Ching Ho Cheng: The Five Elements at Shepherd Gallery
April 7th through May 9th, 2015
58 East 79th Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 4050

Likely the first American artist to prominently feature the selfie, Tseng Kwong Chi has already become an important figure in the history of contemporary American photography and performance history, even though he died of AIDS in 1990. His work is on view at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. And Ching Ho Cheng, not quite as well known in New York art circles, deserves equal status and recognition for his remarkable psychedelic paintings and torn-paper collages, which maintain a startling contemporaneity — this despite the fact that Cheng, too, died during the AIDS crisis in 1989. His work is currently being shown at Shepherd Gallery, on the Upper East Side.

The two shows demonstrate the fact that, early on, the art of Chinese expatriates in New York was not fully recognized, but this failure was not because of a lack of accomplishment. Indeed, Tseng and Cheng formed a nucleus of a small, but remarkable group of Chinese artists working here during the 1980s, including sculptor Ming Fay and multimedia artist and author Mary Ting. Their activities, begun well before the mania for Chinese art arrived, reflected the budding realities of being an Asian artist in the city’s varied cultural context.

Of the two, Tseng has received the most publicity as an originating participant among the Asian-American avant-garde. He also successfully connected with the downtown scene in the 1980s, becoming a close friend of graffiti artist Keith Haring. His black-and-white photographic art, in which he poses in a Mao suit alongside bohemian comrades or the world’s wonders, is a much a performance event as it is a documentary record.

In New York, New York (Brooklyn Bridge) (1979), Tseng offers a startlingly forceful image: he is seen jumping straight up into the air, towering over the graceful if slightly worn lines of the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the great icons of New York City. As usual, Tseng wears his Mao jacket and dark sunglasses, His left hand, clenched into a fist, is raised high above the bridge — or so it seems, given the low perspective he uses in shooting the photograph. At the same time, he holds in his right hand the shutter-release cable that enables him to photograph himself.

As a picture, New York, New York (Brooklyn Bridge) is a visionary romance invoking the city and bridge, but it also announces the extent of Tseng’s ambition. It is clear here, and in Hollywood Hills, California (1979), in which the artist assumes a smart pose, looking upward on the left and wearing reflective sunglasses, with the famous Hollywood Sign in the background at right. Not only was Tseng posing as a prophetic tourist, he also was asserting the right of a Chinese immigrant to participate in the exclusive, fully American rite of passage through the appropriation of historical icons.

The situation for Cheng is comparable, but also different. In the late 1960s, he made psychedelic paintings: highly detailed and patterned works that feel like suspended music, more or less inspired by the great rock melodies, and the great guitar solos, of the period. One work in gouache and ink on rag board, Queenie Study (1968), feels like a spiral slowing moving downward, away from the viewer. The descent is accomplished through circles of red and black bands — dotted with myriad spermatozoa — which ring more and more tightly as the imagery moves toward the center of the composition.

One untitled work from 1987 consists of torn rag paper colored with iron oxide. A leaf-like piece of torn paper, coppery and regularly dotted with depressions that resemble craters, is placed upon another copper-colored sheet whose angle of placement can only be seen at the bottom of the composition. Cheng commits himself to imagery of more or less uncontestable beauty.

Cheng’s determination to create something memorable, even something exquisite, resonates in profound ways. An untitled canvas from 1988, created with iron and copper oxide, as well as acrylic paint, is stunning in its range of colors from gray to black to a fiery copper hue. On the upper left is a black egg-shape, done with acrylic; it balances the differing background colors, which are not directly legible as imagery.

A much earlier work, from 1979, is a very subtle study of a window’s shadow on the wall. Painted with gouache, it marvelously suggests impermanence. The windowpanes are rendered as being on an angle, with a single band or bar separating the two sheets of glass. The band and background are painted a gray-blue, and as a study, the painting is wonderfully satisfying, a kind of image we often see and remark upon, but never capture because of the mercurial nature of daylight shadows.

If Tseng and Cheng were merely pioneers as Chinese artists during a time of remarkable cultural change, their work would be less valuable even as it documented, both abstractly and figuratively, the spirit of that time. But these artists are highly intelligent; moreover, they are technically accomplished in their chosen mediums. Tseng’s photos are memorable in formal terms, just as Cheng’s paintings and torn-paper collages remain in the thoughts of his viewers at least partially for their excellent execution. One hopes that the lives of these two men will remain secondary in interest when the actual works are looked at and read for what they are: sophisticated artworks that hold the viewer’s attention.

In fact, Muna Tseng, sister of the artist, has remarked that writers may focus “too much” on her brother’s death; the same might be true of Cheng as well. This makes sense, as death played no role in her brother’s art, or in Cheng’s. Both men celebrated life. Tragically, both men were stricken young. That doesn’t mean, however, that their work is immature, or that they produced only small bodies of work. Now, Tseng and Cheng are carefully presented to the public by their sisters (Muna and Sybao Cheng-Wilson), who do their best to increase awareness of each artist’s achievements. Time will determine whether the work will be considered major; it is this writer’s belief that Tseng and Cheng will be included among the very best artists of their time.

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Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art

Grey Art Gallery, NYU
September 10 to December 7, 2013
100 Washington Square East
New York City, 212-998-6780

Part two of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art will open November 14 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and will remain on view until March 9, 2014.

The ambitious two-part survey Radical Presence, originally organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, is a thrilling endeavor.  The exhibition showcases 50 years of performance by black artists, with two dozen artists featured in the first installment on view at Grey Art Gallery.  According to the gallery’s director Lynn Gumpert, this portion of the show will be the more historical of the two, with a selection of contemporary works to open at the Studio Museum in Harlem next month.  It was inspiring to see a show entirely devoted to black artists in performance, one which exhibits Cassel Oliver’s deep investment in tracing a historical lineage for artists of color outside the modernist fabric of aesthetic judgments or the strategies of production central to postmodern cultural critique. The exhibition will be accompanied by more than a dozen live performances during its run. However, it is the historical evidence of these works—the document, the artifact, the object—which are central to the installation, forming a new heredity of black performance rooted in the subjective experience of viewing.

Cassel Oliver’s mission to find historical precedents (ie generational links) for artists of color is readable through her installation, which places canonized performances (Adrian Piper and David Hammons) next to lesser known ones.  Radical Presence presents black performance art not as an extension of theater—a medium rooted in visual passivity—but rather in terms of body art practices that illustrate questions of racial difference by actually enacting this difference through its relationship to the body of the viewer.  One such artist is the brilliant Pope.L, whose work Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000) occupies a prominent place in the exhibition.  The installation consists of a toilet mounted on a 10-foot tower where Pope.L originally sat for several days, dressed in a jockstrap and caked in flour, reading pages from the Wall Street Journal before consuming and eventually purging them.  The wall text quotes the artist who writes, “I am a fisherman of social absurdity, if you will…. My focus is to politicize disenfranchisement … to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from.”  His crawl pieces, a project he began in the 1970s, also display the politics of embodiment and social history.  For The Great White Way, Pope.L crawled down 22 miles of Broadway in New York, making himself horizontal against the pavement amidst a capitalist jungle of high-rises and industry.  For this work he donned a capeless superman costume—an appropriated illusion of (white) strength, historically unavailable to him.  These works engage a cross-cultural conversation: why is it that we conceive of whiteness as somehow separate from blackness when one relies on the other for signification?  Rather than seeing either culture as “authentic” or segregated, Pope.L’s work performs the ways in which binary social structures are in fact deeply imbricated in one another.

Coco Fusco is another artist interested in our preconceptions of “the other.”  She is perhaps most well-known for her 1992 collaboration with Guillermo Gomez-Peña in The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–1994), which traveled widely and remains the archetype for contemporary questions of colonization, the aesthetic of primitivism and the very function of the museum.  Fusco’s Sightings Photo Series from 2004 continues her examination of the role and responsibility of the viewer.  The work came out of her video project In her video a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert (2004) in which Fusco weaves together archival video and staged surveillance footage of the FBI search for Angela Davis.  In a portion of the video Fusco narrates “Some women began to fear that an afro had become a one-way ticket to a holding cell, other women decided to put on afro wigs to pass for black.”  During the FBI search, hundreds of black women were wrongly detained or arrested before Davis herself was brought to trial.  What then does it mean when white women appropriate this righteous black aesthetic without any potential for misidentification and thus no actual bodily risk?  This notion of “passing” is something that Adrian Piper commented on extensively early on in her career—a question that is rooted in the experience of the seer as opposed to that of the subject.

Benjamin Patterson’s 1962 work Pond is on display as a series of instructions for performers to produce an indeterminate work.  The open action is guided by a grid designed by Patterson, as well as a number of wind-up frogs that direct the participant’s movements.  In the exhibition catalog Cassel Oliver notes that it was actually an investigation into Patterson’s career that prompted her to begin researching work for Radical Presence.  Patterson, a classically trained musician, was one of the founding members of Fluxus yet remained largely absent from canonical discourse, that is, up until Cassel Oliver organized his retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The Fluxus preoccupations with destabilizing hierarchies through chance operations and the group’s emphasis on the phenomenological (and thus subjective) experience of the viewer is very much in line with the more provocative works in Radical Presence.

The artist Rammellzee (1960-2010) also comes from a musical background.  Known for his elaborate performance costumes and narratives, he became famous in the 1980s New York underground through his freestyle rapping and graffiti tags in the subway.  A photograph on display at Grey Art Gallery features a selection of his elaborate costumes, as the original garments were installed as part of the exhibition in Houston.  Also on view is his 1979 document, Iconic Treatise on Gothic Futurism.  In this treatise, Rammellzee speaks to the political power of language, in particular letters, which, when separated from their narrative function can become powerful weapons that work in opposition to what he calls “counterfeit linguistic systems.”  He was directly inspired by monastic traditions and illuminated manuscripts, in which letters serve both a literary and formal function.  Interestingly, the wall text glossed over Rammellzee’s sci-fi, urban shaman persona; like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, he began as an artist by using the city’s walls as his drawing board.

The art historian and performance art theorist Amelia Jones notes the power of body art, as enacted by the non-normative subject, to expose the naturalized exclusionism in modern art history.  The works in Radical Presence hinge on elements of social construction, intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and the idiosyncratic relationship between seer and seen. This is art that challenges not only the structure of the art institution, but also makes an indelible impact on the social structures beyond the gallery’s walls: Radical, indeed.

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September 6 to December 8, 2012
New York University
100 Washington Square East
New York City, 212-998-6780

Ten years after the artist’s death from AIDS complications, Grey Art Gallery celebrates the work of Frank Moore with the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date.  Accompanying the exhibition is an illustrated catalogue edited by Grey director Lynn Gumpert containing essays on the artist by Klaus Kertess, Susan Harris, and Gregg Bordowitz.  The catalogue also compiles a collection of Moore’s own writings on his work along with reproductions of his paintings and works on paper.  The book is a very well crafted glimpse into the artist’s life and art, with a particular emphasis on his interest in the body as a site of “Toxic Beauty.”

A skilled painter trained in abstraction, Moore turned to representation in the early 1980s for its narrative capacity.  In her catalogue essay, abstract painter Susan Harris points to the artist’s archive, The Frank Moore Papers, now housed at NYU, to trace his professional history and search for clues about his subjects.  Poignantly, she is stricken with a luminosity evidenced by Moore’s spirited journals, which she relates formally to an effulgent quality in his work.  There was something hopeful about Moore’s endeavor, his countless books, articles, and journal entries evidence of his searching for answers about how our lives are reproduced through visual culture.  Moore moved to Paris after graduating from Yale in 1975 to study at the Cité Internationale des Arts.  By the early 1980s he had already exhibited in numerous group shows in New York, and upon his return to The States struck up a relationship with Choreographer Jim Self for whom he worked as a set designer.  The dreamlike quality of Moore’s work from this time has its roots in surrealism, in particular the American surrealist Paul Cadmus, evidenced both by the artist’s formal use of color and the iconography in his work dealing with gender and sexuality.

Gregg Bordowitz, an artist and activist himself, was a close friend of Moore’s, and his essay “Battle Lines” very carefully contextualizes the artist’s work surrounding identity, HIV/AIDS, and the environment within the socio-political climate of 1980s New York.  For all of its poetic subject matter and delicate narrative structure, Bordowitz sees Moore’s work as inherently tied to conflict.  Be it conflicts been the AIDS activist community and the policy governing their treatment, or a metaphysical examination of conflicts between the living and the dead, there is a tension in Moore’s work which is offset by his delicate forms.  His most captivating inquiry deals with Moore’s 1997 work Emigrants, a painting which is included in the catalogue but not on display in the exhibition.  The piece depicts two young gay art handlers who carry an upside down painting of a flag, á la Jasper Johns, collaged in newspaper clippings, one reading “Prostitutes and AIDS.”  These visual hints insist that the viewer look closely at the painting within the painting for clues about the narrative.  Our view of the flag painting is obfuscated by transparent packing material that protects the fragile work while also, perhaps, acting as a symbol for safe sex.  Regrettably, an interrogation of the work alongside that of Jasper Johns is markedly absent from Bordowitz’ commentary.  Johns, a gay artist practicing during the Cold War, was forced to used carefully placed iconography within his paintings to allow for a queer reading of his work without having outing himself to those outside his circle.  Moore, of course, was openly gay throughout his career, open even about his HIV status, and this working through of his personal life—the deepest part of himself—is evident in his work.

Dream-like as they are, there is something distinctly literary about Moore’s paintings, each a tome with layers of information to be read and discovered.  In his essay in the volume, curator Klaus Kertess speaks to Moore’s interest in myth and allegory, a trend, he sees in late 20th–century American art.  He points to Kara Walker’s witty, and often grotesque, reworkings of master/ slave narratives, and the dreamlike fictive universe of creation, destruction and rebirth that Mathew Barney creates for his Cremaster series.  Kertess highlights Moore’s hilarious 1993 work, Venus in particular.  Venus is an allegorized portrait of New York drag queen Lady Bunny portrayed as a mermaid lounging languorously on the beach, her erotic gaze designed to meet and challenge the viewers.  Littered on the sand around her we find used condoms, hypodermic needles, pill bottles, and evidence of sperm swimming ashore.  Bunny’s penis is featured front and center in the work, for which Moore insists he used himself as a model, painting with his pants down to get the perfect view.  Moore is equally interested in issues of sexuality as he is in topics as wide ranging as genetic engineering, addiction, and the sublimity of nature.  He is able to bound effortlessly both in tone and in subject matter from one work to another with either a wink or a turn of the knife, his oeuvre a testament to his wide range of interest.

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January 11 to March 26, 2011
100 Washington Square East
New York City, (212) 998-6780

In his life and work, Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) traversed the 20th Century. Primarily known as an abstract painter and celebrated as a vivid colorist, Vicente was described by colleagues as a paragon of Modernism.  Those who knew him well also recounted his fierce authenticity, poised demeanor, and dignified manner of contemplation.  His was a radiating presence whether in the act of painting, conversing with a friend, or in dialog with students.  His work as an instructor in drawing and painting took him from Black Mountain College to the University of Michigan, from Berkeley to Yale, and finally to the New York Studio School.  He considered teaching an important asset to being an artist and it inspired a life-long sense of fulfillment.

A Spaniard, Vicente was born in Taregano in the province of Segovia, moving to New York as a young artist: he lived and worked in a spirit of nobility under relatively humble circumstances.  He seemed to dislike the notion of having studio assistants, secretaries, preparators, or groupies of any sort.  His intellect was never divorced from his feelings: art was a matter of harmonizing these qualities through the act of seeing.

The current exhibition, Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture, at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, focuses on his collages and small sculptures.  The story goes that he began making collages from newsprint and magazine clippings in 1949 while teaching at Berkeley, this method of working suggested to him by his friend and colleague Elaine de Kooning.  In fact, Esteban went beyond simply using cut and torn scraps of paper. He would enhance the surface by employing other traditional materials as well. These would include gouache, charcoal, and colored pencil over the pasted elements, which were mounted either on board or canvas. The energy that comes across from this five-decade survey corresponds, to varying degrees, to such practioners  as Jack Tworkov, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Eduardo Chillida, and Michael Goldberg.  Oddly, however, there is virtually no trace of Robert Motherwell’s collage aesthetic, which he must have been been aware of at the outset of his collage-making. As Vicente’s experimentations with collage progressed, he grew increasingly more involved with light, as had already been made apparent in his paintings.  According to artist Dorothea Rockburne, it was the luminosity of Vicente’s color that made his work distinct from paintings by American or recent emigrant painters from Eastern Europe.

By the year 1962, Vicente’s collages were in full swing.  He was painting his cut and torn papers with gouache in many cases before they were applied to the surface.  Also, the color becomes richer and brighter.  We see this in two collages from 1962, Orange, Red Black and Black, Red, and Brown, both from the collection of the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia (a magnificent museum in the heart of Spain, founded shortly before the artist’s death).  This absorption of color within cut and pasted papers continued throughout the 1960s, culminating in a 1969 visit to Honolulu with masterworks such as Kalani Hawaii and Kaabumanu.  The exhibition contains a relative paucity of collages of a comparable quality from the 1970s and early `80s. However, by the late `80s, Esteban springs back into form with a luster of soaring shapes, with an untitled work from 1988 where primary colors function in relation to thin nondescript washes, and with another untitled piece from 1994 of various cut white shapes on canvas. A similar approach in used in another collage on canvas from 1998 in which orange and green cut forms amplify four striations in white.

Although rarely discussed by American critics, Vicente’s sculptures, collectively called Divertimiento and dating from1960 to -1979, constitute one the true pleasures of this exhibition. Rather than monumental works, they are intimate extensions of collage or assemblage, a style of building or constructivism in miniature scale, displayed here in vitrines.  They remind me of the delicate bronze Etruscan hairpins on permanent display in the Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. The delicacy of Vicente’s sculpture is a study unto itself as these works represent an originality of three-dimensional form rarely seen or recognized in recent Western sculpture. Some are made from gessoed foam core, others from small pieces of painted wood. The height rarely exceeds a foot, and often less than eight inches.  To study these forms involves concentration as if one were analyzing a lyrical theorem, an oxymoron, if there ever was one. They are paradoxical and assured, clear, and yet, also ambiguous. They are a type of sculpture that exceeds any reference point to how we think about art today.  It returns our consciousness to those who worked in caves and enclosed dwellings from some prelinguistic epoch.

My only professional connection to Esteban was in 1999 when, surprisingly, we were each awarded the Premio Arcale by the Municipality of Salamanca. He was given the prize in art, I for criticism.  Given his age and the condition of his health at the time he chose not to travel from New York to Spain for the ceremony.  My disappointment was that I never had the occasion to shake the artist’s hand.

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