November 8 to December 15, 2018
Babie Brood:  West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New Paintings: 34 East 69th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, davidzwirner.com

A treasure trove of provocations, David Zwirner’s twinexhibitions of  Lisa Yuskavage consolidate her leadership in new figuration. At 19th Street the gallery hosts 91 of her oils in a survey spanning three decades. These small works are mostly problematized depictions of women executed with a virtuosic handling of color, body language, and composition. But a dramatic departure occurs at Zwirner’s 69th Street townhouse where eight large new works include some with an uncommonly tender sense of romantic intimacy.

Yuskavage frequently invokes the idea of Freudian transference, declaring that everyone will simply see a reflection of their own needs when viewing her art. With that in mind I declare that I see her sexualized females as representing an alchemical process by which she transforms vitriolic critique into creative power. This idea can help make sense of her abrasive portrayals of women. It is also based on her own stories.

The complex female figures first appeared in 1991 when it struck her that the spirit of a painting is like a faultfinding idea of a woman’s allure. A painting can’t help but draw validation from its looks. Yuskavage conceived of a series of female forms as metaphors for painting itself and then, in her own words, she was “mean to them”.

This story, as told, is useful for deciphering her depictions of women. Yet a question lingers: why was it necessary to be ‘mean to them’? I wonder if she was acting out a darkly comic version of the life of an artist. Was she performing both roles: that of the creator birthing the hopeful character of a painting and that of the critic turning it into something pathetic? If so, that ritual could allow her to see her life from the outside, giving her a psychological advantage. It could help her transcend her many scathing reviews, turning what could be a leaden drag into the gold of future subject matter.

Her symbolic process is most evident in her early works. In Hamass, (1996) what might have started as a derrière in colorful fishnets ends up as an unhappy protuberance of candied pig meat. In Split, (1997) soft porn tropes are twisted into a new awfulness: light, color, costume, and pose are all shifted off key. As in many of her images the face calls into question the cult of youth as it is warped into an indecency of infantilization. Later works in her “Pie Face” series play out humiliation in a direct process.Creamy white paint is slapped on the figure’s face in Chrissy (2008) in an act of the work itself being pied. Yuskavage employs a stunning variety of means to makes her figures wrong. Subtleties of body language convey exhibitionism or too much self-regard.  More than a feminist critique, it becomes an examination of all kinds of pathos in sexual presentation.

This survey also makes clear her obsession with formal questions of painting. Significantly, she keeps a Philip Guston quote in her studio: “The figuration must be understood as another element layered over and working against the abstraction.”  Considering this, it is vital that her females first sprang from her imagination so that she can alter them at will. Her sense of color is also far from literal. As a way of conveying contemporaneity she uses only recently invented hues. Theorists from the mystically inclined Johannes Itten to the textile designer Laura Ashley steer her palette. Her devotion to chroma calls her to tame fickle modern dyes, such as the phthalos, by pre-mixing and tubing up desired shades (now counting 700). This yields assertive fields and subtle variations of vivid hue.

Over the years Yuskavage has added to her visual vocabulary: interiors, landscapes, males, and babushkas now occupy her mythic realm. But none get the rough treatment of her sexualized women. Apparently, they don’t share the dubious honor of being a metaphor for painting itself.

Uptown, her tilt towards gentler allegory culminates in Home, (2018) a square composition centered on the clasped hands of a youthful couple exuding id and innocence in their nakedness. They stand within a gray domestic space as rainbow-hued light spills forth from the room beyond. One can fail to see that the girl lacks a thigh, the boy his feet. When I asked the artist about this she replied, “You can do anything you want in a painting.”

Transference strikes again. I am left to wonder if anyone else will see these characters as ghosts, and as a deep rebuttal to sexual aggression? I can only say that for me they have become the memories of youthful physical union that forever echo through the aging of a happy couple.

The post Transference: Two Exhibitions of Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner appeared first on artcritical.

May 2 to June 30, 2018
533 West 19th Street, New York, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York CIty, www.davidzwirner.com

Very loud music greets visitors to David Zwirner’s 19th Street space. The white cube gallery has been transformed with soft, lilac carpeting and acoustic panels. These serve to dampen a multitude of sounds that fluctuate during Jordan Wolfson’s 8’24” video, Riverboat song (2017-2018). There’s also a sense of comfort in these gentle colors and textures – elegant  features that contrast with the disconcerting informality of what comes next: the exposed wires and weights on the back of sixteen screens aligned in a massive four-by-four grid. The doorway to the gallery frames this rear view, shielding the projection. This installation establishes power dynamics that soon become evident in the video itself: the space comforts, but the arrangement controls, forcing visitors up against the back wall (the furthest distance possible from the exit), caught between the screen and two large speakers. You feel small, particularly if, as this viewer chose to, you sit down, sandwiched between these mammoth screens and the wall.

The content of Riverboat song intensifies this juxtaposition of comfort and control. The piece is a montage, for the most part featuring a cast of animated characters. There are two “gay” dressed and acting horses, a naked crocodile, three grunge-styled rats, a Huckleberry Finn meets Alfred E. Neuman boy, and a witch. The boy is familiar from Wolfson’s earlier work,  Colored sculpture (2016). Riverboat song opens with a “down the rabbit hole” moment in which  the boy sinks into a giant teacup. This is followed by a series of vignettes: Finn being chopped up by the witch, Finn dancing seductively in Louboutins to Iggy Azalea’s “Work” (2014), the crocodile dancing, the rodents smoking on an airplane, all of the characters sharing pieces of a monologue narrated by Wolfson, Finn jumping in front of a mirror, more smoking rodents, and finally Finn splashing around in his own golden shower. The video closes with an amalgam of YouTube clips of robots, sensually dancing women, violent video games, and one man mercilessly beating another (this last was the inspiration for Wolfson’s notorious 2017 Whitney Biennial VR piece, Real violence).

Riverboat song is permeated by sexual aggression. Pinned up against the wall, I was both surprised and transfixed – perhaps most by the monologue section of the video, which lasted for about a quarter of the piece. This was the “scene” that most forcefully situated the piece within Wolfson’s recent body of work. The monologue – spread between Wolfson’s animated cast, though predominantly spoken by a pantsless Finn – is about a relationship in which one partner manipulates the other for personal gain. The male voice (Wolfson’s) talks about “you” doing things for him: cleaning, cooking, sexual favors, and staying with him despite his emotional manipulation because of a twisted sense of obligation that leaves “you” completely under his control. While the “you” in the monologue is never specified as female, and could just as easily be male, I read it as very heteronormative  – possibly as a woman myself, possibly due to the current Me Too movement bringing attention to female harassment and assault. The casual aggression in the tone of the monologue, both in Wolfson’s inflection and the blasé positions of various characters (penis in hand, in the bathtub, over brunch), matched the riveting and gut-wrenching spectatorship of Real violence, and the emotional instability of Colored sculpture (tellingly set to “When a Man Loves a Woman”). At first, the off-hand and personal tone of this monologue creates the illusion of lovingness, although this soon melts into distinctive domination, much like the discomfort that emerges out of the initial safe feeling of the installation.

Finn takes a distinct pleasure in himself throughout the video – clearly aroused by his talk of supremacy in the monologue, and later luxuriating in his own urine. He splashes around so much it becomes comical as well as uncomfortably voyeuristic, due the length of the clip. However, even in this moment I am so transfixed as to be unable to simply stand up and walk out, leaving the final, over-the-top clip unviewed. Perhaps this is due to innate human curiosity and the need to know what happens next, or maybe something about the anthropomorphism of the characters results in an uncanny feeling of being watched, and thus somehow known or possessed. For whatever reason, I am strangely comfortable on this carpet, back against the wall, and watch Riverboat song again and again.

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September 12 to October 21, 2017
537 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, davidzwirner.com

Perception is a function of rods and cones adjusting in the retina. Waking in the middle of the night, everything is black at first and only slowly more colors begin to emerge. It takes patience and acute attention to make sense of the new reality.

To see Ad Reinhardt’s paintings one must slow down the pace of everyday life. In the Blue Paintings gathered recently at David Zwirner Gallery, dating for the most part from 1950 to 1953, so much medium has been removed from the paint as to provide the opportunity to perceive color directly. These are among the most matte surfaces to be experienced in canvases emanating from the Abstract Expressionist circle in which the artist moved: there is no gloss, there is no reflection on the surface. The paint qualities associated with AbEx are almost entirely lacking in Reinhardt. His use of color is so subtle that it is on the very threshold of perception.

Reinhardt was an oppositional figure: he believed one could find as much meaning in what painters refused to do as in what they actually did do. In relation to the viewer, his void-like canvases inspire trust in the invisible through a viewer’s relationship to their own experiences.. .

Adolph Friedrich Reinhardt, born in Buffalo, New York in 1913, to an immigrant family, attended Columbia University to study art history in 1931. His tastes shifted towards European movements like Cubism and Constructivism. The historical avant garde created new qualifications first of convention and then of institution, through such specific symbolic acts,as when the Russian Constructivist Aleksander Rodchenko presented three monochrome canvases in red, blue, and yellow. In this gesture, he proclaimed the logical conclusion of painting Reinhardt went through several singular color periods in his career, and yet his fidelity to the primaries and, most famously black, actually represents a rejection to Rodchenko’s declaration. Paintings in this exhibition force the eye to slow down and see that there are actually several different hues of blue or green in each work. These elegantly considered paintings act as Rorschach tests for the brain. These somber monochromes — highly considered grids — reward the patient viewer with a site of peaceful contemplation. In a deep negotiation with ourselves, we are seeing rather than looking at art in a gallery transformed into a space of meditation. Experiences that might transcend the normal bounds of what we know through voids, monochromes, and windows could be perhaps paralleled with the revelation and exaltation of a deep spiritual experience. Perhaps this is why such artists as Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko, James Turrell and Anish Kapoor have artworks that double as spaces of spiritual or religious pilgrimage.

Ad Reinhardt was very interested in such spiritual qualities: he sought to purify art and the way we experience it. He also had a desire to keep art and business separate, and while this body of work is hardly a critique of capitalism, he took great pleasure in the fact that these paintings were almost impossible to reproduce photographically. As with most avant-garde art, we must recalibrate our idea of value and redistribute who holds the keys and who does the work. Reinhardt challenges his audience to do more work than the artist, investing forms with their own feelings rather than discovering those of the artist. In this respect, Ad Reinhardt walks alongside Yves Klein as an early instigator of conceptual art. Defying conventions of their times, each produced a kind of determinism for new artistic sensibilities.

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May 5 to June 25, 2016
525 West 19th Street
New York, 212 727 2070

At David Zwirner, Jordan Wolfson’s puppet, totally helpless against the insistent tug of thick chains, inspires a deep sympathy. Yet, its vulnerability springs precisely from its lifelessness. The title, Colored sculpture (2016), fails so utterly to encapsulate the presence and experience of this work. Yet, simultaneously, this overly simple characterization reminds a viewer of the objecthood of this figure, which can, at moments, feel so terribly real. The disappointing artificiality of its intelligence swims into evidence in the bouncing, unnatural animations that dance through the figure’s deep-set eye sockets. Both point to empathy, but also mark him as an object of contempt; Colored sculpture shifts in and out of the semblance of sentience. Even as Wolfson takes advantage of our susceptibility to perceive humanity everywhere, the emotive response is interrupted by the cruelty with which this uncanny figure is tossed about on his scaffold stage. Does the perception of humanity precede or emerge from the violence that is being wreaked upon the body that Wolfson presents?

Heavy steel chains and a limp form clatter and scrape across the gallery’s concrete floor. Mechanized pulleys move back and forth across parallel tracks, distributing and retracting the chain supports in a stilted choreography. The chains withdraw and the metal body ascends to reveal the caricatured form of a boy whose eyes, made of LCD screens, dart around the room to meet onlookers’ stares, tracking them in real time with face-recognition software. Mouth fixed in an expression that is both grimace of pain and hostile affront, this boy — less Huck Finn than Pinocchio, sans-nose — sways, suspended. The strange grace of this figure, as he is gently raised, toes seeming to articulate a regretful caress as they leave the floor, becomes even more fragile and poignant when, a moment later, this precious burden falls unceremoniously, clamorously to the ground.

The thunder of metal is joined precipitously by the Percy Sledge’s swelling vocals as “When A Man Loves a Woman” unexpectedly blasts from speakers overhead. The gallery is filled with a carnival’s promise of seedy spectacle and thrill; here though, you don’t have to pay to watch a chained bear, or boy, dance on chains from behind the security of a metal fence. The uninhibited violence of this display — expressed in the punished surfaces of the floor and the clown’s chipped, ravaged face — breaks brutally upon a viewer. An attendant, earbuds securely inserted, stands watchful, lest visitors stray too close.

Colored sculpture is a study in sadism. However, it remains unclear on which side of the fence the viewer identifies: as aggressor and instigator of this pathetic display, or as with empathy for this vulnerable humanoid creature. In one sense, Colored sculpture is its own master and puppet, wielding the whip to its own torturous destruction. After all, the boyish form is one with the chains mechanism that pulls it about in a self-contained cycle of violence and suffering. In a 2012 interview with Stefan Kalmár, Wolfson said that, “imagining something is a way of understanding to decide if it’s wrong or right,” posing his works as trials of moral fortitude. This sculpture comes to us as a question, a curiosity, about a world in which we can treat people as objects and objects as human beings.

The post Master of Puppets: Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner appeared first on artcritical.

September 16 to October 24, 2015
525 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 727 2070

Clothes cascading from a washing machine, with the compositional grace of court drapery.The world upside down from the perspective of a baby held by a man with a beer in his other hand, her arms and legs flared out in joy. Men’s limbs packed abstractly into a picture frame as a hand rummages inside red shorts.

The imagery of Wolfgang Tillmans is deceptively artless. There are over 100 new works in his show and most could be shown with his work of 20 years ago with no break in style. Within his parameters, however, he constantly tests ideas about photography all the while documenting friends and his immediate environment one moment, activist and gay subcultures the next. In times like our own when lifestyles and personas are so carefully mediated and “curated”, all awkwardness edited out, Tillmans’ quiet insistence in framing content that is gritty, quotidian, or overlooked becomes a bulwark against slick image control.

Tillmans’ first published photographs, of Hamburg nightlife, came out in the British magazine i-D in 1988, a moment when hierarchies of art world, fashion and magazine cultures were being redefined. (Damien Hirst’s Freeze exhibition also happened in 1988, for instance, as artists sought to sidestep the art establishment). i-D magazine was started by former Vogue art director Terry Jones; intrigued by the punk scene, he wanted a forum that reflected street fashion and genuine youth culture. i-D’s acknowledgement of diversity and idiosyncratic beauty were expressed through its photography and design choices and it became a precursor to European ‘anti-fashion’ magazines such as Purple Prose and, in their early years, Self Service and The Face. This ‘realist’ aesthetic was refined by photographers Corinne Day, Jurgen Teller, Terry Richardson, David Sims, and Nigel Shafran, many emboldened by the fearless work of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark in the US and Araki in Japan.

Though Tillmans had been influenced earlier by northern British bands and the sophisticated album covers of Peter Saville, the new ‘realism’ had seeped into music and magazine culture as Tillmans night clubbed and studied at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in the UK between 1990-1992. It is significant after only eight years he became the first photographer and non-British artist to win the prestigious Turner Prize.

Tillmans understood early the need for the avoidance of closure. Each image is a result of micro decisions, from “how would I take a picture of this?” to making a final edit that is not too easy or familiar, and appears to contribute to his hidden compositions that often have a slow reveal. He restlessly recontextualizes his work, each installation constituting, in itself, a separate art piece, the exhibition a labor of relationships between architectural space, images and scale. At his Zwirner show there is a photograph of presentation in progress, studio still life, a, 2013, with large prints covering walls, but then unexpectedly smaller pictures high, creeping up to the ceiling en masse like a colonizing army of ants. Tillman’s makes no distinction between his work appearing in a magazine spread, commercial gallery or fine art museum. Prints are unframed, taped or pinned to the walls. From the outset he used context as a tool for his own ends, ignoring preset rules about how photographic work should be presented or given value. His career has also straddled the divide between analogue and digital photography with remarkable integrity and grace, which this show now emphasizes.

Tillmans lives and works between London and Berlin, and the sensibilities of both cities inform his vocabulary. Tender, candid, intimate portraits of friends and their abstracted body parts, still lives of fruits, or activists in gritty streetscapes are all shot frankly, often in overcast, northern light. But he works hard to make the audience work too. With Patti Smith, Glastonbury, 2015, we see domed camping tents under the grey festival sky and it takes time to figure out that the distant angled projector screens filled with Smith’s face are her oblique portraits.

In Simon, Sebastian Street, 2013, is a portrait of one of his closest friends whose knowing gaze is directed at the camera. The image is so low key it is hard to figure out what the pull is, why it is compelling. Only a study of the elements around him reveal that the lights above his head and the lines of the table radiate from a vanishing point that ends at the eyes, giving the compositional aura of a Renaissance saint. We revisit other old friends of the artist, Alex and Lutz, who in another i-D magazine story from 1992 appeared refreshingly raw and liberated sitting semi-naked in trees with long, open PVC coats. Twenty-three years later they look at us in Alex and Lutz, Hindenmithstrass, 2012, with the same unabashed matter-of-factness and close cropped hair, the past co-existing seamlessly with the present.

Different from Tillmans portraits are the exploratory and process driven ‘Silver’ series, which reveal his imaginatively technical side. These are experiments with the alchemy of photography where residue and silver particles are re-photographed, or alternatively left physically on top of the image, expanding concepts of photography as image or object. His photograph as object would have sat nicely alongside work in Peter Bunnell’s 1970 landmark show ‘Photography Into Sculpture’ at MoMa, with exquisite work by late ’60s and early ’70s artists such as hugely influential UCLA teacher Robert Heinecken, who worked outside traditional ideas of photography; Richard Jackson,who used negatives as sculptural forms; and the young Ellen Brooks who re-mixed photography and other materials into new objects.

Tillmans is an outlier, very different from the previous generation of German photographers like Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer, influenced as they were by Bernd and Hilla Becher and their attendant high seriousness. Critics accused him, in the 90s, of photographing shallow, vacuous, unimportant subject matter, but there is no corresponding surface dispassion or lack of depth to his work to accord with this criticism. The random, slightly chaotic nature of his compositions captures meaning and tenderness and accumulates in his oeuvre into a form of romanticism. Tillmans has indeed said that photography was a way to deal with “bearing the meaninglessness of everything”.

A striking, large inkjet print has been given pride of place in one gallery. It shows a common garden weed growing between mossy paving stones. The colors are lush and nuanced as only the best printing can give, with rich dark greens and purples. Caught in a ray of diffused light, the weed is erect, plucky and fragile. It describes perfectly Tillmans concerns, that beauty is there right beneath our noses, unexpected and between the cracks. You just have to look.

The post Right Beneath Our Noses: The Beauty in Wolfgang Tillmans appeared first on artcritical.

Published this month, the catalogue for “oil painting and sun,” Suzan Frecon’s impressive recent exhibition at David Zwirner, is a fine record of the exhibition and contains a thoughtful essay by David Cohen as well as short texts by the artist that reflect on her process as well as on specific sources of inspiration. During a public conversation held in the galleries toward the beginning of the exhibition, Frecon and Cohen discussed the difficult issue of interpretation through description of her abstract paintings. What follows below is my attempt to add to this by looking in detail at the paintings presented in the exhibition.

Of the eight paintings present, lapis ordering adjacent blues (2015) and dark red cathedral (tre) (2014) are the smallest, both 29 5/8 x 24 inches. The titles, color and scale of the paintings bring to mind Frecon’s longstanding interest in the history of European painting — including Quattrocento panel painting. The half halos, as form at least — here without specific divinity — radiate color. Frecon works on graph paper drawn to scale to establish compositions with colors in mind and then in some instances makes a small painting first. Take dark red cathedral and the much larger book of paint (2015), for example. The compositional similarities are clear; the colors chosen differ however, evincing the intuitive nature of the process. Throughout the exhibition, movement of the brush and bleeds of oil from one color to the next are far from hard-edge abstraction: each change at the boundaries or variation in opacity of the color crucially adjusts a painting’s reading. A painting from 2005, four directions, can be viewed, as the title suggests, in all the orientations available for the painting. Here the painting is horizontal (the only horizontal painting in the exhibition). Its soft geometry interlocks in a maze-like way. Rectangular elements turn and repeat — subtle shifts of scale occur. It is typical that the colors (reds, blues and a green) have weight, and yet resist stasis because of both the musical or architectural stepping of shape and visible brush work. They appear “ineluctably suspended,” to quote the artist, on describing a quality she looks for in painting.

The galleries are lit with natural light for as much of the day as possible, and in the largest one are four paintings — one on each of the four walls. All the paintings measure 108 x 87 3/4 inches and comprise two horizontal, equally sized oil-on-linen panels. In each of the paintings the horizontal line where one panel meets the other is also a point at which there is a change in color. The curved shapes, situated above and below, are horizontally truncated, asymmetrical and specific to the boundaries of the panels’ abutment, which are the external edge and interior passage. The measure and proportions of the paintings — using both the geometry of the Golden Mean and an intuitive searching of relationships within it — determine size of shape, the shapes’ proximity to edge, and color. The size of the paintings insists on an embodied viewing, making it possible for the works to visually enfold viewers standing directly in front of them. The experience is physical, perceptual and meditative; each painting, as it responds to changes of light, incorporates a constant transience as perhaps corollary to the permanent fluctuation of states of being.

DUST (2014), seen obliquely on approaching and entering the back gallery reflects light from areas painted using tube paint with added oil, and absorbs light in matte areas: the relationship of positive and negative space is enhanced. Consequently, light falling onto flat surfaces that have been divided into areas of two different reflective qualities. The passage of light across a given surface is always shifting in Frecon’s paintings, becoming a component part of the paintings’ aggregated meaning. The dark reds and oranges shift tonally, and modulate light as much as the shapes themselves, that recur from one painting to the next.

A horizontal, oblate and earth-colored shape touches three sides of the upper panel of terre verte (2014). In the lower half of the painting, two greens, one lighter than the other, stretch from side to side at its upper edge; a slow curve echoes and inverts the oblate shape above. Its lower edge, a horizontal that, while forming a rectangle beneath, also appears to darken this zone along the base of the painting — like a sky before heavy rain. The idea of color is a key starting point for Frecon, so this change of color range, when compared with the warm hues of DUST, makes the impact of chroma on surface and shape emphatic. Within the relatively simple vocabulary, a variation in weight, complexity and illumination occurs that generates vivid differences. Taken together, Frecon’s work materializes the ideas that generate it — ideas about color, surface, shape and scale — the desire is for painting itself to make a self-referential, visual narrative, that is evocative of, rather than representative of, experience in the world.

In Cohen’s essay, the subject of words in relation to image is dealt with subtly and with regard to the paintings included here, while acknowledging the necessary difficulty encountered in communicating experiential and intellectual responses to some works of art. The role of light and its integral importance to Frecon’s painting is also expansively and insightfully described. Altogether this is a publication well worth waiting for and will contribute to the understanding of Frecon’s work, while marking the achievement of this exhibition.

Cohen, David and Suzan Frecon. Suzan Frecon: oil paintings and sun. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2015). ISBN-13: 9781941701096, 91 pages, $55

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The Pacific Northwest is beautiful this time of year. I travel there every few years and typically end up in the area during summer, missing the rain for which it’s infamous. This year I visited Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, seeing a lot of the gallery and museum scene. The Seattle Art Fair ran during the start of August. It’s mostly a small-ish regional fair, though there were booths by Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace, Zürcher, James Cohan, and other New Yorkers. I skipped it though, having a kind of snooty distaste for those conventions. I mean, who in their right mind would want to attend an art fair? Oof.

So I went straight for the regional institutions. There’s a lot to see. First: The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. It’s set in the city’s hip and young U district, and it’s a smartly designed, well organized space. They show emerging and established artists in a variety of media. They do not have a large space, so there aren’t clusters of galleries with an expansive selection from their permanent collection. Instead, they have well-curated exhibitions and I had just missed the school’s MFA exhibition, which runs for a month, rather than the week that many New York students get.

On view while I was there was, among other things, Martin Creed’s Work No. 360: About half the air in a given space (2015), which was comprised of a large gallery filled almost to capacity by silver balloons. Visitors could enter through one of two doorways and push their way through the claustrophobic mass, being disoriented and kind of pleasantly bewildered by the balloons’ power to constrict and delight. Also on view: a handsome retrospective for photographer Ilse Bing, a show of un-stretched and shaped canvases by Allan McCollum and Karen Carson, and a solo show by Michelle Handelman, with video and photography conflating vampirism, psychotherapy, and class-and-queer antagonism. The video draws from a Silent-Film-era series about Parisian thieves, called The Vampires, so one can forgive Handelman’s melodrama. It’s richly textured in a fetishistic way, and the accompanying photographs are exciting.

A few days later I took the train down to Portland, where I met up with artcritical contributor, publishing magnate, and poet extraordinaire Paul Maziar, and his friends, who showed me the nightlife — great host and hostesses. We remarked on the aesthetic qualities in the bright redness of neon lights adorning one of the construction cranes which has been expanding the city of late. Maziar’s been consuming Marcel Duchamp, so we say, “Sure, why not? Call it industrial-scale readymade sculpture.”

Next morning I left my kind hosts and took a long walk into downtown of the beautiful city, finishing up at the Portland Art Museum. The institution is currently hosting Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold (2010), which is displayed among the museum’s many galleries of Asian art and artifacts. The suite of 12 animal heads represents the Chinese calendrical zodiac, and is based on a sculpture formerly of an imperial garden outside Beijing, designed by Europeans, used by the Chinese elite, then looted by French soldiers in 1860. The scale and craftsmanship of Weiwei’s sculpture is spectacular, however, despite the didactics, I got the sense that I was missing something pretty fundamental about the subtleties of the artist’s choice of representation. Is it something about the Chinese government’s complicated relationship to Weiwei, to the nation’s own history, and the waves of European colonization and Chinese reclamation in these images? I can’t tell.

The aforementioned Asian art and artifacts galleries are really top rate. The layout of the building is labyrinthine, which can vary the experience between excited discovery and a confused, lost feeling.

Another exhibition, “Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris,” collects more than 140 paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the school, from between the 15th and 19th centuries. I can have a hard time with some of the flowery, academic work that the institution produced and inspired, but it’s hard to argue with some of the works on view in this show. Albrecht Dürer’s The Vision of the Seven Candlesticks (ca. 1498), kind of made my jaw drop a little. And PAM also has a great selection of Modern and contemporary work, including a selection, on view now, of reductivist work by Robert Mangold, Dorothea Rockburne, Judy Chicago, John McCracken, and others — stuff that really gets me going. And there’s a large display of photographs, which the museum calls a “Fotofolio,” by Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and Edward and Brett Weston and Minor White. Their silver gelatin prints of the American West made me wish to flee New York and find an abandoned mission on top of a mountain.

Also there, now closed, was a show of David Hockney’s print suite, A Rake’s Progress (1975), along with a set of prints by William Hogarth, made in 1733, on which Hockney’s sequence is based.

Full from Portland, I went back to Seattle. I took a breather and went to the Seattle Art Museum, at which the main attraction is currently “Disguise: Masks and Global African Currents,” which was a kind of unremarkable show about artists using the imagery of African masks in their work. The hanging was gimmicky and impoverished, and several of the artists felt slight and arbitrary (no Keith Sonnier?). But, next to it was a great, like, really out of sight display of actual African masks, along with archival footage of performers at a carnival in the Côte d’Ivoire. That stuff is way more exciting and intellectually engaging than much of the show’s contemporary work.

As well, a small but nonetheless excellent show, called “The Duchamp Effect,” rounded up post-War artists making use of Duchamp’s innovations. There was a lot of toilet humor and pointing at contradictions between image, language, and actuality. One very smart touch was the inclusion of a photograph by Louise Lawler, showing two artworks in a collector’s home. Lawler’s photograph shared gallery space with the two artworks it pictures: a painting by Jasper Johns and a sculpture by James Rosenquist.

I left Seattle’s piney metropolis for an excursion north, to Vancouver. Even Canada’s border is beautiful, with enormous gunnera unfurling at the edges of Peace Arch border-crossing park, and a sculpture by Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han — a billboard-like form of negative space overlooking the Pacific inlet there. A few minutes away, Vancouver is a really, really pretty city, seemingly compacted into the natural concavity of the Salish Sea’s coast. There are tall skyscrapers, the city is sparklingly clean, and I arrived immediately after Pride weekend, with festive banners and the debris of feather boas all over the place. I mean, it’s a really beautiful city. And in Canada, HBO has its own regional programming, including mandated indigenous programs and movies, which are very cool and sort of an entertaining (if small) gesture at reconciliation after hundreds of years of genocide and oppression. I liked the movie Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013). It’s good.

There, I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is hosting an enormous retrospective of Canadian sculptor Geoffrey Farmer, “How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth?” I found myself thinking about Farmer’s tremendous archivist spirit, collecting and combining the pieces of National Geographic back issues, fiberglass sculptures, bits of signs, notes, tapes, vehicles, and all sorts of other things. It brought me back to a perpetual question in an era of explosive image production and distribution: is cataloguing and organizing one of the best strategies for an artist trying to cope, resist, or flow with such proliferation? I think probably yes. One small room held an archive of artist lectures and interviews on cassette tape, and invited visitors to sit and listen awhile.

On the ground floor was a great “show,” a display of works on paper from the museum’s collection, a trifle compared to the offerings that will be on view following the institution’s addition of a new space, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The works on paper, over a hundred on one large wall, were intended to entice viewers to see the benefits of the costly and overdue expansion. The next gallery over showed work from another collection in “Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums,” with a handsome selection of paintings covering a spectacular historical range, while still appearing intellectually clear and to the point. Upstairs was a group show in several spaces, each artist given their own gallery. Called “Residue: The Persistence of the Real,” this exhibition of documentary photography studies the way that history is retained in images, as in Catherine Opie’s beautiful shots of Liz Taylor’s home and Geoffrey James’s absolutely just mind-blowing shots of Canada’s infamous Kingston Penitentiary, where inmates decorated the walls of their cells so ornately they could be mistaken for contemporary installation art.

Down the street, the Bill Reid Gallery shares the history and importance of First Nations’ arts, with a permanent display of work by Reid, one of Canada’s most famous contemporary indigenous craftsmen. Likewise, the museum promotes the continuing traditions of local tribes, including live, free-form Q & A with an artist working in the atrium. Sean Whonnock was there when I visited, and he told me a lot about the construction of regional iconography, about the craftsmanship of these artworks, his own life, and the traditions of his family and tribe. There’s a lot of great indigenous art and craft all over, and most of these museums had great collections, sustaining cultures that were almost completely wiped out during the preceding centuries.

Finally, back in Seattle, I hit up the city’s monthly First Thursday art walk, down at historic Pioneer Square. The galleries are, in many ways, like those in New York and anywhere else in the world: there are some you’d like to spend a lot of time in, others not so much. One major difference is the organization of openings, all on the same Thursday, with plenty of white and red wines, food, and live music. Totally alien, right? The atmosphere is festive and people are out to enjoy the scene, rather than trying to make the scene. I was taken by Greg Kucera Gallery, which had a diverse collection of works on view by self-taught artists, including Gee’s Bend quilts, Henry Darger paintings, drawings by James Castle and Bill Traylor, and so on. In the back was a show by Gregory Blackstock, who is autistic and creates large mixed-media drawings cataloguing all kinds of incidentals: dictionary definitions, sheepshank knots, flags of the world, rottweiler breeds. Blackstock was in attendance and was more open in his discussing his work than any New York artist you’ve ever met.

The whole trip, whirlwind that it was, showed me some new favorite art spots on the left coast. If you’re in the area, you’d be foolish to pass them up.

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February 2015: Vincent Katz, Martha Schwendener and Christopher Stackhouse

Joining Moderator David Cohen February 13, 2015, at the National Academy Museum, the panelists reviewed exhibitions of Mamma Andersson at David Zwirner, Merlin James at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Titus Kaphar at Jack Shainman Gallery, and Heidi Howard at Nancy Margolis Gallery.

We regret to inform listeners that due to equipment failure the last segment of the event was not recorded; Heidi Howard’s review ends part way through and the audience response to the second half of the program (Kaphar and Howard) was lost. Special thanks to recording engineer Isaac Derfel for defying the odds and saving the bulk of this month’s recording.

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September 10 to October 25, 2014
519 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 727 2070

Asymmetry, illusion and odd numbers all add up in this, Tomma Abts’s second exhibition at David Zwirner.  She was last seen in New York in solo exhibitions six years ago at Zwirner and at the New Museum. There are eight oil and acrylic paintings ranged across three walls and five pencil drawings on paper grouped on the remaining wall. All the paintings are hung at what might be considered a lower height than usual, one that invites contemplation from close quarters.

Fenke (2014) is positioned singly over toward the right end of the wall. It is the standard size of 18-7/8 x 15 inches that Abts has been using for some time now. Surface as a subject and its contradiction through an irresistible illusionism propels a counterpoint that succeeds in engaging vision, touch and thinking equally.  Fenke even has a slice cut in from its edge, inviting real space to participate and contrast the illusions of depth created elsewhere in the composition

On the adjacent wall, Wybe (2014)  – one of four this time, three equally spaced, and one distanced further away, again to the right – is divided into two parts by a diagonal space of half an inch or so.  This startling incursion does not masquerade as part of the composition as in Fenke. Wybe evinces a sense of over-painting: there are fine gradations across the canvas tooth and opaque skins marked with ridges formed by edges of now submerged shapes.  We sense an image repeatedly reconfigured or lost, a result of many hours in the studio.

Abts’s approach is intuitive – the geometric planar compositions emerge without a prior plan and so refute along the way the need for a fixed rationale.  Her space is a shallow and completely convincing one, always askew and splintered. Her use of shading and muted color that evokes unnatural light and obscured passages of space recall the sculpture of Vincent Fecteau.

When installing the exhibition Abts looks for a precise relation for her works to the gallery.  The position and height of the works and the lighting are, in a way, the continuation of the idea of composition, this time applied to the gallery itself. Once installed Abts then titles the paintings, sourcing from a dictionary of first names. This way of titling and the size of painting naturally bring portraiture to mind.  and abstraction of this order can indeed portray an emotion or atmosphere, complex feelings and states of mind. Certainly there is openness in how the viewer may choose to identify the characteristics seen, both formally and psychologically. The paintings are a physical and visual language that discovers rather than seeks equivalences to experience. They do, of course, provoke new experience using a vocabulary of traditional means and forms sometimes considered exhausted.

The five drawings made with pencil and colored pencil read as permutations – there seem to be rules or a set of principles that they extend from, in a musical sense. Contained within each linear element is a striped pattern of yellow, red, green, blue and graphite carefully filled in against the white of the paper. The lines pass over and under each other their color joining intermittently and in so doing imply a movement that flickers restlessly suggesting at turns that the lines incise the paper or are slivers of planes seen through slits. The space and diagonal dynamics are close to the paintings – the white paper is substantial and pressing rather than acting as a void. Both the paintings and drawings, whether planar and opaque in the former or skeletal and rhythmic in the latter, somehow remain fragmentary whilst lacking nothing.

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September 26, 2014 saw the season premiere of the tenth year of The Review Panel with newcomers Alexander Nagel and Dorothy Spears joining veteran guest Robert Storr with David Cohen moderating as ever.  The shows under review were of Allora & Calzadilla at Gladstone Gallery, Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner, Angela Dufresne at Monya Rowe and Justine Kurland at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

In discussing Angela Dufresne’s exhibition, Robert Storr introduces the work of Jane Corrigan, showing at Kerry Schuss next door.

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