Curated by Phong Bui and Rail Curatorial Projects
October 10 to December 14, 2014
220 West 18th Street, between Seventh and Eighth avenues
New York City

When reviewing contemporary art exhibitions, we critics normally adopt tunnel vision, occluding our awareness of the features of the gallery space to focus on works of art themselves. The art gallery, as Arthur Danto rightly observed, “is generally not itself a further object of aesthetic scrutiny or pleasure and, lest it distract from the objects it makes accessible, it aspires to a certain neutrality.” This is why the floors in Chelsea are typically concrete; the bare walls white; and the plain rooms brightly lit, sometimes with skylights. Recently, of course, some gallery shows have tampered with the conventions of this familiar white cube. But none so dramatically as “Spaced Out,” which violates all of our well-entrenched expectations. The ground floor is covered with Jim Lambie’s vividly multicolored vinyl tape installation, while downstairs wall-to-wall there is a fluffy pink cotton candy colored carpet. The ceiling is pink and the walls of Red Bull’s irregularly shaped galleries are bright pink, turquoise, and yellow. For some time, Darren Jones and I have been writing a book about the contemporary art gallery. We are interested in the history of these spaces, and in interpreting their aesthetic, political and sociological significance. And so we have been particularly concerned with locating galleries that in one way or another challenge our expectations. But none were remotely as challenging as “Spaced Out.”

In his book Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art (2011), which I reviewed in these pages, Ken Johnson surveys a great variety of art made, or at least seen, under the spell of drug experiences. (A number of the artists he discusses — for example: Chris Martin, Bruce Pearson and Fred Tomaselli — are also in “Spaced Out.”) But Johnson doesn’t analyze gallery spaces as such. When I reviewed the book, I was puzzled to understand how such very varied artists all could be influenced by drugs. Bui’s installation presses analysis into the roots of visual psychedelic experience, in a more revealing and, I think, a more satisfying way. In effect, it turns our normal perceptual experience of the gallery inside out, with the art accenting its gallery setting rather than the other way around. Rather than being objects placed in space, a container for aesthetic experience, that is what we see as if we were high. In that dramatic way, he achieves unity for this exhibition of very varied works of art.

There is a lot of strong work by well known artists in “Spaced Out” — Peter Saul’s Raccoons Paint a Picture (2011-2012), Deborah Kass’s Do You Wanna Funk with Me 1 (2006), and Lisa Yuskavage’s Given (2009) for example. But although none of these artists are shrinking violets, in this setting, the spacey effect of their individual works is reinforced by being presented in what becomes the stunning total visual work of art, the gallery site. Radicalizing the style of  “Bloodflames Revisited,” his recent curatorial adventure at Paul Kasmin, Bui here constructs a space, which foregrounds the gallery, setting the works of art in the background. Reading the description before I entered at this exhibition, I was sincerely puzzled about how to understand it. I wasn’t sure what the art by these very varied artists, as varied as the figures in Are You Experienced? would have in common. How, I wondered, could Robert Gober’s Untitled Candle (1991), Fred Tomaselli’s Diary (1990) and Will Ryman’s Infinity (2014), a mixed media installation, all be about psychedelic experience? But when I came into the gallery, that question was answered. The art here is about psychedelic experience — and so is the installation. And so your eye runs around the space, without ever finding a resting point, an effect that is exhilarating. At the opening, on a gray fall day, my vision was transformed. It is hard to imagine a better artistic commentary on psychedelic experience.

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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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A Mercedes just burst into flames, right in the interior middle. Mercedes are kind of universal, right? In movies and on the news you always see members of a junta or cartel kingpins or threatened pro-Western dignitaries or suspicious CEOs riding around in Mercedes. And then you see the blackened husks of those cars in the aftermath of civil strife. They often provide a kind of proxy for the bodies we don’t see on the news. There are, perhaps, burned Mercedes in Syria, Mexico, Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere right now. The fire just kind of leapt up. The space around the car is totally undefined blackness and the flames spread and there’s no sound except for roaring and crackling auto combustion. There are few cuts in the video and you just see the fire engulfing the car as the camera pans back and forth. Pretty quickly it’s an inferno spewing sooty black into the night sky. The video was made in Vietnam, which, along with its neighbors, Thailand and the Philippines especially recently, has experienced more than its share of violence. The tires are burning and the paint is puckering with boils. The camera gets really close, circling the car. Have they drained the oil, the gasoline and other flammables from out the vehicle’s organs? Could it explode? Superflex is from the Netherlands, where you probably see scenes like this far less often. But if they had Mercedes in the 17th century, there would have been Dutchmen torching them. Lawrence Weschler’s essay, “Vermeer in Bosnia,” does a great job at piercing the myth of still reflection in Dutch masterpieces, reminding you that just outside his beautiful paintings Vermeer’s countrymen were conquering the world (including Vietnam) and setting it up for the kind of crises that lead to flaming luxury sedans today. The tires are gone on one side; the thing takes a contrapposto stance in the darkness, fire still chewing at the headlights and guts. It’s still burning when the credits start rolling. All this happened in about eight minutes — is it in real time? How long does it take to completely destroy a car and leave only a charred skeleton on the roadside, rebels trudging past, for civilians to ponder the horror of?  NOAH DILLON

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It’s been almost a year since Hurricane Sandy wrecked havoc on New York City and much of the East Coast. Artists were effected in a number of devastating ways: from water-clogged homes and studios in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to decades-worth of work lost in flooded Chelsea galleries. Phong Bui, artist and publisher of The Brooklyn Rail is recognizing this anniversary with Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Year 1, a benefit exhibition that is more in the spirit of celebration and solidarity than somber remembrance. Conceived in partnership with the Dedalus Foundation and Industry City, the show features more than 300 artists, roughly half of whom were directly affected by the storm, across a remarkable range of disciplines and career levels. Bui himself lost years of work and much of the Rail’s archive in his flooded Greenpoint studio. The two-month exhibition will also be the site of  poetry readings, film screenings,  musical performances, talks with conservators, and other cultural events.

Exhibiting artists include: Marina Adams, Susan Bee, Katherine Bradford, Mike Cloud, Cora Cohen, Tamara Gonzales, Ron Gorchov, Josephine Halvorson, EJ Hauser, Michael Joo, Alex Katz, Ronnie Landfield, Chris Martin, Carrie Moyer, Nari Ward, Wendy White, Richard Serra, and newer faces such as Becky Brown, Allison Ginsberg, Heidi Howard, Osamu Kobayashi, Brie Ruais, Gabriela Salazar and Nicole Wittenberg.

The opening of Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Year 1 is Sunday, October 20 from 4 PM to 8 PM.

Industry City is located at 220 36th Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The exhibition is open Thursday through Sunday, from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM , and will run from October 20 to December 15, 2013

For more information and a full schedule of events, please  visit: www.cometogethersandy.com, or email: info@dedalusfoundation.org

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Photographs by Robin Siegel, Installation shots by Allyson Shea, Report by David Cohen
click any image to activate slideshow

A Mark Greenwold show is hardly less rare than a new painting from this OCD master of minutiae:  to give the fellow a normal-sized show you pretty much need to stage a mini-survey.  That’s what his new dealers,  Sperone Westwater, have done for the veteran fantasy realist on the third floor of their Norman Foster-designed railroad gallery on the Bowery, in a show that takes its title from a line of Stanley Cavell’s hand-inscribed at its entrance: “The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.”

His admirers were out in force the Friday night of Frieze weekend, including a number of sitters in his bizarre psycho-dramas.  Amongst the latter category were Chuck Close and James Siena who besides their visages and birthday suits also contribute to Greenwold’s visual vocabulary in the form of their trademark pictorial marks – Close’s lozenges, Siena’s algorithmic zags – that the artist uses as kind of thought bubbles hovering over his dramatis personae’s heads.

In his New York Sun review of Greenwold’s last survey, at DC Moore Gallery in the Fall of 2007, artcritical editor David Cohen wrote in terms that still apply that “Mr. Greenwold revels in capturing each hair on a dog, or each thread in a carpet, with a nutty regard for exactitude

Like psychoanalysis, around which these strange dramas revolve, Mr. Greenwold’s painting mode supposes that no detail is to be ignored and that time is no object. Psychoanalysis is the key — if not to decoding these bizarre, narcissistic soul dramas, then at least to understanding the strange genre in which they occur. For Mr. Greenwold’s pictures occupy an ambiguous space nestled between allegory and narrative. Each of the figures feels highly isolated, and yet each one plays a function in relation to the action unfolding around them all.

On view at 257 Bowery between Houston and Stanton streets, New York City, 212.999.7337 through June 28, 2013

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Svetlana Alpers, Phong Bui and Linda Nochlin joined David Cohen to review Silvia Bächli at Peter Freeman, Inc., Michal Rovner at PaceWildenstein, Catherine Sullivan at Metro Pictures, Jeff Wall at Marian Goodman Gallery, and Dan Walsh at Paula Cooper Gallery.

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PHONG BUI
Sarah Bowen until August 7 (210 N. 6th Street, between Driggs and Roebling Avenues, Brooklyn, 718-302-4517).

For all his extreme, at times arid, cerebrality, Sol LeWitt has a soft spot. The Minimalist who helped define “conceptual art” – literally, in landmark statements of the 1960s, as well as visually – Mr. LeWitt creates works that are severe, reductive, and anti-expressive. Yet the echt geometrician is nevertheless a sensualist at heart: Both the romantic and classic sides of his artistic personality come across in his latest murals, his largest to date, which show him both at his most sumptuous and rigorous.

Wall-drawing has been a key component of Mr. LeWitt’s output. Early in his career, they were part of the fashionable drive against the bourgeois, conventional easel picture: Rather than produce a commodity, the drawing was an event. The purchaser received an artwork intentionally balanced between idea and thing.

A trademark characteristic of a LeWitt wall drawing is that it be executed by a team of assistants. In place of anything so old-fashioned as a “touch,” what came from the master’s hand was a set of instructions. The usual results entailed serial blandness: dull, even-paced hatching or grids, and simple math.

But at a certain point Mr. LeWitt, famous for the stated ambition of making “art that’s smart enough to be dumb,” added to his aspirations the desire to make something he could show Giotto with pride. By the 1980s, a new sensuality set in. His murals became gaze-enveloping installations of saturated fresco color. His stand-alone drawings, often large-scale gouaches, admitted vaguely loose, wobbly lines and shapes, with a gestural or at least vaguely organic shape vocabulary.

The new murals, site-specific, or at least site-sensitive – they fill the available walls, at 16-1/2 feet high and 27 and 34 feet wide – have relentlessly matter-of-fact titles: “Wall Drawing #1166 Light to Dark (Scribbles)” and “Wall Drawing #1167 Dark to Light (Scribbles).” His titles are not merely descriptive but instructional. Made by a team of 15 assistants, these works are built out of loose, irregular scribbles. While this allows for some personality in the line, the fact of a whole platoon of scribblers curtails individual expressivity.

Density is tightly determined by the artist, who stipulates the number of layers and the H and B factor of the graphite pencils used within gridded-out circles. The light areas are barely touched with oscillating lines, giving the faintest sense of activity. The thickly clustered darker areas are animated by little flecks of whiteness where wall remains inviolate. The murals, placed at 90 degrees to one another, read like pulsating orbs: a giant eye and an exploding sun.

These huge works evoke a sense of mystery, not despite but because of the transparent, simple, contained way in which they are made. The squad of doodlers under Mr. LeWitt’s meticulous but trusting direction have lent their labor to a sublime mix of ego and egoloss, wildness and control. As such, the murals belong in a religious tradition of art as a picture of the universe. Can’t speak for Giotto, but I was impressed.

Mindful, perhaps, of its reputation as a valhalla of graying avant-gardists, PaceWildenstein has a summer group show of relative youngsters, many of them newcomers to the stable. Although not officially acknowledged, the selection seems a deliberate complement to Mr. LeWitt, if not an homage. Tim Hawkinson, for instance, an inventive humorist in the tradition of Jean Tinguely, has a giant eyeball whose iris is made from converging green disposable pens, some of them icons of design from the era of Mr. LeWitt’s entry upon the scene. It almost reads like a riff on the Minimalist’s new murals.

Mr. Hawkinson’s giant, 10-foot-by-12-foot “Studio Wall Drawing: JANUARY 2005; “ALL FROM ONE (PROTOTYPE ZIGGURAT)” PIECE FOR DIONYSIAC SHOW AT P” (2005), whose colon like squiggle-shapes also read as a sardonic comment on the purposive doodling of the LeWitts. “Nebulous” (2004), a floor piece of honeycomb structures in Scotch tape by Tara Donovan, a pair of untitled pigment ink-jet prints by Corban Walker of computer-generated circles – one proceeding from light to dark, the other from dark to light – an uncharacteristically broadbrushed gouache by James Siena, and an elegantly sparse Kiki Smith of bronze-cast doilies and poetic text all look too much like spin-offs of Mr. LeWitt to be a coincidence.

Mr. LeWitt isn’t the only artist in town presenting a modernist slant on frescos: Phong Bui, showing at Sarah Bowen in Williamsburg, has an installation that’s a kind of walk-through cubist collage. Mr. Bui is a legendary force in the art world, not least as the founder/publisher of the Brooklyn Rail, an art and literary journal of record.

In fact, he is so ubiquitous a figure on the scene and so active in many fields that you could be forgiven for assuming that actual art-making must now be his violin d’Ingres. Recent installations – “Night Flight #1” in last winter’s American Academy Invitational and now “Hybrid Carnival for St. Exupery #2” – put paid to that prejudice: Spunky, zestful, historically informed, and personally inventive, these genre-busters are in equal measure physically, formally, and emotionally ambitious.

The installation features boldly colored triangles which tease the walls with varying degrees of flatness, trompe-l’oeil depth, and actual, architectural protrusion. The experience evokes the heady, early years of Modernism: Along with Cubism, “Hybrid Carnival” is pleasantly haunted by Schwitters’s “Merzbau,” Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International,” and Van Doesburg’s “Cafe Aubette,” making it a kind of Lascaux of the infancy of abstraction.

In addition to his potpourri of nursery and primary colors, Mr. Bui has added text and texture to his installation by playfully inscribing in florid, delicate lettering the names of all the historic figures and living art-world personalities that have influenced him: a gesture true to many people’s experience of the artist as an incorrigible name-dropper.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 21, 2005

LeWitt and Summer Group Show

Bui until August 7 (210 N. 6th Street, between Driggs and Roebling Avenues, Brooklyn, 718-302-4517).

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