Since “Pacific Standard Time,” the comprehensive survey of art in Southern California from 1945 to 1980, organized in 2011 at multiple venues, documentation of artists from that innovative and experimental period has been on reset. The early 1970s, in particular, were a watershed, as young artists emerging in the wake of the game-changing 1963 Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, turned to conceptual and performative practices the boundaries between them blurred. Some, like Ed Ruscha, extended the notion of object making into specific sites of investigation, the surreal nature of Southern California itself chief among them.

Raul Guerrero was born in 1945 in Brawley, California, and is currently living and working in San Diego. He was an active part of the groundbreaking scene of the early 1970s, and has continued in the decades since to contextualize the hybrid culture of Southern California.

In his second solo show in New York City, and his first at Ortuzar Projects, we’re introduced to over 20 years of Guerrero’s ongoing trajectory, from 1971 through 1993. That he began his career at a unique moment in Southern California isn’t lost on Guerrero—this is the time of Chris Burden’s most notorious performances, the 1972 Womanhouse of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, and the work of David Hammons, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari (his first teacher) and Doug Wheeler. Al Ruppersberg, Jack Goldstein, Vija Celmins, William Leavitt, and James Welling were all Guerrero’s peers.

In conversation, Guerrero often uses the phrase, “by coincidence,” usually in appreciation of the fortuitous events that marked his journey and aesthetic.

“Since I was a child, every summer my family and I would travel north and work as migrant workers,” he says. “All the accoutrements we’d need for the summer, the pots and pans, everything, were loaded into the back of my father’s flatbed truck. As we’d go over the 101 Freeway, from the back of the truck I’d gaze out at the Capitol Building, and think, ‘Wow, this is Hollywood.’  We’d stop and cook our meals right by the side of the road, and join the encampments by the Merced River, and suddenly there’d be so many other people, Anglos, Oakies, African Americans, gypsies, Mexicans, and Mexicans from Texas. My aspiring family eventually became middle class, and at 16, I’m lying under a vineyard, wondering, what I’m going to do with my life? I hitchhike down to Mexico City and 4 years later I’m in Chouinard Art Institute. On the first day of class, I found myself sitting next to Jack Goldstein. Can you imagine? He looked just like Paul McCartney, and we became close friends.”

At the Chouinard, which later became part of CalArts, Guerrero understood Duchamp’s work instantly and found it liberating, the essential foundation of his aesthetic philosophy. Not only was he drawn to the concept of the assisted readymade, but also to the subliminal power of a single, iconic object or image. This, for Guerrero, resonated with another influence—Carl Jung’s theories of archetype and the collective unconscious.       

Among the 46 pieces in the exhibition, the earliest are Guerrero’s Moroccan watercolors from 1971, shown here for the first time. These come with the intriguing backstory that sparked their creation. At the suggestion of his friend and mentor Ed Kienholz, Guerrero sold all his belongings and headed to Europe. “By coincidence” (again) he managed to meet everyone right away: sitting next to Francis Bacon at dinner in London, he meets Lee Miller, (Man Ray’s model and muse), and meets his idol, Richard Hamilton, and this is just the first week. He ventures down to Morocco, and soon was living on a few dollars a day in El Ksar Seghir, a small village outside of Tangier. The series of watercolors are intimately sized, as they were created to be postcards for his girlfriend. He shares the dazzling ambiance in beautifully patterned, detailed, and hallucinogenic pieces in which teapots, tiles and other domestic objects with their exotic symbols and arabesques vibrate in talismanic bands of energy—reverberations from the local hashish.

After that summer, Guerrero returned to LA blazing. In just a few years he made significant bodies of work in photography, sculpture, performance, installation, and video. Each of these directions could have fuelled a lifetime of work. Guerrero is a gifted and emotional photographer, as evidenced by his California Sur Photographs from 1972. (He cites the Mexican movies of Luis Bunuel as a childhood passion.) These photos were his personal documentation of a two week road trip through Baja with artist friends. The compositions are effortless. Throughout his photographs, Guerrero’s utilization of light is mysterious, otherworldly, and exquisitely tender, as in the ethereal portrait, for example, of his elderly grandmother, who seems to hover between the tangible and spiritual realms.

Another standout in his multifaceted career is the assisted readymade: Rotating Yaqui Mask(1974) is a seminal, declarative work. Guerrero describes this piece as a formal exploration of, and direct response to, Duchamp’s “Rotating Glass Disc,” but the personal choice of the Yaqui mask can be unsettling. For me, the psychic energy released from the mechanized spinning of this ritual object multiplies seismically in a fearsome way, the context feeling both taboo and dangerously displaced. Similarly, in his movie “Primitive Act” of 1974, Guerrero is squatting and naked among rocks and shrubs, reenacting the primitive discovery of fire.

Seeking a more subjective, and pliable medium, since the 1980s Guerrero has focused on oil painting. Among those on view are four selections from his Oaxaca series from 1984 plus La Mujer of the Puerto from 1993. The Oaxaca series was done on location and, like the Moroccan watercolors, he entrenches himself in the history and culture of this particular place. Guerrero treats stylistic representation like a local language and adapts a flat colonialist style relevant to his theme. Like many of the painters he admires —Walter Robinson, Neil Jenney, Lisa Yuskavage and Alida Cervantes — Guerrero opens the door to Kitsch and pulp desire. As if he is writing a detective novel, heembeds layers and clues in his post-conceptual approach.

Much of Guerrero’s process involves honing his attention and allowing his emotional responses to connect him not only to his own history but to that of the culture at large.He interprets his painting Vista de Bonampak (1984) for me:  “I want to capture not only what represents the place for me, but also a critique of the culture, so after visiting the archeological ruins of  Bonampak, once a Mayan city near Chiapas, Mexico, I imagined a jaguar, coveted within Mayan culture for ferocity and strength, stumbling on the scene of the murals, depicting men dressed as jaguar knights, in jaguar skins, capturing enemies for sacrificial purposes who are also dressed in jaguar skins.  Although I might question who is the most vicious creature in the jungle, I also want to make paintings that are interesting and beautiful.

“There’s a lot that can be said about the brutality of the system, especially with our current president, but I prefer images that don’t delve into it overtly.”

After 40 years of structured study of North America, Guerrero has a new theory:  “Because we’re living on a continent that was occupied by indigenous people through millennia, and their voice has been suppressed, their culture, especially in the artworld, is changing things subliminally by gaining a voice though artists, one way or another. It’s a philosophical and cultural virus that’s spreading. For example, John Baldessari grew up in National City, like I did, ten miles from the border. Now, here’s a major artist, he goes to Mexico and is exposed to all this stuff that you see coming out of Mexico that’s really interesting, but in fact it’s all indigenous culture.

“If you dig tacos, you’re being affected by an indigenous culture. You’re consuming part of that philosophical virus. It’s full of indigenous material: tortilla, beans, corn, the way it’s prepared—it changes the way you see your reality. What that reality is I’m not sure, but somehow that essence, that philosophy, is expressing itself nonetheless into the culture unbeknownst to us.

“In this encounter between culture and things,” he says, “your sense of reality is shifted. Artists like Baldessari, who’s making art about culture on a large scale, has had his view shifted, and then he turned all these other guys on at CalArts. Bizarre, right?”

Guerrera is planning a trip to the Amazon sometime later this year.

The post A Multifaceted Career: Raul Guerrero talks with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

One of the striking aspects of the controversy around Kelley Walker’s exhibition at the Saint Louis Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) is how many important issues it raises, including, obviously, the perilous state of race relations in the country; the dilemmas that arise when one person’s freedom of speech is perceived by someone else as hate speech; whether white artists, or writers, musicians, etc. can tackle the subject of black experience without engaging in cultural appropriation; and the extent to which social media may now put pressure on museums and other public institutions to bring more transparency to their curatorial process (many protestors want to know who decided to show Walker’s work and why).

All these topics urgently require discussion, but there is another one, perhaps less linked to social problems, that I would like to examine: Whether artists are under any obligation to explain themselves or their work? This issue is relevant to the St. Louis Debate because it was Walker’s (and the show’s curator Jeffrey Uslip’s) unresponsiveness to public questioning during a September 17th artist’s talk that really galvanized the protests rather than the work itself. In reading accounts of the event and subsequent reactions to it, I have the impression that if Walker had made a cogent argument for his art, if he had been able to openly share his intentions, if he had offered a counterargument to the accusation that his work was racist, there would have been far fewer expressions of anger and outrage, and the CAM would probably not have felt it necessary to erect walls and post trigger warnings around Black Star Press and Schema. (Unfortunately, the video of the artist’s talk has remained unavailable since it was live-streamed, so it’s hard to know exactly what questions were asked or just how Walker and Uslip avoided them.)

I firmly believe that artists are under no obligation to explain themselves or their work. If an artist chooses not to reveal anything about his or her intentions, so be it. The making of art, great or atrocious, is the only thing required of the artist qua artist—everything else is optional. And yet there is a common expectation that artists can and should provide accounts and interpretations of their work to viewers. In fact, there seems to be an unwritten social contract between artist and audience stipulating that its part of the artist’s role to discuss his or her work and to respond helpfully to questions about it.

Of course, not every artist adheres to this contract. Indeed, two of the most influential artists of recent decades—Sigmar Polke and David Hammons—are famous for their elusiveness and the paucity of their public statements. With both of these artists, viewers are on their own, challenged to figure out what the work is about, to makes guesses about the creators’ intentions. As a critic, I actually prefer writing about this kind of artist even though it’s harder – nothing to go on except your own perceptions – and scarier – you might get it totally wrong. At the other extreme are artists who write extensively about their work, who give long interviews, who make themselves available. Think, for instance, of Polke’s erstwhile friend Gerhard Richter whose collected writings and interviews run some 500 pages or the late Mike Kelley, as unconventional and influential as Hammons, whose published writings comprise two large volumes.

Although few artists are as prolific in writing as Richter and Kelley, it is rare to come across any as reticent as Polke and Hammons. Most artists are more than happy to grant interviews, and the vast majority of them write statements that turn up as gallery handouts of exhibition catalogue texts. Just look, for instance, at Social Medium: Artists Writings 2000-2015, a 544-page anthology recently published by Paper Monument. It is, in part, the ubiquity of such discourse that rendered Walker’s reticence unacceptable, though clearly his frustrated questioners were keenly aware of the proximity of the CAM to Ferguson, where the 2014 death of Michael Brown sparked the ongoing Black Lives Matter protest movement.

The prevalence of the self-explaining artist has much to do with how artists are trained. Anyone who has spent time in an MFA program (or read Howard Singerman’s Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University) will be familiar with the emphasis on teaching students how to offer interpretations of their work, whether via verbal presentations or in written form. One factor driving this trend is the pressure on MFA programs within a university setting to match other disciplines and professions in academic rigor. The demand for self-interpretation is also driven by the persistent emphasis on critical theory in MFA seminars, which has been a feature of art education since the 1980s, and, to cite an even longer-term trend, how artists have more and more become their own spokespersons, a task once fulfilled by critics. (As evidence of this one need, look no further than Art21, the popular PBS series on contemporary art that features only the voices of artists, and never critics or scholars.)

Of course, artists have been talking about their work for a long time. What’s different about the current protocols of discourse is the assumption that the artist will be forthcoming, always happy to elucidate and explain. New York artists in the 1950s, for instance, were probably more voluble than today’s artists, but the circumstances, content and tone of their discourse (arguments among themselves at places like The Club, defiant manifestoes in obscure magazines) were very different from the generally polite realm of artist talks, slide lectures, public “conversations,” and extensive interviews. There’s much to celebrate in the shift from the embattled artist of the 1940s and1950s to the university trained media-savvy, user-friendly figure of today. Despite persistent hostility toward contemporary art on the part of many elected officials, the artist is far less of an outsider in 21st century America, and enjoys, even when exploring extremes of experiment and transgression, a degree of social recognition and economic reward that would have been unthinkable to midcentury avant-gardes. As always, privileges are accompanied by responsibilities and obligations, and for the professionalized artist, one of these is the artist’s talk, a de rigueur ritual that I suspect every American artist (apart, perhaps, from Hammons) who is given a museum show is asked and expected to deliver.

Kelley Walker could have declined the invitation to give an artist’s talk, but he didn’t. And while I believe that artists don’t owe us any explanation, I also believe that once an artist agrees to appear in public, as Walker did in St. Louis, he or she is under an obligation to be forthcoming and responsive. You don’t agree to do a Q&A if you’re not willing to provide some substantial “A”s. So, what went wrong? Why did what should have been simply another instance of “This is why I made my art” and “This is what I was trying to say” turn into a storm of “How dare you” and “Those are not acceptable answers”? From the accounts I have read, it seems as if Walker, Uslip and the institution were in some kind of bubble that insulated them from—or simply prevented them from imagining the existence of—dissenting voices. Among the voices that apparently didn’t penetrate this bubble were those of three museum staff members who in an open letter described how they and other employees, especially people of color and women, had expressed “great discomfort and disdain on numerous occasions” about the work prior to the opening.

As I suspect other people did after hearing of the CAM controversy, I looked for writings – by the artist and others – about the works in question. I didn’t find much, although in a September 22 letter of apology, Walker insisted that he had spoken about the works “in depth in prior artist talks and interviews.” One article I came across did stand out, in part because it seems to speak to the very issue that is at play now, Glenn Ligon’s “Kelley Walker’s Negro Problem,” which was published in Parkett in 2010. In it, Ligon notes “the profound silence in the critical writing on Walker’s work (and in the art world more generally) about how race operates.” Approving of Walker’s work, Ligon argues that the silence is troubling “because Walker is quite aware of the intractability of the ’problem’ of his racial identity in relationship to images of black people, and part of the impact of his work is that it calls attention to very difficult and still unsettled questions about the politics of representation” and laments the fact that critical writing on his work tends to sidestep the issue of race “by quickly mentioning race only to move on to yet another discussion of Warhol and appropriation.”

It’s strange that six years after Ligon wrote about the glossing over of race in favor of discussing safe aesthetic topics, artist and curator seemed willing to prolong that “profound silence.” Without hearing more from Walker and Uslip, it’s impossible to know precisely why they didn’t adequately answer the questions being asked of them, but I would like to propose a theory: it was because they were confronted with the emergence of an audience whose voice had never been heard before. Of course, this wasn’t the first time that black activists and artist have criticized how African Americans are depicted in art, but this may have been the first public occasion for such discourse since the anger and empowerment that has arisen in the wake of Ferguson. Walker and Uslip didn’t know how to respond because they were hearing inconceivable things being said, inconceivable from within the privileged, and still deeply segregated, realm of the contemporary art world. The extreme discrepancy between how Walker’s work was perceived within the art world and how it was seen by St. Louis’s African-American art community is not, as some might conclude, the result of philistine ignorance of avant-garde practices—it was the consequence of two incompatible languages confronting each other. And in the unpoliced discursive space that opened up around these incompatible languages, the artist and the institution sponsoring him lost control of the work’s meaning, which is precisely what most statements and texts by artists seek to avoid.

Thoughtful artists know that it’s ultimately impossible to control how art is received and interpreted (although that doesn’t mean that they are wrong to try to have the work understood in the way they intend). As literary studies long ago proved, the intentions behind a work of art are in no way determinant of its meaning, and in any case they are nearly impossible to establish. What this means for the St. Louis situation is that Walker’s statements, past or future, about Black Star Press and Schema can never erase the perception that his works are complicit with racism. Ultimately, as history, and the field of Reception Theory, teach us, it will be the audience who decides on the meaning of the work, not the artist. Should we take into account whatever an artist has said about his or her work? Of course we should. Do artists sometimes achieve things in their work that were nowhere in their intentions? Yes, thankfully, for otherwise art would be merely a technical exercise. If the controversy in St. Louis tells us anything, it is that meaning is always up for grabs, a fact too often forgotten in the face of contemporary art’s smoothly running interpretative apparatus (of which I, too, am a part).

Another lesson is to beware of every kind of bubble: media bubbles filled with like-minded partisans, class bubbles filled with socio-economic equals, linguistic bubbles filled with single-language speakers, and culture bubbles devoid of those who might look at things from an entirely different perspective. All of us—not least a white, male New York art critic—are ensconced within our respective spherical domains. I doubt that I would be any better prepared than Kelley Walker to respond to one of them being burst by an unanticipated question. I only hope that the next time something like that happens I will be ready to listen. And yet I also hope that explanations will never become compulsory, especially for artists who prefer to stay inside the best bubble of them all, the studio bubble.

Kelley Walker: Schema and Kelley Walker: Direct Drive remain on view at CAM through December 31, 2016. 3750 Washington Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63108, camstl.org

The post The Obligation to Explain appeared first on artcritical.

November 12, 2015 to March 6, 2016
144 W 125th Street (at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard)
New York, 212 864 4500

“A Constellation,” which recently closed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, presented a series of works selected to juxtapose established artists’ work with newer work, disparate in media but engaged in similar themes. Differences between elements of the show reveal that opposing signs — rather than repeated signs — may be more effective in signifying an idea.

From Al Loving’s Variations on a Six Sided Object (1967), the eye bounces back to Cameron Rowland’s Pass-Thru (2013). The latter title conveys an idea of access or transfer of an object. Yet the plastic sculpture, a replica of mechanisms used at bodegas or liquor stores, seems more interested in refusing access. A transparent rectangular box sits on a Lazy Susan within a larger rectangular box. The nails used to construct each box visibly protrude and lend a sense of danger. More obviously, there is only one open side to the larger box, meaning there is no through. An object placed in the pass-thru would only go round and end up exiting the same side. This refusal of use value is reflected in Loving’s painting which, with its solid and dotted lines, is reminiscent of an origami pattern or instructions for constructing a cube. However, the distortion and extension of “sides” beyond the pictorial frame frustrate any attempt to imagine its construction. While Rowland is described as more explicitly interested in social relations, both artists negotiate the viewer’s access to space.

Moving into more specific sites than spaces, Sondra Perry and Nona Faustine ask where a black body has been/is now situated. This is an intentionally objectifying statement; Faustine’s photograph From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth (2013) explicitly places a body (the artist’s own) at an intersection in the financial district, standing naked on a wooden box with shackled wrists, on display. The viewer is conscious of their gaze. The choice of site does not immediately carry meaning, as the sign for a Tumi store and AT&T kiosk indicate that this is a relatively contemporary scene in New York’s Financial District. We learn from the text that this is the site of a former slave market, where countless bodies would have been examined, objectified, and evaluated as property that could be transplanted into the white space of a stranger’s home. The evident comparison of black bodies across time is eerie, and the fact that the viewer is still in a position of examination is troubling. This perhaps is why Faustine chose to reveal the significance of the site only in the text: the distinct experience of realizing its meaning is important. Perry reconstructs the white space Faustine problematizes (the space of a stranger or white master) as one of torment with Double, Quadruple, Etcetera, Etcetera I (2013). Photoshopped (objectified and deconstructed) dancers move desperately, emphatically within the confines of a corner in a blank room. Few architectural details reveal the nature of the space, yet it is clear that these bodies are supposed to disappear within it. Instead of arms, legs, and torsos, the viewer sees a grey blur occasionally interrupted by the misplaced line of floor meeting wall. (Architectural space is displaced onto the body just as the body experiences displacement in space.) Our only indication of the identity of the dancers is in the signification of their race — their hair — which in turn becomes the reason that they must disappear, the reason they must move so frantically through space. The trauma of their confinement in this space parallels Faustine’s refusal to belong in a slave market.

Specific to the site of the gallery itself is Torkwase Dyson’s 2015 wall painting, Strange Fruit (Dignity in Hand), which relates to the geometry of Loving and Rowland but seems more interested in conveying meaning. Representations of demographic statistics first come to mind when taking in Torkwase’s grid of painted dots. Again, the viewer only understands its meaning through the exhibition text. We learn that the painting on the wall commemorates “a fraction of the nearly 4,000 lynchings recorded in American history.” Structure communicates the presence of a narrative, but the narrative only unfolds through text.

Narrative is again constructed with ruby onyinyechi amanze’s that low hanging kind of sun… (2015), where the spacing of mixed media elements relates to the layers of that narrative. Here, not even the text reveals what the drawing must contain for the artist. The exquisitely rendered face of a woman kisses the masked face of another body melting into a mermaid’s tail. Three motorcycles drift into the web of a flock of birds nestling into the charcoal hair of another woman, drawn diagonally opposite from the first.

More explicit in creating a narrative, Talwst’s jewelry boxes encouraged the viewer to hold contemporary memories of racial violence close. The miniature scale of depiction should not be confused with scarcity of detail or meaning. In Por Qué? (2014), the killing of Eric Garner is recreated in front of a white American flag, reminiscent of flags by Jasper Johns. Within our culture of wealth and privilege, jewelry and commitments, what cases of cultural violence do we snap shut and hide away?

A literary mind could draw proximate parallels between titles: Jack Whitten’s Psychic Intersection becomes Billie Zangewa’s Divine Intervention (2015), or Andy Robert’s After Mass (2015) transmutes into the aftermath of Talwst’s Por Qué?, and from there into the math of Perry’s Double, Quadruple, Etcetera, Etcetera I. A visual mind may find representational rhymes: a wooden sculpture, Mother and Child (1993) by Elizabeth Catlett, stands in front of a silk tapestry of another mother and child by Billie Zangewa. The arrangement of elements in Troy Michie’s STRAND, CABLE, TWINE (2015) seems tied to the spatial arrangement of drawings in amanze’s work. Money transfers invoked by Pass-Thru relate to David Hammons’s piggy bank, Too Obvious (1996). Adrian Piper’s thought-bubble portrait painting hangs near Tony Lewis’ speech bubble Make His Mouth Bigger, Angrier (2015). Melvin Edwards’s Working Thought (1985) concretizes the slave shackles depicted in Faustine’s photograph.

This is not to say that these works are unproductive in and of themselves. A constellation is about the larger picture, but the curation of the show focused too narrowly on connecting dots based on narrative and representation.

The post Drawing a Line: “A Constellation” at the Studio Museum in Harlem appeared first on artcritical.

March 15 to May 27 2016
45 East 78th Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 0020

The fiction of the facts assumes innocence, ignorance, lack of intention, misdirection; the necessary conditions of a certain time and place.

Have you seen their faces?

–Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

“Prankster” is a word that comes up repeatedly in discussions of artist David Hammons and his work. Much has been made of his evasiveness, of the fact that he has spent his career flouting the art world’s propriety: his continual refusal to settle on a dealer; the propensity to make himself unavailable to curators even in the midst of show preparations; to stage exhibitions, performances, and installations with no prior announcement. Then there are the works themselves, from alluring abstract canvases you will never really see, as they’ve been shrouded with trashed vinyl tarps, to sculptures that cull beauty from empty bottles of $1.99 wine. But to seize and insist upon the perceived jokey qualities of Hammons’s art and persona resists the deeper significance of his output over the past 50 years. “David Hammons: Five Decades,” currently on view at Mnuchin Gallery, offers a corrective to this narrative. Comprised of 35 works spanning from the late 1960s to the present, it’s a crystalline show that helps to elucidate the long view of an artist who has made a career of otherwise obfuscating it.

This is the third show of Hammons’s work presented by Mnuchin (formerly L&M Arts), and though much care has been taken to note that the gallery does not strictly represent the artist, it seems clear that Hammons finds satisfaction in the contrast of having his work — frequently made from lowbrow or dilapidated materials — showcased in the refined and august premises of the Upper East Side townhouse. It also eschews the sterility of the White Cube, of which Hammons has in the past proclaimed his disdain. Notably, just prior to this exhibition’s opening, Hammons arrived unexpectedly at Mnuchin and upended the nearly complete installation: rearranging, removing several works, and adding new ones. The entirety of this show at Mnuchin, as organized by Hammons, becomes its own distinct work of art, a complete whole made from its heterogenous parts.

Shrouds abound in the exhibition. Two large paintings, both untitled (2008–14 and 2015, respectively) are almost entirely obscured by ragged tarps that dangle across their faces. With two large sculptural works, also both untitled (2013 and 2014, respectively), Hammons has concealed ornate, gilded floor-to-ceiling wall mirrors, one with a black cloth and one with large sheets of galvanized steel. Aside from the more apparent association of this shrouding as a manifestation of Hammons’s own mystique, it also brings to mind the Jewish tradition of covering the mirrors in a house after the death of a beloved. One wonders whether these works, all made within the last few years, are indicative of an artist reflecting on his legacy in his elder years.

With the inclusion of the diminutive but potent In the Hood (1993), a shroud of another sort takes on a more politically foreboding tone. The work consists simply of the hood of a sweatshirt severed from the shirt itself, and hung on one wall. The dark void at the center of the hood, where a head should be, conjures the familiar image of the Grim Reaper, and when considering its high placement on the wall one can’t help but be reminded of the deplorable chronicle which pollutes American history — that of the scores of African-Americans lynched at the hands of whites through the decades. And at nearly a quarter-century old, In the Hood seems remarkably prescient as an object, anticipating the outsize symbolism of racial inequity in American culture that the “hoodie” has taken on — especially acute in recent years.

So loaded has that article of clothing become that poet Claudia Rankine selected In the Hood as the cover image of her award-winning 2014 book of prose poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, which reflects on black life and systemic injustice in the United States and whose pages are peppered with reproductions of artworks by prominent black artists. It also includes a passage dedicated to the memory of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager shot and killed by George Zimmerman in 2012. Zimmerman claimed Martin was suspicious in part because of the dark hoodie he wore as he walked down the street of a private community. The point is underscored by several black-and-white prints from the late 1960s and early 1970s Hammons has hung in the same gallery, whereby the artist pressed his own body to the page and then added charged imagery like the American flag, or the spades of a playing card.

Robert Storr says of Hammons, in an essay included in the exhibition’s catalogue, “From the very start it is plain that he has set his higher goals as high as they come. Specifically that has meant escaping the sorry fate of ghettoization while slipping the noose of becoming a token ‘black’ artist in a predominantly ‘white’ art world.” Considering Hammons’s work solely through the lens of race runs the risk of reducing his conceptual athleticism to a single note. As an object, In the Hood is a descendant of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), down to the conscious, unexpected placement of the work. The viewer garners a solid sense of the roots Hammons shares with artists like Piero Manzoni or Joseph Kosuth, who were thumbing their noses at artistic conventions in the early 1960s. By being able to see the long trajectory of Hammons’s output gathered together in this mini-retrospective, we can also understand how the disparate parts align.

In the last gallery, a taxidermied cat curls up on a wooden drum stool. Called Standing Room Only (1996), it has been placed in the corner, the cat’s sleeping face pointed towards the window instead of towards the center of the room. A creature known for its cunning and detachment, the cat might be Hammons’s spirit animal. Aloof and mysterious, with his back to the world, we revere the cat for what he is able to pull off — living freely, and purely on his own terms.

The post America is Hard to See: David Hammons at Mnuchin appeared first on artcritical.

May 2 to June 26, 2015
8 East 76 Street (between Madison and 5th avenues)
New York City, 212 737 2221

Longing and obsolescence are the lingering experiences of Luca Dellaverson’s second solo show at Tilton Gallery, “Fight This Generation.” It is a display filled with sullied objects of desire that leave us with the feeling of time palpably slipping through our fingers. The first such encounter, upon entering the gallery, is an iPod Classic doused in epoxy that sits in an industrial bucket — the now-defunct device immobilized like a prehistoric insect in amber. This urge to remember a not-too-distant past continues with Dellaverson’s pirated digital films from the 1990s, such as Jurassic Park and Independence Day, distorted to a point of unrecognizability. Covered with epoxy resin and Plexiglas, the LED monitors, each playing a different film, create a cacophony of yesteryear in which, from time to time, one can make out a phrase from a favorite movie. Reminiscent of Jack Pierson’s grainy billboards or Marilyn Minter’s steamy close-ups, Dellaverson’s movies appeal to the instability of memory — the haze of passing years whose patina covers our youthful memories. In the final room, lastly, is a set of works paying homage to David Hammons. There is a sense of tragic distance, that we are indeed fighting a generation so dear to many of us as we move along in the 21st century.

The tour de force of the exhibition is a set of glass and resin paintings-cum-sculptures. Using epoxy resin poured over glass, Dellaverson creates aleatory, web-like cracks that recall Tomás Saraceno’s spider-infested vitrines exhibited earlier this year at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. With no control over the outcome of the image, these works are the reflection of a chemical process rather than an authorial mark. Flamboyantly colored and spectacularly lit, they remind this writer of a drag show in a glamorously run-down club long after the dancing has stopped. As a result of the interaction of epoxy and resin, each monochrome, moreover, bursts and ripples at the edges, like a piece of ice slowly melting away. These sculptures are at once intensely material and ethereal; it seems that they could fall apart into nothingness at any moment even as they stand firm like monuments.

In this way, Dellaverson breaks apart the monochrome like a collapsed disco ball; or put another way, he shatters the monochrome and lays it bare for examination, like a battered body upon an operating table. Whereas Kazimir Malevich placed his Black Square in the corner of the gallery like an icon, Dellaverson completely destroys any spiritual connotations by likening his works not to, say, stained glass in a cathedral, but rather to the detritus of a recently bygone decade. The conventions and aspirations of monochrome are thus destroyed, to become instead a fractured collage.

The vision of modern life Dellaverson presents is thus random and jumbled and overwhelmingly insecure, yet there is a beauty in this state of flux that is akin to the unpredictable nature of the human body. These pieces resemble flesh with all its wondrous uncertainty and its cascading marks of age. Dellaverson’s work is as corporeal as it is conceptual. As a consequence of the bodily and art historical conventions Dellaverson evokes, a paradoxically joyful melancholia pervades this exhibition. Despite their inviting appearance, the glass and resin works are mirrors that reflect nothing. Our own vanity frustrated, we are implicated in this process, as we cannot find ourselves in these mirrors. Like the splintered surface of these objects, our ego too falls apart; the history of the monochrome thus becomes an analogy of our constant battle against time — physically, mentally and spiritually. Wholeness is impossible, no matter how desperately we hope for it. Time and materiality have placed Dellaverson’s work into an alien realm with which we must nevertheless contend if we are to truly feel and embody the steady march of history. Towards what? Dellaverson gives us no answer.

The post The Haze of Passing Years: Luca Dellaverson at Tilton Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

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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February 13 to May 26, 2013
235 Bowery, between Rivington and Stanton streets
New York City, (212) 343-0460

NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, currently on view at the New Museum, examines the art scene in New York over the course of one year and attempts to chart a lineage connecting the city’s artists working today with the major players of twenty years ago.  Of course, many of the featured artists are still active in the New York scene, and it’s a falsehood to suggest that this group of artists was the first to engage in robustly political art.  The insinuation that these artists were the first to tackle such historically broad issues as race, gender, economic concerns and sexuality is one of the many frustrations of the exhibition, and while the works on display are some of the most visible of the period, one senses a missed political opportunity on the part of the curators.

The show is certainly prolific in scale, the first in the New Museum’s history to span all five floors and take up every gallery space.  The wall text and catalog essays (much of it written by curator Massimiliano Gioni and the New Museum’s director Lisa Phillips) stress the notion of “capturing a particular moment.”  This moment, according to Gioni, saw the rise of relational aesthetics—in his view a product of a global recession—as well as a critique of consumerism, and an emphasis on art as a basis for community building.  But why turn to 1993 as a time capsule for these problems?  On the same day as the press preview, the brilliant critic and theorist Amelia Jones was featured on a panel at the College Art Association Annual Conference titled “Art Criticism: Taking a Pulse.” In her talk Jones brought to light the enormous debt that Rirkrit Tiravanija and others working directly within Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of relational art owed to the feminist artists of the 1960s and ‘70s.  I bring this up to illustrate that what Gioni terms a “new conceptual climate” seems much more influenced by the art of twenty years prior than is made public in the text for the show. The missing historical link is the broad adoption in the 1970s of postmodern theory in academia and MFA programs across the country, and the guidance of artist-teachers who were deeply invested in feminist and relational politics.

While much of the work in NYC 1993 is rooted in institutional critique and questions of gender and race, the wall labels and curators’ comments in the catalog are no match for the intellectual rigour of the art on display.  Furthermore, many of these works would be greatly enriched by a reading that steps outside of their historical contingency. David Hammons’s quietly shocking In the Hood consists of the hood cut from a green sweatshirt, hung on the wall.  The work recalls decapitation, the suspicious image of the hooded black man so often seen on facial composite sketches, and even evokes the Ku Klux Klan.  If the curators were to initiate a conversation that relates the art practices of 1993 with the political landscape of today, the shooting of the black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 would have been an obvious parallel to draw with this piece.  Hammons’s simple work is imbued with suspicion, fear, and the simultaneous concealing and exposure of identity: issues that are far more nuanced than the translation of “hood” as black lexicon for “neighborhood,” which the wall text offers.

With that being said, many of the works on display are incredibly powerful, and, for me, aesthetically representative of the time period the show examines.  Two understated pieces by the Mexican-born artist Gabriel Orozco on display in the second floor gallery fell under this category. Yielding Stone is a clay ball of the artist’s weight, which he rolled from his studio on Broadway to the New Museum in 1993.  The sculpture resembles a boulder, and though its surface is constituted by the grit and grime of lower Manhattan, the art object more closely resembles an organic form found outside the city.  Isla en la Isla (Island within an Island) is a small photograph taken next to the West Side Highway of a miniature Manhattan skyline made from garbage and wood debris facing the real skyline.  This “gritty” work, in which the city plays a lead role, is characteristic of the overall aesthetic of the exhibition. The rough simplicity of Orozco’s work shares an urban poignancy with the enormous, yet equally subtle, Félix González-Torres billboard Untitled, on the fourth floor. In marked contrast, the filmmaker Larry Clark’s multimedia installation revels in the same “downtown” aesthetic without the conceptual or emotional weight.

An arresting work to see in person was Janine Antoni’s installation Lick and Lather consisting of fourteen self-portrait busts deformed either through Antoni bathing herself, as she did with the busts carved from soap, or gnawing and licking away at those made of chocolate. The work was originally displayed at the ’93 Venice Biennale, and this show along with the ’93 Whitney Biennial were touched upon numerous times within the exhibition.  Glenn Ligon’s contribution to the 1993 Biennial catapulted him to art superstardom, and while his Notes on the Margin of the Black Book was absent from NYC 1993 (perhaps because he started working on the piece in 1991) his Red Portfolio was an ingenious addition to the exhibition.  The work exists as a series of framed descriptions, white text on black background, of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs as penned by the Reverend Pat Robertson in a 1989 letter for his constituents in an effort to describe government-funded works.  “A photo of a man in a suit exposing himself” refers to Mapplethorpe’s Man in a Polyester Suit (1980), an image that is a subtle and tender a commentary on the fear of black masculinity this is possible in the presence of an enormous black penis.  The culture wars of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was certainly burned into the public consciousness of the time, and Ligon’s work brilliantly displays the attitudes of the religious right without judgment or commentary, allowing the slippery relationship between art images and language to be laid bare.

My experience of NYC 1993 was one of equal parts frustration and fascination.  It would have been impossible to include every revered work from that year in the exhibition, but the selection of art chosen by the curators was extraordinary. It must be noted, however, that a majority of the work was rooted in the political or institutional critique of its time.  The frustration thus lies in a reticence on the part of the New Museum to examine more closely the historical and social contingencies of the art on display, and the ways in which it differentiates itself from art being produced in 2013. Instead of taking up these thorny issues, the curators have presented a neat time-capsule exhibition that seemingly functions no differently today than it would have in 1993.

The post It Was Twenty Years Ago Today: NYC 1993 at the New Museum appeared first on artcritical.

How do you respond when a justly renowned artist whom you admire creates a high-profile fiasco? I remember with total admiration David Hammons’ last exhibition at L & M Arts, the display of defaced fur coats. I loved that this very cutting political commentary was set in an Upper East Side town house, in the one neighborhood where such coats are worn. I recall his great Kick the Bucket video (retitled Phat Free, 1995), which stood out in the Whitney Biennial a few years ago. And of course I have seen photographs of his fabulous performance piece Blizaard Ball Sale (1983).  Hammons is a major artist because he is boldly original and highly independent and because he tackles issues of race in an art world that is much in need of his perspective.

This show attracted an over the top review in The New Yorker’s Goings on About Town section:  “You know it the instant you step in the door: here is marvelous, very possibly great art, a game-changer and a joy. . .  Nearly every one of these works belongs in a museum, in a room of its own. Any other art juxtaposed with it would curl up and die.”  And Jerry Saltz expressed similar enthusiasm in New York magazine.

We seem to be looking at different exhibitions, for the show I saw was bleakly formulaic. Hammons covers abstract paintings with cheap plastic garage bags, tarps or fabrics of various colors, sometimes cut so that we see the painting underneath, often draped down to the floor. Some of the paintings look like de Kooning-esque gestural pictures in color. Others are black and white abstractions. At the back of the ground floor the tarpaulin is replaced an old wooden armoire, with its mirrored front facing the canvas.  And the doorway between the two rooms on the ground floor is partly blocked by a hanging translucent tarpaulin. Upstairs is more of the same. Maybe Hammons’s conception is that here abstract painting is quite literally under wraps, or that it is now visually inaccessible.  Whatever! These have become dull clichés, which are not animated visually by the art shown.

The veteran color field painter Sam Gilliam has done subtler, more aesthetically satisfying free hanging abstractions, and the recent Robert Rauschenberg survey at Gagosian/Chelsea shows how varied informal use of materials can create compelling art.  Were they by some young artist, I would say that these constructions show real promise. But devoting two floors of a gallery, whose bread and butter exhibitions include displays of Abstract Expressionist masterpieces is a mistake.  Just as Frank Stella’s recent fascination with assemblage has not yielded satisfying sculpture, so Hammons’s real greatness as a political artist does not make him a successful painter.

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June 10 – September 2, 2010
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

New York City endured a near-death experience during the 1960s, and the steep decline of lower Manhattan precipitated the rise of a vibrant underground culture. The City began to acknowledge the pioneering efforts of artists to create live-work spaces or lofts within this wasteland of residential and commercial buildings in the 1970s by rezoning them as “mixed use”, albeit in piecemeal fashion and with much rancor. Within a decade, the empty lots and ruined real estate property that had incubated a wealth of sinewy conceptual art were transmuted into Soho gold.

If “mixed use” as a real estate term inspires this show’s outward theme, it implicitly applies to “artistic practices and strategies” in transition over a four decade period, as well. Curators Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp present a considerable array of films, photographs, texts, and sound installations by 40 artists spanning several generations. The city as performance space or experiential sphere of creativity becomes the unifying frame around projects of wildly differing intention, and the show often suggests links between specific works by artists who might otherwise appear to have little in common.

For example, several of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills from 1978 (#25, #60, #83, #63), hang near Barbara Probst’s Exposure #9, New York City, Grand Central Station, 12.18.01, 1:21 pm from 2001. Probst’s six-part work features a female model, photographed simultaneously from six distinct points of view. Clearly, Sherman’s and Probst’s concerns, conveyed through distinct conceptual and technical approaches to picture-taking and picture-making, are strikingly different and decades apart. Yet the juxtaposition of these selected works highlights a common interest in the instability of photographic verity, set right in the midst of some of New York’s most familiar public spaces.

By contrast, photography as a straightforward accomplice to performance pertains in Babette Mangolte’s Woman Walking Down a Ladder from 1973. The ladder in question is that of a rooftop water tower. Contact sheets reveal a figure descending perpendicular to the ladder with no visible sign of a harness or guide wire. At close range, we see that she wears a nondescript blouse and skirt, while her face is obscured by her hair. At medium distance in profile, her descent appears even more precarious against the void of sky; and she is a mere speck when the photographer pulls back to reveal the full height and might of the building on which the water tower is delicately perched.

New York City’s rooftop water towers are also featured in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s 15-part array of fine black and white photographs from 1988. Echoing a 19th century trend to assemble photographic archives of like things for civic records, the Bechers adopted a similar methodology in the 1960s to make comparative studies of decaying industrial architecture in Europe and the US. Their systematic approach dovetailed with strategies of conceptual art being forged in that era, and the Bechers’ typological studies of water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and other industrial relics have been highly influential.

Typologies abound in Mixed Use, Manhattan. From John Miller’s enigmantic series Clubs for America (1993) to Moyra Davey’s Newstands (1994), the streets of New York are teeming with similar things made unique by happenstance and style as much as wear and tear. The windows of urban buildings are the common denominator for Jennifer Bolande’s Globe series, which features blue metallic orbs with maps that are forever out of date. In a different key, Gordon Matta-Clark’s deadpan, black and white Window Blow-Out from 1973 depicts an abandoned building whose grid of broken windows is animated by a lone dog’s vigil.

The line between typology and series is porous. They synchronize neatly in William Gedney’s 1960s views from his apartment window. Entertaining a play between the static camera and everyday movement in the world beyond, his window is the theme for a set of variations. James Welling employs much the same strategy in Eastern Window #1-24 (1997-2000) except #8, 11, 12, 23. A chair on the neighboring rooftop changes position; light alters the buildings’ forms; the moon changes phase and disappears. Welling’s introduction of occasional color in this black and white world of ideas is mildly startling.

If still photography lends itself easily to urban typologies, photography on the move offers other possibilities. Sound and physical movement predominate in David Hammons’s video Phat Free (1995), in which a hand-held camera follows a performer kicking a can down the street. In David Wojnarowicz’s well-known series, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), a figure wearing a crude paper mask of the poet’s face traverses Coney Island, Chinatown, and the deserted streets of the West Side, enacting the artist’s taste for romantic irony and despair. With less drama, the painter Christopher Wool would photograph streets at night while walking home from his studio, studying incidental marks.

Images of the bygone West Side Piers stir piquant nostalgia for many New Yorkers of a certain age. In all their decrepit glory, the Piers were a magnet for aesthetic prowess as well as sexual trysts. From 1975-1986, Alvin Baltrop photographed their interiors and exteriors, observing cruisers, lovers, and yawning empty space in exquisite detail. When Gordon Matta-Clark cut an enormous, half-moon aperture at the far end of one pier, Baltrop noted its impact on the huge space as sublime cathedral or camera obscura. Peter Hujar’s haunting nocturnes of the Canal St. Piers, from 1983, submerge their secrets in velvet hues of photographic black. What’s left of them in 2010 amounts to jagged rows of decaying piles, as shown in Emily Roysdon’s gray-hued photographs, The Piers, Untitled (#2-5).

In 1971, the Piers were the site of an ambitious series of conceptual art pieces by 27 artists (all male, as it happened). Curated by Willoughby Sharp, photographed by Harry Shrunk and Janos Kender, the consistent format and high quality of the small, gelatin silver photographs establishes a collaborative framework within which each artist had his own word-and-image solo. Because the works were installed in a long corridor of the museum, viewers walking past the sequential imagery might experience it like stills from short silent movies. Vito Acconci, for example, spars with a reputed stranger who threatens to push him off the pier. Besides Acconci, the list of illustrious participants included John Baldessari, Keith Sonnier, Michael Snow, Daniel Buren, George Trakas, and others.

In quite another register, Charles Simonds, Gabriel Orozco, and Bernard Guillot found in the city places for reverie and magical thinking. Simonds, a sculptor, made a 16mm film called Dwellings in 1972. With children as his witnesses in blighted neighborhoods on the Lower East Side, Simonds uses tweezers to move tiny clay bricks into wall crevices. He explains that he’s creating miniature cities for “Little People” who will be moving in soon. (Simonds’s ephemeral archaeology eventually found its way into permanent niches, such as the stairwell of the Whitney Museum). Orozco’s color photograph, Isla en la isla (1993), also plays with changes in the cityscape’s scale. Wooden planks and other debris lean against a traffic barrier in a parking lot beside the Hudson River, mimicking the World Trade Center buildings and piers along the skyline due south. Guillot, in a series of photographs titled Orpheus and Eurydice from 1977, reinvents a mythic tale of tragic love, death, and descent into the underworld as photographic views of forlorn territory on the West Side.

The richness and variety of these projects is daunting. They attest to the elasticity of photographic and cinematic media as co-conspirator to artistic vision, be it performance, conceptual art, architectural intervention, socio-aesthetic political commentary, memento mori, extreme ballet, found object, available view, topographic documentation, lyrical serial existentialist anarchy, rough play. Cumulatively, the show exudes an inviting sense of spontaneity and hard-won freedom. I was particularly moved by Glenn Ligon’s harrowing, 20 wall-panel narrative of his residences, from his youth in the Bronx through a series of legal and illegal sublets early in his career, to, more recently, a stable situation in a condominium. Ligon’s true story is a bracing reminder of the anarchic forces of city real estate and the crucial, double role of the home-studio environment in an artist’s life.

It should be remembered that many of the works in Mixed Use, Manhattan were not seen publicly at the time of their creation. Some of the work on view came to light only through the efforts of dedicated curators and/or the survivors of loved ones. With equanimity and to fascinating effect, the curators have conjoined informal, private, and underknown works with widely known icons. Despite the real estate theme, as I see it this exhibition primarily draws inspiration from artists of the 1960s and 1970s who intentionally kept their work out of mainstream systems, creating alternative avenues for reception and distribution. A long perspective on the sensibility they set in motion can be found here, in disparate works that embrace plurality and resist categorization, revealing quixotic and tantalizing whispers of desire.

The post Vitality Amidst the Ruins: Lower Manhattan’s gritty golden age appeared first on artcritical.

September 24 to December 13, 2008
45 East 78th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, 212 861 0020

Liza Lou does minimalism with political attitude. Tower (2008), which extends thirty feet upward, is a minimalist grid wrapped in white beads. Continuous Mile (2007-8), reminiscent of Jackie Windsor’s sculptures [see Jonathan Goodman’s review], sets beads on a menacing coil. Security Fence (2005-7) in the back gallery, with glass beads on steel, shows how security fences would look if Tiffany’s made them. And Maximum Security on the ground floor of Lever House, twenty some blocks downtown, also embodies that idea. Some years ago influential commentators claimed that minimalist sculpture was implicitly political. As if making explicit that interpretation, Lou’s titles and structures reveal how readily classical minimalist structures can embody political ideas. Lou’s wall hangings like Clear, Hold, Build (White) (2007-9), made of glass beads on aluminum, are upstairs. If she is trying to reference Muslim prayer rugs and comment on the obvious ways that many people are ambivalent about Islamic culture, as the gallery publicity claims, then these reliefs carry too much political baggage to be effective.

When in winter, 2007 L&M Arts showed David Hammons, everyone was aware of a certain aggressive tension. What we normally expect to find in that Eastside townhouse is upscale modernist art, the sort of paintings and sculptures purchased by people who wear furs. And so it was surprising to see Hammons’ relentless attack on ladies’ coats. But what better site for an attack on the lifestyle of the seriously rich than their home territory? There’s nothing new about that—since the Enlightenment, the grand bourgeoisie have been patrons for their critics. This exhibit extends that way of thinking. Just as Hammons burnt, painted and otherwise defaced furs, so Lou beautifies menacing security apparatus. You could learn a lot about the politics of public art by eavesdropping on the business people looking with bewilderment, at least when I was there, at Maximum Security. We all know that beautiful artifacts are grand commodities, and so have to be carefully guarded. But by making her sculptures beautiful and menacing, both at the same time, Lou brings home that contradiction. The name of the guard at L&M Arts who makes sure that you don’t touch her beads should be included in the check list for he, as much as the art on display, is part of the show.

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