Art Dealers Association of America The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory

February 27 to March 4, 2018

Don’t wait until next week to get into fair mood: This year, for venue scheduling reasons, The Art Show, the ADAA’s annual outing at the Park Avenue Armory, precedes the onslaught on the piers—the other Armory. And, like years past, it’s proving to be the place for aesthetic delectation.

I simply don’t know where to begin, there are so many fabulous exhibitions packed under this drill hall, so I may as well begin at the beginning: Cheim and Read’s solo display of new sculpture by the redoubtable Lynda Benglis that greets you at the entrance. Turn left, as supermarkets have discovered most of us do, and you get a revelatory display of landscape sketches by Myron Stout at Washburn Gallery, along with one of his trademark black and white painted iconic shapes: the nervously breezy, feather-stroked perceptual landscapes done in Provincetown, Mass. in black Conté send you back to the hard-edged abstraction with renewed intensity.

Brian Washburn told me they discovered a box of these drawings when they moved downtown recently hidden in plain sight in a painting rack. A metaphor, in a way, for The Art Show experience, where in one box after another (the booths) treasures from the past reveal themselves. Just over the aisle, Peter Freeman, Inc. have Mel Bochner paintings from the early 1980s that, if you are more familiar with his word pieces, will come as a surprise: Shaped canvases bursting with geometric forms dispatched with neo-expressionist gusto. Bochner first painted these images on regular shaped canvas, the sales assistant told me, and then determined the right irregular shape from the resulting form. Their surfaces reminded me of his contemporary, Terry Winters, represented elsewhere at the fair in a group show at Matthew Marks.

Hirschl and Adler, nestled in the corner, are in an appropriately intimate, almost closeted space for their show, Americans 1943: Realism and Magic Realism. This marks the 75th anniversary of a show of that title at MoMA. Sunday communist Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi delivers an allegory of corruption and resistance in The American Dream, 1935, that suggests that only the settings have changed in the interim. All the same issues are in place: horny CEOs, marginalized minorities, put upon protesters and an unloved statue.

Speaking of minorities, African American artists feature prominently amongst stand out solo booths in this year’s fair, including some historic rediscoveries. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery celebrates the achievements of abstract painter William T. Williams, while Galerie Lelong & Co showcase the lyrical gestalts of southern painter Mildred Thompson with Magnetic Fields, a series from her last decade. “Years ago, I had a dream about an event in space” she wrote in a 1992 statement. “Feeling fortunate to see this event, I stayed to look at it in detail.”

Detail is the essence of the experience of Harmony Hammond’s riveting textured grids in the Weave Paintings at Alexander Gray Associates. Not that one is seeking to survey the fair in identity categories, but another openly queer artist, Nicole Eisenman, makes play with a two-person display with Andy Warhol at Anton Kern Gallery. Their brochure quotes Andy Warhol as saying “If only one day my work could be shown in an art fair booth alongside the work of a radical lesbian”, which ambition Eisenman has obliged in a display where master and acolyte are not always easy to tell apart.

Intensity of detail and exquisiteness in finish are also determining factors in appreciation of Lynn Herhmann Leeson’s early work at San Francisco’s Anglim Gilbert Gallery, Dotty Attie’s works at P.P.O.W. and new drawings by Amy Cutler at Leslie Tonkonow. The balance of aesthetic and mechanical precision in Thomas Chimes 1970s metal box constructions are aptly contextualized at Philadelphia’s Locks Gallery display with Alexander Calder and Joseph Cornell. But the last and abiding delectations in the final aisle were of a more rough-hewn nature: Milton Avery at Yares Art, sumptuous and fulsome collages by Biala at Pavel Zoubok, and the take home dream of this visitor, the ravishing quietude of James Bishop with San Antonio, Tx. gallerist Lawrence Markey, where color and space seem to be breathed onto the page.

ADDENDUM: Posted as a featured item from THE LIST on Sunday, March 4

So natural is the tendency of commercial galleries to hedge bets and pack their stands with variety that many art fairs have color coded sections put aside for solo spots. Not so ADAA’s The Art Show at Park Avenue Armory, now in its 30th year, which through natural selection, it would seem, affords a hearty mix of group and solo presentations. Two standout stands that eluded my round up earlier this week exemplify these respective models. Jill Newhouse, whose gallery specializes in historic works on paper as well as contemporary works in different mediums, showcased a fine selection of drawings by Pierre Bonnard along with a tightly hung, intriguingly diverse group of living artists working in the Bonnardian spirit. The six living painters – curated by Karen Wilkin – included Larry Poons, Graham Nickson and Rachel Rickert. Danese Corey, meanwhile, opted for audacious singularity in presenting just one massive eight-foot high bronze sculpture by William Tucker, Meru, 2015-2017. The intricacies and folds of Tucker’s massed modeling and the demands of this complex form to be seen, fully, in the round could detain the discerning visitor as long as the salon hung massed ranks of intimate works at other stands. It is just not quite so easy to take it home.

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July 8 to August 12, 2016
170 Suffolk Street (between Houston and Stanton streets)
New York, 212 274 0064

Sticky, squishy, felty, rubbery. Plush, plump, porous.

Part cactus, part snowman-shaped Peep candy, a bulbous form stands a shy distance from the front doors. Shaded a dusty aquamarine, slightly blanched like the surface of freshly cut silicone, three cylindrical volumes perch one atop the other. In tumid contours, this shape vaguely gestures to that the class of object that contains canine chew toys, children’s building blocks, and paraphernalia for the sexually adventurous. Jayson Musson infuses Pedestrian (2014) with unexpected life, bringing the object to the physical scale of the human form. In the placement of this work, curator Feelings (whose book on soft art was published last year by Rizzoli) prepares us for the wealth of sensations to come, abstracted in objects that become bodily in their engagement of ours.

Temptingly tactile, Justin Adian’s works echo gestures that feel intimately human; in Yabba Dabba Doo (2016) a mitted hand crunches closed, while 2^nd Cousins (2016) gives a sidling sway that closes the awkward distance between a baby-boy-blue rectangle and a girlishly pink wave. Spongy, enamel-coated forms cling to gallery walls, creating pastel pop-out patterns detailed by crinkled material and real-life shadow. John Chamberlain’s Untitled (1967) seems to complete these flirtatious motions on the second floor of the gallery, comprised of two partial spheres that kiss, tenderly embracing to become whole.

Guy Goodwin’s cardboard cushions resemble the dotted patterning and depressions of upholstery, an allusion borne out in titles such as Springtime for Henry Grimes (2016). However, we are made sharply aware of the distinction between content and form as Goodwin’s cardboard amoebas stiffly sail through stippled seas. Weirdly plush in volume, these rigid surfaces model structures that they cannot possibly match, distorting internal integrity to achieve the uncanny quality of plastic food or fake hair.

The humble moving blankets that compose Sam Moyer’s series of Night Moves (2009) are impeccably folded, the original patterning of gray and neutral-toned expanses are divided by neat seams, joining one region to another. Regular, orderly ripples traverse each square plane. As with Goodwin’s unyielding bubbles, Moyer’s compositions fall eerily flat, less interested as they are in tactile pleasure, than in clean aestheticism.

Retaliating against hard lines and geometry, Lynda Benglis’s Untitled (1970) makes the fluid discrete in a colorful spill that fails to mar the floor of the gallery. Uneven blocks of color seep stickily in this flow frozen in diffusion, movement caught in permanence. By contrast, Erwin Wurm’s Internal (2016) dissolves that which should have integrity, warping the sturdy exoskeleton of a toaster.

Samara Golden’s pillowy figurative sculptures are tattooed with patterns that feel distinctly, embarrassingly American. Here is the body politic, striated by squiggly bacon strips, foreheads emblazoned with law books and hammering gavels. If we sit too hard and long on the couch — watching conventions, of course — will we too soak up its dull, grandmotherly floral ornamentation? The American flag flourishes across arms upraised in the pose of one of Picasso’s demoiselles. Eyes, painted over these designs and illuminated by a track of fierce gallery lights, look at us coyly sideways. Walk around to other side, and these same limp forms are illuminated by a blacklight that causes a very different relief to manifest: glowing skeletons, skulls, and bones fluoresce. Yet, for these two fronts, there is no substance, no interior.

Airy, insubstantial, empty, hollow, these various works find life in the inanimate and the object in the human. There may not be a whole lot in the way of content here, but that is proudly proclaimed by the exhibition title. This is about substance, but not the intellectual kind; texture is the name of the game and we are awarded with a crunchy, crinkly, plushy show that gives to our gaze as easily and as generously as it would under the weight of a hand. Touch with your eyes. I dare you to feel something.

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March 17 to August 16, 2015 (Uklanski Selects closes June 14)
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York City

The soaring banners that greet visitors in the Metropolitan Museum’s Great Hall are “living photographs” by Piotr Uklanski, the subject and selector, respectively, of exhibitions currently on view. The banners reconstitute a work of his from 2007, Untitled (Solidarity) in which aerially shot images of red and white clad soldiers at the Gdansk shipyards spell out the name of the independent trade union, ‘Solidarnosz in one image while the same word is seen disintegrating, in the other, as three thousand soldiers spill away. 1990 was the year that Lech Walesa was elected president of Poland and Uklanski was able to immigrate to the United States.

Despite this theatrical flourish, Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklanski Photographs overall feels a bit thin in places, particularly in a clustering of early work.

The show opens with images from Uklanski’s series, Joy of Photography 1997-2007, where he appropriates and plays with ‘how to’ ideas of photography. By faithfully following step-by-step instructions to achieve the perfect photograph from a Kodak manual – resulting in colorful blobs of soft focus flowers, a chiffonade waterfall, a tropical setting sun – Uklanski critiques the utopian promise of self-expression available to all, His project remains conceptually interesting even though the eventual aesthetic outcome is utter visual ennui

If Joy of Photography implies a mistrust of photography as a means to an end, the work that follows, The Nazis (1998), questions film’s reliability as a source of historical representation. This is a floor to ceiling wall installation of looming close-ups of Hollywood actors that are the embodiment of the American heroic ideal: Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Ronald Reagan, Robert Redford, William Shatner, even ‘ol’ blue eyes’ Frank Sinatra. To Uklanski, the volume of Second World War films speaks to a subconscious fascination and fetishization of the Nazi aura, portrayed in a sanitized and glamorous way. The American audience are to be kept safe and at a distance from the Holocaust reality by experiencing a dual consciousness, of a trauma, but appropriated and mediated by the faces of familiar stars.

In a nod to the infamous 1974 Artforum double page spread paid for by Lynda Benglis depicting herself nude, gloriously defiant and brandishing a dildo, Uklanski collaborated with curator Alison Gingeras on the piece ‘Untitled’ (GingerAss ) (2002). This portrays Gingeras, his partner, naked and lit from behind in a glamorous, erotic style that brings photographer Guy Bourdin to mind. Like Benglis, the artist paid for the image to appear in Artforum. Despite all the cheeky bravura however, their piece is compromised here by what seems to me a sheepish sentence within the wall text where the museum feels the need to tell us that Gingeras was “his romantic partner (they are now married).”

Benglis’s 1974 work was a sophisticated feminist critique, using her own body satirically on her own terms within a predominately male art context. Why should it make any difference whether they are now married, a fact offered in parentheses like an apologetic disclosure– as if the audience, after seeing a naked rear end, need reassurance that this couple still follow conventional societal norms? Such a patronising attitude offends the spirit of Benglis’s radical gesture and undermines Uklanski’s oeuvre.

Piotr Uklabski is known for heterogenous work ranging from large scale ceramic installations, fabric pieces, paintings, film and photography to his infamous relational aesthetic piece Untitled (Dance Floor) 1996 for Gavin Brown’s Broome Street space. It appears that this polymath has put together Piotr Uklanski Selects from the Met Collection with ease: it is by far the better of his two shows, compelling and engaging, evoking a pre-Internet, old-fashioned pleasure in making connections between disparate images and objects.

Using the themes of Eros and Thanatos, the “life force and death wish”, to guide his choices, Uklanski culled artefacts and images from eleven curatorial departments in a refreshing, occasionally shocking display. One gallery wall is hung with many of the photographic greats: Nadar, Alfred Steiglitz, August Sander, Francesca Woodman, Sally Mann, Martin Munkasci and Malick Sidbé are here, to name a few. Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier 1936, hangs nearby the surreal Laurie Simmons Walking Gun 1991, and a Pierre-Louise Pierson from around 1863-66, Games of Madness, of an elegant woman looking drolly through a small picture frame back at the viewer feels subversive yet so fresh

A sly wit is seen in a subtle repetition of patterns from different images: a tangle of lesbian’s legs hard at it, shadows of a man’s arms and legs, and the abstract close-up of a horse’s hip and thigh with leather and metal harness. One small painting hung so low one has to kneel to see it properly appears to be of a half dressed young boy who seems about ten lying on a bed while a woman, naked, her face hidden by long hair, fellates him. This is Picasso’s La Douceur, (The Pain) (1902). The ‘boy’ is in fact Picasso aged twenty-two, joking about orgasm and le petit mort. Painted over a hundred years ago, the sexuality and sexism are both still raw and palpable.

After the subtle and tonally muted photographs, Uklanski’s sculptural work, Untitled (Sacre Coeur), 2015, a visceral glistening heart in red resin, is a jarring experience. It is placed next to a cool, sleek yellow jasper Egyptian fragment of a mouth from around 1350 BCE. It almost works, her lips a wonderful contrast of ideas, temperament and form, but ultimately Sacre Coeur is too brash for her distinct, inscrutable, beauty.

Poignantly, near the end of the exhibition was a fragment of a right hand and forearm in marble, Greek, ca. 300 B.C. The written text stated: “this sculptural fragment may have belonged to Eros holding a bow or a torch “. It felt like amongst this gathering of talent from the era of photography, a hand was reaching out from the past.

Many thanks to Woman Around Town and Eleanor Foa Diestag for credited photographs above.  We apologize for the absence of Polish accents on the artist’s name and titles, a problem we are trying to fix.

The post A Sly Wit: Piotr Uklanski at the Met appeared first on artcritical.

Good exhibitions are designed to create a visual program of content and experiences that communicate affect most effectively. Curators and designers consider a number of factors to ensure that the visual experience — the look and feel — of the space accurately conveys the story they want to tell about the work: What if the art is lighted from below or above? How might the object look hanging from the rafters or on the floor? What if the walls aren’t white? What if the physical environment is not rectinlinear?

In March 1947, renowned dealer Alexander Iolas — then director of Hugo Gallery — sought to push the boundaries of curatorial license through a breathtaking environment for modern art in the exhibition “Bloodflames.” The show featured art curated by Nicolas Calas installed in the unconventional Fredrick Kiesler-designed environment filled with bright, bold colors and sloping walls. Works by Gorky, Noguchi, Lam, and Matta among others lay propped against walls, hanging from the ceiling, and jutting out at odd angles. Paul Kasmin, in collaboration with Rail Curatorial Projects, revisited this seminal exhibition through “Bloodflames Revisited,” curated by artist, writer, and Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui.

Filling the expanse of both Kasmin galleries, “Bloodflames Revisited” features work from more than 20 artists, including Will Ryman, Cindy Sherman, Chris Martin, and Roxy Paine. While certainly not as radical and disruptive to the senses as the original — you’ll find no sloping exhibition walls or amorphous blobs interspersed between works of art at Kasmin — this contemporary response to “Bloodflames” presents an effective and thoughtful alternative to the traditional white-cube exhibition as we know it. Upon entering the galleries, viewers are jarred by Crayola-colored walls that stretch from the hay-covered floor to the ceiling. “Bloodflames Revisited” is filled with artwork, although the orange-yellow of the walls and the earthy smell of hay trigger the senses to conclude the opposite. Walking into the exhibit spaces takes a bit of re-orientation that immediately calls into question the visual cues we associate with the display of cultural objects. Is it the color on the walls the risers or the hay beneath our feet that suggests everything we experience and see in this space can be questioned?

I walked through the 27^th Street gallery as if down a pirate’s gangplank and felt a relationship to the artworks that unsettled me. When we go the gallery or the museum, we stand apart from the art and typically view it from eye level. Standing on the riser, I looked down on Tunga’s sculptural assemblages, and my eyes rested on the top third of Deborah Kass’s and Alex Katz’s paintings. I decided to surrender to the moment, realizing that the exhibition was successful in its premise: it had indeed forced me to interrogate ideas I had internalized about what my relationship to the art should be as a viewer.

Glenn Ligon’s electric blue and neon green Niggers Ain’t Scared (1996), from the Richard Pryor joke paintings series is still jarring, even when viewed from above. “Alot of niggers ain’t scared, youknowwhatImean?” the text begins in Ligon’s signature stenciling style of imperfection. “I mean like when the Martians landed and shit white folks got all scared.” In an additional act of visual violence, the stenciled words smear down the canvas drawing more attention to the textual dissonance. “Nothing can scare a nigger after 400 years of this shit,” the joke concludes.

Nearby, Lynda Benglis’s giant half sphere of red-orange tinted polyurethane protrudes off of the wall as if floating in space.Benglis developed the brain matter-like forms of her metal and polyurethane half-spheres after combining elements from her work with knotted metal in the 1970s and glass in the 1980s. After discovering she could make knots of glass with her hands using technology, she gained a greater understanding of the material’s properties and began casting concave and convex forms. D’Arrest (2009) is mesmerizing, due in part to its relationship to light. The pigmented polyurethane seems to absorb light while reflecting it, causing it to act like a proprioceptor. The form appears to change as its jelly-like squiggles catch the light from various angles.

On Tenth Avenue, my viewing experience was altered still. The exhibition continued to use bold colors and elevated platforms, but the limitations of the physical space were brought into view more sharply. The snaking riser connecting the two viewing spaces here felt especially distracting, which encouraged me to step down and freely traipse around through the hay. As I examined Do Ho Suh’s stove from the Specimens series, I was reminded of the relationship between belonging and assimilation. In the series, the artist explores his own relationship to cultural displacement and belonging by making scale replicas of items from his New York apartment using only polyester fitted over wire armatures. The translucent material reveals while it conceals, showing some of the internal structure of the object yet protecting the vulnerable insides.

Much of our visual viewing experience is guided by subtle contextual clues: the height of the walls, the lighting, the props on which art objects reside, etc. What other stories do cultural objects reveal through the environment in which they are presented? How can altering the visual context of an artwork allow us to see it fully? The ideas presented in “Bloodflames” and its modern-day re-imagining emphasize the possibilities in disrupting how we relate to art through the physical space where it is presented. Bui fiddles with some of the contemporary conventions of exhibition design by swapping out sterile white walls and employing our other five senses in the viewing experience. It is a welcomed disturbance. Though Kasmin’s gallery spaces will return to their familiar spotless white and polished concrete in a few weeks, “Bloodflames Revisited” serves as a reminder that the relationship between viewer and art object can — and should be — personal and visceral.

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artcritical writers on Lynda Benglis:

David Cohen, 2007
David Carrier, 2006
Joan Boykoff Baron and Reuben M. Baron, 2005
David Cohen, 2004

More information on the artist can be found at Cheim & Read

Full index entry for “Benglis” at artcritical

“HUBS” is a new category on artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical 

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Weatherspoon Art Museum
Greensboro, North Carolina

August 6 to October 15, 2006

Recently the art world has been much concerned with its own recent history. “The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984,” organized by the Grey Art Gallery, 2006, told part of that story, displaying Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and a number of other influential figures who turned away from painting. “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967- 1975” tells another part of the history, showing artists who tried to keep painting alive.

Like the art world at large, they rejected Clement Greenberg’s ways of thinking. Most were Americans, but some distinguished visitors, Blinky Palermo and Kayoi Kusama for example, passed through this New York art world. Some of these artists worked with other media. Lynda Benglis and Carolee Schneemann did video while Mel Bochner and Dorothea Rockburne made installations. Others were using traditional materials in untraditional ways. Alan Shields created painted sculpture constructions; Harmony Hammond did fabric and acrylic constructions on the floor; Howardena Pindell and Louse Fishman constructed hanging grids; and Lynda Benglis poured paint on the floor. Artists tried to keep painting alive by using spray paint (Dan Christensen), by laying the canvas on the floor (Mary Heilmann), or by employing big mounds of paint (Guy Goodwin). Jo Baer and Jane Kaufman were minimalists; Michel Venezia and Lawrence Stafford played with optical effects; and Ron Gorchov, Mary Heilman, Ralph Humphrey, and Elizabeth Murray, who went on to have distinguished careers, were finding their styles. What perhaps unified this community was their desire to distinguish themselves from the clean designs of Greenberg’s color field painters. Their shared ambition, it might be argued, was to return to the era of Abstract Expressionism when, after all, painting was the dominant medium.

This exhibition interested me greatly, because when I started writing art criticism just a few years after this period, I too focused on abstract painting. I got to know some of these artists, and saw their paintings. And then in the 1980s I read (and participated in) the debates about whether painting remained viable. The catalogue gathers a great deal of interesting sociological material. I hadn’t known, for example, that four gifted black artists – Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell and Jack Whitten— were painting abstractly in this period. Nor was I aware of the range of women’s art presented in this exhibit. It was hard then to be an abstract painter, especially if you were female or black.

A great deal of this art is fascinating, at least to me, but in the end this style of abstraction didn’t have carrying power. The most important American who belongs with this group, Thomas Nozkowski, is not in the exhibition. And, to my surprise, David Reed, who advised the curator Katy Siegel and contributed an evocative essay to the catalogue, did not include his own early art. Some of the artists on show went on to have distinguished careers, but in the end, the interests of the art world moved elsewhere. And so now when the terms of debate have shifted so dramatically, it’s hard to recapture the sense of this moment when the attacks on painting were so ferocious.

What did in painting, Robert Pincus-Witten suggests in his catalogue essay, was October. As I see it, the situation is different. There is a lot of fascinating art on show, but nothing I would want to take home. Many of the artists in this show were immensely talented, but in the end none of them are as significant as their immediate precursors, or the Abstract Expressionists. In the end, then, painting survived, but not in the hands of the artists in this exhibition.

The exhibition will be on show at the National Academy Museum, New York, February 15-April 22, 2007

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July 15 – October 2, 2005

This lively exhibition at the Albright-Knox Museum is about connections and dialogues and more broadly about how to buildbuilding bridges.  The connections do more than demonstrate relationships between works within this exhibition or between this exhibition and past exhibitions curated by the museum’s new director, Louis Grachos.  These connections are bridges to the past, to the present, and to the future.  They open up new possibilities for audiences to appreciate good art that do not presently exist.

If this is not the best possible survey of contemporary abstract art that could be put together, and it is not, it is certainly strong enough and unique enough to be well worth a visit to the Albright-Knox.  Indeed, some of the reasons why this could not be a more representative exhibition of contemporary abstraction,  are part of its strengths.  Dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, the Albright-Knox was one of the first museums to collect abstract art and today, the museum’s collection is approximately 60 percent abstract.  At issue here is a valiant attempt of the museum’s curatorial staff to juxtapose its legacy of abstract masters with current abstract art that is not limited to painting.  Extreme Abstraction reflects a predilection to showcase works that are experiments in materials, color, form, and media (video, computer-based art) as well as various new venues for abstract art—floors, steps, and outside walls.  The result is that the more than 150 works selected for this show enable the past to reframe the present and the present to reframe the past.

In the words of David Pagel, these are mostly examples of “hands off” art that eschew the use of a brush to apply conventional paint (oil or acrylic) to canvas.  Hot art is compared to cool art.  The basic dialogue then is between this newer art and the museum’s very strong, albeit not complete, permanent collection of abstract art beginning with Malevich,  Rodchenko,  and Mondrian, and then journeying through Abstract Expressionism, Optical and Kinetic Art, Color Field and Minimalism.  Here, masters include: New York School painters Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Clifford Still, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Wilhelm deKooning, Hans Hofmann and Ad Reinhardt; Color Field painters such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, and minimalists of varying sorts—Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Sol Lewitt,  Elsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin.  It is noteworthy that the permanent collection is so strong that one has to work hard to find omissions like Barnett Newman,  Robert Ryman and Brice Marden.  But then again Morris Louis and Richard Serra are present as bookends between the end of Abstract Expressionism and the rise of Minimalism.  Here, an Eva Hesse would have been welcome but there is a strong Lynda Benglis floor piece.  There are also two excellent examples of the Light and Space Movement—Craig Kauffman and Robert Irwin.  The Bengalis  and Kauffman are particularly important because they represent direct antecedents  to the contemporary extreme abstractions in regard to the use of quirky, industrial materials and colors, as well as blurring the line between painting and sculpture.   They portend the delightful impurity of the Extreme Abstraction sensibility by exchanging extroversion for introversion, affirmative emotions such as joy and playfulness for angst, and substituting a garden of earthly delights for high-minded ideals.  And most telling, such artists producet art that is perhaps more expressive of the materials they use than their own personal struggles to wrest meaning out of the void.

The installations here are crucial.  For example, a powerful Jackson Pollock, “Convergence” (1952), is paired with a floor piece,  “Reckless” (1998) by Polly Apfelbaum, which is an assemblage of individually cut pieces of synthetic stretch velvet, fabric and dye.  Such dialogues are multifaceted.  At certain formal levels the works are similar—they both show all-over abstraction and they are both floor pieces albeit in different ways.  Apfelbaum’s is a floor piece in terms of the installation and Pollock’s in terms of how the work was painted.  But they are also profoundly different in ways central to today’s Post-Modern abstraction.  The Apfelbaum and related works in the exhibition such as Linda Besemer’s Fold painting, consisting of a sheet of pure acrylic paint draped over a bar, have a feminist agenda; they, along with Lynda Benglis’ “Fallen Painting” (1968) which is a floor piece of pigmented latex rubber, demonstrate that women’s work can give rise to “high art”.  Specifically, such works are “crafted”, not painted on canvas,  playful rather than driven.  There is, however, a deeper connection that needs to be explored.  Pollock, Apfelbaum, Besemer and Benglis create art that, in the terms Robert Smithson (1965) used to describe Donald Judd, have an  “uncanny materiality”..   How these works were created and how they need to be viewed are transformed by the expressive materials used.  Such art encourages a viewer to look at Jackson Pollock differently.  Pollock’s style of working, in regard to his throwing and dripping paint as he danced around a canvas, created art that is best seen in an active, embodied way.  Michael Fried not withstanding, theatricality in abstract art is born here with Pollack, not with Judd’s minimalism.  The scale, surface tactility,  and complexity of pattern invite the viewer  to complete the work by moving close to it and walking from side to side.  This is also true of Apfelbaum’s and Bengalis’ floor pieces.

A major strength of this exhibition is that works do more than enhance one another—they have a synergistic effect.Another interesting form of connection or dialogue is how the museum’s installation allows different works to enrich the meaning of works in the same visual space.    John Armleder, for example, uses in his own work to key an installation of Oop and Kinetic art he curated form from the museum’s permanent collection.  The installation newer work, especially coupled with a video by Jennifer Steinbcamp makes theisolder art seem fresh, exciting and contemporary in feeling, and not so distant from cousin to Leo Villareal’s monumental outdoor light piece.  Although Villareal’s mechanisms are extremely different being based on computer software and LED lights, his work in this context becomes a contemporary descendent of Op and Kinetic art..  Then there is a wonderful dialogue among works from different artists and different periods all of which turn color into lava-like flow fields.  What other exhibition comes to mind that would encourage us to see similarities among the work of Clifford Still, Morris Louis, Lynda Benglis and Ingrid Calame?

There is also a productive visual dialogue between David Reed’s exuberant xxxx vertical painting of brushstrokes that playfully twist and turn and fold and unfold and a massive sculptural piece that shares many of these attributes by Liz Larner.  Here, blues, greens,  redsyellows, and purples speak to each other across a broad visual field, thereby giving a dynamic, contemporary twist to Albers’ color contextualism, this time across media.  The Reed and Larner works also share a kind of tawdry sensuality of form and color and both require an active, embodied viewer since they change from different distances and viewing stations.  Further, they are neither organic nor inorganic, but trapped between these worlds (Larner’s sculpture could be seen as e an alien space ship.)

The exhibition also reflects a hidden connection across time and space with a previous show that involved Louis Grachos, the new Director of the Albright-Knox Museum.  Specifically, his earlier curation at Site Santa Fe of an exhibition entitled, Postmark: An Abstract Effect (1999) included thirteen artistsmore than a dozen artists that are in the present show.  This suggestsIt appears that the seeds of at least certain aspects of Extreme Abstraction were planted in Postmark’s exhibition of “hands off” abstraction—w, work informed by the movies, TV, computer screens and automobiles.  These abstractions captured a world in which the boundaries between high art and low art are blurred if not obliterated.  In this connection (pun intended) Extreme Abstraction’s placing of a Flavin light sculpture across the room from David Batchelor’s “Idiot Stick” is illustrative.  Specifically, this exhibition, as did Postmark, celebrates the impurity of a current abstraction that is often more decorative than spiritual.  The impurity also extends to the inclusion in the current exhibition of photographic and video forms of abstraction including the photographic material of Adam Fuss and Gregory Kucera and the videos of Jeremy Blake and Jennifer Steincamp, the latter of which dialogues so beautifully with the large Armleder light piece

.  There is also an interesting connection albeit a much lower degree of overlap between the Albright Knox’s previous exhibition, The Forman Collection of Monochrome Art, which although it included some nontraditional materials like Florence Pierce’s resin pieces which were also in the PostMark exhibit but did not make it into this one.  This is unfortunate because Pierce’s work is an interesting hybrid.  It has an affinity to Agnes Martin’s transcendental minimalism while at the same time being much a creature of the expressive industrial material it uses, a subtheme of the present exhibition.

There is also what is likely to be an unintended  but we find fascinating connection between several works in this exhibition and a classic surreal painting by Salvador Dali, the Persistence of Time.  In Dali’s work, the line between inorganic and organic objects is blurred, time pieces flow and drip, losing their rigid boundaries.  Interstingly, there are a number of works in this exhibition that have a kind of flowing, bendy, drippy kind of quality that threaten their integrity as solid objects.  These include works as divese as Apfulbaum, Pollock, Besemer, Reed, Zimmerman, Yamaoke, Grosse and Davie.  This affinity group suggests that at least for a subgroup of artists in the Extreme Abstraction exhibition,  there is a kind of meta-impurity, what might be termed surrealist abstraction.

Finally, the museum and especially its director are to be congratulated for initiating an exhibition program, starting with the Forman Collection this spring, that departs from the current rage for a kind of decadent figuration reminiscent of Klimpt and Schiele.  InsteadThe Albright-Knox is offerings us a virtual library laboratory for the study of abstraction in its many forms.  Taken together with Grachos’ earlier Postmark exhibition at Site Santa Fe,we have a demonstration these three exhibitions demonstrate that the death of abstract art has been greatly exaggerated.  Abstraction has once again abstraction has morphed.  It has changed its material, form and aesthetic sensibility, thereby making it an ever more elusive target for the its would-be executioners  of abstraction.  Indeed its arch-enemy, Post-Modernism, has now been assimilated into it.  Abstraction is dead; long live Abstraction.

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Mia Westerlund Roosen: Namesake
Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. until April 3
560 Broadway, Suite 308, at Prince Street, 212-941-0012

Once the enfant terrible of the New York School, Lynda Benglis is now one of the grande dames of American sculpture. But she has never lost her essential brashness. A compact survey of her work since 1967, now at Cheim & Read, shows her to be a truly original force, at once deeply serious in her explorations of form and material and a fearless vulgarian.

Ms. Benglis is something of a changeling, even at times a hermaphrodite. Her work oscillates between exquisite form consciousness and consummate poor taste – just as, in another direction, it does between solid and flux. She was part of the generation that put process above object, yet she is clearly a maker of things, reveling in the tactility and tangiblity of her creations.

Her career, as presented here, is bookended by phalluses (and this from so feminist an artist). The earliest work, “Embryo II” (1967), is a three-foot-long pole encrusted with weird accretions of purified, pigmented beeswax and damar resin. In the tradition of Giacometti’s “Disagreeable Object,” it is at once compelling and yukky. The latest work, from this year and installed in the gallery’s chapel-like project space, is a 13-and-a-half-foot-high hanging lampshade, with bulbous curves. Titled “Bikini Incandescent Column,” the piece puns the feminine garment and the island of atom-bomb fame in a collision – typical of this artist – of the sexual and the political.

The phallus as political gesture will always be conflated with Ms. Benglis’s name thanks to her notorious stunt, in November 1974, of placing in Artforum an advertisement in which she posed naked, greased up in the porno style of that era, and sporting a dildo. Ostensibly announcing a show at the Paula Cooper Gallery, this act – which caused great scandal at the time, bitterly dividing the editors of the journal, for instance – presaged a period of performance and video in Ms. Benglis’s career.

None of this work is represented in this survey, but issues of sexuality and gender are never entirely absent from Ms. Benglis’s concerns. In the late 1960s, she pioneered a hybrid form between painting and sculpture, which entailed congealed puddles of brightly pigmented polyurethane foam. These would be nonchalantly deposited on the floor, looking as if they were still oozing forth, or heaped in a corner, as in “Quartered Meteor” (1969).

Such works were much of their time in terms of the prevailing obsession with process and penchant for un-arty (industrial) materials, but Ms. Benglis subverted the severe rationalism of male-dominated minimal art with metaphorical intimations of nature and anatomy. Her embrace of the fluid and the decentered was a counterpoint to her mock-worship of the phallus.

These puddle pieces, rooted as they may have seemed in an anti-object, process-driven aesthetic, developed into monumental sculptural installations whose poured forms solidified into floating entities of ambiguous weight. These suggested that, despite Ms. Benglis’s allegiances to the avant-garde, a baroque sensibility – a love of the conceit and deceit of frozen gestures, the solid object as metaphor of movement – is her defining characteristic.

The artist’s abstract “knots” of the 1970s approach figuration, with limb-like forms writhing to and fro. Later works explore the artist’s Greek heritage, with references to caryatids and to carved drapery. But no one would accuse her of giving in to classical refinement – “Summer Dreams” (2003), a shiny bronze fountain made from orgiastic heaps of gnarled, pummeled matter, is truly an exercise in the grotesque.

Mia Westerlund Roosen has, in more ladylike manner, followed a similar career trajectory to Lynda Benglis. She, too, started out steeped in the aesthetics of process and installation. Inspired by the women’s movement, she explored sexual and erotic content in pared down abstraction. Both women’s work relate, also, to the nebulous, erogenous forms of Louise Bourgeois.

Ms. Roosen’s major contribution so far has been in site-specific works, often temporary, such as those in her widely acknowledged outdoor exhibition at Storm King in 1994. Ms. Benglis, too, has made such pieces – carved brick works in India that I have only studied in photographs but that seem to represent a departure in her work and a close point of formal similarity with Ms. Roosen’s elephantine, robust awkwardness. Where Ms. Benglis is a priestess of volume, however, Ms. Roosen serves at the altar of mass. Her sensibility is genuinely monumental.

Still, she is more than capable of singular statuary, as six new sculptures at Lennon, Weinberg and two pieces at the Invitational at the American Academy (reviewed in these pages last week) show. These pieces are at once tough and vulnerable, quirky and strident, personal and aloof. This string of dichotomies reflects, in a way, their facture, which also reconciles a more fundamental sculptural duality, that between carving and modeling, (processes often posited as temperamental opposites) for her concrete sculptures are cast in moulds but their surfaces are worked by hand. .

Each piece in the Lennon, Weinberg show is named for a famous historical or mythological woman. The most striking is “Clio” (2003). The Muse of History is presented as a triad of pulsating balls on cloven feet from whose energized surfaces little pipes protrude like the nails in an African carving. In her tenderness and absurdity, Clio looks like a cross between a baby elephant and a bride of Ubu (as drawn by his creator, Alfred Jarry).

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 18, 2004

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