October 1 to November 6, 2016
791 Bushwick Avenue at Dekalb Avenue
Brooklyn, info@theparlourbushwick.com

What a World, What a World is an exhibition of eight sculptors who use found materials—to some degree. It was curated by Luisa Caldwell, whose impressive curtains of found candy wrappers, exhibited at Long Island University last Spring, wove Aztec beach blankets with Klimt-like translucency from scraps of colored cellophane. That same riches-or-rags dichotomy is expressed in this show where half the works are elegant and refined, the other half crude and casual, and where all are experimental departures from the artists’ usual practice.

The Parlour’s parlor greets us with Donna Huanca’s Hooker Shoes, (2016) a pair of stilettos encased in nylon nets, fur, toy octopus bits and other flotsam presented on a pedestal. It might pass for a Bruce Connor assemblage were it uniformly brown, rather than motley –– and a far cry from the ambitiously cool, candy-colored aesthetic of Huanca’s installations involving painted living skin. On second thought, the angry rush of materials is nothing like Conner’s infinite care with the abject, and seems intended politically. If so, it’s a bit undercooked, considering that spiked heels right out of the box perform the body as an entanglement of sex, sexism, fashion, consumerism, race and class, and have been a staple of artistic speculation since the days of Meret Oppenheim.

On the mantle behind, Jane Benson’s vase of flowers is so subtle that it could be mistaken for brownstone decor were it not for a slab of thick yellow on a face of the glass, applied with an impasto that recalls Jonathan Lasker. Even then we might miss how the “hand-cut artificial flower” within has been plausibly returned to geometry. The artist has a second work in the pantry in which only green, money-shaped leaves remain. The gesture of these works is precise –– the hand redeems human synthesis of nature, but only by acting like a machine.

Jude Tallichet and Matt Freedman, a sculptor couple with independent sensibilities collaborating here, have furnished the parlor with a ghost upright piano made from thin wood stripping hastily screw-gunned into an exact-size bounding box. Two wiggling, rubbery casts of keyboards, yellow and purple, seem to want to express the idea of “jazzy,” as in a wall display behind the popcorn stand at the cineplex. Too tragically real in their deformity, however, they verge instead on “creepy.” A jazzman’s pork pie hat sits atop the schematic piano; it is sculpted from a papier mâché-like material with satisfyingly blunt impatience, as is a collection bucket on the floor. Disembodied pairs of lips with teeth overflow the bucket, the haul from a Surrealist rent party, perhaps, or a Gumby slaughterhouse.

If the obsessively reworked and damaged ceramic objects that Ron Baron recently exhibited at Valentine felt like exorcisms, The House Stripped Bare, Really (2016), his sectional, wall-mounted architectural scenario made from folded tin dollhouses and plastic figurines, returns to this artist’s usual sculptural clarity and emphatic punning. On the wall, the Eisenhower and Kennedy era dollhouses create a suburban cul-de-sac as seen from above. One house has its furniture outside, as if for a bankruptcy or alien abduction, while a crowd of stereotypes (cowboys, Jacks and Jills, soldiers, dogs, astronauts, babes) pours downward toward the unperturbed Bride, who faces them in her bell-shaped wedding gown. Baron (at least in this more familiar mode) is a perfectionist, not only as craftsman but – in his assemblage preferences – as collector. One house is softly colored like a Golden Book, another is as crisp as a Popular Mechanics diagram, and all cast shadows through the grids of their cut-out windows onto lushly printed metal interiors.

Swinging back to the anti-perfectionist end of the show, Root People, (2016) Anna Rosen’s compound of hanging plastic cylinders recycled from old planters, seems a far cry from the freshness and sophistication of her painting practice. The floral patterns she brushes onto the cylinders would get worked hard on canvas and transformed, but here they stop at their initial iteration. Crude clay figures can be spotted inside –– homunculi, perhaps, of creative fertility, which can’t take root in this bare, leftover plastic. (The rich loamy smell of potting soil might be just what the piece is missing.)

Harry Finkelstein’s jewelry-sized tableaus of small fragments of disparate kingdoms are arranged in several locations. A tiny knot of wood like a scholar’s rock, shattered windshield glass set like precious gems, and other curiosities straddle the line in these works between the fabulous and the arbitrary. One untitled work (2016) suggests a Fabergé egg, complete with an oval window. The view inside, however, is no more intricate than outside, a disappointment that may or may not be intended. 

And Caroline Cox’s lighter-than-air Whirl (2016) is an arrangement of crystal spheres and aqua blue monofilament on a pure white slab. Looking down, one is reminded of a drawing made by a super collider, with subatomic rarities etched in beautiful curls of decay –– except that the materials could have been bought on Canal Street for a few dollars instead of half a trillion; and instead of terawatts of energy, Cox needs only the magic of physical behavior: reflecting, magnifying, looping, and twisting. In conjunction with What a World, a visit to the superb group show Fish Tank, currently in LIU’s glass-enclosed Humanities Gallery and co-curated by this show’s Matt Freedman, is highly recommended, in part because Cox’s web-like installation there is a kind of three-dimensional, hanging version of Whirl’s acute graphic slice. On its white slab, poised above the floor on hidden glass spheres, Whirl is an epigrammatic snapshot of the artist’s taming of chance.

Cox co-ran a pioneer gallery in Williamsburg for many years called Flipside. Crucial parts of a healthy ecosystem, artist-run galleries and artist-curated shows are like Cox’s refracting, inter-connective webs. On the way out, you may notice some of Freedman’s extra porkpies on the period hat rack, reminding us of hats being passed around, of wearing different hats, and of getting to try things on.

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Artist Matt Freedman’s written and drawn memoir, Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal, is not your typical chronicle of illness and rehabilitation. Neither recovery drama nor tear-jerking tragedy, it’s instead nearer to comedy. Both the tone and the format are semi-comic, with fluid illustrations, diagrams, and panel-like sequences floating on waves of hand-written text. Sometimes Freedman’s drawings take the foreground, with words functioning as captions, but mostly text and image create a hybrid that is surprisingly seamless — and absolutely compelling, since his wit is always to the point, even in extremities of hellish pain, anxiety, or drugged oblivion. Equally sharp is his draftsmanship, honed by the self-imposed mission to fill four notebook pages a day during the two months in 2012 when he underwent intensifying radiation and chemotherapy for cancer of the tongue, neck, and lungs.

If traditional illness narratives tend, understandably, to be lacking in humor, Freedman’s over-analytic mind cannot but go there, even with death looming. (The current health of the author, a beloved friend of this writer and many others, is thankfully vigorous, though still endangered.) At his first radiation treatment, with proton guns firing at his diseased throat, he smells the back of his tongue burning. “I’m cooking,” he realizes. The sting of the observation is eased by the cartoonish rendering of his prone head’s cross-section, a Dristan^® ad gone rogue. Similar images get more anatomically precise yet more gruesomely hilarious as the treatment progresses: razor blades, scissors, and swords through the tongue; a burn pattern on the skin resembling a map of Russia; stripes of loose flesh in his neck, “like from a hot pizza cheese burn.” Color appears rarely but to strong effect, primarily when felt-tip red is used as bitter punctuation to locate this widening gyre of pain. But when associative portals open onto vistas of memory Freedman can wield the same color like a fireballer’s change-up –– as when the number five (a parking stall at the hospital) recalls Joe DiMaggio’s uniform number, and thus a lush image of the Yankee Clipper kissing Marilyn Monroe’s flaming red lips.

“It’s remarkable what a trivial little person is revealed when everything is stripped away by drugs and pain and fear,” Freedman remarks. Sports trivia, at any rate, assert a weird priority in the book, with other hospital parking slots calling forth Ted Williams’s .406 batting average in ’41 or –– more borderline autistic –– Lyman Bostock’s .388 or Rob Deer’s 230 lifetime homeruns, each such jog of memory occasioning a fluent sketch of the player’s trading card apotheosis. Power hitters loom with similar iconic weight above Raymond Pettibon’s punk-erudite obsessions, although where Pettibon is occult, Freedman is communicative, leading us by the hand through the educational zig-zag of his thoughts.

Freedman has often played with academic mannerisms in his performances and collaborative instigations. They are absurd events, such as a recent conflation of the French Revolution and the U.S. Open tennis finals, re-enacted shot-by-shot in real time, with losers guillotined; or live lectures with an easel and Sharpie^®, covering obscure historical subjects, accompanied by a jazz drummer. Even in his primary medium, sculpture/installation, Freedman never loses touch with caricatural literalness, nor with a sense of pedagogical mission. His 2012 solo show at Valentine Gallery in Queens, “The Golem of Ridgewood,”included numerous papier-mâché props, some humble and some lavish. The bluntly beautiful, chromatically rich sculptures helped tell the true story of Jewish resistance to the Nazification of Ridgewood’s German immigrants during the early 1940s, a forgotten local history that Freedman utterly entangled with tall tales, myth, and farce.

Relatively Indolent is full of similar entanglements, side-trips from his daily accounts of inscrutable doctors and protocols. We travel backwards in time to harsh assessments of Freedman’s childhood self; and to the day he met his future wife after accidently cutting off his finger in a sculpture studio. (She drove him to the hospital.) We witness Hurricane Sandy through the lens of Freedman’s exile at a Boston hospital, sharing his frustration and guilt at having to focus narrowly on his own pain.

Still, the unprecedented ravages of Sandy call forth affectingly drawn montages, distilled from CNN videos and news photographs. Not only does Freedman’s utilitarian, seat-of-the-pants draftsmanship manage punchline humor and informational razzmatazz (as with the anatomical cut-aways), but it efficiently captures each of the five stages of grief. Crucially, the publisher’s preservation of the hand-written notebook text –– sometimes scrawled on a bus ride or under the effects of strong painkillers, but always legible –– slows the eye, just enough, from reading to looking. That allows Freedman’s resolutely unstylish drawings to sail past an initial repellency, while we learn to read his distinctive, sketchy line. Even as we become addicted, Freedman bears down, expanding his inky range and power, gaining confidence as the work progresses.

Throughout, Freedman records unsentimental self-evaluations, of his work, his thoughts, and his life. The book’s title refers to the slow but steady growth of his rare form of cancer, but “relatively indolent” also serves as a thematic self-assessment, especially as regards his career. Even as he wonders about his lack of focus and killer instinct, the title’s sardonic pun typifies Freedman’s relentless approach: to milk doubt, failure, and anxiety so as to transcend the pretensions of artistic ego and careerism. In all his activities, Freedman remains a truth teller and a joke teller, a principled dreamer in cynic’s clothing –– never more so than in this brilliantly honest and defiantly funny book.

Matt Freedman, Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014). 240 pages, illustrations, ISBN 978-1609805166. $24

The post Cancer, Chemo, Comedy: David Brody on Matt Freedman’s Cancer Treatment Journal appeared first on artcritical.