March 6 to April 21, 2019
55 Washington Square South
New York City, judson.org

Ahead of his career as an artist and critic, William Corwin dreamt of being an archaeologist. Admitting to an element of Indiana Jones in his fantasies, he was quickly put off by the science of the discipline and trained instead as an architect before segueing into art. Nostalgic for his earlier ambitions, perhaps, Corwin has conducted many interviews with archaeologists, counting Lord Colin Renfrew amongst several illustrious catches. Once the archaeology thing is understood, it is impossible to dismiss ensuing insights into Corwin as an artist as mere biographical fallacy.

Largely self-tutored sculptor, he who favors elemental, almost obstinately primitive modes of casting, carving and assembling in materials like lead, pewter and concrete. Almost everything he makes has something of the appearance of artifacts awaiting proper designation, of objects unearthed and dusted down as best they can for now, as much for the benefit of science as for aesthetics. Less creation than specimen, a Corwin is an “anxious object” in Harold Rosenberg’s sense of that phrase, teasing us with its own status and discharging clues as to what it might mean in the very unease it generates. In the vein of “artist’s artist” he is, you could say, an archaeologist’s sculptor.

The assembled characters on an improvised altar-like support at the Judson Memorial Church that has been on view in their sanctuary this Lent – part of the church’s series of commissioned residencies – conforms in spirit, despite being an art project, to Lenten prohibitions on iconography. Its obstinately plain sculptural forms partially shield the congregation’s view of the familiar carved angels on the wall behind. Traditionally attributed to Augustus Saint-Gaudens but likely by an assistant, these almost Hallmark Card-like, markedly feminine angels would in any case have been hard pressed to commune with Pazuzu flanking Seraphim (Flaming Creature), 2019, the three angel forms at the heart of Corwin’s group based on ancient Mesopotamian representations of Pazuzu, king of the demons of the wind.

Corwin’s seraphim – the six-winged angels of Ezekiel’s visions – parenthetically acknowledge in their title filmmaker Jack Smith’s queer classic premiered at the nearby Bleecker Street Cinema in 1963. This is doubly appropriate as Judson is a deeply gay friendly congregation and has a longstanding historic connection to avant garde culture. Judson had provided exhibition space for the likes of Rauschenberg, Oldenburg and Dine early in these artists’ careers, as well as rehearsal and performance space to Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer and other doyennes of dance, as something integral not incidental to their ministry. Greeting Corwin’s nod towards Smith with enthusiasm, the minister who oversaw the commission, the Rev Micah Bucey has written in his own bio statement at the church’s website: “I think Christianity is inherently queer and I paint my nails to show my commitment to a continual re-queering of the Gospel.” Flaming Creatures evidently landed in the right parish.

Unfinish and anti-monumentalism are key attributes of Corwin’s art in general, and Flaming Creatures in particular: his altar arrangement would have fit right in to the inaugural exhibitions of Met Breuer and the new New Museum respectively. At his most recent solo gallery exhibition, at Geary last year, “The Old Gods,” a strange mix of purposiveness and casualness permeated the mode of display. Resembling forlorn fragments at an excavation site museum, scrupulous rigor as to where a thing was retrieved won out over visual concern of how it might look best: a case of science trumping aesthetics once again. And yet, bereft of original context or function as they might seem, his strange hybrid forms often emit a charge greater than the sum of their material actuality. They are not so much provisional as contingent. It could be said that he collides the prehistoric trope of modernist sculpture (think of the menhirs of Hepworth or the precycladic kouri of Brancusi) with a postmodern penchant for nonchalance, for surface indifference.

Another trenchantly archaeological aspect to Corwin, besides process, presentation and state, is his layeredness. Objects and relations between objects come with varying and intersecting symbolic possibilities. The pervading sense, in “The Old Gods”, was of idols and artefacts from one order or culture incorporated by the next, their meanings reinterpreted; or else unearthed out of sequence, so that one era’s faith system jutted into the sacred space of another like stray guests from a different party. This conceit is revved up at Judson where the line-up of characters on the altar-pedestal resist coherent gestalt. This despite the fact that the arrangement is essentially symmetrical and hierarchical. A red seraph presides dead center to form a trinity with its cement-colored confrères, all three thrust aloft by rudimentary, scrappy yellow poles. A stacked, rope-bound stone piece (Teeth, 2018, in hydrocal and sand, from the Geary show) anchors the arrangement at the foot of the central seraph while a pair of sculptures bookend the pediment-forming ensemble, mounted on red pedestals. The other two sculptures break the symmetry, one by clinging to the side of the stone stack, the other by finding a center left position not echoed on the right. There is enough symmetry and regularity to induce a sense of missing figures, which would extend the archaeological conceit. If the vibe instead is of completeness, one doesn’t think of these strays as casually milling about so much as fulfilling some secret or obscured function within a ritual.

Disparate though Corwin’s characters, references and arrangement remain, they exude a sense of belonging to a given order. A sharper sense of juxtaposition occurs with the setting, and even there, somehow, there is the possibility of ecumenical coexistence, even between the hallmark angels and Corwin’s seraphim, cast in rigid foam, from 2019. The artist views his non-angelic personages, cast in lead from 2014-15, as the four evangelists whose corollaries — similarly contrasting in style to the Pseudo Saint-Gaudens and Corwin’s angels – are present in the rose window above the ensemble, in the only window in the sanctuary not by John La Farge (again, their authorship is not certain, though the favored contender is one D. Maitland Armstrong). The iconography follows the traditional attributes of the evangelists but with the twist of pre-Christian precedents, although that too has Christian precedence: Corwin’s lion for Saint Mark, for instance, is based on the Piraeus lion in Venice which that city had appropriated for their patron saint. The lead piece second from the left, resembling a blade to blade stack of axes, is, according to the artist, based on the Yipwon type of sculpture found among the Sepik River peoples of New Guinea.

The red of the presiding seraph and the end piece pedestals, and the yellow of the poles, pick up in the vaguely psychedelic marbling effect of the altar’s façade which adds another art historical clue to the lasagna of references, this time being a repeated fragment printed off the internet from Fra Angelico’s decorations of the San Marco convent in Florence.

With Easter fast approaching, and a congregation hungry perhaps for an unimpeded view of resurrected Victorian angels, Corwin’s modern/prehistoric interlopers must finally prepare to be packed away. A celebration of his residency is planned for Tuesday evening, April 16, 5-7.30PM

The post Angels for Lent: William Corwin at the Judson Memorial Church appeared first on artcritical.

WILLIAM CORWIN: The Aesthetics of Matter is the curated section of Volta. Mickalene and RC , you have zeroed in on the idea of collage, as well as the model of the artist’s collective as a vehicle for change. What historical models are you looking at?

RACQUEL CHEVREMONT: The Dadaists. Political turmoil really brought that movement together and a lot of the work was based around collage. Given the times we’re living in with the current political situation, especially as it relates to people of color; we felt that was a good model to follow.

Do you have any favorites of the Dadaist group?

RC: Hannah Höch.

MICKALENE THOMAS: I think of them as a collective and I don’t necessarily work out of them: it just makes sense to find an historical thread of how one would work when it comes to our political and social endeavors.

You’ve talked about collage as a political vehicle, can you give me your own definition?

MT: It’s making sense of all these things that are in your everyday life, in the sense of using this information—how does one decipher and use this information practically? To make sense of that, you take all of the components and you make it into your own. When you do this you are sourcing very various aspects of society: cultural, metaphorical and spiritual, and combining them in a pastiche; putting them together, which is collage.

For me, that’s what’s happening right now. As an artist in 2018, what type of art is one to make when you have a history of genres? Which genre would you pull from? If you look at a lot of painters today, they’re pulling from various genres trying to find their own voice—they’re trying to authenticate their own language.

RC: The #Metoo movement, Black Lives Matter, and then the political environment as it is, we needed to figure out how to make sense of all this information coming in. That was the other impetus for collage.

And the influx of technology?

RC: Social media, all of it, there are so many things going on that artists are having to deal with; collage is just what you naturally go toward.

MT: It’s a metaphor, something you can’t and shouldn’t always define, but you know it when you see it. For example, Devin Morris: when you look at his work, you would not immediately think of collage; but how he puts together the images, the sets, the space, and the performativity of the work. What’s executed is a photograph, but everything that went into making that photograph is collage.

How did you two co-curate? What was your process?

MT: It was natural: she would bring an artist to the table, I would bring an artist to the table, and immediately [snaps]. As soon as Racquel presented me with the work it was a must, and likewise [with my selections], and some of them we came to together. Naturally, we’re two women here, so I think out of the gate most people would think we’re going to have all women artists, and we would love to do that, but we wanted the work to be conceptually about groups of people, regardless of their gender and background, so you’ll see a really beautiful balance.

RC: There’s an MFA from Yale, then you’ll have someone who hasn’t even gotten a BFA.

MT: Some that are represented at galleries and some that don’t have any representation. There’s a dialogue with all of the work.

RC: It probably isn’t all that well known; we’re starting something called the Deux Femmes Noires. It’s an initiative to help bring exposure, and use our platform and visibility, for artists of color, in particular women. We all know, as a female artist, it’s extremely difficult to get funding for museum shows—a lot of museums don’t show women because of that—and then add to that being an artist of color, and then your odds go up even more dramatically.

MT: There’s a misconception that these funds are available, and then when you get to the door, you realize they are available, just not for you.

RC: We’re trying to bridge a little bit of that gap. We can’t do it all, but we’ve gotten to a point in our careers where we want to give back. We’re starting it off with this show at Volta.

Switching to the exhibition “Figuring History” at the Seattle Art Museum; it’s very rare to have the artist and the muse at the same table. I want to investigate that relationship. Several images of you, RC , are in the show, so I think it’s very a propos that we discuss this. How do you work together as the artist and the subject, what is that relationship like?

MT: It’s fantastic. It’s magical.

RC: I don’t actually feel like a subject, I feel like it’s a collaboration and we’re working together on it, so it’s wonderful.

You’ve been a subject many times before, Racquel, so you’re used to this in a way, being the inspiration.

MT: There was a lot of apprehension on my part to make and show some of her images. It’s for my own selfish needs, you know, not wanting anyone else to have any other images of her but me. A lot of these works come from previous bodies of work such as photographs and collages that I made three years ago, but I just had the creative space and the emotional space to gift them now. It is a gift from me to make a work of art of my partner, the person I’m in love with, the person who I’m growing with on all these different levels of partnership.

Do you feel like you’re giving part of that away?

MT: I was, but now I think it’s a great gift, because I’m showing the world what I feel and my connection to this muse, if you will. It was a lot of apprehension and resistance to present those, I was holding onto them for a long time.

Racquel, do you feel this apprehension, almost jealousy, in sharing this as well?

RC: I wish we could own all of them, but I do love that they’re going out there into the world. I am, we both are, very protective of them and where they end up, if they end up somewhere other than in our home. A part of it initially was she was nervous to paint me.

Were you nervous to be painted?

RC: I wasn’t because I love her work.

MT: I wake up with her, I was on eggshells: what if I paint her and she hates it? Or, the depiction is wrong, or something is awkward and she can’t stand it? All of that anxiety is around someone you love, you want to put them on this high pedestal. You want them to see it, and when they look at it, it speaks; it resonates; it glows.

What if she doesn’t like the image? Has that ever happened?

Both: No!

Mickalene, you’ve said that when you entered art school, you entered an abstract painter and you left a figurative painter. What caused that transition? What instilled that new found idea of the power of the image?

MT: Photography.

RC: I’m going to sneak in—I’m not sure she considers herself a figurative painter…

MT: Yeah, the use of figuration: image-maker, or one who uses representation. When I think of figurative painting I think of Eric Fischl and all those painters. I don’t necessarily look at the figure in the same way. There’s a different way of looking at, and seeing, the body that interests those particular practices that doesn’t necessarily interest me. But, I respect them. There is an element, a thread of that which comes into the work, but it stops at a certain point and I put it on the shelf because it’s about representation and the subject. What the subject embodies to me is most important: how I come into that is through photography. Using photography as a reference tool to make a painting was an avenue to how I approached using representation. I was making these crazy abstract paintings and I enjoyed making them. I received a pre-requisite letter in my mailbox as everyone does after their first semester at Yale that recommended that I take a photo class. I took that photo class and it changed everything.

I would never have thought that photography would be this huge facet of my work, every aspect from the collage to the installation to the painting is about photography, and I never imagined I would work out of that as a language. Thinking about materiality, concepts, and how I execute my work has lead into video and film. Though there are various disciplines I use in my work, there’s still that underlying thread that connects, and…that…is…collage [laughs]

Racquel, what is the motivating factor behind your practice as an advisor and a collector?

RC: I work within a narrow spectrum in the art world. I essentially collect African American, diaspora, and latino work. I began advising because there weren’t a lot of people that looked like me that were collecting. There are a lot of people that look like me who had the means, but didn’t have the interest. I thought it was really more that they didn’t have the [art] education and they weren’t told this was something you did. I began doing these salons in my home in Brooklyn where I would invite young people to come and listen to artists, curators, and other collectors speak.

While I was modeling I was travelling a lot. I wasn’t a party girl, so I wasn’t at night clubs. First off, I was reading investment magazines, and about art. I would go to every museum in every city I could—I was in Europe for a long time. The first few pieces I purchased were French artists, but then I got back to the U.S., to New York and really focused. I said “I’m going to build a collection: what do I want it to be when I’m no longer here, what do I want it to represent?” Mickalene was one of my early purchases; Laila Ali, Kehinde Wiley.

My passion is to make sure that people who look like us have a part in this history, and I felt they weren’t even being excluded, for the most part; because they weren’t even attempting to get involved.

The Aesthetics of Matter features Christie Neptune, David Shrobe, Devin Morris, Didier Williams, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Tomashi Jackson, Kennedy Yanko, Troy Michie. Figuring History also includes the artists Kerry James Marshall and Robert Colescott

The post “The Impetus for Collage”: A conversation with Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont appeared first on artcritical.

October 27 to December 17, 2016
510 West 26 Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 399 2636

In a show of new sculpture at Alexander Gray, Siah Armajani has made the gallery a mortuary temple stocked with the tombs of two poets, one philosopher, and one martyr. The sculptural/architectural proposition of the tomb has traditionally encompassed both subversive and normative figures from Alexander to Oscar (the Great and Wilde, respectively), so his choice of Arthur Rimbaud, Frank O’Hara, Richard Rorty and Dietrich Bonhoeffer doesn’t stray from tradition. Still, the act of publicly commemorating cultural figures via intricate and monumental sculptural tombs certainly fell out of favor over the course of the 20th century, so Armajani’s pieces, invoking wit and anger with his crisp visual riddles rather than melancholy, is a welcome return to one of humanity’s more enduring tropes of visual culture. The artist’s process is on display in the exhibition as well, with preparatory drawings presented alongside the executed sculptures, but this decision posits much more of a quandary: while the two-dimensional renderings of the monuments are arresting in their sharp orthogonal perspective, their inclusion, as well as that of maquettes for the larger works, primarily serves to double the number of objects in the show and display a variety of scale that is largely irrelevant. In an architecture exhibition, drawings and maquettes are included because the final product isn’t. Armajani is not an architect, he is a revolutionary in terms of the direct connection between politics, life and art which he insistently draws in his work, and the inclusion of these Lilliputian doppelgangers only serves to create a false sense of the magisterial controlling master plans that are the bane of most monumental architectural projects. Armajani’s sculptures, despite their aspirations to the eternal and their sleek signature aesthetic, are humble, deeply heartfelt and personal.

Do the tombs evoke the individuals they represent, or are the titles more of a playful allusion to the artist’s own intellectual meanderings? It’s hard to tell: Armajani expects a lot of his viewers in terms of background knowledge.Tomb for Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2016), a sleek vermillion coffin on black sawhorses, clearly evokes the courageous minister, fitted with a noose, which was the instrument of his martyrdom at the hands of the National Socialists. The tombs of Rorty, Ribaud and O’Hara are not quite as explicit. Tomb for Frank O’Hara (2016) is a jolly affair and a much looser interpretation of the tomb — five disembodied and legless chairs emerge from two tables implying a late-night drunken conversation. The presence of a dark casket arbitrarily placed on the white tables pulls the whole assemblage back to the funereal; but this surreal centerpiece serves to heighten the absurdity, again directing the mind towards a besotted Irish wake rather than an eternal resting place. Tomb for Arthur Rimbaud (2016) also is a play on furniture-as-sculpture, lifting the everyday to the monumental. The “punch line” or pivot around which the piece moves is a pink and baby blue ramp or distorted table, perhaps alluding to Rimbaud’s youth and melancholy nostalgia, as well as his overall surrealism — in this tomb there is no box for a corpse.

The philosopher’s tomb, Tomb for Richard Rorty (2016), is the most architectural, and by that token the least sculptural; a large beige box stands atop a scaffold, like a fisherman’s hut on a pier, while the end of an umber coffin emerges from a rectangular orifice in the side. Both the coffin and its housing are not completely opaque: there are sizeable chinks between the wooden slats allowing for a visual permeability that negates the monolithic quality of the massing. How this is related to the father of neopragmatism is anyone’s guess though. It does seem a very pleasant dwelling place for the hereafter.

Written Iran (2015-16) and 100 and 1 Dead Poets (2016) utilize text in much the same ironic way that the artist repurposes furniture (and, to a subtler extent, architecture). In both cases, Armajani uses words to construct a fabric: in the former, text becomes an urban expanse, and, in the latter, an abstract pattern punctuated by a few small drawn objects referring to the text. As with the tombs, text becomes the jumping-off point of visual experience, and what the words actually say is sometimes less important that what they symbolize or the individual who wrote them. Written Iran brilliantly hops back and forth between the proposition that the city is a regulating geometry and presentational structure for the writing versus the words supplying the building blocks of the city. Armajani’s bridges and towers, recurring images for the Iranian-born artist, function much in the same way — their obvious but limited practicality only serve to highlight their metaphysical and textual meaning as beacons and links between people. In his sculpture, Armajani emphasizes a clear but limited color palette — and one that seeks to visually delineate the different parts of the construction — rejecting the idea of unifying the form through a sameness of medium but instead outlining a narrative by distinguishing the multiple parts and aspects of the piece. This brings a depth of vibrancy, warmth and humor to a dauntingly titled series.

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July 21 to August 12, 2016
185 Varick Street (at King Street)
New York City

William Corwin’s chunky objects, fragmentary assemblages, and thematically installed aggregates are discursive, and recursive works. A veritable time traveler, the knowledge that fills his heterogeneous, interdisciplinary, and multicultural sculptures veer from the mystical to the mundane. His point of view is both speculative and rooted in history and Western Metaphysics. Meanwhile, his aesthetic is intentionally crude, sometimes verging on the abject.

On entering his current exhibition, which is titled “Champollion”, we are greeted by a single rectangular slab-like, translucent sculpture in Lucite. Illuminated by lights installed in its pedestal, the somewhat abstract, minimalist Double Doors of the Horizon is neither pristine, nor like so many of the other objects in the show rough-hewn—unique in its form and materiality, it duly stands on its own. The two parallel holes that pierce the upper third make it resemble a scale model of the swinging kitchen doors in a restaurant, or, perhaps, the peepholes through which one views Marcel Duchamp’s Etant donnés. Given its title, neither referent rings true, however. These are, instead, the doors of perception through which one passes in the quest for awareness and transcendence. What lies beyond, literally, is a large stepped display-stand, made of rough construction grade plywood. This structure, placed on the diagonal, occupies the center of the gallery. It has three tiers on one-side (facing the gallery’s door) and two in the rear. Its top surfaces, on which Corwin has installed his sculptures, are painted a bone white.

The show’s title, “Champollion”, is references Jean-François Champollion, the French Egyptologist who deciphered the Rosetta stone. Hieroglyphs are a pictorial form of writing in which each image is a complete concept. From this we may conclude that Corwin’s objects consisting of pre-existing bits of detritus and iconic references are meant to combine to create a new category of hieroglyph. If we are to unlock Corwin’s ideographs, he seems to be telling us we must engage his works as if we were archeologists and cryptologists. In this endeavor, we are left us to our own devices, without a lexicon. The collection of objects that make up Champollion consists of small sculptures cast in lead, plaster and resin – each material exploited to a different end.

These objects invite categorization by format and structure. For instance, Juggernaut or Rath Yattra (2013), Herm (2013), Ouroboros (2014) HDT (Henry David Thoreau) 2013 and Bathtub Madonna (2013) are all cast in Hydrocal, and are monochromatic and cube-like, with each side consisting of an assemblage of images in relief. Madonna, (2016) Lion (2016) and Man (2016) are freestanding figures cast in different materials, whose images are somewhat deformed by the process of their production and by their roughly worked surfaces. Ox, Eagle, and another decapitated head (St. John) (all 2015), are still life-like objects with smooth surfaces and cast in lead. All of these works are relatively small, the largest being Herm at 17 inches tall.

By using parts to designate whole concepts, and things, Corwin’s sculptural hieroglyphs can be said to constitute a visual shorthand. Subsequently, in Bathtub Madonna he has embedded into an irregular brick structure, a bathtub Madonna — a time honored lawn ornament in working-class, catholic neighborhoods. The work is in the powdery blue color associated with the Madonna. In this manner, Corwin joins together the sacred and the profane. Reciprocally, the four castings of the single image of Lion raises questions about its possible referent. Ancient Abyssinian sculptures of seated lions, used as temple guardians, come to mind, and from here one may think of Haile Selassie, venerated as the Lion of Judah in the Rastafarian religion. This connection to Selassie has to do with the idea that among the differing races that descend from Noah’s son Ham’s children were the Cush from whom the Ethiopians are descended. This game of associations, and connections runs through Corwin’s works, bouncing back and forth within each piece, and between them. Corwin recently spent time in Ethiopia where he visited various biblical sites.

In the end, in part because of Corwin’s crude or improvised manner, I could not resist thinking of this installation as being a post-apocalyptic society’s display of objects representing its mythic history and origins. In this scenario, Corwin’s hieroglyphs are comparable to the role the book “The Wizard of Oz” plays in the movie, “Zardoz“ (1974; dir. John Boorman), or the mash up of Celtic Mythology, St. Eustace, and Punch and Judy in Russell Hoban’s novel, Riddley Walker (1980). In both cases, totally misunderstood narratives come to serve as models not only for cautionary tales, but also for the reconstruction of society. If this interpretation in any way corresponds to Corwin’s project, then central to this endeavor is an attempt, on his part, to make sense of the existential appeal of the ontological and the mythic.

The post Doors of Perception: William Corwin at Geary Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.

To represent concurrent and complementary group exhibitions from curator William Corwin, here is a work by an artist in neither. Perverse, I know, but bear with me.

Cyborg, now in its closing week at Zürcher Gallery, does indeed include three photo/text pieces by Juliana Huxtable, the model of Frank Benson’s 3-D printed sculpture pictured here. (In the course of writing this article, Benson’s Juliana emerged as the final ARTCRITICAL PICK for 2015.) Benson’s work, voluptuous and ethereal in equal measure, was the presiding presence over the 2015 Triennial at the New Museum and feels a fitting cover image in the dwindling days of a year joyfully marked by increased transgender visibility. But that isn’t the theme of either of Corwin’s exhibitions.

Cyborg unites disparate contemporary visions of man/machine hybrids, going well beyond cinema’s Vitruvian conception (Metropolis to Ex Machina) of the robot. The show encompasses everything from Michel Huelin’s visually overbearing computer renderings of post-nature environments to Cordy Ryman’s stark yet engrossing walk-in representation of the digital binary in relief panels of alternating and repeating bars of color; and from Tamar Ettun’s disconcertingly “other” casts of the artist’s isolated body parts to Corwin’s own sculptures eerily evocative of the phantasmagoric-vehicular vision of Ezekiel that, as he recounts in an essay, he found himself discussing with Huxtable in her studio during the planning stage of his show.

While Cyborg deals with the future of embodiment, with the literal conquest of death, Devotion, at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, concerns itself with visual contemplations of afterlife in a traditional if uber-ecumenical religious way. It is a glorious jumble of contemporary works, ranging from Roxy Paine hyperrealist sculptures of mushrooms and Elizabeth Kley ceramic lanterns and Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels’s rood screen dividing and cramping the gallery’s commercial premises into an approximation of a sacred space to Mike Ballou friezes of birds and a psychedelic throne by Rico Gatson, among others, with Russian and Romanian icons from the Tabacaru family collection thrown in for good measure. Some of the works are overtly spiritual, but many are joyously press-ganged into ritualistic duties in a curatorial installation that is itself a hybrid, to extend the metaphor of Cyborg, of chapel and wunderkammer. Taking a cue from Corwin’s curatorial energies, therefore, the Benson-Huxtable hermaphrodite thus presents itself as a connective tissue between the two shows, a vision of harmony of human will and biological grace.

Cyborg at Zurcher Gallery, December 1 to 29, 2015. William Corwin, Anthony Gormley, Katie Holten, Tamar Ettun, Juliana Huxtable, Michel Huelin, Mike Cloud, Cordy Ryman. 33 Bleecker St, between Lafayette Street and Bowery, New York City, (212) 777-0790

Devotion at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, November 21, 2015 to January 17, 2016. Mike Ballou, Joe Brittain, William Corwin, Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, Elizabeth Ferry, Rico Gatson Elisabeth Kley, Rachel Monosov, Roxy Paine, Joyce Pensato, Katie Bond Pretti, Carin Riley, Paul Anthony Smith, Justin Orvis Steimer, Gail Stoicheff, Sophia Wallace. 250 Broome St, between Orchard and Ludlow streets, New York City, (212) 260-2481

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September 19 to October 24, 2015
287 Spring Street (between Hudson and Varick streets)
New York, 646 345 9831

At the center of “Alula in Blue,” Tamar Ettun’s exhibition at Fridman gallery, wedged between the two columns, is a giant ballast. Tied in place with chords and kept inflated by a perpetually blowing fan, the piece Blue Bubble (all works 2015) resembles a stomach or a lung, made from a parachute. Perhaps it was the combination of bright colors, glossy and glistening plastics and the profusion of body parts strewn throughout the gallery, but Ettun’s solo show left me feeling as if I had been dropped into an encompassing and deconstructed version of the always eagerly anticipated childhood game of Operation^®. Dispersed throughout the gallery is a working body that breathes and masticates, touches and digests. Orbiting around the inflated-parachute piece are wall-hung sculptures and free-standing totems, with a pair of vignettes in both window spaces. The entire show was constructed on-site from Ettun’s magician’s bag of components. While it was a living breathing body, it is also a handbook for interacting with “foreign objects.”

As with all contemporary user’s guides, a DVD is also included: A Mauve Bird with Yellow Teeth Red Feathers Green Feet and a Rose Belly, is a 13-minute performance created during a Watermill Center residency this past winter. Ettun’s dance ensemble, The Moving Company, features seven dancers in shimmering stretchy blue dresses, performing outdoors. Moving and accommodating each other, and they manipulate other objects as well — oversize balloons, large swaths of fabric and bushels of tomatoes. The video is the first of four to be created at the center.

In Ettun’s dance pieces, as in her sculpture, negotiating objects and other bodies is a means of reflecting and incorporating the environment into the self. Her sculptures are cast from her own or other’s bodies, and these writhing polychrome plaster replicas — mostly of hands, but also mouths/faces, backs/buttocks and breasts — perform for us solo, or with partners drawn from a joyous and intriguing array of “inanimate” partners. Woman with Tina’s Hip resembles a classical herm: a hatter’s dummy head is perched atop a blue cardboard cylinder, itself placed on a base made from a re-purposed speaker. What adds the dash of ribald sexuality that marks the herm trope is a draped thin plaster cast of Tina’s back and buttock — giving the perpendicular piece a gesture and movement, and wit. Woman with Tina’s Hip utilizes many alternate visions of the body as sculpture: there are the armless, legless and headless trunks of classical antiquity, the vast and trunkless legs of Egypt, but also the subversively beautiful thalidomide models of Marc Quinn.

The 10 singular hand sculptures and the larger ensemble piece, Parade, are inspired in part by Yvonne Rainer’s tantalizing 1966 piece Hand Movie. While many of these table-top-sized cast pieces are about handling objects (fabric, balls, paintbrushes, bananas), most of them, like Rainer’s film, are about moving one’s own hand and the wonder in the almost sign-language significance contained in each gesture. Fittingly, many of the objects are incorporated into the fingers themselves, as in Hand with Funnels and Hand with Kebab. Not all of these attachments look like they feel so pleasant, and this forced connection of body with object adds to the immediacy of the gesture, Hand with Twisted Fingers and Hand with a Brush positions the fingers behind the knuckles in a show of double-jointed acrobatics that imbues the sculpture with an unpleasant potential energy. Boob with a Nail is a small wall sculpture that tips an erect nipple with a dangerously protruding barb — a symbol of menacing femininity as much as a playful S&M aesthetics.

The act of caressing or holding or positioning a small object is the poetic heart of the work. These seemingly little sculptures, though they are life size, take on an intentionality all their own and very affectingly and sweetly elevate the simplest acts — of standing tall, or holding a flower or brush, or holding each other. The two robin-egg-blue hands lifting a banana in Two Gloves with a Banana look like workmen moving a sofa onto a truck by virtue of their scale! This tenderness is also manifested in Blue Bubble, which within Ettun’s physiological glossary could be the aforementioned stomach, lung or skin, but by virtue of the fact that it is meant to be entered and sat inside, it serves as a cool blue refuge from the frenetic activity of all the appendages outside. Inside the bubble, with the two columns framing the round form on either side, like a pair of hips, it is a quiet womb-like space where one can meditate on big things that seem small on first glance.

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May 28 to Jul 18, 2015
526 West 26th Street, Suite 211 (between 11th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 462 4406

The woven, the embossed, the embedded and the laminated: upon viewing “Paper Route 66,” one felt a bit like Carl Linnaeus trying to develop a taxonomy for works on paper in the year 2015. The summer group show at BravinLee Programs featured six sub-curated spaces of artists from around America: Houston, Pittsburgh, Miami, Detroit, New Orleans and Baltimore. While the show was too small and neat to allow for the consideration of larger questions like “Is regionalism dead in the Internet age” or “Is there a new American style?” the 20 artists and 26 works did present the confusing array of methodologies and processes that continue to complicate the increasingly non-literal categorization “work on paper.” It also gave a pleasant taste of each curator’s/curatorial group’s taste in choosing works.

Phillip Pyle’s Super Huey (2015) and Mark Ponder’s Jim Jones is Awesome (2015) presented a pair of portraits in Houston curator Paul Middendorf’s selection. Starting off the exhibition with these two heads — Huey’s in a bulbous cosmic helmet printed on glossy metallic paper while Jones a barely registered face receding into the space of the off-white paper — immediately gave the show a totemic mystical bent. This was bolstered by Devan Shimoyama’s Shadow (2014-15), a sparkling, glitter-covered pair of heads breathing rainbows and exuding galaxies, chosen by Amanda Donnan and Kim Beck from Pittsburgh. These were the only faces, but hero-worship was invoked by Spider Man and Gulls (2015) a six-part composition that posited an abstracted Spidey in the lower left-hand corner and played off that theme in a series of abstractions, by Stephen Booth and Jordan Bernier, chosen by curator Freddy, of Baltimore.

The work on paper inhabits a conflicted interstitial space; it lingers between finished piece and study, between experiment and pared-down iteration of larger works for which the artist is known. Corey Escoto, chosen by Pittsburgh’s Amanda Donnan and Kim Beck, contributed a delightful little muted geometric composition on Polaroid, Grid and Gob (2015), which resembled some sort of not-too-distant-future cocktail, a very nice evocation of his larger and more sublime sculptures and installations.

Next to Escoto in the Pittsburgh section was a quietly engrossing relief etching by Delanie Jenkins, Untitled (from the traces of absorption series) (2005-2006), a piece that plays on the ever-present patterns contained on the sheets of ultra-absorbent paper-towels, but shifts the designs into an off-kilter gear that results in a disquieting hallucinogenic sensation. Also capitalizing on the manipulation of texture are two prints from the Object Print Collection (I, IV, 2014) by Jessie Vogel, chosen by Amy Mackie of New Orleans, where the deep reliefs left by the collagraphy process imbue the paper with an almost object-like presence. Megan Heeres, chosen by Detroit curator Jennifer Junkermeier, reverses this process by embedding two circular thin metal chains (“found jewelry”) into handmade paper in A Certain Slant of Light (number 2) (2014). The foreign matter is not only described by its color and how it bulges through the tissue, but in the oxidation process initiated by the paper-making process itself: brown rust blooms form around the metallic elements. Slam Dunk, Madras, and Port (all 2015) by Justin Long, chosen by Amanda Sanfilippo of Miami, brings the operation full circle by dispensing completely with paper and drawing implement and instead sews series of acute isosceles triangles into a variety of fabrics. The fragile lines of twine play off the solidity of the red in Port and the quirky plaid in Madras and remain very much drawings.

Of actual recognizable drawings, there are a few. Sanfilippo-chosen artist Cara Despain presents two drawings Shallow (2001) and Belvedere [Birdcage] (2009), with narrative architectural fantasies, meticulously drawn, and toned and dusty with graphite. Despain utilizes wallpaper patterns and rococo silhouettes to visually frame and impose a composition on her surreal images of houses and garden vistas. While invoking a traditionalist sensibility by calling on these archaic forms, there is a literalness in the use of the wallpaper patterning that is much more contemporary — a kind of hand-drawn texture mapping. Jennifer Odem’s Table Study (2015), chosen by Amy Mackie, depicts a pair of enigmatic blobs placed squarely on a 12-legged schizophrenic table in a sort of fairy tale/fable-like visual composition, with spidery pencil lines and films and skeins of gouache reinforcing the fact that this is definitely a drawing. Oddly enough. Odem also employs the mimicry of a wallpaper/textile pattern on one of her blobs, and similarly to Despain’s drawing, the texture has a presence which seems disembodied from the rest of the image: again like a collage or texture mapped image. This pattern mimicry in these carefully drafted images leaves one with the impression that perhaps Odem and Despain are yearning for, or a bit jealous of, the tools being enjoyed by the other artists in “Paper Route 66.”

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April 25 to May 30, 2015
54 Franklin Street (at Cortlandt Alley)
New York, 212 727 3323

The subject of Holly Zausner’s 2015 film Unsettled Matter is the artist herself, but just as clearly, it is us, the viewers. It is a cyclical film, which variously embraces and casts off narrative, almost on a whim. Zausner passes through New York as a ghost — purposefully marching through empty streets, lobbies and stations, sometimes no more than a flicker, but just as often stopping to contemplate: a book in the basement of the Strand, the mangled visage of Queen Hatshepsut at the Metropolitan Museum, or us, the viewer, at the center of the swirling maelstrom of Times Square (the only time in which we see other human beings). Though she interacts with no one, she is performing for us, right up until the possible endpoint of the film, when she comes physically crashing down onto her workbench strewn with stills from her last work — death by art.

We cannot tell if the most spectacular special effect of Unsettled Matter is in fact the end of the artist. In Unseen (2007), her previous film, set in Berlin, her silent antagonist is a larger-than–life-sized rubber doll. This feminine and sculptural figure has appeared as a prop in many of Zausner’s works over the years. It is burdensome and seems to provoke danger wherever the artist goes: in Unseen she is watched by a tiger and threatened by a nearby explosion. Unsettled Matter is more foreboding as the enemy is ever-present, and we get the inkling that it is somehow contained within our own act of spectation. Besides a sense of determination in her demeanor and gait, Zausner’s primary emotion seems to be impatience and weariness. At one point the artist, wearing sunglasses indoors, drinks a pint and takes a brief respite from her perambulations — giving us a moment to breathe as well.

If this film has a beginning or an end, it is a tale of escape and alienation, and of the artist’s lonely practice, which, it would seem, always ends badly — the tense lines that support, very literally, this floating life, can give away at any moment. But such a linear narrative to Unsettled Matter is a bit too easy, and Zausner inlays the very simple activities of the film — walking and looking — with a few brief supernatural gestures that lead us to understand that we may disbelieve our eyes at any moment — this is the stuff of metaphor. The mystical details also become more apparent after watching the piece again, when we are half-expecting them and the suspense is much stronger. This is another indication that there is a rhythmic and endless cycle at play. Zausner briefly communes with the pharaoh Hatshepsut, then while admiring a tomb in the Metropolitan Museum, she departs, leaving her reflection standing there a few seconds too long. Similarly weird is a passage in the Strand, in which all the titles are inverted — a mirror of a mirror. Zausner also moves in slow-mo and speeds up until she becomes a blur. Despite these visual sleights-of-hand, the superb sound always keeps us aware of her steps, clack-clacking on the pavement.

Unsettled Matter seems most likely to be a dream, and a rejection of time. Unlike Unseen, which was decidedly tragic — the artist weighed down by her life, her choice, her femininity and her art — here she eludes us, traipsing through memories of past and future alike. She flits and stomps through the city, which is all hers, coldly regards the hysterical Monica Vitti in L’Avventura, and moves on, and keeps us a sympathetic but bewildered spectator, hustling to keep up.

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Protocol at Chimera-Project

January 29 through March 6, 2015
1072 Budapest Klauzál tér 5.
Budapest, +36 30 768 2947

From the top of the stairs leading to the mezzanine of Chimera-Project on Klauzál Square, the visitor could just make out Róbert Németh’s glowing trompe l’oeil curtains Untitled (2015), painted in a commandeered storage closet. Much like the theme of the exhibition “Protocol” (29th January through March 6th), the drawing disappeared on closer inspection; dissolving into darkness and incomprehensibility when one drew too close — highlighting the often ambiguous and transitory nature of the once precisely defined genre of drawing. Németh’s gesture was effected with a UV light and a motion sensor, but the work of the five other artists in the exhibition runs the gamut, from intensely literal — such as Péter Koppányi’s iridescent graphite pseudo-photograms — to a very loose interpretation of line itself, as in Delphine Pouillé’s performances in the streets of Taipei.

The Post-it-based sketches of András Wahorn are points where “Protocol” oscillates nicely between randomness and intentionality. Wahorn created a body of drawings on Post-it notes while based in Los Angeles from 1994 to 2001 and has retrofitted them into larger works that play off and expand on the simple or iconic spontaneous imagery of the yellow squares. Whether or not the Post-its are doodles is immaterial: the extreme ephemerality of the medium forces any art based on this medium into a spontaneous and transitory category. Wahorn then utilizes the drawing fragments as inspiration for a larger works. Here he presents the Post-it/doodle as a spark in for Meditation (2001), where a serpentine figure kneels before a Gauguin-like fetish, and Something Inside the Head (2001) in which a Post-it Homunculus has taken up residence in the head of a screaming giant. Erika Baglyas’ works are almost too narrative and representational to quite fit among the other works. She presents a very graphic visual equation: a lump or puddle of color or, as in Training Camp 3 (2014), a large arrow, which is then assimilated into a composition with smaller non-descript figures. The imagery is vaguely angsty and political but lacks the bluntness or the quirk of the other pieces.

A flat-screen display featuring seven brightly colored raincoat-clad figures marching through the streets of Taipei marks the periphery of the realm of drawing claimed by “Protocol.” The female figures are connected by tubes from one individual’s mouth to the back of the hood of the preceeding individual, and while the performance touches on issues of expression and verbalization and freedom of movement/expression, or lack thereof, the actors very literally form nodes along the length of a line. While they move, the tubes bend and stretch and one of the most basic elements of a drawing, a line, is modulated and transformed according to the topography of the city blocks and sidewalks of the urban fabric. Pouillé’s six-minute-long video Umbilical Parade (2012), bridges the space between an experiential, body-based performance while jerry-rigging together all the niceties of a well-made diagram or graphical interface — color, visual interest, representation of data, environmental input and the resulting behavior expressed by the performers/vehicle of graphic representation.

Outside of “Protocol,” Umbilical Parade might not have been read as a drawing, but starting with silhouettes and building up our tolerance for the unexpected with Post-its, motion sensors, and ball bearings, the expanse of the genre of mark-making is substantially and happily extended to fill much of the new territory opened up by ever-developing genres.

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Sonia Delaunay: Les Couleurs de l’Abstraction at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

October 17, 2014 through February 22, 2015
11 Avenue de Président Wilson
Paris, +33 1 53 67 40 00

A blanket stitched by Sonia Delaunay for her baby Charles in 1911 is the most evocative piece in the exhibition “Les Couleurs de l’Abstraction” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (on display through the 22^nd of February and then at the Tate Modern from the 15^th of April through the 9^th of August). That is not to say that Delaunay’s ferocious output and creativity ended there — it was only the beginning. The blanket, crafted of 70 roughly rectangular and triangular pieces of shimmery cloth, placed in relation to each other based on principles of color resonance and harmony that were an obsession of her husband Robert (he drew his theories from the French chemist and color theorist Michel Eugene Chevreul), stands as an epic transition in the history of early abstraction. It also embodies the pragmatism in her approach to her work: she soon stretched and exhibited the blanket as her first work of pure abstraction. One may surmise she did this once the baby had outgrown his blanket.

Delaunay mixed the applied arts with “pure” painting throughout her career. This duality lies at the literal and metaphorical center of the exhibition where a gallery of coats and textiles, and even a promotional film she made in the 1920s, runs on an endless loop. The clothing, furniture and costume design do not have the same vibrancy or theoretical insistence as the paintings. Her striking Manteau pour Gloria Swanson (1925), with radiating rectangular bands, is a dazzling cross between a Russian soldier’s bulky overcoat and early Atari graphics — a bit of Delaunay’s Russian roots with some Aztec thrown in. It lacks the encompassing throbbing exhilaration of Le Bal Bullier of 1913, given pride of place a few rooms earlier.

Posed in counterpoint to the fashion film, which features models lounging in Delaunay fabrics in front of her paintings, is a mighty textile display machine on the opposite wall that the curators have conjured up. Beneath the word “Simultané” four bolts of fabric roll up or down constantly, contrasting the artist’s seemingly endless fountain of design ingenuity. Along the walls are swatches, sketches, kerchiefs and ties reinforcing this point. Unfortunately, it comes across as a bit crass — the same sinking feeling one got on seeing the Louis Vuitton shop placed smack in the center of the 2008 Murakami exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum.

But the baby blanket is not crass, and the clothing designs and the costumes for productions by Tristan Tszara and Sergei Diaghilev are full of the colorful and garish enthusiasm of post-WWI experimentation. They are wild deco colonialist interpretations of Ancient Egypt, for the ballets Cleopatra and Aida (1918). Does this interdisciplinary existence make Delaunay a feminist icon because she straddles both the at-the-time male dominated world of painting and the perceived woman’s sphere of sewing and clothing production? Perhaps her claim to icon status, beyond her talent as a painter, should be her very asexual approach to her practice, a personality trait that presaged later art/entrepreneurial giants such as Warhol, Koons and Hirst. Delaunay had a very sanguine relationship with her clothing and costume design — it was a career that only really took shape after the Russian revolution took place and the money from home (St. Petersburg) ran out. She adroitly hired Russian seamstresses to make her clothing and weave her textiles (the Delaunay sweatshop?) and felt liberated from her commercial responsibilities after the 1929 market crash for all intents and purposes put an end to her fashion business.

“Les Couleurs De l’Abstraction” shows Delaunay at her strongest at the beginning and the end. The exhibition begins with juvenilia — portraits of peasants and friends made on vacation in Finland with her aunt and uncle, then student work heavily influenced by Gauguin and the Fauves. This is followed by the strange process of mutual assimilation that was the marriage of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, one that birthed the Orphism movement (a term coined by Apollinaire), which set up a category of pure abstraction utilizing the methodological approaches of Cubism. Along with Le Bal Bullier is the illustration to accompany Blaise Cendrars’s travelogue poem “La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France,” probably the most successful evocation of the Delaunay’s concept of Simultaneity — a confusing theory based around a fascination with technology, applied color theory and interdisciplinary collaboration among the arts. The series “Prismes Electriques” was started in 1913 and became the defining image of both Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s careers — beacons of light with radiating waves or shells of colors.

After the stock market crash, Delaunay returned to painting with renewed vigor. Her most successful series of applied works, though, was a cycle of illustrative murals for the 1937 aerospace pavilion for the “Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques dans la Vie Moderne.” In these she isolates technological objects — the propeller, the cockpit, the dashboard, gears and sparkplugs — and renders them as symbols within a context aesthetically redolent of Orozco and Rivera’s great murals of a the early ‘30s.   The cycle achieves its goal of aggrandizing contemporary technology by injecting the Delaunays’ brand of radiating circles (now neatened up) into a well-crafted layout that has the punch, poignancy and mystique of an engineering blueprint. It is a design sensibility that wouldn’t be surprising on a website in 2015.

The exhibition is vast, as was Delaunay’s output. She remained active, painting and designing rugs and fabrics, well into the late 1970s: she died in 1979 at the age of 94.   Over that very long period she still focused on the circles that had so fascinated her and Robert in the teens — hybrid symbols of electric light-cum-wheel-cum-human head, an all-in-one beacon. Robert died in 1941, and perhaps freed from his influence, Sonia’s beacons become more introspective, as with L’Affereux Jojo (1947) which is less bright and less color-theory obsessed and overwhelmingly gray, the circle also becoming a half-circle now. Maybe the artist is blinking here and catching her breadth. Triptyque (1963) finds her even less obsessed with the ideology of the long-dusty Orphism; the forms are more distinct and freer, and again there are more blacks, ochres and slate colors, the paintings are less optimistic and more worldly. At the heart of the exhibition is the feat that Delaunay took an abstract trope that began with a baby blanket in 1911 and expanded and elaborated on it for almost seven decades, generating a visual/personal timeline that narrates the history of abstraction in the 20^th century.

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