May 2 saw the season finale of The Review Panel at the Nationa Academy Museum. Stephanie Buhmann, Mario Naves and newcomer to the series Saul Ostrow joined moderator David Cohen to discuss shows dotted around Manhattan, taking us from the Lower East Side, via Soho and Chelsea to 57th Street.  The shows under review: David Maisel: History’s Shadow at Yancey Richardson, John Newman: Fit at Tibor de Nagy, Jackie Saccoccio at Eleven Rivington’s two spaces and Allan Wexler: Breaking Ground at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.  The panel will be back for its tenth season at the National Academy in September.  Sign up to our bulletin to be the first to know the details.

The post From the archives: Stephanie Buhmann in 2014, with Mario Naves and Saul Ostrow appeared first on artcritical.

October 10 to November 22, 2015
260 Richardson Street (at Kingsland Ave.)
Brooklyn, 646 729 4682

Nicola Ginzel’s recent solo exhibition at Brooklyn’s Cathouse FUNeral featured a considerable amount of small-scale mixed media objects and embroidered works on paper. Occasionally framed but mostly hung directly on the wall, these works were shown in close proximity and at an unusual height. Allowing only a tall viewer to peruse them at eye-level, works could easily be inspected both frontally, as well as slightly from below. This made for an intimate acquaintance between viewer and subject, serving Ginzel’s work particularly well. Rooted in the playful mixture of eclectic materials, her enchanting concoctions aim to not only disguise but to reinvent the familiar; she adds value not where it was lost, but where it hardly existed in the first place.

Hybrids between sculpture and painting, Ginzel’s objects involve a staggering amount of found, fragmented, and usually random ingredients. The latter can range from tea bags, mohair, wax, thread, gaffers tape, wasp nest, felt, clothing remnants, rubber band and gold leaf, to dirt. Mixed, re-matched, and altered, the remnants are stripped off their former functionality and everyday context. However, that does not equate with a loss of meaning. In fact, Ginzel’s hand-sized objects can exude an almost shamanistic quality. One might easily imagine them playing an important part in some ritual. The fact that some of the materials involved are gathered in specific places, including dirt from the music haven Muscle Shoals in Alabama, for example, enhances this notion.

In addition to her three-dimensional works, Ginzel also continuously embroiders various scraps of paper. These can either be discarded snippets of mass-produced candy wrappers or popcorn packages, for example, or involve more personal notations, such as schedules, index cards, or specifically selected book pages. Stitch-by-stitch, these mundane items are elevated from the commonplace to the carefully considered. By tenderly abstracting her materials, Ginzel helps them to obtain a sense of preciousness and even an air of Romanticism.

In order to provide a comprehensive overview of Ginzel’s oeuvre, “My Bed is Made of Atoms” presented a selection of works from the past 15 years. In that period she has consistently found inspiration in mainstream culture. However, it is the elegant execution of her work, as well as her careful handling of her materials, that reveal a high regard for craft. She is interested in interacting with her subjects in a simple and yet profound way, or as she has pointed out: “It is in the simplicity and interaction, where the essence of life’s breath resides, not in the end result or goal achieved.”

The post Retrospective Scraps: A Survey of Work by Nicola Ginzel appeared first on artcritical.

March 8 through June 7, 2015
11 West 53 St (between 5th and 6th avenues)
New York, 212 708 9400|

Stephanie Buhmann: So here we are, two longtime Björk fans, who went to MoMA with our 16-month-old daughter in tow, hoping for an incredible event. What were your first impressions after leaving the museum?

Todd Simmons: I was a little confused about what exactly the curator, Klaus Biesenbach, was hoping to accomplish with this presentation of Björk’s extraordinary audio and visual work. What kind of an expectation did you have about what a visual retrospective of her work would be?

SB: I was skeptical from the get-go, doubting that a retrospective of a musician, no matter how innovative and groundbreaking, could be pulled off by a visually focused museum. Björk certainly is an exceptionally gifted artist in her medium — which is primarily music but also extends toward digital innovation. She is, of course, famous for her costumes and makeup, but there isn’t much there in terms of sculptural objects, drawings or anything else traditionally considered fine art, even in a loose sense. I was curious to see how MoMA was going to pull that off. I was also curious whether Björk had a traditional visual oeuvre (drawings, photographs, collages, etc.) in private, something many musicians do. That doesn’t appear to be the case. I walked away thinking that this show was an artificially constructed installation of minor visual objects, failing to truly celebrate — or enlighten us about — the non-material work that makes Björk the incredible artist she is.

Some of the most interesting objects on view were largely ignored: the pipe organs, for example, were installed in the downstairs lobby. They are fantastic instruments and unusual objects so why are they not part of the main exhibit?

TS: And they were only heard intermittently and it’s very easy to miss both the objects and their sound if you enter the museum at the wrong moment. I was there for three hours that day and only heard the instruments played briefly. The Tesla coil mounted on the foyer ceiling roared so abruptly that I saw a group of people jump out of their skins. That’s actually the kind of visceral experience I’d hoped for; only it never happened again that I noticed. I wanted to walk in off the street and be immediately captivated by the dynamic sound of Björk. But I had to fight my way into a cramped wooden structure to do so. She should have been given much more space for her thrilling music to soar in. Not merely a claustrophobic fort. For the show’s subject to have her sound get lost in the overall museum chatter is a significant problem.

SB: That name of the show sounded to me like a reference to Australian Aboriginal culture. In the Aboriginal belief system, a “songline” defines a path across the land. By singing songs in the appropriate sequence, Aborigines could navigate vast distances through the desert. It’s a way to navigate and to remember and pass on history, a concept that must resonate with Björk. The fact is that we learned too little. When it presents a pop-cultural icon, the museum promises two things: to enlighten us about the work of this artist and to convey a sense of the person, the mind behind it. This show is an empty promise; neither of these tasks were accomplished.

So what’s the original intent of this show? Is it trying to get us closer and more familiar with the artist or veil her further into mystery?

TS: There were partial attempts towards the personal, by including scattered diary entries, for example.

SB: Right, but although interesting on a personal level, the diaries and notebooks are not really visually engaging.

There are some interesting things to discover, like the wall of sheet music underneath several flat screens showing her performing on stage, but this is used as a mere backdrop in the waiting area. These musical notations, which reveal how elaborately layered and carefully arranged Björk’s music is, are in themselves beautiful abstract drawings — so why are they cast to the side at MoMA?

TS: It’s a mistake to have them displayed in a corridor when you’re queuing up to get into a room where the promise of a unique experience awaits. You can’t help but feel the push of the crowd and the promise that a “real” experience is going to be around the corner. It’s a fleeting flirtation, which is frustrating when you’d like to savor these details, but you’re being pressured to advance to the next station. You couldn’t feel good about lingering because you’d be holding up the line. It made me wonder: is it ill-advised to dub this bottleneck “Songlines,” in a city as crowded and impatient as New York is, and in a museum designed to process throngs of humanity every hour?

SB: I know what MoMA can get out of this exhibit. I don’t know what Björk is gaining from the experience, as it has not been pulled off well.

TS: A deeper level of credibility or acclaim that she already has? No. She’s arguably one of the most experimental pop stars of her generation. She’s not an artist that you would think is in it for the exposure. One can only speculate what her motivation was to do this. As Biesenbach has said, the museum asked her to do something as long ago as 2000 and she declined. Then in 2012, according to him, Björk decided that she was in a place where a mid-career retrospective was more appropriate. But there’s no explanation why such a show is more justified now than in 2000 or 2030.

SB: Beyond being a let down for fans like myself, I think MoMA missed the opportunity to show a significant artist with respect to her craft and Björk’s work wasn’t able to help MoMA succeed in branching out towards new media. Björk’s work might not be your taste, but I think she is one of the first and few artists who have successfully used computer technology to talk about how human we are. This exhibition doesn’t reveal this at all. I would have liked to see an entire floor in the museum be dedicated to dark rooms and only sound.

TS: It just didn’t have a specific character to it and there were strange spaces in between the objects and galleries, such as a corridor that didn’t lead anywhere. I constantly wondered if I missed sections of the exhibit and reexamined the program to investigate. But I hadn’t. It felt both claustrophobic in the rotunda and scattered in the other parts, including the display of instruments from Biophilia, which is also the first app in MoMA’s collection. You might have noticed the instruments if they happened to be playing when you walked by, but if not, you could have easily missed them.

The show is supposed to be a “cutting edge, audio experience.” MoMA staff greeted us at the beginning of the exhibit, effectively explaining the audio device we wore on our ears and hanging around our necks. The advanced technology tracks you and senses where you are in the exhibit and triggers the audio, obviating the need to look down to device and fumble with it, which is smart.

SB: The concept sounds incredible, but in reality I found that songs and storylines were switching up too fast and unpredictably. As soon as I was getting into a song and turned, the next track started and pulled me out of the moment. It didn’t flow organically.

TS: I was confused by the narrative, which I assumed as I walked through was a story of Björk’s life as a child emerging into womanhood, only to find out later that it was actually a made up narrative made up by an Icelandic writer, one of her friends. It was simply fiction posing as an autobiography and what confuses me about that is some of the early stages in the exhibit had personal photographs, journals and writing, which made it very easy to assume that the narrative was equally autobiographical. I felt deceived afterwards. Why do we have to make up a narrative and if we have to, why don’t we take it even further? Björk’s songs always push boundaries.

But I think of Björk also as a visual artist — nearly as much a pioneer in her visual presentation as she has been in music. She has an incredible daring in her experimentation with video and certainly in her fashion sense and costuming. there is always collaboration in her projects — with Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Alexander McQueen, etc. — however, she is a visual vessel.

SB: She’s a great sourcer and channeler. She taps into a certain kind of zeitgeist and then finds very interesting collaborators to create something unique. In a way her albums can be considered curated exhibitions, not just in terms how the music unfolds from song to song, but how she goes about developing the accompanying imagery.

TS: You would never want to start one of her songs in the middle for example. You want to drop the needle at the beginning and play it all the way through. But “Songlines” only gives sporadic snippets of her music, partially drowned out by an invented narrative in voiceover, written by somebody else. And, as we were talking about earlier, there’s no complementary focus on objects. Those on display serve as mere props to her art. There’s the infamous, ridiculed swan dress she wore to the 2001 Oscars — but is that’s not what she’s really about. Things like that feel quaint. Why show her swan dress, when showing the process of creating Dancer in the Dark (2000) would be so much more enlightening?

SB: I wanted the installation to reflect what Björk is about, but also to capture some of the unique sense of spectacle she creates.

TS: It seems a jarring contrast that this inadequate presentation of her work would coincide with the release of her ninth solo record, Vulnicura (2015) which resonates with an almost painful depth of catharsis and courageous personal exploration. We understand that one of the album’s songs, “Black Lake,” is essentially an expression of the dissolution of her union with Matthew Barney and the fracturing of her family. That’s pretty much the most blatantly autobiographical Björk has ever gotten in her work. And one can only imagine the impact of the live experience of this album in concert. But the contrast between the album and “Black Lake” in particular and this cramped cluster of exhibit rooms was jarring. Two different leagues entirely.

SB: I think that “Black Lake” is incredibly moving and shows Björk at her best: A beautiful song about a heartrending story, framed by a stunningly desolate Nordic landscape, and yet with a glimpse of optimism at the end.

TS: No question in my mind that the video for “Black Lake” was the highpoint of the show, because it was an uninterrupted experience with dynamic, masterful sound design by Marco Perry, who uses 49 loudspeakers divided into groups around the room. It’s the one instance of this show utterly nailing something. Sitting through it on the floor, taking in the video amid a mind-blowing sound system, took my breath away. It was sensational. A totally immersive experience. Perry told me that the objective for him and Björk in that space was to create “a rarefied atmosphere, like walking onto the moon and hearing the sound of the stars.” Something tells me the entire exhibition would have been electric if the rest of it had honored that objective.

SB: I think that it was the only successful collaboration between Björk and MoMA. The museum commissioned it and stuck to her natural medium: music with a narrative video. I was moved by the rawness of emotion you find in the lyrics and her voice, as well as on film. In it, we see Björk age: she portrays a middle-aged woman now finds herself left vulnerable and alone, lamenting the death of her family, as she knew it. This is not a young girl or a vain attempt to cling to youth. It’s an incredibly gutsy project for that fact alone. Some people might say that some of the scenes seem melodramatic or lean towards kitsch, but those who’ve experienced a similar emotion at some time in their lives will know better. It’s a pretty sober portrayal by Björk’s standards and that was probably the most surprising discovery of the show for me.

TS: “Black Lake” succeeds on many levels. It offers a magnificent experience. We got a sustained piece of music. The sound in the room was truly immersive and powerful and detailed. They did a phenomenal job of bringing the potency of her music to vivid life without it being uncomfortably loud. Perry explained to me that it was as elaborate of a sound set-up as was possible for a room that size. The sound is literally all around you in a way that I have never experienced before.

SB: I experienced the sound very physically. It was almost as if it pulsated in my veins, as is if it infiltrated my body.

TS: Absolutely. It was such a potent sound design that even outside of the room you could still feel that whole section of the museum vibrate from the low frequency components. It rumbles the glass balcony and lends an inadvertent excitement to other sections of the exhibition without you knowing where it’s coming from.

SB: The use of two-channel projection worked well, too. You have to choose which one of the synchronized screens to watch, but the effect is that you always have a light source behind you. You are sandwiched between the content of “Black Lake,” which is inescapable.

TS: That’s a good point. It all feels very exposed. You watch an intimate scene you might rather not be witnessing, but you can’t pull yourself away from it either. It reminds me of Fassbinder or Cassavetes‘s anguished scenes of human emotional breakdown; but you also see her striving to avoid being crushed completely. For Björk to allow herself to be exposed like that is brave.

SB: And this sense of raw exposure is also reflected in the fact that her upcoming New York concerts are all being held during the day. It’s an unusually sober hour for rock n’ roll shows.

TS: Yes, one of the seven concerts is going to be at noon at Carnegie Hall, for example. You have breakfast, walk into the concert in broad daylight, and exit into daylight. That’s very unusual in rock. Her new album Vulnicura is heavily electronic and it was produced by two young London-based musicians: the Haxan Cloak and the Venezuela-born DJ Arca. It will be interesting to see if they will join Björk in concert or if these performances will reflect the stripped and raw quality we find in “Black Lake.”

SB: I wanted to see more of this raw quality at MoMA. Maybe the problem was that the bureaucracy that comes with the realization of a major museum exhibition proved stifling to Björk, for whom MoMA is not the ultimate temple for her particular craft. Maybe the problem was that MoMA mainly aimed for a blockbuster, weighing the success of David Bowie’s retrospect at the Victoria & Albert, Alexander McQueen at the Met and Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” at MoMA, along with Björk’s internationally famous name.

TS: I’m sure that this retrospective couldn’t have had Björk’s full attention. It felt like in some ways she had a hand in it, but in other ways she let them lead, and because of that it felt somewhat half-baked. The collapse of her family and the construction of a new album that documented that very painful chapter in her life must have taken up most of her attention and energy during a time when this show was coming together as well. Albums as detailed and elaborate and passionate as hers do not happen over night and it must have taken her attention away from focusing on her art museum debut and retrospective, which seems to belong more to Matthew Barney’s world than hers. It’s a strange dichotomy to present what feels like a fairly frivolous retrospective in conjunction with Björk’s most personal and gutsy album, Vulnicura. Presumably, her music will transcend MoMA’s squandered opportunity.

The post Björk at MoMA: A Conversation with Todd Simmons appeared first on artcritical.

May 2 saw the season finale of The Review Panel at the Nationa Academy Museum. Stephanie Buhmann, Mario Naves and newcomer to the series Saul Ostrow joined moderator David Cohen to discuss shows dotted around Manhattan, taking us from the Lower East Side, via Soho and Chelsea to 57th Street.  The shows under review: David Maisel: History’s Shadow at Yancey Richardson, John Newman: Fit at Tibor de Nagy, Jackie Saccoccio at Eleven Rivington’s two spaces and Allan Wexler: Breaking Ground at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.  The panel will be back for its tenth season at the National Academy in September.  Sign up to our bulletin to be the first to know the details.

The post May 2014: Stephanie Buhmann, Mario Naves and Saul Ostrow with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

Stephen Mueller, abstract painter of exquisite poise and art critic of insightful, affirmative precision, died on Friday after a relatively short battle with lung cancer.  He was a week shy of turning 64.

Eight of his sumptuous, at once subtle and exuberant watercolors are currently included in the group exhibition, “Papertails” curated by Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond, on view at NYU’s 80WSE Gallery on Washington Square.  Last year he was the subject of a well-received solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg, where he had shown his work since 2007.  Reviewing that exhibition in these pages, Stephanie Buhmann observed how, with solo shows by Thomas Nozkowski and Brice Marden as neighbors, Mueller’s show was “a wonderful intervention in a gallery-to-gallery symposium concerning the nature and experience of abstract painting.”

Born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1947, Mueller had studied at the University of Texas, Austin before taking his masters at Bennington College, Vermont.  Bennington was then a hotbed of a Greenbergian formalism “shoved down your throat” as he told Joe Fyfe in a 2002 Bomb magazine interview.  His subsequent career can almost be defined as a running battle between aesthetic purism and engagement with visual culture. But rather than resulting in tension, this collision course of values seemed to result in a harmony that was all the more sweet and intense for its complexity.

In his mature work – which was characterized by vibrant yet ingeniously modulated color choices and increment-free paint surfaces (or in the case of watercolor, ethereal yet sumptuous stain) – the imagery manages to be at once cosmic and decorative. Typical compositions would see mandalas floating amidst audacious plaids.  The sensibility, however, was not an abrasive one of postmodern incongruence.  Rather, he traded in a kind of tantric gaiety that could collapse the boundaries between kitsch and the sublime.

Mueller brought similar qualities to his art writing as to his painting, most notably a kind of sophisticated naïveté in which he could develop somewhat off-the-wall comparisons and formulations while paying close attention to the mood and intention of the work under review.  His writings were published with some regularity in Art in America magazine, Gay City News and, in seven cherished contributions between 2003 and 2007, here at artcritical.  His writerly tone managed to combine deadpan delivery and almost impish enthusiasm.  His conclusion to a joint review of shows by Deborah Kass and Dana Frankfort from four years ago around this time of year (the post Labor Day rush) is a timely reminder of the purpose of making and seeing art: “The implications and issues raised in both of these shows are far ranging and quickly become quite deep. They are both a lot of fun and offer several fertile fields for painting to grow in. Don’t miss them before the shows come too thick and fast to detect an issue or an implication.”

The resolution of opposites in both his art and his criticism was for some of a piece with Stephen’s deportment, in which a seemingly somber and taciturn manner actually proved a foil for a lust for life and an unfailing generosity of spirit.

Click Here for a complete list of Mueller’s writings at artcritical

The post Mandalas Amidst the Plaids: Stephen Mueller, 1947-2011 appeared first on artcritical.

February 17 – March 19, 2011
525 West 19th Street
New York City, 212 727 2070

In the past decade, Marcel Dzama has largely become known for intricate figurative drawings in which, with an unusual blend of charm, humor and bite, he depicts a vast array of distinct characters and fabled creatures. Walking trees, owls, nurses, bats, bears, cowboys, ghosts and even snowmen are among signature protagonists that inhabit a world rich in exotic adventure. Scenes range from somewhat whimsical to outright dark and it is Dzama’s strength that he is able to stage a complex spectrum of emotions. His figures can find themselves entangled in both moments of tenderness and extreme tension – the latter usually defined by sexual aggression or even lust for murder.

Though “Behind Every Curtain” remains true to Dzama’s vocabulary, the exhibition documents the artist’s continuous search for new twists and ways to channel his vision into different media. To start, his new drawings reveal an increasing affinity for complexity and density. Most are made of adjoined sheets of paper or scrolls. In addition, large clusters of figures fill out almost the entire picture plane and evoke mysterious patterns. The backgrounds, which were formerly left spare, now contain inscriptions, fragments of linear structures and charts. By layering his compositions, Dzama introduces a notion of spatial depth that is further explored in his dioramas.

Closely related to the drawings, these captivating objects also assemble large groups of figures. Organized on different planes and depicted mainly in shades of red and gray, they form a stark contrast to the architectural structures, which are left white. Much of Dzama’s oeuvre translates as a serious study of play and the dioramas function as miniature theaters, onto whose stages the artist projects his imagination. But Dzama has never been interested in presenting his audience with ordinary narratives. His characters might have personalities, but they hardly serve as storytellers. As is the case in dance, it is primarily the expressiveness of their gestures that conveys meaning. Their actions seem rooted in the abstractions of a dream rather than in reality. This makes for a Surrealist undercurrent, from which Dzama’s increasing interest in Operatic drama emerges.

Over the years, Dzama has repeatedly avoided categorization. Even during his formative years in Winnipeg as a co-founder of The Royal Art Lodge, an artist collective whose members would collaborate weekly on drawings and sculptures, Dzama was devoted to versatility. Be it due to simply embracing unabashed experimentation or the more conscious striving for creating a Gesamtkunstwerk, Dzama’s quest is without doubt always genuine.  That does not mean that all his ventures have been equally successful. His paintings for example always felt a touch awkward, trying to translate the drawings into the new medium but lacking the same technical finesse. In contrast, his dioramas appear as a natural extension of the language he originally set up on paper and his films have also quickly gained in sophistication. The music video he directed with Patrick Daughters for the band Department of Eagles in 2009, being one of the most prominent examples.

This exhibition culminates with “A Game of Chess”, Dzama’s fourteen minutes long homage to Marcel Duchamp’s favorite board game. Incorporating Dada references, Bauhaus aesthetics, and nods to Oscar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet of 1922 and the Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin, Dzama’s dramatic black & white projection depicts performers dressed in geometrically designed costumes. Concealed by elaborate masks, they dance across a checkered board, each delicate ballet step registering like a staccato. The film has its entrancing moments, aided by the fact that the music weaves together seamlessly with the visuals. Again, the narrative gives way to an overall orchestration of emotions. However, the weight that the exhibition puts on this work is distracting. “Behind Every Curtain” leads the audience through rooms filled with drawings, dioramas and rotating sculptures, finding its crescendo in a large screening room in the back. This layout transforms Dzama’s other works into mere props to his latest film. This does not serve Dzama well, as it is his unique trail of thought, not one sole work that is the most impressive.

Ultimately, there is much to discover in “Behind Every Curtain.” While there is a large group of simply stunning works, the most crucial realization one takes from the exhibition is that Dzama remains an artist with a wide-open path ahead. He has set his stakes high by breaking away repeatedly from what he knows. One can expect that this approach to art making will lead him to both repeated success and error. Considering that the former came to him early, while still in his twenties, it is refreshing to know that he allows himself to find the latter as he matures. He occasionally might stumble, but he certainly will get stronger as well.

The post The Orchestration of Emotions: Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner appeared first on artcritical.

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Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, Stephanie Buhmann, and Peter Plagens joined David Cohen to discuss James Casebere at Sean Kelly Gallery, Sherrie Levine at Paula Cooper Gallery, Wangechi Mutu at Gladstone Gallery, and Roxy Paine at James Cohan Gallery.

The post November 2010: Anderson-Spivy, Buhmann and Plagens with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

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Stephanie Buhmann, James Kalm, Greg Lindquist and Jennifer Riley joined David Cohen to review Annie Leibovitz and Ron Mueck at the Brooklyn Museum, Darina Karpov at Pierogi, and Mark Esper at Dam, Stuhltrager.

The post January 2007: Stephanie Buhmann, James Kalm, Greg Lindquist, and Jennifer Riley with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.