May 27 to September 7, 2016
1071 Fifth Avenue, between 88th and 89th streets, New York City
www.guggenheim.org

In addition to a kaleidoscopic retrospective of one of the last century’s towering aesthetic figures, the Guggenheim’s Moholy-Nagy survey also serves as a history of the reception of abstract art in the United States. The prescient eye of Solomon Guggenheim is noted in the wall text of one 1926 canvas, which had hung – like so many of the Hungarian’s works – in the Museum of Nonobjective Painting, precursor to Lloyd Wright’s spiral temple of modernism. His work had likewise hung at the Brooklyn Museum’s Exhibition of Modern Art, organized by Katherine Dreier and the Societé Anonyme in 1926. It was thus with a keen sense of his achievements in a stunning array of media that the artist himself eventually landed on these shores, as an exile from Hitler’s Germany in 1937. Perhaps no other individual embodied more emphatically a kind of intermedia experimentation than László Moholy-Nagy, who not only helped to introduce the avant-garde to the United States, but navigated numerous, seemingly inimical strains of modernism from the start of his career.

Some of the artist’s early works on canvas make plain his attention to the very objecthood of the support. Tilted Fields (1920-21) interposes bands of unprimed and unpainted canvas with diagonal lozenges of paint, effecting not only a dynamic pulsation of geometry but also a sense of the materials at play. Featuring wheels, pulleys, and other apparatuses, some collages from around the same time reveal Moholy-Nagy’s interest in the mechanomorphic imagery of Francis Picabia. While Picabia’s ambivalent treatments of modern machinery might seem diametrically opposed to Moholy’s earnest, lifelong dedication to the utopia of technology, the long arc of works on display makes plain spirited, and often lighthearted, dimensions which leavened the seriousness of his experiments. Moholy’s mesmerizing 1922 photomontage, Structure with Moving Parts for Play and Conveyance, evinces the sensibility of an artist as sympathetic to the work of Raoul Hausmann and Jean Arp as to the eventual productivist strains of Russian Constructivism. But while the works themselves – and the energy between them – remains crackling even in its coolness, the exhibition’s installation dampens some of the dialogue that might have been staged between its wide-ranging components.

Right from the start, a replica of Moholy’s most renowned inventions – his kinetic sculpture, Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1930) (often referred to as the Light-Space Modulator),– is cordoned off in in a walled-in small room off from the ramp. The viewer is plunged in media res, into a proposed construction of Moholy’s “Room of the Present,” a consummately modernist installation developed in 1930 but never realized. Bearing curving glass panels, perforated metal grills, and numerous panels of montages, film stills, and posters – both by Moholy and by others – the star curiosity of this futuristic cabinet is the Light Prop, which exemplified Moholy’s ambition to use light as a “new plastic medium.” The star of its own film by the artist, the Light Prop proposed a radical new integration of time and space, aesthetics and technology. Its seemingly incidental position here is egregiously anti-climactic.

To be sure, we find some of the Light Prop’s geometric integuments echoed right away in numerous paintings lining the museum’s upward spiral. The surfeit of these various Construction paintings, however, appears at times to reach overkill. The exhibition’s chronological tack accounts for this concentration. Still, the curator might have intercalated these works with some different, and relatively contemporaneous, work, to striking effect. For if any oeuvre bears the record of simultaneous experimentation in seemingly endless media, it is that of Moholy-Nagy. Nearly all of the show is grouped according to medium rather than motif, even when there is overlap in production. The eventual appearance of Moholy’s “photoplastics” – his pioneering photomontages of the mid-1920s – thus comes as a relief to the mediumistic monotony in this hang. The industrially produced enamel paintings from 1923 alsobear numerous points of contact with the contemporary works on canvas, as does his legendary 1921 sculpture, the Nickel Construction. All of these respective examples were displayed separately. The curator seemed more preoccupied with highlighting the ever more rarefied (or workaday, as the case may be) nature of Moholy’s material supports, from Galalith, to Rhodoid, to Trolit, to other unpronounceable industrial plastics.

At any rate, the number of photoplastics displayed together here affords an unprecedented consideration of their innovation, and their intersection with other of the artist’s experiments. Drawing upon Dada and international Constructivism in equal measure, they suggest just how much a sense of play and fantasy endured at the Bauhaus, due in large part to Moholy’s presence. Largely missing from the exhibition, however, is a sense of his legendary pedagogy. Some wall text accounts for his prodigious activity at the Bauhaus, which he joined in 1923 at the behest of Walter Gropius, who tapped him for the precociously technological orientation of his aesthetics (in contrast to the more mystical expressionism of former Swiss master Johannes Itten). We have to make do with a few Bauhaus publications consigned to vitrines. The somewhat awkward display is further exacerbated by the emptiness of numerous bays, in favor of large gray panels, mounted on spindly piers and placed at an angle. While these allow for a closer look at the paintings and other objects, they are incorporated less than gracefully.

Like so many of his contemporaries, Moholy-Nagy found his burgeoning career suddenly buffeted by the rise of Fascism. Shortly after the newly established Nazi regime shuttered the Bauhaus in 1933he relocated first to Amsterdam and then in 1935 to London. The range even of his advertising commissions is staggering, evinced in everything from posters for the London Underground to color coded price tags for a Berlin department store. While undertaking commercial work to support his family, Moholy pursued experimental work in some striking films from the early 1930s, in addition to writing on the modernist possibilities of the medium. Berlin Still Life (1931-32) reveals streets scenes and piles of garbage, while his Architects’ Congress (1933) documents a gathering of the CIAM (Congress Internationale Architecture) in Athens. Here again though, the films (transferred to DVD) were tucked off to the side, around a corner from the ramp and out of sight. Already in his own time Mohly-Nagy had complained about the inadequate circumstances in which some of his films were screened. At least his landmark Light Play (1922) enjoys a larger screen in one of the ramp’s bays.

Moholy’s eventual move to Chicago found him briefly at the helm of the so-called New Bauhaus, eventually redubbed the Illinois Institute of Technology. He soon took up an irrepressible interest in Plexiglas – a material whose banality nowadays belies what must have seemed an almost revolutionary promise. By turns scored/scratched and painted, many of his sculptures push the material past any merely decorative or formal faculties. Moholy coerces its folds to cast shadows, to serve simultaneously as frame, painting, and transparency. While the photograms he completed in Chicago remain striking in their experimentation, his paintings from the period often reach into garish corners of kitsch. Conversely, his experiments with 35mm Kodachrome film reveal how a relatively ordinary instrument could be turned to sophisticated ends.

Verging on the decorative, the increasingly whimsical tendencies of Moholy’s late paintings–before his untimely death in 1946 – suggest a recoil from the terrors ravaging the globe in the early 1940s. What must the artist – who had held such utopian expectations for technology, coaxed by art– only have thought of the uses to which machinery had been put in Europe’s apparatuses of liquidation? A glimpse of the porosity between dream and nightmare comes early in the exhibition. A 1918 crayon drawing on paper reveals a thick copse of trees, likely from the hills above the city of Buda. It long bore the title Landscape with Barbed Wire, however, as Moholy’s widow believed it to represent a view from the front lines of World War One.

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May 12 to July 29, 2016
514 West 25 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 941-0012

Five medium-sized paintings in the rear of the gallery break with Stephen Westfall’s familiar practice. Unlike more characteristic paintings such as Cortona (2015), with their coolly satisfying symmetry, the structure of these newer works display a strongly asymmetrical and relational pictorial composition. This exciting departure is a result of the artist’s experience of mural scale wall painting completed over the past several years where he has begun to break with pattern, to an extent, and has increased the role of white as a color. The site-specific murals completed at at Art OMI, Ghent, New York, in 2014 are examples of these.

There is also a faux comical undermining of seriousness, both in the titling of the show and in the deadpan paint surfaces. For a Modernist like Westfall, the strategy of linking high and low cultural narratives—constructivism and graphic signs—proves expedient in deflating grandiosity and productively opening influence to the vitality of quotidian environment. But originality is not dependent on novelty of technology and media. Westfall has achieved a singular style of painting that stands out for all the right reasons—it is compelling, arresting work—whilst not straying from already existing modes.

The diamond shapes, though recalling a harlequin design, represent an ostensible pattern that is broken through changes of hue and value. There is one color per shape, often now with the addition of white diamonds that when adjacent to each other create a context of figure/ground with the chromatically varied diamonds with which they cohabit. These consistent shapes, edited actively at the edge of the paintings’ rectangular limits, are converted into triangles of various sizes in proportion to the over all size of a particular painting. In The Future Advances and Recedes (2015), a central diamond shape is made up of four smaller diamonds, two aligned vertically, the top one deep purple, the lower one black. The horizontally aligned diamonds are a cadmium red and cobalt blue and can be read as eyes in a Paul Klee-like geometric head balancing on a diagonal of orange and yellow. The orange is a triangle formed by the lower edge of the painting bisecting what would have been another diamond. The orange and yellow flip to read also as a three-dimensional roof-like shape. The remaining triangle, taupe in color and to the left of the geometrical head as I describe it, skews what would have been otherwise a general symmetry of composition.

Color is liberated to function in a kinetic way through the simple devise of geometric shape. Thus articulated, color moves and reorganizes, as we perceive it, like a mobile turning through space. Like Stanley Whitney, an artist who structures color through geometry in a similar way, nothing is static in these works. Pages could be written simply to address what color does as one looks at it, the sensations it causes and the thoughts it elicits. An added quality is the perspectival lean that happens in a steeply vertical painting like Delta (2015): the narrow format and large scale of the contained shapes fragment the composition in such a way that there is no complete diamond visible, creating an almost sculptural column. That so much is possible still in the field of an expanded, inclusive modernism and its visuality is evident in considering this exhibition. Westfall’s change in direction only serves to intensify and enlarge his subtlety and range.

The post Diamond in the Smooth: Stephen Westfall at Lennon, Weinberg appeared first on artcritical.

January 22 to February 21, 2016
291 Grand Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York City, 212 714 9500

Mernet Larsen has been teasing us for a long while now with enigmatic, spatially-warped interiors: are they pure constructions or abstractions from daily life? Her bewitchingly plain, boxy people, the only possible inhabitants of such regimented spaces, are perhaps distant descendants of David Bomberg’s anxious Vorticist personages and Oskar Schlemmer’s utopian Bauhaus ones, as well as the lay figures of how-to-draw manuals and avatars in computer games. But they might not be as generic as they seem. Some have identifying features like beards and glasses that could hold keys to identity. Often their clarified, repressed gestures distill emotion. A recent show of Larsen’s paintings at the new downtown outpost of James Cohan Gallery staked a claim to conquered turf, freshly restating the terms of her practice. Clearly this lately minted star — it was the septuagenarian artist’s first show at a big-name New York gallery, and it sold out — is only just getting started.

One of the new paintings, Alphie (2015), substantially obeys what Larsen calls reverse perspective, her trademark disrupter of conventional pictorial space. This algorithm, in which objects get larger as they recede, is not easy to intuit. You can start by noting that normal perspective paintings, like Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ (ca. 1455–1460), use the very same grid, with parallel lines converging to a point. But Larsen knows how to booby-trap this grid so that, should she choose, she could restore the scale of Piero’s famously upstaged man-god, relegated to the rear, to his rightful priority.

Larsen’s eccentric viewpoints, if plotted conventionally, would actually be closer to Ed Ruscha’s Standard station or a vertiginous Jack Kirby Fantastic Four panel than to centralized Renaissance mises-en-scène. In Alphie, a perfectly logical, if Marvel Comics view of a brick wall hung with a foreshortened portrait rises obliquely on the left of a cafeteria scene. We are looking dramatically up, and can even see a bit of the ceiling. Yet figures sitting at tables — the main subject — are rendered on the grid as if viewed from above, the liquid in a wine glass and a coffee cup attesting to this dissonant gravity with level calm. No matter what you tell your eyes to see, the mapping of up onto down, and thus near onto far, feels dizzying and uncanny, quite aside from the weird proximity of the portrait-hung brick wall’s “normal” space, which somehow seamlessly amalgamates with the rest.

Reverse perspective began to appear in Larsen’s already spatially disruptive compositions around 2007. Patches of the technique’s compelling illogic might be construed in Roman and Byzantine painting, and in the work of El Lissitzky (whom Larsen acknowledges as a source for many of the compositions here), as well as that of Josef Albers, M.C Escher, and Al Held. Larsen’s fully worked-through reverse projections, however, are unprecedented, aside from in the fascinating paintings of Scott Grodesky, who has also made powerful use of the device for many years. On the other hand, no space is ever quite global in Larsen’s world, and in the group of paintings shown at Cohan, the artist seemed at pains to display all the tricks up her sleeve.

Punch (2016) is a variation on the dining theme, an interior of five rather bored friends around a circular table. As in Alphie, the nearest figure is the smallest, but it’s more that he and his two neighbors go upside down, ceiling-wise, while the table above bends magically back into an alternate, isometric gestalt.

With Chainsawer and Bicyclist (2014) Larsen explores even fresher ground. The ostensible subject is a suburban idyll or, alternately, a horror film depending on how one resolves a visual pun. Saul Steinberg would stage incompatible incidents along a single horizontal line, casting it sequentially as a marine horizon, the upper edge of a viaduct, a laundry line hung with clothes, and so on across a dozen pages. Larsen’s humor here is more devilish. The woman with the chainsaw is ominously poised to sever the bare linear logic of the room that contains her, and which also functions as a roadside curb to the oncoming, plunging bicyclist. With fewer shading cues than usual, Larsen lets axial geometry rule; we infer the bike’s front wheel only from a straight black swath, as if the wheel happened to be pitched and yawed just so. The imperiled line under the teeth of the saw barely holds the woman’s and the cyclist’s disparate spatial worlds together. Should time begin to flow, the speeding saw teeth would cut this slender fulcrum like the string of a balloon.

Such tensely buoyant dynamics are the rule of the new paintings. At any rate, they seem airier than Larsen’s previous acrylic canvases, which regularly included zones of impasto. Her current textures — degrees of astringency — are, if not quite as delightful, all the more decisive. Freehand or ruled pencil lines, as always, get the last word along crucial edges of figures, furniture, and architecture; the steely graphite joins Larsen’s smartly shaded planes of color, where needed, into Superflat inlay. Further evidence of the gnarly intellect of the artist’s hand was seen in a number of careful studies, collaged and gridded-off for transfer.

Along with thinner paint quality comes a new lightness of spirit, even overt parody. At any rate, the subjects have emerged from the claustrophobic basements of academe­­ — seminar rooms, linoleum-tiled corridors — into the great outdoors. Frontier (2015) with its rifle-thin riflemen quotes Barnaby Furnas’s Civil War figures almost too closely, substituting for Furnas’s angular bloodbaths the liquefied, queasy undulations of a deforested landscape. Misstep (2015) doesn’t depict the accident of the title so much as it cartoons the crisis of graduation, wherein a sturdy man and woman are sequentially falling forward, lemming-like, from a pixilated Minecraft cliff. Or, if you prefer, they roll off the end of an assembly line into the unknown.

In opening up and broadening their horizons, it must be said that many of the new paintings relinquish the uniquely pressurized sensation characteristic of Larsen’s previous work. But Reading in Bed (2015), in compensation, takes the psychological remapping of space to a new level, by bringing us into the quotidian intimacy of a couple’s domestic blahs. The wrongness of scale is right at home in the brooding disconnect between enormous, watchful wife and diminishing, distracted husband. As with the best of Larsen’s twisted, inverted interiors, one finds oneself — rather in the manner of the film Being John Malkovich (1999) — passing impossibly to the inside of another person’s head.

The post Built Differently: Mernet Larsen’s Strange Constructions appeared first on artcritical.

Manifesta, the European biennial of contemporary art, is held in Western European cities — most recently in Genk, Belgium. This tenth edition, hosted by St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, was housed in the Winter Palace and New Hermitage, the two main buildings of that institution and, across the enormous Palace Square, the city’s main plaza, in the newly renovated General Staff Building. The Hermitage, an encyclopedic museum celebrating its 250^th anniversary, is devoted to world art, going up to Post-Impressionism and the paintings by Henri Matisse; another collection of Russian art is in the State Russia Museum. Because visas are expensive, Russia is not readily accessible to many Americans and West Europeans, so the primary intended audience was Russian. There were a great many foreign tourists in St. Petersburg when I visited in late July, but relatively few of them focused on Manifesta.

Some of the artists responded to specifically to contemporary issues in Russian society. Alexandra Sukhareva, who is Russian, presented photographs from World War II archives. There is a video of a Russian dance class by Klara Lidén and a video of young dancers by Rineke Dijkstra. Boris Mikhailov presented photographs of a protesters’ camp in Kiev. The late Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, a gay artist who had been beaten up in the streets, was represented with Tragic Love (1993), a series of photographs of the artist dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Some foreign artists also offered Russian themes. Yasumasa Morimura made photographs based on drawings of the Hermitage when its art was removed during World War II. Marlene Dumas showed portraits of famous gay men including three Russians — Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Diaghilev and Rudolf Nureyev. Thomas Hirschhorn, whose Abschlag (2014) was designed for “Manifesta 10,” showed a gigantic collapsed building in which works by the revolutionary Russian Constructivists are installed. Erik van Lieshout presented the story of the Hermitage cats, longtime residents of the museum; they perished during the siege, but today are back in the museum basement, controlling invading rodents. And Francis Alÿs, whose boyhood dream was to travel from his native Belgium to the other side of the Iron Curtain, crashed a Russian Lada, a now-obsolete model of car into a tree inside the courtyard of the Winter Palace.

Facing controversy about Russian anti-LGBT laws and, also, about the country’s action in the Crimea, in interviews Manifesta’s curator Kasper König, who described Russia as “a repressive and authoritarian country,” articulated frankly the difficulties he faced. So far as I could see (I was not able to attend the performances or public performances, which were held outside the central exhibition site), much of the art, including most of the art by non-Russians was the kind displayed at such exhibitions in America. Certainly this is true of Olivier Mosset’s large, handsome monochromes; Ann Veronica Janssens’s very beautiful installations of floating liquids; and Vladim Fishkin’s A Speedy Day (2003), which compresses the twenty-four-hour light cycle into two-and-a-half hours, an effect especially evocative in far-North St. Petersburg, where the summer days are so long. The same can be said of Joseph Beuys’s Wirtschaftswerte (“Economic Values,” 1980), a commentary on food shortages in East German stores; Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage, 2001); Susan Philipsz’s piano recording inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which was played on the main staircase of the New Hermitage. Lara Favaretto’s installation of concrete blocks in the gallery for ancient Greek sculpture; Tatzu Nishi’s temporary wooden living room built around a chandelier in the Winter Palace, creating a home with the museum; and a painting from 1966 by Gerhard Richter made similarly affecting use of the site.

As the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, rightly notes in the catalogue, “Displaying contemporary art alongside the classics is a common occurrence.” The logic of this procedure deserves discussion. In the gallery of the Hermitage devoted to Nicolas Poussin you can see the relationship between his early Joshua’s Victory Over the Amalekites (1625-26); Moses Striking Water from the Rock (1649), painted more than 20 years later; and his Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1655-57), a marvelous example of his late style. Normally we thus find visually connected works in one gallery. When, however, the physically contiguous works are historically distant, imagination is then called upon to identify connections. This is true when Louise Bourgeois’s silver sculpture The Institute (2002) is installed alongside an etching by Piranesi and when Katharina Fritsch’s sculpture Frau mit Hund (“Woman with Dog,” 2004), which alludes to the life of Russia’s historical high society, is displayed in the former emperor’s private quarters. In a challenging variation on this familiar procedure, Maria Lassnig, Dumas and Nicole Eisenman occupied the two rooms of the Winter Palace usually dedicated to Matisse. (His paintings were removed to the General Staff Building.) They too deal with the female body and its sexuality, and so temporarily giving them his privileged place in the Hermitage counted as a political gesture.

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Inspired by Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and bringing in elements from Russian Constructivism as well as Modernism, Ohad Meromi ignites a passion much needed in today’s commercialized art scene. In his current solo show at Nathalie Karg Gallery on Great Jones street, Meromi presents works in mediums such as sculpture, installation, and video, creating a space oriented towards participation and gathering.

When entering, the gallery’s raw space seems quasi-empty. In the center of the room a 75-inch totem titled Grave Digger #23 (Primitive B, 2014) stands solitary. The totem is a gray primitivist female figure made of cast aluminum and mixed media, sitting on top of a plinth made of carved wood. The figure is in a squatting position; its eyes, brows, mouth, and nose are painted black, as well as its nipples and genitalia.

Meromi’s series of figurative “Grave Digger” sculptures was initially presented in 2010 at Gallery Diet in Miami, and was inspired by Andrei Platonov’s novel The Foundation Pit (finalized in 1930 but published only in 1987 due to censorship). The iconic novel traces a group of workers who are digging a foundation for an ideal building that epitomizes a picture-perfect future. In the novel, the pit becomes a political commentary towards the brutalities of Stalin’s collectivization of Russian agriculture, and is eventually revealed to be a grave for the diggers themselves. According to Marx and Lenin, the term “grave diggers” refers to a rising revolutionary class that will overthrow the ruling bourgeois order. The symbolic sculpture stands silent and erect and serves as guidance for the possible revolution of the proletariat, or as we will soon recognize — of the cultural producers in contemporary capitalist society.

Further in the gallery is Half Modular Dome (2010) made of wood, industrial paint, and concrete. The structure appears as a behind-the-scenes theatre construction. On its backside (facing the viewer entering the gallery) are yellow stickers of numbers and letters as well as assembly and re-assembly instructions that trace the dome’s previous functions. When built a few years ago, the dome was designed to transform Meromi’s studio into a rehearsal space, and to adapt to different venues to create a performative stage. Here, the dome divides the gallery space in two: a primitivist presence on one side and an improvised amphitheatre on the other. The centerpiece of the show, a 20-minute-long single-channel video called Worker! Smoker! Actor! (2010-2013), is situated behind the dome. The video combines stop-motion animation with recorded participatory performances from workshops held at Meromi’s 2010 solo show, “Rehearsal Sculpture,” at NYC’s Art in General. Meromi meticulously created all the elements in the film: the props, the architectural models of the protagonist’s hangouts, and even the complementing electronic video-game music and graphic intertitles. The story is pretty simple: a factory worker (performed by Jessica Lin Cox) wakes up in the morning, goes to the factory to produce American Spirit cigarettes, goes to the supermarket to get groceries, and then goes home to rest. The cycle of “production” is completed when the worker finds out she has lung cancer and is sent to a healing facility.

The notion of “work” and “rest” preoccupies Meromi and is addressed in a theatrical manner in this video in the form of the worker’s cigarette breaks. The cigarettes themselves then play various roles: they are the central element in the “working” process, they are the “resting” tools, and they are the toxic hazard that leads the worker to the resting resort. Meromi also uses text in the film in the form of placards based on Vsevolod Meyerhold’s actors-training method, called “Biomechanics.” These short texts, rewritten by Meromi to suit his narrative, raise questions regarding the existing division between labor and rest, and whether this division can be transformed. In one of the placards Meromi writes: “Every worker tries to expend as few hours as possible on labour and as many as possible on rest.”

House of Culture (2010), a 15-by-14-inch architectural model made of glass, concrete, and mixed media, is situated in the front gallery’s windowsill. The miniature building’s colorful stained-glass windows bring transcendent light into the gallery and a glow of utopian idealism into the exhibition space. In the last scene of the featured video, the worker gazes at the House of Culture from afar, and Meromi writes: “The very craft of the actor in an industrial society will be regarded as a means of production,” bringing the show’s vision to a final conclusion.

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