March 9 to April 15, 2018
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, nyss.org

“BICYCLE LANE CLOSED PROCEED WITH CAUTION” is emblazoned on a firehouse red police placard flexible enough to buckle slightly at the point at which it’s fastened to a similarly hued plastic barricade. The signage and street furniture are off duty, variously nested, falling over each other or willy-nilly abandoned, cordoned off by more orange in the form of trestles and cones. Huddling up to this scrum is an alien, though still color coordinated object that takes its chances in the street like a parked vehicle. It is, in fact, something familiar to aficionados of the author of the photograph being described, Diana Cooper: one of her few freestanding sculptures, Speedway (2000-03). At its reverse the sculpture is also furniture-like, albeit with warped functionality, exposing a dollhouse grid of cubbyholes, but on the side visible in this photograph it is a veritable Mappa Mundi of circuitry and squiggles that encourages the illusion of a vortex at its center. As if all this perspectival overload were not enough, in the distance a fantastical mural can be spied in which gnarled tree roots frame a naively rendered cityscape intimating streets beyond the street.

Packing a semiotic punch, this photograph marks the bottom right corner of a salon hang of over four dozen disparate smallish pieces in two and three dimensions (vents and meshes being popular starting points for the sculptural objects) to constitute Wall Piece (2018). This show-within-a-show aggregate (something Cooper has done before, incidentally, in an accumulator piece titled “Watch Your Step,” 2012) Wall Piece is the most recent of the 13 works in “Gleanings”, a 21-year overview of this intrepid “explorer of situational geometry,” as the critic Barbara Pollack has described the artist. Pulling back to reveal a contained scene that is, itself, but a microscopic detail of a larger picture could, indeed, be deemed Cooper’s trademark idiom. Such micro-macro progression, now familiar from the periodic repixilating of Google Maps, proceeds within and between works such that a given Diana Cooper exhibition is a teeming matrix of focal points, layers, associations.

Photography, with its clean, mechanical precision, is very much in a minority among Cooper’s mediums: Most of her work, in this show and beyond, is resolutely handmade in a way that refuses to disguise the human agency of the maker, although there is no effort, either, to achieve expressivity or a projection of selfhood. Her touch has the casual obsessiveness of a visionary – nerdy, dutiful, sometimes urgent, other times repetitive, always matter of fact. Her vision, on the other hand, is systematizing, committed in earnest to taxonomies of form and function. There is something almost unnerving about the way the found and the fabricated cohabit within this artist’s soul: It is as if she operates within one mode for organization and another for execution, to produce something simultaneously neat and ambiguous, clean cut and mushy, scientific and craftsy.

She is not alone in the contemporary landscape in the pursuit of either mode. Born in 1964, she is five years junior to Jessica Stockholder, with whom she shares a formalist willingness to misread, color code and otherwise redesignate as raw things cooked already by the culture that produced them; and senior by the same number of years to Sarah Sze who plays similar games with scale within exquisitely precarious ecologies. Cooper stands alone, however, in the starkness of her split.

One way of making sense of this divided sensibility is to think of everything she makes, regardless of size or resolution, as a sketch. It is as if she didn’t get the memo that drawing has an end, in both the sense of a place where it ought to stop and in the sense of a preparatory function. Whatever medium a work of hers seems to inhabit – in terms of dimensions or impact or scale – it remains within the orbit of drawing. Recalling Jean Baudrillard’s fable so popular at the time of Cooper’s education, it is as if she is mapping the world to scale. Even in the earliest piece in the show, The Black One (1997), a painterly work executed on canvas, the support expressively activated in areas of tearing and lacing, with a metastasizing sculptural protrusion in black pipe cleaner, the quality of line is insistently graphic. This is equally true of the cutout or taped lines in reduction works like Façade (2016) or Silver City (2010-13). Drawing, it would seem, is Cooper’s way of being in the world.

But drawing would seem to occupy a spectrum in Cooper, the axes of which are collage and doodle. The street scene with which we started extends to photography a collage mentality, one that juxtaposes environmentally encountered banalities and personally generated marks in a string of associations. The doodle, on the other hand, pulls back – at least in its moment of becoming – from the clarity and purposiveness with which the artist organizes and orders materials, amongst which, ultimately, the doodle will be one more. Nonchalant, resigned to a state of semi-consciousness, fiddled but unfussed, the doodle is yarn from which imagery is spun.

Overdrive (2007) a mammoth double-sheeted framed drawing 80 inches wide in ink, colored pencil and marker, is a tour de force of doodling, reveling in the oxymoron of that designation. Recalling Mark Bradford in its cartographic density, it reads like a stack of maps on transparent pages where somehow lines and patches bleed between layers, the choice of red abetting such sanguinary, cellular associations. The drawing relates to an important sculpture/installation in Cooper’s career, All Our Wandering (2007), a telescoping ziggurat of red cubes whose exposed interior physically literalizes the receding planes suggested by Overdrive. Addressing her love of maps, systems, color coding and the like, Copper has said (in interview):

Systems are a way people try to make sense of things or create order. They also are all around us, in the natural world and in the man-made world, and I am intrigued by how they intersect, echo one another, or come into conflict. But I am less drawn to the specific content or narrative of a given system, which for me is just raw material. In fact, I am interested when something like a diagram or a graph disassociates itself from its origins and becomes something else entirely.

Some commentators have argued that, by hand rendering complex systems, Cooper re-humanizes them, both mitigating their oppressive impersonality and exposing their fragility, and thus the vulnerability of those who depend on them. This is a valid though somewhat reductive interpretation as it detracts from the inner logic of drawing. A more compelling way to view the relationship of the handmade and the systemic that incorporates the seismographic aspect of the artist’s hand is to think of the doodling, sifting, categorizing artist as a cog within a bigger machine, a cell within a pulsating organism, a spider in her web.

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February 22 to March 31, 2017
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
fordhamuniversitygalleries.com

Carleen Sheehan has curated a small but intriguing exhibition at Fordham that brings out new ideas from two fearlessly inventive artists, Diana Cooper and Lee Boroson, each better known for large installations. Cooper’s relentless assemblage practice, a thoroughly original kind of 3-D doodling that began with large felt-tip drawings but grew to encompass sculpture and photography, has been colonizing walls and floors since the mid-1990s. Here she shows a barely contained wall piece and projects a fascinating site-specific video, her first work in that medium. Boroson’s installations have often included enormous pneumatic elements that encroach from the ceiling. He outdid himself with a breathtaking installation in 2014 at Mass MoCA, Plastic Fantastic, which filled a football field-sized gallery with symbolic, alchemical transmutations of industrial materials back into base elements –– air, water, fire, and earth. For Prismatic Shifts he works comparatively fast, cheap, and out of control –– and small! –– but with the same drive to reclaim synthetic matter for nature, through organic metaphor.

It can work the other way around too. The maple twigs in Boroson’s Ruderal Object (all works 2017) are cut at zig-zag angles and reattached into bebop rhythms. A ruderal plant is one growing in wasteland; the breezy way the vivisected twigs are balanced on a slight steel armature, interspersed with mirrored disks and colorful foam-core placards, transforms forgotten weeds and studio leftovers, as it seems, into music. His Clear Cut also makes use of tree parts, with a forest of cut logs supporting an undulating tabletop. Here, though, Boroson digs into sculptural mass and patient construction. The curvy top element, extruded with accordion folds of paper like an automobile air filter, gives off a Roberto Burle Marx vibe, with tropical color provided by a collage of circles made from notion-shop ribbons, sliced into small angled sections and joined polygonally. The overlapping circles of vivid color standing out on the clean white table top recall tree growth rings, rain drops in a pond, and synesthetic Arthur Dove foghorns. Their psychedelic quality makes one also want to imagine them as beautiful drink stains from the aftermath of a party.

Cooper’s Undercover, a reworking of a wall piece first shown in 2010, serves as a sampling of her goofy constructivism, and of her color-coordinated palette of diverse materials –– most of them, as with Boroson, synthetic, including foils, gels and plastics; grids, dowels and corrugations; fasteners and tapes; and, as always, ink. Amid the dense, primarily black and white complex of layered silhouettes and graphic filigrees, a small photograph of a glass door recurs. Beyond the door is a curving pedestrian bridge, conceivably a campus-scape from the original installation site. A discreet black belt bars the way, however, and the phrase “Emergency Exit, Alarm Will Sound” is superimposed on the glass. She has shown increasing interest in institutional architecture and surveillance, simultaneously as critical subject matter and raw object matter. Here, the dysfunction of the glass doors, proffering escape while denying access, mirrors Cooper’s enigmatic, possibly absurd attempts to possess space through transparent films and overlapping framings. A sort of coda, detached to the right of the main body of Undercover, thrusts a kludged-together, “off the wall” extension arm forward holding a translucent version of the photo, as if the image were appearing on a security monitor.

The show is strongest where the artists respond to the site. For Breach, Boroson uses a high window in the gallery to hang sewn strips of velvet, a cascading coat of many colors, which spreads onto the floor like a waterfall. Boroson has re-imagined cascades of water in a number of impressive fabric works, but all of them have been monochrome. In the Bible, Joseph’s coat was torn, drenched in goat’s blood and shown to Jacob as proof that the favorite son had been killed by wild beasts. The more pertinent Bible myth put in play by Boroson’s hand-made elementalism is, of course, the Flood. Still, blood and betrayal can be read into Breach’s implicit warning about climate change, with the gallery’s high window resembling a basement vent from which nature’s spectacular wrath pours down, as if from rising seas.

As noted, Cooper’s untitled 9-minute video (2016-17) is the artist’s first work in that medium. It is so successful that one wonders what was holding her back. Using footage of an escalator bank across the lobby as raw material, much as she uses plastic gridding or multiple snapshots, she creates mesmerizing patterns through division and multiplication. Foreshortened close-ups of the meshing treads, repeated in mirror image again and again, produce uncanny spatial folds and faults across the visual field.

One minute, two conflicting shots share the screen; the next, a hundred video boxes of the same shot make a collage of grids. Just when a pattern achieves a kind of Rodchenko-like clarity or Jeremy Blake-like drama, however –– that is, when we forget about the escalator and see only abstract forms in motion –– Cooper changes things up, unhinging obvious symmetries and bringing us back to the curious facts of institutional architecture and artistic impulse. You can see the escalators through the gallery’s glass doors, and you can hear their lonesome mechanical breath. The sound track of the video is the site itself.

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David Brody, Paddy Johnson, and Peter Plagens joined David Cohen to review shows by Francis Alÿs at David Zwirner, Song Dong at Pace, David Shrigley at Anton Kern, and Diana Cooper at Postmasters.

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Postmasters
459 West 19th Street (at 10th Avenue), New York

March 5 – April 2, 2005

Any beekeeper can tell you that when the bees in a hive become too numerous for the space available, all or some of them will leave to begin a new colony elsewhere. Their en-masse activity is called swarming, and it usually occurs after periods of rapid population growth due to fertile surroundings and favorable conditions. Presumably, Diana Cooper experienced such an optimal environment in Italy last year as a Rome Prize winner, for it is clear that she has been busy populating her brain with new artistic ideas. Some of Cooper’s new concepts have emerged from her creative comb and taken up residence at Postmasters Gallery in Swarm, her aptly titled, first New York exhibition since her return from Italy. It is a honey of a show.

There is one dominant piece in each of the gallery’s two rooms. The other works are seen in relation to the dominants—like Workers hovering around their Queens. In the first room, the viewer is immediately drawn to the graphic vibration of a large, predominantly black and white installation that shares the show’s title. As the name suggests, many relatively small parts act in unison, giving the work a swirling, dynamic energy. Like the hexagons in a honeycomb, recurring forms play a major role in the dynamic strength of Cooper’s works. In this installation, a chorus of chevrons and rounded, technological looking shapes soars along the walls and the floor. Like almost all the pieces in the show, it is remarkable in its complexity, impressive in its overall form and demonstrative of another trait that Cooper shares with bees: an ability to build intricate, marvelously engineered constructions using simple materials. Bees use wax; Cooper uses mostly corrugated plastic, cut paper, felt and foam core.

In the second room, Orange Alert: USA is the royal in residence. Its bright orange presence spans the room from floor to ceiling, emitting a visual hum that commands attention, almost impelling viewers to kneel in respect. There is even a pair of felt strips projecting straight from the base of the piece to a cushion that could be used for genuflection.

Or, maybe the pad is meant for introspection. The most memorable components of Orange Alert: USA are small windshield-like objects made with foam core frames and orange gel panes. Visible through them are red felt shapes that look like distant spiky mountain ranges. While four-wheeled travel and far away mountains have symbolized American optimism since the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada highlighted the horizons of settlers in covered-wagons, in this work, the tables have turned. Red mountain ranges, whose contours resemble turbulent economic charts as much as picturesque peaks and valleys, seen through orange windshields, all in front of a fealty pillow, provide a striking combination. Shall we take a knee and contemplate whether instead of seeing things through the rose tinted lenses of late 20th century sanguinity we now huddle behind worldview windshields colored in the orange-alert chroma of caution?

Maybe, but Orange Alert: USA is flying solo in terms of subject matter; geopolitics and economics are not obvious themes in this show. The real common denominator here is the complex visual lyricism Cooper achieves in coupling technological shapes with organic rhythms. In title and in appearance, Mechanical Cloud sums up this intriguing partnership. Its combination of angular and rounded forms brings to mind disparate elements such as circuit boards and cell structures, subway maps and snakeskin patterns; and marries them harmoniously. Tropical Depression, Trapped and Untitled (The Emerger) are all similarly successful, evoking a wide range of imagery including electrical schematics, fungal colonies, topographical maps and urban planning diagrams. All of these pieces, like good Worker bees, function well both individually and as a part of the group, supporting and strengthening their Queens.

But every swarm includes a few Drones: haploid bees that do nothing but mate and die. Genetic placeholders, they are like DNA vessels that pass genes to the next generation without contributing new traits of their own. It is a testament to the quality of this Swarm that only one such cipher exists here. Moving Targets in Black and White functions more like a receptacle for Cooper’s artistic stem cells than as a finished piece. It will no doubt grow into something as beautiful and alluring as any of the other pieces in the show, but it is underdeveloped and has been unfairly asked to hold a wall by itself. It would be interesting in an exhibition of studies, or as part of a documentary on Cooper’s studio practice, but it cannot compete with the other works in this show.

Overall, it is evident that Cooper has been as busy as the proverbial bee in constructing wonderfully engaging and interesting works. If she keeps up her pace, the buzz will be about how her visual sting hurts so good.

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