In the week that has seen a woman secure the presidential nomination of a major party for the first time in US history it seems fitting that our ARTCRITICAL pick should be an all-female lineup that in turn honors — at least in title — an indomitable fighter of yesteryear. “If Only Bella Abzug Were Here” acknowledges congresswoman and activist Bella Abzug, founder of WEDO (the Women’s Environmental and Development Organization) and celebrated for her trademark big hats. The big hat exhibition, curated by consciousness-raised Marc Straus gallery directors Tim Hawkinson and Ken Tan, includes work by Holly Coulis, pictured here, alongside Nicole Eisenman, Anj Smith, Joan Levinson, Tomona Matsukawa, Eleanor Ray, Ann Craven, Rachel Selekman, Bettina Blohm, Lily Kelly Napangardi, Anna Leonhardt, Genieve Figgis, Emma Rivers, Tarra Bandet, Rachel Garrard, Sarah Crowner, Shara Hughes, Nicole Cherubini, Shirin Neshat, Emily Wardill, Kirsi Mikkola and Liliane Tomasko.

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Nicole Kaack on Nicole Eisenman at the New Museum, June 2016

Dennis Kardon on Nicole Eisenman, June 2016

David Cohen on Nicole Eisenman at Leo Koenig, March 2004

David Cohen on Eisenman’s work in the Arts and Letters Invitational, March 2001

The post Nicole Eisenman Double-Bill: Reviews of Her Exhibitions at the New Museum and Anton Kern appeared first on artcritical.

May 4 to June 26, 2016
235 Bowery (between Rivington and Stanton streets)
New York, 212 219 1222

Exiting the east stairwell onto the New Museum’s third floor, I am greeted immediately by Hanging Man (2016), a sculpture of wood and wax mounted on a wheeled, metal table. The wooden structure’s arms end in clumps of clay from which organic sticks awkwardly protrude. Just below this armature, a figure rests vertically but upside down, legs kicking in the air atop a torso-less giant head. Clumps of dark brown wax are strewn about the worktable. Below, a stream of burnt sienna paint issues from a tube to form a spiraling pile beneath the table’s final shelf. Crudely, playfully, this tableau evokes linguistic and experiential allusions that, much as we try to avoid it, are undeniably part of human life; these rough, “piece-of-shit” objects suggest the different shapes and smells that our bodies are capable of producing. However, equally present in the sculpture is its titular relationship to hang-man — formally established in the hooking arrangement of the wooden arms — and the history of violence so carelessly invoked in this children’s game. This olfactory experience and the following tide of associations seems a fitting introduction to “Al-ugh-ories,” a survey exhibition that attempts to address the humor, complexity, and satire of Nicole Eisenman’s varied and probing works.

After the fashion of the old masters that she alludes to, Eisenman creates compositions so rich in their references that they are painted not only in pigment but also in words and relationships. In Night Studio (2009), the names of artists and movements listed on the spines of painted books color my reading of the painting, pressing it into a history of imperialism and cultural appropriation, even while objects such as a bottle of Vitamin Water and an orange extension cord return the scene to the present moment.

In literal and contemporary interpretations, Eisenman demonstrates the ridiculousness and crudity of the ideas that construct our intellectual canon. Eisenman visualizes Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus complex in Dysfunctional Family (2009), mocks the fleshy dynamism of Michelangelo’s renditions of the human form in Spring Fling (1996), and teasingly exaggerates the tawdry romance implicit in traditional renditions of Death and the Maiden (2009). The Triumph of Poverty (2009) gestures explicitly to Hans Holbein the Younger’s drawing of the same name, even while imposing a group of miniature figures copied directly from Pieter Bruegel’s The Parable of the Blind Men (1568). In spite of the richness of this iconography, there is a fundamental humanity in Eisenman’s paintings that make them legible to a varied audience. Her portraits render our lives in startling relief, bringing the awkwardnesses and banalities of life to the painted canvas. This leveling does not discriminate between an alluring nude, an individual performing oral sex on his or her partner, and boy looking onto his own body with confusion.

In a society that mortifies the flesh for the beacon of intellectual democratization, Eisenman’s sculptures and canvases confront us with visions of human corporeality, capturing the body in all of its base carnality and abjection. Captured in gaudy hues and caricatured parts, these figures are aliases for human bodies that allow us to enter a surreal space of symbolism and alterity. In the startling revelation of the human form rendered grotesque and confusing, Eisenman refuses to adhere to expectations of class, age, or gender. In Coping (2008), a mummy, a bundled form, and a female nude pass each other in anonymity on a provincial street. A reclining yellow figure in the forefront of Night Studio, although explicitly female, remains uncertainly coded in a challenge to a sexual binary that is fully realized by the child who castrates himself in Dysfunctional Family. Many of Eisenman’s characters exhibit a curiosity and physical self-inspection that both question and potentially affirm difference. The cartoonish cyclops of Selfie (2014), a boyish figure in I’m with Stupid (2001), and child in the Dysfunctional Family all seem to wonder “Am I normal?” These disruptions ask us, in turn, to dispute the idea of normal and other cultural expectations laden with judgmental biases.

Eisenman reveals modern allegories in even the most banal of gestures. The stack of books and cheap beer depicted in Night Studio do as much to communicate time and narrative as iconographic and allegorical details do in classical paintings. The individuals who live out the minutiae of the everyday in these colorful canvases unselfconsciously wear their unusual identities on their sleeves. As layered as they are in emblematic markers of character, these badges point to an “ordinary” that is not necessarily common. By comparing the flawed models of aesthetic tradition to the normative power of contemporary conventionality, Eisenman demonstrates the stifling impossibility of conforming to the idealized archetype. In the lovingly mocking tone of Breugel’s paintings of peasants, the artist brings our daily discomforts and failures into sharp (or occasionally stylized) relief. These unapologetic portraits of unexceptional life are characterized not only my mistakes, foolishness, and crudity, but also by the joys of affection and laughter. Eisenman’s forgiving gaze tells us that it is alright to have a nonconventional face, body, or sexuality. Because nothing follows the prescribed model, particularly not our allegories.

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May 19 to June 25, 2016
532 West 20th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 367 9663

The sudden embrace of Nicole Eisenman as culture hero should come as no surprise. She’s a prolific painter whose unleashed imagination and hungry heart have produced memorable and disturbing works of art. She also happens to hit the diversity buttons of underappreciated woman, queer, and gender fluidity that animate current cultural discourse. And of course the trifecta of MacArthur Fellowship grant, survey exhibition at the New Museum, and concurrent first solo show at Anton Kern gallery, has obviously made her the focus of attention. But what makes Eisenman important, rather than merely au courant, is her approach to ambiguity.

Something significant has happened to Eisenman’s paintings since the work shown in “Al-ugh-gories” at the New Museum. Much of “Al-ugh-gories,” though compelling, is fairly easily parsed, and critical interpretations seem remarkably consistent.

At Anton Kern, the truly subversive nature of Eisenman’s vision flowers when she focuses on “normal” everyday life. Her new focus recalls a passage from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts:

It reminds us that any bodily experience can be made new and strange; that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it; that no one set of practices or relations has a monopoly on the so-called radical or the so called normative. 

The more one gazes into the mechanisms of these paintings, the more it is apparent that ambiguity has become the medium with which she now paints. In so many different ways, ambiguity animates every new Eisenman painting. If it isn’t the uncertain gender of her figures, it’s a subway train’s direction of travel in a station, the era in which a party occurs, whether a shooter is gangster or cop, or the nature of the figure/ground relationship.

The tour de force Grand Guignol here is Another Green World (2015), which is also the title of the Brian Eno album the central character is examining. A huge 128-by-106-inch party scene that is inhabited by 28 figures (by my count, if you don’t include Grace Jones on an album cover) of indeterminate gender and sexuality who are making out, doing drugs, listening to music, eating, drinking, dancing, conversing, smoking, moon-gazing, or passed out under the coats on the bed. Oh yeah, and despite the ‘70s disco ball, vintage turntable with vinyl LPs, and lines of coke, there is a figure raptly gazing at a cell phone, which throws the whole era of the party into question. The binaries of male/female and gay/straight and past/present quickly break down, as we try to assign gender to all but a few obviously female figures. It is interesting how reflexively we desire to do this in order to navigate our social world. But here it doesn’t matter; it’s a party, everyone’s welcome.

In Another Green World Eisenman also successfully confronts the figure/ground problem that has increasingly challenged her as a painter. Eisenman has great skill as a draughtsman, but her talent lies in expressively depicting people. Against the blank paper, there is no problem, but in her paintings she has to invent the environment in which they occur. The details of background have evidently always been less compelling to her, and might have seemed like tiresome labor. With scaled up canvases, the figure/ground dilemma has become more urgent: how to animate every inch of the canvas while preserving the hierarchies of attention needed to construct emotional legibility. It has been interesting to watch Eisenman tackle this as an idea she seems to have realized that she needed to address.

Part of her solution has been to increase the number of figures so that sometimes much of the background is now other figures. But more interestingly is the way she now considers paintings as a jigsaw puzzle of shapes. And whether they are the positive shapes of feet, hands, faces, clothing, and objects, or instances of negative space revealing surfaces of carpet, furniture, table, or landscape, Eisenman treats each shape as an arena of painterly invention of differing facture, not letting big expanses of emptiness dominate. What keeps it together is her masterful drawing, creating space through exaggerated changes in scale, juxtaposing oblique surfaces coexisting in impossible perspective, and establishing different points of focus using her sharp tonal color sense.

Despite the cacophony of Another Green World, Eisenman gets the whole drama to revolve around the brightly lit woman at the center raptly studying the eponymous album, and rubbing her nose in reaction to the bump of coke she has probably just snorted. Our attention rotates to the lower left to the kissing couple, a topless woman sprawled upside down on the couch in the embrace of an impossibly blue figure of indeterminate gender, though perhaps the stubble on her legs indicates female–but that’s how closely you have to look.

There are many compelling paintings in this show, which also invite rigorous analysis particularly Weeks on the Train (2015). Despite focusing on a central young person slouched in a window seat working a laptop, whose cat in carrier occupies the aisle seat, Eisenman pulls off the neat trick of rotating the windows 90º to fit parallel with the side of the vertical canvas. This pushes the viewer’s perspective high above the painting. From this point of view, our focus is pulled to the cartoonish Guston-like head ensconced by big red headphones, with a single, large bulging eye in the bottom foreground staring out the window. At the level of this eye, the view out of the window becomes thick with impastoed booger-like flowers.

Though more emotionally subtle, another focal point of this show is the tenderly haunting Morning Studio (2016). Here Eisenman eschews the butch/femme brazenness of her two pre- or post-coital chapeau’d women in Night Studio (2009) at the New Museum and replaced them with two embracing figures whose erotics are more maternally consoling than flatly conversational. In Morning Studio, the faces are painted with different levels of specificity but it is the boyish person with ochre skin who fixes the viewer with a wary stare, and who is comforted by a more generically represented topless woman who is also simultaneously reaching a hand beneath her jeans. Eisenman then explodes this intensely personal moment with references to the world out a window and the universe via a large spiraling galaxy computer screen, which watches impassively over the scene. This is where we see Eisenman striving for an emotional complexity that she achieves specifically in her recent paintings.

The measured construction of her paintings provides a pointed contrast with the still wonderful drawings in the second, back room of the show. They demonstrate how Eisenman’s work has previously been driven by her drawings, which are fairly direct depictions of any idea that crosses her mind, no matter how silly, heretical, or gross. Her drawings are pure id, she doesn’t seem to judge or censor, and they have a spontaneity and freshness that has always been thrilling and noteworthy.

But this show seems to indicate that Eisenman’s present ambition, her desire for significance, now lies in her paintings. Earlier paintings seemed often like large elaborations of various ideas originating in drawings and fleshed out with details in paint. Now the paintings seem to develop on their own terms, with the ambiguities and complexities that the act of painting promulgates seizing control over the content. Drawings are direct and fast and in the present, while paintings are slower, much more calculated, and connected to a history that is mostly white and male. In her new paintings, we see Eisenman sublimating the immediacy of her drawing talent and examining historically established protocols that she either honors, flouts, or fucks with. It is now in these mature paintings, that Nicole Eisenman is finally confronting her artistic superego.

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September 10 to October 24, 2015
456 W 18th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 680 9467

In her exhibition eight years ago at Zach Feuer gallery, Dana Schutz showed a series of “How We Would…” paintings – fantasies of accomplishment or desire. Especially striking was How We Would Give Birth (2007), which depicted a woman on a bed distracting herself by staring at a Hudson River School painting on the wall while a bloody infant struggles to emerge from her open womb. This painting came to mind while confronting twelve huge exuberant paintings (one close to 10 by 20 feet) and four drawings in her present show at Petzel, and realizing all but one were done in the past several months of 2015 after the birth of her child, a little more than a year ago.

While usually her paintings look out at a world gone wild, most of these paintings seem to gaze inward. Schutz’s images have always seemed like proscenia, upon which are enacted the dramatic complexity of her own ambivalent feelings. And in this spirit we might consider the animating engine of her current exhibition to be Post-partum Expression. Whatever her fantasy of parenthood might have been eight years ago, these paintings are the palpable result.

The human-scaled Sleepwalker (2015) in Petzel’s entryway guides us into the exhibit. It displays a person in a yellow t-shirt, hands outstretched zombie-like, having just descended, or ascended, or about to tumble down (the perspective is ambiguous) a long flight of stairs. The vision is reminiscent of those post-childbirth, middle-of-the-night walks to quiet a crying infant: trying to be awake just enough to accomplish the task, yet still able to fall back to sleep afterwards. Ironically, the “Adidas” emblazoned across her chest has its final “s” obscured or missing to become Adida, the past participle of the Spanish verb adir — to accept.

Acceptance of the present moment, of chaos and loss of control, is not only a condition of parenthood, but of painting, as well. Some of these images might seem incoherent at first, but the confusing, fractured, and contradictory points of view of Cubist space, which frustrates stable analysis, seems to have become the ideal tool for Schutz to explore her emotional state.

Lion Eating Its Tamer (2015) introduces us to this ravaged pictorial space where every brushstroke simultaneously creates form and is a form itself. Being consumed by what one is trying to control calls to mind the experience of being physically and emotionally devoured by one’s child, probably every nursing mother’s nightmare. The lion is an implacably ferocious stone idol upon whose altar the tamer has been sacrificed. The various objects contained in this flattened image — a ball, a sperm-like whip, a ring of milky flames, a nipple shaped pedestal, a purple streaked square of paper or diaper, a broken wooden joint and nails — are arranged around the central action like iconographs in a Byzantine Madonna and Child painting. The tamer seems less terrified than resigned or sleep-deprived, engulfed by, or perhaps ejected from, the mouth/womb of the chimeric beast. The drama is staged not in a circus ring but on a trapezoidal examination table under overhead surgical lighting.

A yet more mysterious painting, The Glider (2015) is as bewildering as any Cubist Pablo Picasso, and at first the central female’s face seems pulled from one of his paintings. Learning that this glider is not an airborne one, but the term for a reclining nursing chair clarifies the image. The wood chair, the red infant, elongated funnel breasts (there seems to be four), and various glasses with water and straws create a private moment that we share. The Picassoid face of the nursing mother, as fractured as it may seem, expresses a specific emotion somewhere between shock and ecstasy, and locates a head that is leaning back and seen from below, which would be the nursing infant’s point of view, and becomes our own, pulling us into this intimate experience.

This sense of introspection and privacy, despite the manic energy of their execution, extends even to the two titular paintings of the show with their metaphors of a brawl in the enclosed space of an elevator. The calm abstractions of flat brushed metal doors, either opening or closing like curtains on the intense energy of wildly painted forms at the center, separate us from the drama. The chaotic confrontations of a contained world are in the process of being concealed or revealed to our isolated view. The quite wonderful Slow Motion Shower far from a salacious view of a naked female bather offers a hunched over, multi-armed and possibly weeping Shiva, whose tears blend with the shower spray and conveys the feeling of a retreat from the demands of human contact and the one place to find solitude and release.

The immense Shaking Out the Bed (2015) in the last room depicts not only a locus of pleasure and conception (certainly not sleep here) but also a fraught arena for any new family. Initially so chaotic seeming, the painting slowly reveals how Schutz has structured this boudoir explosion.

Several different points of view here have been woven together. Seen frontally the stable entry point into this eruption, at the center bottom, is the dark surface of a night table. Upon it rests an ominous hammer, a water glass, a crumpled paper, and a giant cockroach. Anchoring the right side of the painting is the flat top of a headboard seen from above, displaying four ornamental ceramic pots. The upper part of the painting is held in place by a lamp on a blond night table, drawer expressionistically askew, and on the left side, looking down past the foot of the bed is a laundry basket possibly containing soiled diapers.

The “shaking out” of the title occurs in the center of the painting where coins, newspaper and pizza slice fly out at us like a big bang. Bang might be the operative word as it is generated by two figures caught in coitus, as evinced by their straining appendages and bare buttocks, and the concentrated expressions of their giant Philip Guston-like heads pressed intimately together, trying unsuccessfully not to disturb the diapered infant at the foot of the bed. Mostly we are looking down on this scene, which throws us into the air as well.

Schutz emphasizes how personally significant this painting must be for her, not only through the scale and the intimacy of the activity, but in the specificity of markers around the edge: the stack of Self magazines under the bed, the calendar page in one corner showing the date June 27, and the digital clock in another revealing the time to be 12:31.

Evident here is the influence of other artists who have explored the metaphoric significance of family experience, whether Guston, Elizabeth Murray, Nicole Eisenman or Judith Linhares, each in entirely different ways. But the boldness and fearlessness of Schutz’s approach, her constant risky experimentation with both form and subject matter, and an almost desperate desire to get to the bottom of her feelings through paint, reveal her, to my mind, as one of the great painters of our time. Julian Schnabel once bragged that he was the closest thing to Picasso we were going to get in our lifetime, but he’s now been pushed aside.

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

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

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

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

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Victorian wallpaper was used as a status symbol along with other tasteful furnishings by the burgeoning bourgeoisie of the 19th century. Densely packed and richly colored, its heyday coincided with the apex of mechanical reproduction. Oddly enough, this “machine-made” quality is what English designers like William Morris were reacting against when they introduced a handcrafted process and designs that mimicked the gothic. Their work continues to form our view of “classic” decorative wallpaper. In the early 20th century, wallpaper design followed the arts loosely through many styles: art deco, modern-abstract and mock colonial; but by the mid century it had evolved into a debased variation created for suburban houses. These were cheaply made, inoffensive and made little statement apart from matching the avocado or beige color scheme. Now, after decades of white and off-white walls, we have begun to decorate again with Pottery Barn leading the way, selling us an ersatz “Arts and Crafts” movement. Though today’s domestic interiors have the emphasis on technology (have we begun to think of the “house” itself as an “appliance?), and are littered with computer gear, we want a little coziness,albeit in a post-modern sort of way. It is interesting, then, to see how contemporary artists deal with this quaint notion of wallpaper.

The exhibition, On the Wall: Wallpaper and Tableau, at the Fabric Museum and Workshop In Philadelphia, updates our view of wallpaper in a major way. Including 33 artists and numerous historical pieces, the exhibition showcases excellent examples of contemporary art. (Of contemporary art or contemporary wallpaper? Or do you mean excellent examples of the ideas inherent in contemporary art.?) This is not an easy task since contemporary art envelops so many concerns normally not confined to walls. The usual axioms of race, gender and politics are to be expected, but when the artists grab onto some aspect of decoration and twist it -this is where the show really does make a statement about the relationship of contemporary art (wallpaper?)to its wallpaper (Victorian?) predecessor. This double intention gives the show an inherent contradiction that could have been emphasized; it deals with issues of art versus decoration by default while simultaneously dealing with artists’ usual concerns. Having said this, the show becomes more of a showcase for these concerns rather than attempting to make any larger cohesive statement about our wider relationship to the decorative arts.

Andy Warhol succeeded in using this medium and set a well-known precedent with his Cow Wallpaper from 1966. He was the first to make the connection between art and domestic (commercial?) products, and artists have been following his lead ever since. Virgil Marti’s Lotus Room nods to Warhol and forms the centerpiece of the show. This is a mixture of homage to a “tasteless” past and a formal exercise in reflective qualities of Mylar and stick-on flowers. This is a wonderful work, though I was disappointed in not finding a sofa, a large palm and a stereo playing Abba to complete the installation. His day-glow, black-lit Bully Wallpaper, which literally depicts people (bullies?) from his high school yearbook, does not have this contextual problem. Installed cleverly in the men’s room, it evokes the seventies so strongly it is scary. This is where the mix of materials and metaphors is most effective, a successful amalgam of style as (and?) content. Other witty works by artists Renee Green and Rodney Graham update the past effectively though they both needed to be more enclosed. These are pieces that could easily be pasted up in work places and homes. (explain what these look like) Notables like John Baldessari and Robert Gober were marginalized in glass cases, and Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays seem out of place perhaps because there is no nod to decoration (explain what they do have if not a nod to decoration.). This is where the contemporary “historical” aspects of the show didn’t work so well. Adam Cvijanovic’s hand painted removable mural wallpapers show a clever technical development on traditional wallpaper but his suburban scene doesn’t connect much with the method. (this last sentence should be moved up in sequence; the “doesn’t work so well” sentence should be your last to sum up the general feel of the exhibition.)

Organized by Judith Tannenbaum, Curator of Contemporary Art at the RISD Museum, the show began as a smaller version (on a smaller scale?) with a slightly different title: On the Wall, Wallpaper by Contemporary Artists. It has now been expanded by Marion Stroud, Director of the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and includes more artists and tableau. This ambitious expansion perhaps included too many possibilities to explore. Curator Tannenbaum’s assertion concludes that artists subvert the everyday simply by adding content in the form of politics or sexual imagery to the so-called “background,” but this is simplistic. Although many works in the show do this, there is not enough tableau to contrast it nor enough “real” rooms to emphasize the inherent ironies. It is certainly the use-value of these decorative objects that is most interesting (regardless of the subject), but that can only truly be gauged outside the museum context. The wallpapers that worked best were the ones that indeed subverted our idea of decoration but they were, oddly enough, the prettiest to look at in the conventional sense. Nicole Eisenman’s amusing Dr Suess-like illustrations of life in a women’s prison are an effective example. That is the twist. Omitting that twist made the Jenny Holzer work fall “flat” and made the Bullies in the bathroom effectively creepy. Apparently film director Gus Van Zandt (My Own Private Idaho) has wallpapered his office with Virgil Marti’s “Bullies.” Now, that I’d like to see.

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Bouvard and Pécuchet pretty much had the right idea about academies. Never miss an opportunity to ridicule them, and never turn down an invitation to join! My own “received idea” about Salon-type exhibitions is largely informed by London’s Royal Academy of Arts which every year delights ladies in tweed (plaid) from the Home Counties and embarrasses the artworld with that time-honored ritual, the Summer Exhibition. Academicians, already an odd-enough cocktail, add to the brew of their own eclecticism by opening their august walls to other talents, new or old. Nothing can be more calculated to offend a modernist sensibility than the double- and triple- hangs with a resulting visual cacophony that typify the RA Show and the comparable Salons (de Mai, d’Automne etc.) arranged periodically at the Grand Palais in Paris and indeed anywhere where exhibiting societies of yore survive. Post-modernists generally find cooler ways to overturn the applecart of modernist purism than throwing in their lot with these meat markets (though one year, as it happens, YBA Michael Landy did submit a market stall to the RA where it held pride of place under a rotunda). Anyhow, this is all by way of introduction to the totally unexpected positive feelings engendered in me by this year’s “Invitational” exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

I don’t know what others do when they receive an invitation with thirty-eight names on them, but in a mix of curiosity and vanity I like to circle any acquaintances, and to my astonishment, when this particular card arrived on my desk I soon found a baker’s dozen of haloed names. These were all artists I admired and respected; yet in my wildest dreams I would only curate them into one exhibit as a Surrealist gesture. A sewing machine and an umbrella are more likely to meet on a dissecting table than Melissa Meyer, Chakaia Booker, Amy Sillman, and Martha Diamond to exhibit together in glorious, top-lit nineteenth-century galleries in a complex of like-buildings floating as incongruously amid the northern reaches of Harlem as the Taj Mahal in modern Agra. But that’s exactly what’s going on at the Academy’s Art Galleries at Audubon Terrace at Broadway between 155 and 156 Streets til April 1. For those of us – shame on us! – who have never ventured to this neighborhood before, the delights of Velázquez and Goya and much else await at the Hispanic Society of America next door.

Of course, the Invitational follows hot on the heels of those bazaars, the Armory and Pier shows, so New Yorkers may still have the magpie sensibility needed to extract aesthetic experience from the quagmire of overload. I should say, however, that the Academy show is installed with remarkable dignity considering the number of artists included, and the depth given to each artist. The sculptor Lucky DeBellevue is given better opportunity to do his thing here than he was in the encyclopedic “Greater New York” show at P.S.1 in Queens last year. His exquisite mesh of chenille stems in the suspended canopy The Underneath made for a magisterial entrance to the South Gallery. A heightened sense of nature versus artifice is sustained as the visitor turns left, to find, framed by an alcove, a sumptuous Ena Swansea shadow painting. The annex revealed a new artist to me: Justen Ladda, whose sensationally crafted Tree of Knowledge in glass crystal beads- knowingly, wickedly kitschy – is sorely tempting.

On a similarly lapsarian note, it struck me on this occasion that Nicole Eisenman’s slick, slippery, mannerist panel paintings of mean, muscley ice-maidens (which I had actually seen already at the Jack Tilton Gallery, but needed a second viewing to be convinced by) could be the work of Adam Elsheimer angry ex-wife, Lilith! Fishing, 2000 (borrowed from a Miami Beach collection) I have now decided is a masterpiece. The gleeful, girlish illustrational quality of this image, of a surly sisterhood lounging around in tight catsuits on Giotto-like icy hillocks and presiding over the dunking of a hapless Acteon (hoisted – literally – by his own petard) compounds rather than distracts from the intensity of the whole. Sure, this is Bad Painting with a capital B, but there is real aesthetic communication here, not just art about art, which is why, in my opinion, Eisenman leaves John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage out in the cold (it’s Nicole who really “breaks the ice”!). The tight contorted awkwardness sits well with the erotic energy experienced by painter and viewer alike in this Rubenesque paean to voluptuous girl-power. But enough… this review is about to get X-rated!

Seriously, though, you can see the problem with a Salon review. There are thirty-eight artists here, and I’d like to talk in similar depth about, say, twenty-four of them. It’s tempting to delve into the revelations that arise from the juxtaposition of artists from totally different milieus. I love the way Jacqueline Humphries’s sparse, sleek drip paintings, commentaries on, as much as essays in, abstraction are on the other side of a wall with Charles Cajori’s sweaty AbEx figural abstractions, as if to say, here are two sides of one coin. And it is interesting how, out of the icebox of Mary Boone’s uptown gallery, Will Cotton’s high-end kitsch ice-cream paintings melt into the hokey academic still lives by Nancy Hogan hanging next to them. But still, there is no group aesthetic, no zeitgeist that I’m smart enough to discern. I guess this is why there’s never an effective equivalent of Ruskin’s Academy Notes or Baudelaire’s Salon Reviews for the Whitney Biennial or the Venice Biennale, the modern equivalents of those sprawling old fixtures. So, I can’t actually review the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitation Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture. But I certainly can recommend it.

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