March 4- June 17, 2017

Gladstone 64, 130 East 64th Street

Once, some years ago, on the way to my hotel in Rome, I was greatly amused to see everywhere billboard posters for the great Sergio Leoni Spaghetti Western il buono il brutto il cattivo (The good, The Bad and The Ugly, 1966, but the title sounds so much better in the original). Sometimes Rome sites what Joachim Pissarro and I call Wild Art alongside its grand baroque monuments in ways that can inspire artists. Cy Twombly, who lived and worked in Rome, made paintings combining graffiti and classical allusions. A little earlier, in the 1950s, a decade before the birth of American-style Pop Art, Mimmo Rotella’s decollages made direct use of billboard materials. Abandoning abstract painting in favor of this more immediate art form, he collaged assemblages of affiches (advertising posters), which he had ripped off walls and then reworked in the studio, letting bits of the poster show through. He also went on to make what he called retro d’affiches, sticking the posters onto his support with the back upward to reveal traces of plaster and other attached materials. Taking his cue from Duchamp, Rotella realized that the materials for his art were right there already in front of his eyes. “I wanted to say to everyone, look, you don’t realize that the city is a museum” Gladstone Gallery’s catalogue reports him as saying. A museum, we should add, of contemporary as well as old master art.

Assembled at Gladstone’s Upper East Side townhouse gallery are 18 of these pictures, dating from 1953 to 1961. All relatively small (the largest is 68 5/8 x 41 inches) they are surprisingly varied compositions. Some of them, the décollage Scotch Brand (1958-59), which contains a detail from a bottle of the Italian San Pellegrino Rabarbaro liqueur, for example, manifest their source materials directly. Others, like the retro d’affiches Senza titolo (1953) and Al reverso (1959), are abstract-looking. But in TAL (1957), as in some other works, the government tax stamp remains.

As co-author, with Darren Jones, of a recent book about art galleries, I’ve become super-sensitive to the context in which artworks are displayed. It is fascinating to see Italian street art made of absolutely banal materials in this luxurious setting. Like some of his American artist peers, Rotella wanted (and failed) to change the world. Nowadays advertising in Rome is displayed very differently, and of course the commodities on show are different, and, in the meantime, Rotella’s decollages and retro d’affiches, like Andy Warhol’s Pop Art paintings, have become pricey historical documentation, reminders of a life that now feels distant. When commonplace commodities become artists’ subjects, whether in still life paintings or in Pop Art, they are transformed—transfigured if you will. Banal things then become precious artworks. In a dramatic demonstration of the much discussed process of de-skilling, Rotella created artworks which are composed directly from advertising images. How surprising that this dramatic breakthrough was made by an Italian, perhaps in part because the bustling consumer economy was a real novelty in his country. When, in 1964, Robert Rauschenberg, another painter inspired by the street art of Rome, won the Golden Lion at Venice, Rotella was marginalized. In his long later career (he died in Milan in 2006), although he achieved serious recognition he never recaptured this early moment of inspiration.

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November 6 to December 19, 2015
530 West 21st Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 7606

Standing in Gladstone’s 21^st Street gallery, Jean Tinguely’s sculptures might run the risk of appearing jokey and dumb. Some do, but being jokey and dumb doesn’t preclude being serious and intellectually engaging, which Tinguely’s work is. Negotiating presumed contradictions is usually difficult, but they’re often not true binaries, and those qualities that are considered dichotomous turn out to have a complicated relationship. Dumb and smart, at least in some art, in Tinguely’s work, are interdependent.

In a 1975 review of Brice Marden’s work, Mel Ramsden wrote that he didn’t think it’s stupid, but that it’s dumb. There’s a big difference. In some ways, this is studio shorthand: as Ramsden notes, Marden himself, that same year, said, “A painter’s just this odd weird person who has to do this dumb thing called painting.”[1] One important distinction is that while “stupid” implies a moral judgment, “dumb” typically doesn’t. It’s not pejorative. Dumb is big, blunt, crude, juvenile, corporeal, synonymous with mute. As an aesthetic strategy, dumb can smuggle a lot of complex information. Tinguely’s dada lineage is visible in the absurdity of his artworks, but there’s something more in being dumb. Beyond an artwork addressing the viewer as an invitation to play, it invites the viewer to grapple. One might consider the work of Richard Serra, Roxy Paine, Tim Hawkinson, or John O’Connor.[2] The same goes for other media — dumb video, dumb performance, dumb sculpture, etc. It needn’t be confined to kinetic art or sculpture.

The Tinguely exhibition features work made between 1954 and 1991, and its dumb may be harder to detect now. Some of this invisibility can be accounted in time and canonization, the hermetic seal of their historicity. Art is often expected to be erudite and sophisticated, savvy even in irreverence. Tinguely opens his hands and offers: Here is a thing made of garbage and it might disintegrate. In addition to the multicolored lights and spinning feathers, twirling poodles, that adorn his sculptures, Gladstone underscores the comic tone with large red buttons, which viewers step on to activate their kinetic features.[3]

The onanistic and spasmodic pieces rumble and screech and shake, powered by old motors. They smell, look, and sound decrepit. Trüffelsau (1984) sharpens the metaphor, with a boar’s skull blindly chewing air, foraging nothing. Its jaw is forced open by a rotating, motorized piece of driftwood attached at the left side, connected to the mandible by a jerking, twisted metal armature. Another, Untitled (1990), mounts an antelope skull on a rocking pendulum, powered by a motor and a rotted tire. A slat of sheet metal appears to have been torqued and worn into a wavering ribbon by the repetitive motion of being mindlessly rammed by the mechanical pendulum. In many pieces it’s unclear what purpose certain parts serve, or if they do at all.

A recent book by designer, artist, and amateur ethnographer Ernesto Oroza, entitled Rikimbili (2008), depicts constructions reminiscent of Tinguely, found in Cuba and made by common people trying to create machines to fill technological gaps with handmade antennae, repurposed motors, improvised battery chargers, motor bikes, and other devices. As Oroza explains, gadgets often come with a set of manufacturer-proscribed allusions that limit their possible uses, whereas these backyard inventors “liberate” objects from such strictures, repurposing and re-organizing components into novel, unsophisticated tools — a discipline he calls “technological disobedience.” They highlight the dysfunction of centrally planned consumer goods, assist in black market trade, and also serve as a model contrary to capitalist production. Like Tinguely’s assemblages, they strip existing information from devices (brands, patents, target markets, functionality, the timeline of planned obsolescence, international supply chains) and make curious, unexpected mutants.

And, similarly, Tinguely’s rude robot functionaries can be read against capitalist labor relations just as easily and effectively as they could be used to flog any of its historical alternatives — the headlessness of Marxism’s obsession with production, class, and technological development. Tinguely’s dumb can be critical, as in Oroza’s technological disobedience, and so, too, in its refusal of articulation. It pushes viewers in broad directions, but needs them to close finer hermeneutic gaps.

Tinguely’s work has been analogized with Rube Goldberg contraptions,[4] whose complex mechanisms achieve small tasks. But that’s wrong since, even less than Goldberg, his machines actually do nothing. They shudder and groan, perform spastic fits. Raichle Nr. 1 (1974) presents ski boots holding up large shears with a rusty armature. Press the button and the blades begin cutting, with blind and fearsome violence. The mechanical age is supposed to be surpassed by the digital, the information. The motorized, headless relics here are fun and frightening.

[1] Emphasis added

[2] It’s unclear whether or not this is largely a male phenomenon.

[3] This is, apparently, SOP for contemporary curations of Tinguely’s work.

[4] As by Alfred Barr in a press release for Tinguely’s 1960 Homage to New York performance at the Museum of Modern Art.

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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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In an eerie augury of Hurricane Sandy’s onslaught, Chelsea galleries in October 2012 were full of art about disasters. Three separate exhibitions put viewers face-to-face with the calamities, natural or man-made, of recent years. Although widely varied in their tone, each beckoned viewers to consider themes of fragility, vanity, and culpability.

At Lehman Maupin, the Japanese artist Mr. used a room full of clutter to depict the horror and chaos left by his country’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The installation Metamorphosis: Give me Your Wings packed the gallery’s center with furniture, toys, books, boxes and chattering television sets. The artist covered the surrounding walls with graffiti and canvases painted in the Manga style. Teen magazines, thick with soft-focus photographs of adolescent girls, were piled and strewn everywhere.  With the focus on aspects of Japanese culture that fascinate Americans—the magazines and the Manga illustration—the installation seemed quite like an alternative comic book store that had been run through a centrifuge. Rather than mourn, I felt I was being asked to browse.

Not far away, Thomas Hirschhorn’s room-sized display Concordia, Concordia at Barbara Gladstone commemorated the recent cruise ship sinking off the coast of Italy. Entry to the main part of the gallery was blocked by floor to ceiling wreckage. With paintings on the ceiling, flat panel televisions on the floor, and lamps hung sideways from the wall, the whole scene was topsy-turvy. Skeins of unwound videotape cascaded over piles of orange life vests, and in a reminder of the film Titanic, heaps of broken plates. Seen under the glow of unshielded fluorescent lamps, the installation’s tawdry materials—brass, Styrofoam, fake wood paneling—were a poignant reminder of cruise ships’ paper-thin luxury. That Hirschhorn took a stand on his subject’s banal materialism made his pile of clutter more effective than the previous one.

Ejecting myself from the airless nightmare of the Concordia, I found momentary relief in a serene and spare arrangement of curved metal bars at Mary Boone’s Chelsea Gallery for Ai Weiwei’s installation, Forge. A quiet interplay of form and void focused thoughts on the granularity of matter and how, viewed from a distance, disconnected bits add up to solid forms. Little did I know that the bits I was looking at were actually rubble from the deadly 2008 Sichuan earthquake.  Ai’s two-part installation, which continues at Mary Boone’s midtown location) featured twisted rebars recovered from concrete school buildings that had collapsed on their young occupants’ heads.  The artist’s orchestrated recovery of the rebar, depicted in a video shown in the back of the gallery, brought dozens of volunteers together to painstakingly collect, clean, transfer, and hand-straighten thousands of pieces of the material. His bold maneuver was at once performance art, craft, political defiance. The undertaking’s communitarian ethos effectively condemned the enforced communitarianism of China’s overlords (who use the word “harmony” as a euphemism for censorship). It also, of course, helped land the artist in jail.

By making disaster art that was not itself a disaster, Ai captured his subject the more effectively. Whether his approach differed from those of Mr. or Hirschhorn as the result of artistic sensibility or culture of origin I cannot tell. Regardless, this multi-national array of disaster exhibitions—and the recent horrors of Sandy—remind us that disaster does not respect nationality. Where human beings presume themselves to be invincible, nature is there to show them otherwise.

Exhibitions discussed in this article:
Mr.: Metamorphosis: Give Me Your Wings at Lehman Maupin Gallery, September 13 – October 20, 2012, 540 West 26th Street;
Thomas Hirschhorn: Concordia, Concordia at Gladstone Gallery, September 14 – October 20 , 2012,  530 West 21st Street
Ai Weiwei: Forge at Mary Boone Gallery, October 13 to December 21, 2012, 541 West 24th Street/745 Fifth Avenue

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Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, Stephanie Buhmann, and Peter Plagens joined David Cohen to discuss James Casebere at Sean Kelly Gallery, Sherrie Levine at Paula Cooper Gallery, Wangechi Mutu at Gladstone Gallery, and Roxy Paine at James Cohan Gallery.

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Carroll Dunham’s rough canvases, tilting toward aggressive sexual assertion and actions of near anarchy, are catchy tunes of hipster malice. Brilliantly colored, self-sufficient in the confidence of their rhetoric, the paintings are busy with protrusions resembling genitalia, organic forms indicative of other body parts, and a humorous treatment generally of the human body. Comic-book clarity and raw desire figure in major ways in this show of Dunham’s recent paintings, which focus on the back view of a female nude in a stylized landscape. Both the female body and the environment in which it has been placed are rendered in grossly configured terms; viewers experience a kind of overkill, determined by the intensity of Dunham’s hues as well as the sheer frankness of the imagery. It is clear, then, that the artist’s reputation as a bad boy with considerable skill dies hard; indeed, it is more or less evident that this is the way he wants to be seen by the public.

This stance may be well and good on a surface level, but it raises questions and doubts about the work itself. What are we to do with so strenuous an outlaw painter? Assuming an attitude is not the same as painting a painting, although it often appears that, for Dunham, the two activities are pretty much the same. While the artist’s technical skill is not in question—his sense of color and graphic composition abilities are really very good—it proves easy to doubt the stylized stance of someone whose creativity revolves around an adolescent vision of sexual high jinks and comic disorder.  The paintings, both past and present, look like adult cartoons on the order of soft porn; they perform their transgressions rather perfunctorily, as if Dunham himself was a bit bored with an attitude so thick it can be cut with a knife. His eroticism is not necessarily divisive, but it does narrow the expressive range of his formal ideas.

In Tree with Red Flowers (2009), a large mixed-media painting with a thick brown trunk, dark green foliage ending in round-shaped branches given a black outline, Dunham’s simplified rawness works to good effect. There is a rough beauty to the colors and imagery, which include a blue-white sky and a series of red flowers painted on top of the greenery. The composition’s simplicity emphasizes the primal forms it comprises, so that Dunham’s audience can appreciate his deployment of contrasting hues.  But in the “Hers” series, the sexual takes over—in (Hers) Night and Day #1 (2009), we see the naked body of a black-haired woman lying on her stomach. Surrounded by nature—a brightly blue sky, grass, a tree, and purple flowers with a red center—the nude projects her own erotic meaning toward the viewer, complete with big hips and a hairy vagina. Nature takes second place when juxtaposed with the imagistic force of a naked woman.

But there is a problem with the adolescent imagery—like much erotic art, it tends to become repetitively stylized, evoking desire in a way that seems superficial. Dunham’s range of imagery is rather narrow, and he would like to make up with intensity what he lacks in breadth. In Bather (One) (2009), a naked woman is seen from the back; naked, she is bent over, thigh deep in water. An explosion of black hair covers her erogenous zone.  Dunham, meanwhile, constructs a lyricism in the hilly landscape beyond: green grass, trees with coiled foliage, a pale blue sky, and, at the top of the painting, the bottom half of the sun. The figure’s breasts hang freely just above the water line. One is hard put to appreciate the heavily outlined body, which offers viewers access to the primal reality of the cartoon. Formally, the composition is workable, but it isn’t about very much. Dunham needs a new theme to inspire his talents, which here lose out to a rebelliousness that makes little sense.

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Paine until February 25
533 W. 26th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-714-9500

Thomas Hirschhorn and Roxy Paine, two sculptors with ambitious installations in Chelsea right now, might seem diametrically opposed in terms of sensibility, representing Dionysian and Apollonian extremes of anarchy and order, sloppiness and control. But they might equally be different branches of the same tree: They are united by dark visions of the opposition of the natural and the mechanical, humankind and the universe.

Mr. Hirschhorn’s sprawling installation at Gladstone, the Paris-based Swiss artist’s second with that gallery, is a kind of adolescent crap-fest, exuding the raw urgency and nonchalent makeshift of protest art. The obsessive-compulsive use of cheap, found materials also lends a whiff of outsider art to the project. In contrast, Brooklyn-based Mr. Paine’s sculptures are hi-tech and precisionist, impeccably crafted and sophisticated in their understanding of art-world issues. But his conception and execution are taken to such knowing extremes that Mr. Paine’s ingenuities have a similar nuttiness to the low-tech, trashy approach of Mr. Hirschhorn.

Mr. Hirschhorn’s installation, titled “Superficial Engagement,” is a bizarre cacophony of light and dark — literally and metaphorically. Arranged on four platforms that fill the gallery to bursting point, and seemingly pulled together in a hurry, they slap together imagery from incongruous sources: geometric and kinetic art from the 1960s, mangled corpses from the Iraqi conflict. Such a jarring juxtaposition of chirpy, optimistic art and gross, grim reality — at respective heighs of the abstract and the visceral — suggests a collision of the artist’s own values and intentions. He oscillates between irony and angst, whimsy and agitprop.

This seems at first to be a phantasmagoric overload of ideas and things. But there is method in the madness. The gruesome war images, culled from the Internet and printed with an indignant sense of the provisional, dwell without remorse on battered and charred remains and body parts. A man dotes on the decapitated head of a friend or relative; a scorched torso lies on a roadside; an eviscerated groin spews mutilated innards.

The abstract art from the 1960s is represented in equally mediated form: photocopies of magazine articles; spiral motifs printed on CD-cases; battered, worn-out monitors with fading screen savers. Printed images, whether of art or war, are scotch-taped to old planks or scraps of carton.

Another motif running through the installation is nails. These occupy an ambiguous space between war and abstraction, destruction and repair. Buckets of nails and hammers and drills seem to invite intrepid viewers to leave their mark. (I heard the drill going at one point.) Nails crowd into horizontal planks, logs, and mannequins. In the planks they have a purely formal elegance, recalling the constructivist art of the Brazillian Jesus Rafael Soto. On the mannequins, by contrast, they have a menacing, surreal mystery. This brings African sculpture to mind, of which there is actually an example included, an incongruous addition to an otherwise detritus-only mix.

Although the juxtapositions are too extreme to mean anything obvious, the work has the energy of propaganda. But what ideology does this art actually serve?

The answer lies, perhaps, in one other ingredient. Obvioulsy of personal importance to the artist, though a buried clue, visually, is a text about the life and times of the Swiss medium, healer, and researcher Emma Kunz (1892–1963), presented on a makeshift lectern in front of one of the stage sets. Some of the childlike geometric patterns transpire to be copies of her visionary designs.

This interest in art as psychic healing (recalling Joseph Beuys) adds an earnest, spiritual dimension to Mr. Hirschhorn’s otherwise bewilderingly indulgent collision of purist abstraction and gruesome reportage. It might prove too obscure a hint of idealism, however, to redeem the work of its puerile addiction to the macabre and the scatological.

The collision of the mechanical and the organic in Mr. Paine’s work is a kind of theater of the absurd on par with Mr. Hirschhorn’s schoolboy dada. Mr. Paine is probably best known, since the 2002 Whitney Biennial, for his steel trees, fabricated with precision not just to look but to “work” like actual, growing trees. But he first came to art-world attention with two bodies of work: hyperrealistic synthetic representations of mushrooms, and madcap machines for making art where a canvas would be robotically lowered into a vat of paint following computerized instructions.

Mr. Paine has moved on from a deconstruction of artistic creativity to a reconstruction of geological process. It’s as if he were saying, having debunked art, let’s take on God.

“Erosion Machine” (2005) uses a manically efficient factory setup of a computer, robotics, and compressor and vacuum devices to program the controlled erosion of a block of sandstone. The erosion takes place within a sealed glass vitrine. Every so often the robot sets to work, blasting the stone according to a program that follows an arbitrarily chosen but purposive set of data — the weather reports in Bridgehampton in the summer of 1990.

Another kinetic sculpture, “Unexplained Object” (2005), also works according to arcane data. A canvas tent that wobbles around as if a couple were making love inside turns out to be programmed by a Geiger counter that records, in actual time, levels of radioactivity in the environment. Again, the Paine principle is to create a simple but enigmatic effect from complex but efficient information.

Another sculpture — this one in the mold of his mushrooms — is “Weed Choked Garden” (1998–2005), a lovingly literal representation in synthetic materials of a rotting vegetable patch. In a back gallery is blown-up piece of head cheese, also in resins and plastics. A final work underscores the artist’s pessimism: “Bad Planet” (2005), a gruesomely blotchy, uninhabitable orb with a diameter of 5 feet. It looks like a hapless planet from “The Little Prince,” about to implode from its own inner corruption.

It is an impressively crafted work, but like the rest of this exhibition it is unlikely to evoke much by way of fear or awe. Too pretty looking, conceptually neat, and merely bemusing for the sublime nihilism they intimate, Mr. Paine’s artworks offer a kind of Madame Tussaud’s experience for the artworld.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, January 19, 2006

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“Richard Bosman” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery until November 13 (529 W. 20th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-463-9666)

“Carroll Dunham” at Gladstone Gallery until December 4 (515 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh, 212-206-9300

The late work of Philip Guston, so axiomatic to the 1980s, was the harbinger of a new, “Bad” painting. Thanks to an almost insolent expressivity and gauche personalism Guston made a goofy appeal to the primitive, in the forms of graffiti and cartoons, and thereby defined the decade.

Somehow the influence has never gone away: Bad painting was just too much of a good thing. It could be that much of Guston’s importance to succeeding generations of painters had to do with his extreme, urgent expression of a perennial struggle (a kind of romantic-classic opposition) between the formal and the informal, the polite and the brash, felt by every creative painter worth his or her salt.

The winds of Gustonism gust through various Chelsea galleries right now. At Anton Kern, for instance, there is a young German painter named Bendix Harm whose self-portrait even resembles the errant Abstract Expressionist, with sad eyes and Picassoid distended nostrils captured within turned-up lapels. There are shades of Louise Bourgeois and Francesco Clemente in the image, too. The head surmounts a pyramid of cushion-like forms each containing the word “moi” repeated in a child-like scrawl.

Richard Bosman is a natural carrier of the Guston gene: He studied with the master in the 1960s as a pioneer student at the New York Studio School. His other influential teacher there was Alex Katz, who included Mr. Bosman in a group show last summer at Colby College, Me.

Mr. Bosman can compete with Guston – or any artist – in terms of the depths of vulgarity he plumbs. His paintings are like oversized illustrations, shiny and brash. His Americana borders on kitsch, only there’s an energetic ambiguity at play: Equal degrees of earnestness and satire animate his depictions of rural museums, Civil War enactments, historic monuments. He gives us a row of Shaker dresses, a vintage 19tjh-century forge, a barn full of collectibles, Herman Melville’s writing desk, cutout figurines of lumbermen in a way that collides 1980s excess with a timeless American innocence.

Mr. Bosman offers a very different experience of kitsch than, for instance, Jeff Koons, where smoothness and slickness underline machined banality (though, as if to tease out a comparison, Mr. Bosman’s collectibles include toy lobsters like those favored by Mr. Koons.) Mr. Bosman’s painthandling is as ambiguous as his subject matter: The freshness and precision with which he paints wet in wet belies the allusions to painting-by-numbers in his style. The dresses, for instance, recall Wayne Thiebaud in the succulence of their delivery.

Initially so disconcerting, his paintings end up appealing precisely because of their parity of style and motif. His vulgarity has a perverse purism: Though illustrational, his illustrations are original, seemingly derived from observation rather than appropriated photographs or engravings. His images are vulgar in the edifying, original sense: powerfully plainspoken, in a common language.

”]Carroll Dunham is looking more Gustonian than ever, though his new show at Barbara Gladstone is equally haunted by the shade of Picasso. This comes across in broadly delineated, dark scaffolds, filled in with brushy dabs of pink and blue, and with the sense of priapic figures disporting themselves by the sea.

Mr. Dunham revels in the fleshiness of pink – its exposed, sexed, puffed up tipsiness. His forms juggle penile and testicular associations with other body parts and facial features to build up an absurdist portrait of an Ubu Roi type – sometimes we get to see his top hat – luxuriating at the beach. The Guston-Picasso influences come across stronger than in previous shows, despite the fact that his earlier work had more of the gutsy impasto associated with the last, loose painterly splurges of those men. By comparison, these new images are thinned-out, aqueous.

Even though he only really hit the artworld’s radar screen in the 1990s, Mr. Dunham remains a quintessential 1908s artist in terms of scale, speed, and subject: Julian Schnabel and Keith Haring must be counted as influences as strong as Picasso or Guston.

Mr. Dunham paints diptychs, presented here in overbearing frames, with halves differently oriented to emphasize spatial and compositional displacement. Some of the pairings read as the same forms from different perspectives. He pushes to an extreme, in this repetitive series of paintings, the oxymoronic hard-edged messiness of his style, with definitive outlines playing off gratuitous splatter. He is masterful in his handling of these opposing qualities, and they are the key stage effect in his drama.

In the back room, Mr. Dunham displays a set of sculptures in laser-cut steel on rather prissy coffeetable-like pedestals. These are charming enough, at first, in their nursery exuberance. Seeing his forms in cool black metal and three dimensions, however, only serves to emphasize how little intrinsic value there is to his cartoonish vocabulary – a mere vehicle for something profounder and more satisfying in his painting. The whimsy and humor quickly wears thin. The sculptures look like Tom Wesselman playing a joke at Antony Caro’s expense.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 4, 2004

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