artcritical backs the call, initiated by artist Marina Adams, to make OY/YO, the public sculpture by Deborah Kass, a permanent feature of the DUMBO riverbank. The work, commissioned by Two Trees Management Company, is scheduled to remain on view at Brooklyn Bridge Park through August 2016.

We support making it permanent for the excellent reasons given by Ms. Adams in her petition to Mayor Bill di Blasio, which we invite our readers to sign:

OY/YO, by Deborah Kass has instantly become a beloved icon, a Statue of Liberty, an I Love NY for the 21st century. It speaks directly to the many communities that make NYC the greatest city in the world. OY/YO has been acclaimed by the New York Times and gone viral on Instagram. New York Magazine calls it perfect public art. It is both a tourist attraction and an integral part of the Dumbo neighborhood and waterfront. (On top of that it is one of the only public sculptures made by a woman!) NYC loves OY/YO and we want to keep it permanent and public so we can continue to enjoy it.

There may be more public sculptures around by women than Ms. Adams implies (there are at least four in New York City by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney alone, to name one artist) but we won’t quibble on that front, especially as there are for sure nowhere near enough. This week, Philadelphians saw the temporary removal of Robert Indiana’s LOVE from the park that bears its name. Indiana’s iconic sculpture, a forebear (see below) of Kass’s street-smart monument, will take up temporary digs in Dilworth Park as Love Park undergoes renovations. It is rare when a work of public art touches the public’s hearts this way, and should be cherished.

But we acknowledge strong arguments against routinely making temporary public art interventions permanent simply because they resonate and are popular. One is that doing so might inhibit future temporary interventions; another is that it might aggrandize gestures that would be sweeter if they were simpler from artists invited to make temporary works but secretly hopeful of winning the bonus prize of permanence. There is always, however, an exception to prove a rule. The Eiffel Tower, initially reviled, was designed to be temporary. What would Paris be without it?

For the record, in November of last year, shortly after it was unveiled, OY/YO was an ARTCRITICAL PICK. Here is what David Cohen said of it:

OY/YO can be read two ways in more ways than meet the eye. Of course, the bright yellow typographically-symmetrical eight-foot-high aluminum letters, sited in DUMBO’s Brooklyn Bridge Park, read in different languages from Manhattan or Brooklyn, in Yeoman Yankee slang  as well as  Spanish if you face east and Yiddish if you have  your back to Kings County. It’s a gentle joke about multiculturalism and borough rivalry perhaps, although kvetching is pretty much universal and non-denominational throughout greater New York. Deborah Kass offers both a recall and a riposte to Brooklyn’s lost Domino sign and the Queens waterfront’s repositioned “Pepsi” through the democratizing while lost in translation reverse legibility of OY/YO. But the real genius of this at once layered and brazen concrete poem is the way it works for different crowds without anyone getting patronized: Kass speaks the language of art historical appropriation to critically savvy insiders – recalling her classic Jewish feminist deconstructions of Warhol, this time she riffs off of Robert Indiana’s LOVE and Ed Ruscha’s OOF – but she equally presents an upbeat, innocent originality to Joe Public, lounging in the park or stuck in bridge traffic. A knowingly classy graphic for a gentrified sometime slum, OY/YO is a two-way mirror of an only-in-New York variety.

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Good exhibitions are designed to create a visual program of content and experiences that communicate affect most effectively. Curators and designers consider a number of factors to ensure that the visual experience — the look and feel — of the space accurately conveys the story they want to tell about the work: What if the art is lighted from below or above? How might the object look hanging from the rafters or on the floor? What if the walls aren’t white? What if the physical environment is not rectinlinear?

In March 1947, renowned dealer Alexander Iolas — then director of Hugo Gallery — sought to push the boundaries of curatorial license through a breathtaking environment for modern art in the exhibition “Bloodflames.” The show featured art curated by Nicolas Calas installed in the unconventional Fredrick Kiesler-designed environment filled with bright, bold colors and sloping walls. Works by Gorky, Noguchi, Lam, and Matta among others lay propped against walls, hanging from the ceiling, and jutting out at odd angles. Paul Kasmin, in collaboration with Rail Curatorial Projects, revisited this seminal exhibition through “Bloodflames Revisited,” curated by artist, writer, and Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui.

Filling the expanse of both Kasmin galleries, “Bloodflames Revisited” features work from more than 20 artists, including Will Ryman, Cindy Sherman, Chris Martin, and Roxy Paine. While certainly not as radical and disruptive to the senses as the original — you’ll find no sloping exhibition walls or amorphous blobs interspersed between works of art at Kasmin — this contemporary response to “Bloodflames” presents an effective and thoughtful alternative to the traditional white-cube exhibition as we know it. Upon entering the galleries, viewers are jarred by Crayola-colored walls that stretch from the hay-covered floor to the ceiling. “Bloodflames Revisited” is filled with artwork, although the orange-yellow of the walls and the earthy smell of hay trigger the senses to conclude the opposite. Walking into the exhibit spaces takes a bit of re-orientation that immediately calls into question the visual cues we associate with the display of cultural objects. Is it the color on the walls the risers or the hay beneath our feet that suggests everything we experience and see in this space can be questioned?

I walked through the 27^th Street gallery as if down a pirate’s gangplank and felt a relationship to the artworks that unsettled me. When we go the gallery or the museum, we stand apart from the art and typically view it from eye level. Standing on the riser, I looked down on Tunga’s sculptural assemblages, and my eyes rested on the top third of Deborah Kass’s and Alex Katz’s paintings. I decided to surrender to the moment, realizing that the exhibition was successful in its premise: it had indeed forced me to interrogate ideas I had internalized about what my relationship to the art should be as a viewer.

Glenn Ligon’s electric blue and neon green Niggers Ain’t Scared (1996), from the Richard Pryor joke paintings series is still jarring, even when viewed from above. “Alot of niggers ain’t scared, youknowwhatImean?” the text begins in Ligon’s signature stenciling style of imperfection. “I mean like when the Martians landed and shit white folks got all scared.” In an additional act of visual violence, the stenciled words smear down the canvas drawing more attention to the textual dissonance. “Nothing can scare a nigger after 400 years of this shit,” the joke concludes.

Nearby, Lynda Benglis’s giant half sphere of red-orange tinted polyurethane protrudes off of the wall as if floating in space.Benglis developed the brain matter-like forms of her metal and polyurethane half-spheres after combining elements from her work with knotted metal in the 1970s and glass in the 1980s. After discovering she could make knots of glass with her hands using technology, she gained a greater understanding of the material’s properties and began casting concave and convex forms. D’Arrest (2009) is mesmerizing, due in part to its relationship to light. The pigmented polyurethane seems to absorb light while reflecting it, causing it to act like a proprioceptor. The form appears to change as its jelly-like squiggles catch the light from various angles.

On Tenth Avenue, my viewing experience was altered still. The exhibition continued to use bold colors and elevated platforms, but the limitations of the physical space were brought into view more sharply. The snaking riser connecting the two viewing spaces here felt especially distracting, which encouraged me to step down and freely traipse around through the hay. As I examined Do Ho Suh’s stove from the Specimens series, I was reminded of the relationship between belonging and assimilation. In the series, the artist explores his own relationship to cultural displacement and belonging by making scale replicas of items from his New York apartment using only polyester fitted over wire armatures. The translucent material reveals while it conceals, showing some of the internal structure of the object yet protecting the vulnerable insides.

Much of our visual viewing experience is guided by subtle contextual clues: the height of the walls, the lighting, the props on which art objects reside, etc. What other stories do cultural objects reveal through the environment in which they are presented? How can altering the visual context of an artwork allow us to see it fully? The ideas presented in “Bloodflames” and its modern-day re-imagining emphasize the possibilities in disrupting how we relate to art through the physical space where it is presented. Bui fiddles with some of the contemporary conventions of exhibition design by swapping out sterile white walls and employing our other five senses in the viewing experience. It is a welcomed disturbance. Though Kasmin’s gallery spaces will return to their familiar spotless white and polished concrete in a few weeks, “Bloodflames Revisited” serves as a reminder that the relationship between viewer and art object can — and should be — personal and visceral.

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Bellwether Gallery
134 10th Avenue
212-929-5959
September 8 to October 6

The beginning of the season has brought us two remarkable shows at either end of the tenth Avenue gallery corridor. The shows beg for comparison. Both women work in what is, by now, a genre, text painting, or at least make paintings that include words and phrases in them. Both are working at the intersection of language, symbol and abstraction. They each have impressive credentials, make no bones about or make issue of their Jewishness; Kass-“It’s Hard Being a Jew”, Frankfort-“Star of David (orange)”. It’s a sort of beyond post-feminist double whammy.

Kass reminds me of old New York, the New York of the Thalia Theater and the New Yorker Bookshop. Highly intelligent, cynical, wise cracking, and fast fast fast. Her paintings which combine signage of iconic modernism and phrases of city argot or lyrics derived from Broadway musicals are hilarious and also like a punch in the stomach or on the arm, really hard. “Oh Come On” and “Enough Already “ are good examples of the former and “What I did For Love” and “Sign Out, Louise” of the latter. In “Painting With Balls” Kass spells out Cojones repeatedly painted in the grisaille style and font of an iconic Jasper Johns work that actually includes two balls. In “Daddy I Would Love to Dance” Kass spells out that phrase in bold block letters done black or white drip style (a la Jackson Pollock) against a camouflage (a la Warhol) background.

The famous Kenneth Noland target is emblazoned with the phrase “Nobody Puts Baby In the Corner”. References to other famous artists, linguistic and stylistic, obvious and subtle, are all over the place. Kass is not about to earnestly canonize any patriarchal figure. This is a serious game and Kass’ sure graphic hand and knack for over the top color consort to make the work something more than jokes. The occasional strange choice of lyric and graphic combination strikes an odd note and feels like pop psychology. “Let The Sunshine In” is in this category. For the most part the work has teeth and will most likely have ”legs” as well.

Dana Frankfort’s show at the super-cool Bellwether Gallery is more finite about the nature of words and more painterly in touch. Simple words or phrases are left to do their own work of resonation and cross-reference. Don’t be deceived by the seeming simplicity, these paintings are every bit as subversive.   “Crack” and “Stuff”, and “Possibly Permanent” are examples of the sort of word-phrases used as a springboard for Frankfort’s paintings. She is more in doubt of the efficacy of the word and the word is sometimes painted over itself several times making it almost unreadable, bringing to mind the ineffability of much of what we intend to communicate and the multiplicity of meaning without context. Frankfort also has a sure graphic touch but it’s one we don’t recognize yet, it’s more underground and slightly street. Her color is often near impossible, even lurid, yet sly and funny in it’s own knowing way. In “Lines” and “Lines (transformer)” the seraphed font moves top to bottom, seraphs top and bottom making an onomatopoeic representation of the word. Sometimes as in “Word” the scale of the font jumps around in size and space. It included a Star of David indicating that symbol can take the place of the word. The soundtrack for this work is far from Broadway. It is more abstract, dissonant and propulsive…. Several generations away from Kass’ “Do You Wanna Funk With Me”.

The implications and issues raised in both of these shows are far ranging and quickly become quite deep. They are both a lot of fun and offer several fertile fields for painting to grow in. Don’t miss them before the shows come too thick and fast to detect an issue or an implication.

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