The missing historical link is the broad adoption in the 1970s of postmodern theory in academia and MFA programs across the country, and the guidance of artist-teachers who were deeply invested in feminist and relational politics.

While much of the work in NYC 1993 is rooted in institutional critique and questions of gender and race, the wall labels and curators’ comments in the catalog are no match for the intellectual rigour of the art on display.  Furthermore, many of these works would be greatly enriched by a reading that steps outside of their historical contingency. David Hammons’s quietly shocking In the Hood consists of the hood cut from a green sweatshirt, hung on the wall.  The work recalls decapitation, the suspicious image of the hooded black man so often seen on facial composite sketches, and even evokes the Ku Klux Klan.  If the curators were to initiate a conversation that relates the art practices of 1993 with the political landscape of today, the shooting of the black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 would have been an obvious parallel to draw with this piece.  Hammons’s simple work is imbued with suspicion, fear, and the simultaneous concealing and exposure of identity: issues that are far more nuanced than the translation of “hood” as black lexicon for “neighborhood,” which the wall text offers.

With that being said, many of the works on display are incredibly powerful, and, for me, aesthetically representative of the time period the show examines.  Two understated pieces by the Mexican-born artist Gabriel Orozco on display in the second floor gallery fell under this category. Yielding Stone is a clay ball of the artist’s weight, which he rolled from his studio on Broadway to the New Museum in 1993.  The sculpture resembles a boulder, and though its surface is constituted by the grit and grime of lower Manhattan, the art object more closely resembles an organic form found outside the city.  Isla en la Isla (Island within an Island) is a small photograph taken next to the West Side Highway of a miniature Manhattan skyline made from garbage and wood debris facing the real skyline.  This “gritty” work, in which the city plays a lead role, is characteristic of the overall aesthetic of the exhibition. The rough simplicity of Orozco’s work shares an urban poignancy with the enormous, yet equally subtle, Félix González-Torres billboard Untitled, on the fourth floor. In marked contrast, the filmmaker Larry Clark’s multimedia installation revels in the same “downtown” aesthetic without the conceptual or emotional weight.

An arresting work to see in person was Janine Antoni’s installation Lick and Lather consisting of fourteen self-portrait busts deformed either through Antoni bathing herself, as she did with the busts carved from soap, or gnawing and licking away at those made of chocolate. The work was originally displayed at the ’93 Venice Biennale, and this show along with the ’93 Whitney Biennial were touched upon numerous times within the exhibition.  Glenn Ligon’s contribution to the 1993 Biennial catapulted him to art superstardom, and while his Notes on the Margin of the Black Book was absent from NYC 1993 (perhaps because he started working on the piece in 1991) his Red Portfolio was an ingenious addition to the exhibition.  The work exists as a series of framed descriptions, white text on black background, of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs as penned by the Reverend Pat Robertson in a 1989 letter for his constituents in an effort to describe government-funded works.  “A photo of a man in a suit exposing himself” refers to Mapplethorpe’s Man in a Polyester Suit (1980), an image that is a subtle and tender a commentary on the fear of black masculinity this is possible in the presence of an enormous black penis.  The culture wars of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was certainly burned into the public consciousness of the time, and Ligon’s work brilliantly displays the attitudes of the religious right without judgment or commentary, allowing the slippery relationship between art images and language to be laid bare.

My experience of NYC 1993 was one of equal parts frustration and fascination.  It would have been impossible to include every revered work from that year in the exhibition, but the selection of art chosen by the curators was extraordinary. It must be noted, however, that a majority of the work was rooted in the political or institutional critique of its time.  The frustration thus lies in a reticence on the part of the New Museum to examine more closely the historical and social contingencies of the art on display, and the ways in which it differentiates itself from art being produced in 2013. Instead of taking up these thorny issues, the curators have presented a neat time-capsule exhibition that seemingly functions no differently today than it would have in 1993.

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6.30-9pm at La Mama Galleria,
6 East 1st Street, between Bowery and 2nd Avenue
party, drinks, Vietnamese rolls, $20 at the door

artcritical.com is proud to announce that it is the official media sponsor for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s panel discussion, Girls Just Want To Have Funds.  Moderated by the foundation’s director, Quang Bao, the provocatively/wittily titled event seeks to open up debate on an issue that just doesn’t want to go away: why women artists aren’t getting their share of the cake when it comes to commercial, institutional and media success.

This perennial debate is made the more topical by the recent storm over remarks by Ken Johnson, the New York Times critic, who questioned whether female marginalization had anything to do with “the nature of the art that women tend to make.”

Confirmed speakers for the January 15, 2013 panel, which takes places at La Mama Galleria in NoHo, include Janine Antoni, Jennifer Dalton, Alexandra Grant and Linda Sormin.  The event is also sponsored by Studio Zürcher on Bleecker Street (where the event was originally scheduled to take place).

The panel is also to be a celebration preview of works donated to the Rema Hort Mann Foundations’ May benefit.  The foundation was founded in 1995 by family and friends of Rema who were determined to honor the creative spirit of a woman who died of cancer aged 30, and has since collected and sponsored a phenomenal array of emerging talents – including in their breakout years the likes of Danica Phelps, Laylah Ali, Mikalene Thomas, Lane Twitchell, Sarah Sze and Dana Shutz – along with its work in cancer.

In what’s now a tradition for the foundation, all the donating artists are women.  This year’s pickings include Alison Blickle, panelist Alexandra Grant, Franziska Klotz, Alex Olson, Karen Seapker, Claire Sherman, and Lara Schnitger.

Of course, giving is something women are used to doing on their own.

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David Brody, David Carrier and Linda Nochlin joined David Cohen to review Kehinde Wiley, Maya Lin, Chris Ofili, and Janine Antoni.

The post September 2009: David Brody, David Carrier, and Linda Nochlin with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

Danica Phelps: Integrating Sex Into Everyday Life
LFL Gallery 530 W 24th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, phone: 212-989-7700, through

Erwartung/Expectancy: A Video Installation by Dara Birnbaum
The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue on the northeast corner of 92nd Street, through January 4, 2004

Janine Antoni’s bombastic new installation at Luhring Augustine literally assaults the senses. Even out on the street, the eyes and nose begin to itch. Inside, there’s a full-scale olfactory attack. Between two awesome, rusting nine-foot steel reels – relics from some dark, satanic mill, perhaps – is gathered a vast heap of raw hemp fiber that fills the cavernous gallery with pugnacious dust.

It’s ironic that the senses should get it from so echt a conceptualist as Ms. Antoni, but then, her work has always knowingly collided the cerebral and the sensual. She came to attention in the early 1990s with work that earned her a place in course textbooks as the epitome of the art world’s obsession at that time with (capital B) the Body. Not to be confused with figurative art, Body art sought to reintroduce awareness of the somatic, and delighted in weird and wonderful imagery to do with fluids and organs and other yucky stuff. Apparently, it all tied in with critical theory at the time.

Ms. Antoni’s classic piece in this genre, “Gnaw” (1992), entailed performances in which she would chew away a gargantuan block of chocolate to reveal a (pre-prepared) statue of herself or, in corresponding fashion, model herself out of soap. Her aesthetic has always entailed an element of the endurance test. To witness, or know about, the physical suffering or tedium to which the maker has subjected herself became integral to the appreciation of the work.

The problem is that if you just chance upon the humdrum academic statue of a young woman in brown material without knowing (a) that it’s chocolate and (b) that a suffering, post-feminist, shaman chocoholic body artist ruined her teeth to sculpt it for you, you may think it’s just an academic statue.

Similarly, with this new work, “To Draw a Line,” empathy is hardly possible without news about how the piece came about. Before the show opened, apparently – and one has to read the press release to realise this – Ms. Antoni walked the tightrope of overstretched and eroded hemp that connects the two giant reels, knowing that despite a summer of practice (the invite card shows her balanced on a police barricade on Canal Street), she was doomed repeatedly to fall seven feet into the billowing dusty hemp that was her safety net. In this respect, Ms. Antoni recalls the antics of various classic conceptualists (Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci) whose performances or processes entailed injuries or inconveniences of varying gravity.

But here the viewer doesn’t even have the thrill of seeing the artist suffer. The object under view, visually recalling Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis with his fondness for steel and stuffing, is really a souvenir for a main event that might not ever have happened. It pushes the divorce of artifact and performance (props as sops) far further than even Matthew Barney. His sculptures and installations, in relation to the Cremaster movies, make the gallery feel like the cinema foyer, but they have some life of their own (just less life than the movies). As an irate collector was overheard to ask on my visit to Ms. Antoni’s show, “Isn’t there even a video?”

In overblown and oversimplified form, “To Draw a Line” recalls Ms. Antoni’s one truly impressive work to date, “Slumber” (1994). In this, the sleeping artist had herself hooked up to an EEG machine; the resulting REM readings were then fed into a loom. Again, lots of string, lots of explication, but for once, the yarn was literally part of the art.

As well as belonging to the subgenre of machines that make art, “Slumber” took its place in a genre which is quite peculiar to recent art, in which a kind of poetry ensues from nutty documentation or registration of the artist’s presence, bodily processes, or mundane activities: Conceptual-process-performance art, in other words, for the era of reality TV.

An artist some years younger than Ms. Antoni who has made her career out of what one might call personalist statistics is Danica Phelps. Up to now, accountancy has been the probity of her art. She would keep head-spinning logs of her spending over long stretches of time or devise improbably elaborate bartering schemes: narrative flow kept pace with formal rhythms in the schematic presentation of her data.

Ms. Phelps remains a devotee of informational overload and dogged resolve, only now she has taken up the one subject sexier than money: Sex. According to an open letter to family, friends, and colleagues that forms a press release for the exhibition, after seven erotically uneventful years of marriage, Ms. Phelps has come out as a lesbian. As students of her compulsively diaristic exhibition, entitled “Integrating Sex into Everyday Life” soon discover, the lucky lady’s name is Debi.

Arranged in the middle of the gallery are a mattress, a makeshift kitchen, the artist’s somewhat grungy wardrobe, and a work station: Evidently (though not on the day of my visit) the artist will be *in situ*, making art (if not love) and living some of the very life that will be documented in her drawings. Hanging on the wall, and perhaps increasing in number as her life is further lived, are these drawings, which consist of copious date-book entries which hourly notatewalking the dog, gallery-going, drawing, reading, and – with healthful frequency – making love with Debi.

Next to these lists are spindly, doodly sketches of interlocking couples. These are sensual and personable enough but Ms. Phelps is hardly the new Egon Schiele. At the base of each page are arcane, colored bar codes thatapparently register cash flow and credits/debits incurred, recalling her pre-Sapphic preoccupations. So much for measuring out one’s life in coffee spoons. Still, a precarious balance of anal retention and erotic release lends this whole project an endearing and welcome charm.
***

“Erwartung/Expectancy,” Dana Birnbaum’s installation at the Jewish Museum, was a work originally commissioned in 1995 as an outdoor project by the Vienna Kunsthalle. A plexi screen is coated with a blown-up reproduction of one of Arnold Schönberg’s watercolorsenvisioning a stageset for his revolutionary “monodram” of that title. Onto this textured support, Ms. Birnbaum projects images of a woman with flowing red locks in a period dress, whose poses that have all the drama and circumstance of an L.L. Bean catalogue.

Accompanying each shot are stage directions and lines, in English, from Marie Pappenheim’s libretto. The soundtrack sounds like digitally messed around fragments of Schönberg’s score, slowed down and with the voice edited out. In the darkened room, fragments of image bounce back upon the walls in further attempts at ambiguous distortion. While curatorial wall text makes big claims for the feminist radicality of this venture, in truth it seems there is little a video installation artist appropriating Schoenberg can do that’s more expressive or weird than the audacious a-tonality of the original.

The composer’s watercolor will feature in the Jewish Museum’s upcoming and much anticipated exhibition, Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider, which opens October 24. Even as a teaser for it, this piece is frankly presumptuous and inconsequential.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 11, 2003

The post Janine Antoni at Luhring Augustine, Danica Phelps at LFL Gallery, Dara Birnbaum at The Jewish Museum appeared first on artcritical.