February 8 to May 18, 2013
545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor
Between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City

In a variation within our series, A TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES, David Cohen presents his latest thoughts on the Flag Foundation’s survey of Harkness’s cutaway paintings within the context of his  own earlier reviews on the same body of work. His earlier engagements with these paintings were originally published in the New York Sun.  Readers new to Harkness will want to read the reviews in order of publication (from the bottom up).

2013
The other day I was musing on a profound subject: who will star in the first movie made of a Hilary Harkness painting?

The obvious casting choices for the party-girl warriors who populate, in miniature, her dense, chirpy yet  grotesque scenes are those acrobatically proven in the action movie genre—Angelina Jolie, say, whose assassin or tomb-raiding getup recalls the bikini-booted scanty efficiency of the Harkness babe.

But why would anyone turn an artwork into a movie, you might be asking?  The traffic in contemporary culture is entirely the other way around, with artists raiding cinema.  Hollywood – adapting novels and historic events, regurgitating TV shows, and Broadway musicals, remaking other, old or not so old Hollywood movies – has surely never, in similar fashion, made a film of a painting.  Art history-savvy directors make compositional sense of them in individual shots, but that is a different matter.  There was “Girl with the Pearl Earring,” (2003) but that’s from a novel that spins a yarn around a painting, and is thus at several stages removed.  What I have in mind for Harkness is something more like director Lech Majewski’s “The Mill and the Cross” (2011) but even there the narrative arc takes in Brueghel the Elder, author of the 1564 masterpiece, “The Way to Calvary,” that is the movie’s painterly progenitor.

This is all a rather discursive way of saying two things about Harkness.  First, that there is a narrative logic in her work that compares to literature or movies more than to the static medium of easel painting, at least at the pace that form has demanded of viewers for the last few centuries.  In Harkness, local incident unfolds over time as the eye is obliged to read accumulative detail.  And secondly, “bad girl” transgressive as they remain, these sado-masochistic scenarios warrant big audience attention rather than art world connoisseurship. The ingenuity of Hilary Harkness has (or ought to have) blockbuster appeal.

The Flag Art Foundation has brought together fifteen, which is to say almost all of these labor-intensive and thus rare works from Harkness’s signature idiom, the cutaway babe-infested setting, whether terrestrial or nautical .  As the artist has begun to move decisively in the direction of more traditional, single-scene images staffed by dramatis personae of legible individuality (her Gertrude Stein series), the Flag show affords that first chapter in her work a retrospective sense of closure.  Her newer work dispenses with the assured absurdist humor of her trademark strategy and puts her in uncharted water in which human foible takes over from inhuman gesture.  Meanwhile, the display of her cutaways of battleships, mansions, and even an auction house with their stylized, weirdly good-humored depravity confirmed to this now hardened fan (note the skepticism in the earlier reviews reposted below) her unexpected capacity to build distinct mood within each work despite the seeming ubiquity of her aesthetic and moral world view.

Later paintings within the Flag group witness odd shifts in scale and the introduction of male and animal characters, but still, you might wonder, what would there be for an actress to do, to say, to emote in such emotionally vacuous situations as Harkness offers? Angelina will require adversaries, of course, so step up Milla Jovovich and Charlize Theron.  But how would these players “co star” when casts of thousands are actually rendered equals, each with their deadpan walk-on macabre moment?  I guess it will have to be one of those movies where the star mutates, like the namesake lead in “Being John Malkovich” (1999), and like a comic book-derived action movie all the while regaining pristine calm as they are choreographed from one act of chilled meanness to the next.

In a way the Surrealists would have loved, where one message in my inbox this morning reminded me that the Flag Foundation show is about to close, the next message put Ms. Jolie herself in a headline with news that the actress has undergone a double mastectomy to diminish her odds of cancer. Life is never the jolly game that art can be, snipping the wires between violence, beauty and pain.  If there can possibly be meaning in this bizarre juxtaposition of data (not to force equivalence) it will have to do with second chapters, courage and sparky women.

2008
Ms. Harkness, who has been written about in-depth in these pages before, is a mannerist with an unwavering ability to marry perversity and skill. She is a master of kinky scale, packing busy compositions with tiny yet dynamic figures engaged in strange activities that fuse cruelty and pleasure. Their industry — relentless yet dispassionate — mirrors that of their own making, and our viewing. The figures in the paintings, and the paintings themselves, exude a cold, absurdist eroticism.

She paints armies of Barbie doll-like stick-figure women, their tight-fitting apparel, rather like Lara Croft’s, suited equally to the bedroom and the battlefield. Their activities generally involve pleasuring or torturing, but with little emotional involvement in either case.

The scene has a Second World War ambiance, though often with contemporary details thrown in. Her style is a cross between comic book fetishist Eric Stanton and Hieronymous Bosch. She will present a building or battleship in cutaway isometric so that you can see room to room overrun with her women, ant-like in the way they devour space.

“Pearl Trader” (2006) makes the Christies auction house at Rockefeller Center, with its distinctive curved façade and Sol le Witt mural, the locale for a battle orgy surrounded by art. In one room there is a Damien Hirst tank and a Roy Lichtenstein “girl” signaling suitable touchstones for Ms. Harkness’s reductive eroticism and chilled cruelty.

Ms. Harkness shares with Sade not just the pathology to which the Marquis lent his name but also an essential element of style — endless variation, at once exhilerating and enervating, upon an obsessive theme.

In a departure from Ms. Harkness’s normal procedure, “Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas, Paris, October, 1939” (2007–08), painted on copper, increases the scale of individual figures, and is overtly quotational. It is a handsome work, and it is understandable that the artist should look for an escape from her bizarre servitude to the miniature, but it does not yet have the bravura awkwardness that is her essential hallmark.

2005
The narrative energy in Hilary Harkness is in a higher gear than in [Elizabeth] Huey [discussed earlier in the same review]: the focus of her sapphic, sado-masochistic orgy scenes, pillages and riots is unrelenting. Her skills are in harmony with her vision: where Ms. Huey paints with an awkward approximation of old master painterliness, Ms. Harkness has the hard, clean, nerdish exactitude of a cartoonist. She can be old masterly, too, but in her case it is the finesse of mannerist paintings on copper that come to mind: paint is transparent, surfaces sealed.

But while a typical Harkness is crowded to bursting point with legions of near-identical figures—willowy, leggy stick figures running around torturing each other and exuding as much individuality and personality in the process as laboratory mice—they actually share with Ms. Huey’s angels and children a vacant sense of alienation. Her cloned cast is a herd of loners.

Less than a year ago Mary Boone presented her first show of this fascinatingly perverse artist: three relatively small panels were given a wall each of her Chelsea barn. Now, in a less precious display, an exhibition ostensibly devoted to drawings, which actually includes new panels and works in oil and watercolor on paper alongside line drawings, is offered at their uptown gallery. Morally speaking, it is business as usual: a massacre on a beach, a shoot out amidst back to the future modernist skyscrapers, a mass ablution in a luxurious ladies room.

As ever, formally speaking, there is an amazing balance of detail and all-overness. “Heavy Cruisers” presents in cut-away cross section the bowels of a ship heavily populated by sailorettes equally busy with the naughty and the nautical. If the title is a suitably unsubtle pun, the handling of different mediums nonetheless reveals the extraordinary touch and control of this weird young woman. The firm delicacy of her line drawing, for instance, which have the legato exactitude of engravings, recall the neoclassical draughtsman John Flaxman. It makes one think: if Flaxman had honed his skills to Sade rather than Dante art history would have had its Harkness two centuries earlier.

2004
Hilary Harkness is a deliciously perverse absurdist in paint who brings together the unemotional nastiness of [Cindy] Sherman and the crowd addiction of [Spencer] Tunick [discussed earlier in the same review]. The somewhat precious display of just three smallish pictures at Mary Boone’s Chelsea barn, Ms. Harkness’s first show with this dealer, is a perfect complement to the masquerades and mass actions explored in these other exhibitions.

Ms. Harkness’s all-female S/M orgies and girl’s own adventures at sea are a chilly marriage of medievalism and the comic strip. In “Matterhorn,” (2003-04) for instance, Hieronymous Bosch and Lucas Cranach team up with Quentin Tarantino, Henry Darger, Balthus and his oddball occultist brother Pierre Klossowski, gay illustrator Tom of Finland, and vintage bandes-dessinées pornographer Eric Stanton. In what reads like a sliced-open doll’s house, she offers cross-sectional, compartmentalized views of an army of skinny young women kitted out in black with sexy boots, hotpants, bikinis, and military caps who in each room torture, abuse, molest, and mortally dispatch sartorially and anatomically similar fellows. In fact, as no discerible emotion is displayed on the perfunctory faces or standarized bodies of any of the participants, it is not too easy to say what criterion, fate, or preference determines whether you are a perpetrator or a victim, although the majority of the latter are wearing white socks, which might signify something. No one registers much by way of pleasure or pain on their cute, dumb faces.

In painterly terms, Ms. Harkness favors a flat, nerdish, swiftly dispatched naïvete, in harmony, some might argue, with her moral maturity. What does actually make these sick, silly pictures interesting beyond the shlock-horror inventiveness of her abuse fantasies, and her nostalgic eye for period charm, is a compellingly crafted ratio of detail to whole, a weird sense of decorative balance and all-overness. Mind you, once you allow so formalist a take of scenes of rape and pillage, the artist’s warped values are obviously working.

The post Relentless Yet Dispassionate: Hilary Harkness at the Flag Art Foundation appeared first on artcritical.

It was only Thursday, December 1, but Vixen, a Shiba Inu belonging to Miami collector Sean Gelb, had had enough of the fairs. She lay on her side, panting, at the foot of a pedestal holding one of Patricia Piccinini’s mutant babies. People crowded the booth of Conner Contemporary Art at the Pulse Art Fair to gawk at it, but Vixen remained steadfastly unimpressed.

I’ve been through the trial of fair going in Miami enough times to have worked out a two-part strategy that forestalls the moment when I start feeling like Vixen. Part One is to proudly not see everything. My list for this year was Art Miami, Pulse, Scope and Art Asia (combined in the same circus tent this year), Seven, and Edge Zones. Skipping the main fair may sound like treason, but it means enough art-viewing impetus is left to appreciate the plenitude on offer at six others, which is considerable.

Part Two is to accept the fact that you are at the art equivalent of a farmer’s market. You are there only to admire and sample some minuscule fraction of its bounty.

On Thursday at Pulse, some critical part of my brain titled like a shoved pinball machine when I saw the actor Michael Douglas and the comely rear view of Catherine Zeta Jones making their way through a corridor of art made dark by one of the power outages that plagued the early days of the fair. This is no way to see art, I thought, nor perhaps Catherine Zeta Jones. I wandered toward the exit, where Paul Kusseneers, whose eponymous gallery was showing atmospheric, filmy, grid-based abstractions by Stefan Annarel, stood fuming in the half-light. Even in the dim booth Annarel looked good, but imagine coming all the way from Antwerp and having to present them that way. A longtime Miami artist speculated, without evidence but not without cause, that the fair organizers hadn’t adequately greased the city’s palm. I overheard a man in a black suit, clutching a walkie-talkie, explain to a gallery director in romantic lighting that a generator was being installed posthaste and they were not going to wait for the local utility to restore power.

By Sunday, this or better had been accomplished. I make a habit of asking dealers whether they’re having a good fair, without detailing what I mean by that. Everyone, even Kusseneers, answered yes and seemed sincere about it. So with that problem solved, it was time for a second pass at the art.

Duane Hanson, whose work I had seen the day before at Bridge Red Studios Project Space in North Miami, came to mind upon reviewing Piccinni’s animal-human hybrid infant at Conner Contemporary. How much more difficult it must have been for Hanson to achieve sculptural photorealism with 1970s materials. This new take speaks to an imminent biotechnological future in which more and more things are going to demand human treatment despite their categorical position at the edge of humanity. As art, though, it was too illustrative and sentimental. (Charming and patently illustrative work by Maira Kalman, executed for author Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual” and appearing at Julie Saul, somehow escaped a similar fate.) Also at Conner was a meticulously painted lesbian orgy on a picnic table at night by Erik Thor Sandberg, inexplicably executed on a dramatically curved panel. Doubtless there was some allegory at work – there usually is in Sandberg – but it resisted deciphering, and not to its credit.

Conner also had a handsome Leo Villareal, which I mentioned while admiring a small, animated LED piece, amber and flickering, by Jim Campbell at Hosfelt Gallery. This turned out to be a bit of a touchy subject – the gallery noted Campbell’s earlier work with the medium. Better works of technology-driven abstraction, which is still at its early stages, is at least as successful as its better constructivist counterparts. Bitforms showed a work by Zimoun in which cardboard chits were mounted on little spindles and made to spin and collide in a crowded grid. It was charmingly low budget and seemed to have a determined personality.

There was a note of controversy around some non-technology-driven abstraction as well. Daniel Weinberg Gallery had some small geometric abstractions that looked as if they were studies for Frank Stella’s protractor series, both in shape and pastel palette. They turned out to be works by Walter Darby Bannard, whose art and writings I have studied at length, and they actually predate Stella’s series.

Flirting abstractly with both paint and technology were Michael Laube at Kuckei & Kuckei, Sharon Louden at Morgan Lehman, and Markus Weggenmann at Thomas Taubert Contemporary. Laube had painted a variety of stripes and marks on layers of superimposed Plexiglas, and despite an initial impression of excessive trickiness they held up to repeated viewing. Louden’s deliberate, spare paintings in oil on paper on panel distantly recalled Julius Bissier, reinterpreted in high-key materials. The attractive sensibility refused to translate into her video or sculpture, as evidenced by examples thereof placed alongside them. Weggenmann sends out designs for simple abstractions and semi-abstractions to be executed in high-gloss coatings on aluminum. The lack of touch looks good in enamel-like paints like this, and big, simple shapes tend to stand out at the fairs as visual respites. Jus Juchtmans at Margaret Thatcher Projects served this purpose as well.

At a certain point of art viewing, patterns emerge unbidden from the surfeit of material. Was there an architectural trend at Pulse, exemplified by Gregory Euclide’s whimsical wall-mounted landscape sculptures at David B. Smith, Sarah KcKenzie’s luscious studies of house framing in oil (better than her larger, deadpan treatments of finished buildings) at Jen Bekman Projects, Isidro Blasco’s snappy urban photo-collages at Black & White Project Space, and Ayssa Dennis’s delicately drawn architectural fantasies at Kesting Ray? Was there some kind of weird angle on female sexuality, given data points that include Erik Thor Sandberg, Jeff Bark’s C-Print of a bosomy nude oddly arrayed in kneeling profile among strips of Super-8 film at Hasted Kraeutler, and Hillary Harnkess’s Sinking of the Bismark (2002), a naval disaster acted out by scantily uniformed crew in a style reminiscent of early Renaissance masters, at Daniel Weinberg?  Or was it just time to go home?

But not before stopping in the Impulse section of the fair, dedicated to single-artist installations. Ellen Miller Gallery, for instance, were showing the work of Deb Todd Wheeler, whose photogrammed cyanotypes of plastic bags hauntingly evoke sea life, despite their origins as garbage. Teresa Diehl closed off the booth of Galerie Anita Bekcers for a installation of predatory mammals and fighter jets, cast in clear glycerin, arranged over a spotlit, rotating mirror and covered with a camouflage net of flowers. She made it in response to the revolutions in the Middle East this year, but it grew into a transcendent, timeless narrative. I came to rest at the work of Alia Malley at Sam Lee. Her Frederick-Church-inspired photographs of the Los Angeles County landscape, either deserted or literally desert, presented inviting vistas, refreshingly free of crowds and, well, art.

Now it was time, like Vixen, to find a floor to lie on.

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Unbelievably, painting is yet again under assault. Despite strength of activity evident in commercial galleries, art school degree shows, and studios, the medium is held in suspicion thanks to its virtual exclusion from the Whitney Biennial and the inaugural exhibitions of the new New Museum. Once more, oil on canvas is made to feel like a guilty pleasure.

There is no better way to savor that sensation than in the enjoyment of “Bad” painting. In this strange stylistic phenomenon of conceptually driven academicism, kitsch, and mannerism, painterly technique is less a means to end than an end in itself. Being a painter becomes a performance, a posture.

And yet, once they make a career out of this position, painters are in an odd place: however tongue-in-cheek they may have been about painterly quality, the sheer mechanics of working in traditional styles, confronting the very problems that were historically the motor of stylistic development, means that their “bad” painting gets better. There is progression within their transgression.

Two iconoclasts currently showing now are in danger of getting so good as to become iconic: Delia Brown, at D’Amelio Terras, and Hilary Harkness, at Mary Boone. Both artists manage to collide issues of gender and technique in ways that give avant-garde edge to their formal finesse: “old master” technique is played off against the femininity of their motifs.

Delia Brown’s show is titled “Precious,” a suitably ambiguous term, equally connoting treasure and affectation. Her subject is mother-child relations, so the word fits the sense of intense connection. But it also sits well with the highly wrought surfaces of these compressed genre scenes, which are generally no more than a foot and half in their longest dimension. She depicts figures in luxurious domestic interiors in a virtuoso style, at once tightly observed and dashed off. They merge the unabashed sentimentality of Norman Rockwell and the bravura brushwork of John Singer Sargent.

Ms. Brown chose her models from among acquaintances in their late 30s, women nearing the outer reach of childbearing age who are not yet actually mothers. The kids they are posed with were borrowed. Knowing this adds a layer of “as if”-ness that bolsters the artifice of the artist’s investment in her appropriated, academic figurative language.

Sargent notwithstanding (the artist’s printed notes also cite Mary Cassatt, Fragonard and Balthus as pictorial points of reference), Ms. Brown’s work more strongly recalls mid-20th Century traditionalists like John Koch, and countless marginal, conservative artists whose commissioned family portraits graced upper middle class homes of that period than they do bona fide art historical sources.

Ms. Brown’s preciousness relates to a broad current of contemporary women artists presided over by Elizabeth Peyton (whose latest show closes at Gavin Brown this weekend) who knowingly fuses commercial illustration style and fey emotion. Ms. Harkness’s intense detail and miniaturist skill, equal parts old master and comic book, fits the same somewhat nerdish aesthetic.

In her statement, Ms. Brown understands the gender issues of her stylistic departure in historic terms. “In painting school, one was told not to be ‘precious,’ which was a way of saying that one must instead be bold, muscular, unattached, unsentimental — in a word, masculine.” Ironically, the paint handling and compositions of the shows that first brought the artist to attention had such qualities — orgy scenes of well-bronzed young figures and self-portraits that accentuated her buxom features were suitably Rubeneque, in a highly kitsch way.

In compression of scale, however, Ms. Brown has begun to tap a genuinely precious seam of her own talent. Without losing the insolence that is essential to her aesthetic, she has painted a show of real gems. The tight scale makes it harder for the artist to indulge her tendency towards slick mimesis, energizing the work with an enriching awkwardness. This comes out, for instance, in the treatment of space in “Snack Time” (all 2008), in which a child sits at Saarinen’s Tulip table with an English Bull Terrier nestling up to him while a French bulldog looks on: all the postures and expression — canine and childish — are perfectly caught in this reduced space.

In “Mother’s Bathroom” two teenage girls try on make up while perched on the edge of a tub. Their intertwined, spindly legs have a soft floppiness more akin to Ms. Harkness’s mannerist figuration than Ms. Brown’s habitual soft-core photorealism.

“A Pink Rocker” plays odd games with scale as an Asian woman with an occidental child on her lap sits in what is probably the child’s chair in a distant room, a toy filled cot dominating the foreground and adding further confusion to the varying head sizes.

There is still plenty that is obnoxious and meretricious about these pictures: Neither Ms. Brown nor her champions would want it otherwise. But even in the most self-consciously “decadent” Fragonardian painting, “A Young Girl’s Room,” in which a Chloe Sevigny-like adolescent with dreamy limbs frolics with a Highland Terrier, the play of different lights, textures, and perspective has more to do with the dynamics of facture – getting stuff down in limited space – than with detached style games. It makes for a rich painterly experience.

Ms. Harkness, who has been written about in-depth in these pages before, is a mannerist with an unwavering ability to marry perversity and skill. She is a master of kinky scale, packing busy compositions with tiny yet dynamic figures engaged in strange activities that fuse cruelty and pleasure. Their industry — relentless yet dispassionate — mirrors that of their own making, and our viewing. The figures in the paintings, and the paintings themselves, exude a cold, absurdist eroticism.

She paints armies of Barbie doll-like stick-figure women, their tight-fitting apparel, rather like Lara Croft’s, suited equally to the bedroom and the battlefield. Their activities generally involve pleasuring or torturing, but with little emotional involvement in either case.

The scene has a Second World War ambiance, though often with contemporary details thrown in. Her style is a cross between comic book fetishist Eric Stanton and Hieronymous Bosch. She will present a building or battleship in cutaway isometric so that you can see room to room overrun with her women, ant-like in the way they devour space.

“Pearl Trader” (2006) makes the Christies auction house at Rockefeller Center, with its distinctive curved façade and Sol le Witt mural, the locale for a battle orgy surrounded by art. In one room there is a Damien Hirst tank and a Roy Lichtenstein “girl” signaling suitable touchstones for Ms. Harkness’s reductive eroticism and chilled cruelty.

Ms. Harkness shares with Sade not just the pathology to which the Marquis lent his name but also an essential element of style — endless variation, at once exhilerating and enervating, upon an obsessive theme.

In a departure from Ms. Harkness’s normal procedure, “Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas, Paris, October, 1939” (2007–08), painted on copper, increases the scale of individual figures, and is overtly quotational. It is a handsome work, and it is understandable that the artist should look for an escape from her bizarre servitude to the miniature, but it does not yet have the bravura awkwardness that is her essential hallmark.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 15, 2008 under the heading “Gallery Going:  In Defense of Painting”

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June 27 to August 31

Zwirner & Wirth’s “Old School” explores a tantalizing mega-generational gap: the divide between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings and our postmodernist counterparts. Nearly thirty landscapes, still lifes and figure paintings by old masters and contemporary artists make for a fascinating mix, telling us a little about traditions of art and a great deal about current uses for them.

The paintings have been paired according to theme and style, on walls painted a rich shade of red. A 1630 panel of a wedding procession by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (son of the great painter) depicts self-absorbed throngs with the same busyness of detail as Hilary Harkness’s “Flipwreck” (2004)—though the latter’s shipwrecked women, in sexually masochistic poses and clothes, set an entirely different tone. Anj Smith’s small canvas from 2007 boasts much thicker textures than the adjacent painting of Saint Anthony by Jacob van Swanenburgh (c. 1571-1638), but both feature fanciful monsters in compositions of torn, turbulent forms. Michael Borremans’ conventionally skillful likeness of a young man from 2006 hangs next to an impressive, if facile, portrait from c. 1664 by Caesar Boëtius van Everdingen.

It should be said that most of the old master paintings demonstrate fine technique, but not the inventive brilliance of the greatest artists of their times. The Brueghel is a pale echo of his father’s extraordinary “Harvesters” at the Metropolitan Museum, and the van Everdingen shows an artist who clearly valued technical cleverness over a gravity of form; no part of the body—sleeves, hands, torso—rhythmically supports the flourish of the face. The masters of “Old School,” consequently, largely come off as quaintly dated foils for the postmodernists; it’s their quirks of style and subject matter that spark across the centuries.

Many of the contemporary artists appropriate these quirks with gusto. Richard Wathen’s “Once Removed” (2006) amplifies the vulgarity of the van Everdingen with eerie primness, depicting a mother and children—dressed as if sitting for a Gainsborough—with an almost amphibian coldness of color and detail. A still life attributed to the school of Caravaggio contains, along with fruit and melons, a grasshopper as fiercely detailed as an armored vehicle; next to it, Glenn Brown’s painting of a stringy mass amounts to a collection of such obsessive, unsettling details—in his case orifices, shriveled blossoms, and human and animal faces.

The exhibition does include a true masterpiece, a madonna and child by Lucas Cranach (1472-1553). In this panel, the angle of Mary’s head and hair exquisitely counterbalance the infant’s compact verticals. Colors and contours continuously press upon one another, so that points of detail—like the grapes clutched by mother and infant, or the child’s intricate foot—appear at the end of poignantly unwinding limbs and garments. A second panel attributed to this master’s studio is hardly less remarkable.

The Cranach tends to make the other old masters look dawdling, and the aims of most of the postmodernists…well, enigmatic. Figure paintings by Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik, from 2001 and 2003 respectively, provoke thoughts about social perceptions, but both are so weak in their arrangements of color next to the Cranach that it’s unclear whether they are consciously parodying a genre or simply unaware of painting’s potentials. The DayGlo colors of Djordje Ozbolt’s 2007 landscape jangle nonsensically, reducing his panel to a kind of flip commentary. Mr. Brown’s previously mentioned work, somewhat tedious in its subject, becomes utterly so in its scaleless, measureless design.

John Currin, on the other hand, is represented by one of his stronger works; a certain discipline of rhythm animates the forms of his indulgently surreal still life from 2001, giving weight to the gestures of a violin and lobster. Notable, too, is Julie Heffernan’s “Self Portrait as Tender Mercenary” (2006), which, despite some indiscriminate amassing of detail, sturdily locates a figure in a strange scene.

Overall, though, “Old School” most consistently gives an impression of postmodernism’s peculiar love/hate relationship with the masters. While the presentation of these venerable painters—in ornate frames, on stately red walls—suggests reverence, neither the contemporary work nor the installation itself shows much inclination to discriminate between their greater and lesser efforts.

The cure for this ambivalence should be simple enough. Our huge expectations of art derive from the achievements of Giotto, Titian and Rembrandt, not their lesser peers. Getting to know these artists—as individuals rather than makers of quirky, generic artifacts—eliminates any doubt about the possibilities and demands of painting. Or so one might think, though it’s a challenge too seldom engaged by the young painters in “Old School.”

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Hilary Harkness through June 25 at Mary Boone, 745 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, 212-752-2929.

Thomas Trosch through June 10 at Fredericks Freiser, 504 W 22nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-633-6555.

Can a socially progressive male critic use the term “girlie” without getting lynched? Conscience and propriety would suggest not, yet an ascendant artworld aesthetic cries out for just this word.

Show after show, it seems, of emerging arists feature Barbie-like stick-figures, delicate, often saccherine colors, wilfully adolescent touch and a hyperbolic feyness that collides an inner child with a post-feminist sensibility. Whether the imagery is diaristic, narrative, or a postmodern jumble, the exemplar for the girlie generation, perversely enough, seems to be the wacky, tortured visionary Henry Darger: young women artists are as devoted to the Chicago janitor as he was to the Vivian Girls of his magnum opus.

Amy Wilson is an extreme example of this: “The Global Appeal of Liberty,” as her show is titled, closing this weekend at Bellwether, reveals an artistic personality split between psychological intensity and total drippiness, with a fusion of anal graphic handling and delicate watercolor, on the one hand, and long, bewildering bubble captions in a neat, fastidious script, on the other. The aesthetic is somewhere between medievalism and 5th grade.

What Ms. Wilson has in common with three other current exhibitions that warrant closer attention is a charged collision of the obsessive and the ditsy: one of these shows is even by a man, just to prove there is nothing “essentialist” in the girlie aesthetic.

At the front project room at Feigen Contemporary, Elizabeth Huey’s instense, involved symbolist narratives, often starring angels, little girls, and deer (a favored motif of the girlie generation, pace Maureen Cavanaugh and Jenny Scobel) are set in primal forests with intricately rendered Tudor mansions or oppressively bland institutional or utilitarian buildings as lurking presences.

A recent Yale MFA graduate, Ms. Huey’s made a strong debut at Michael Steinberg last year. Combining folkoristic, religious, scientific and historical imagery, she pits naivité and sophistication against one another in terms, equally, of subject matter, artistic language, and attitude; the same dichotomy relate to her own interestingly split intentions.

Her show is dominated by a monumental diptych: “ The Cyclothymic Forest,” (2005). The figure of a young woman in a stylish, slightly retro dress repeats in mirror form at the joining edges, suggesting she is the “Girl, Interrupted” of the psychological disorder referenced in the title. But the two canvases fail to divide along bipolar lines, as degrees of elation and enervation permeate both halves. She is lost in her forest of signs: washed out gray sheep meander along pathways; men in green jackets empty likely toxic contents of a bucket down a manhole; a dominatrix with a blanked-out face struts around; illustration book twin girls with spindly legs, one dressed in Indian feathers and a bandit mask, look on. The figures seem pasted in, oblivious of one another, their costumes appropriated from different epochs and unrelated dramas, and yet this is far from being a flattened-out, arbitrary decorative schemes: the elements are held together by a strong narrative urge.

In Ms. Huey’s handling, incongruity has neither the menace or humor of surrealism nor the cyncism of such image anarchists as David Salle or Sigmar Polke. What she offers instead, bravely, is an internalized bipolarity, with a handling and rendering that veers from masterful confidence to mousey feebleness, lyricism to quiet angst.

***

The narrative energy in Hilary Harkness is in a higher gear than in Ms. Huey: the focus of her sapphic, sado-masochistic orgy scenes, pillages and riots is unrelenting. Her skills are in harmony with her vision: where Ms. Huey paints with an awkward approximation of old master painterliness, Ms. Harkness has the hard, clean, nerdish exactitude of a cartoonist. She can be oldmasterly, too, but in her case it is the finesse of mannerist paintings on copper that come to mind: paint is transparent, surfaces sealed.

But while a typical Harkness is crowded to bursting point with legions of near-identical figures—willowy, leggy stick figures running around torturing each other and exuding as much individuality and personality in the process as laboratory mice—they actually share with Ms. Huey’s angels and children a vacant sense of alienation. Her cloned cast is a herd of loners.

Less than a year ago Mary Boone presented her first show of this fascinatingly perverse artist: three relatively small panels were given a wall each of her Chelsea barn. Now, in a less precious display, an exhibition ostensibly devoted to drawings, which actually includes new panels and works in oil and watercolor on paper alongside line drawings, is offered at their uptown gallery. Morally speaking, it is business as usual: a massacre on a beach, a shoot out amidst back to the future modernist skyscrapers, a mass ablution in a luxurious ladies room.

As ever, formally speaking, there is an amazing balance of detail and all-overness. “Heavy Cruisers” presents in cut-away cross section the bowels of a ship heavily populated by sailorettes equally busy with the naughty and the nautical. If the title is a suitably unsubtle pun, the handling of different mediums nonetheless reveal the extraordinary touch and control of this weird young woman. The firm delicacy of her line drawing, for instance, which have the legato exactitude of engravings, recall the neoclassical draughtsman John Flaxman. It makes one think: if Flaxman had honed his skills to Sade rather than Dante art history would have had its Harkness two centuries earlier.

***

“Pardon me if I seem lost in a world like a girl in a dream,” exclaims the bubble above the head of one of Thomas Trosch’s protagonists, a middle-aged lady presiding over a suburban salon. Mr. Trosch’s paintings are a risqué satire of modern art and bourgeois femininity. His absurdly camp style has often been compared with Florine Stettheimer in terms of whimsicality, naivité, and jolly palette, but where Stettheimer’s subject was her own high powered interaction with the pioneers of American modernism (Duchamp was a fixture in her salon) fused with a language, however fey, of personal intensity, Mr. Trosch offers a different edge in his collision of subject and style. He has almost recognizable Abstract Expressionist masters, or at least their spin-offs, blend with his rococo touch and girlie palette, sending up the supposed machismo of these heroic masters. But Mr. Trosch is demostrably more than a mere satirist: within the histrionics of his own tongue in cheek style he is concerned with the same formal issues as his mid-century artistic victims, for all that he tries to seem as blasé about them as his ladies-who-lunch fashion victims.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 2005

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“Spencer Tunick: Public Works 2001-2004” through June 19 at I-20 Gallery, 529 W 20th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-645-1100).

“Hilary Harkness” though June 26 at Mary Boone (541 W 24 Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-752-2929).

Now that the doyen of feminist performance photography has taken to masquerading as tacky, pathetic circus performers it seems a good time to come clean with a double confession: I have never found clowns or Cindy Sherman remotely entertaining.

Make no mistake about the gravity of these failings: Within polite art-world company not to “get” Ms. Sherman is tantamount to not having a brain, rather as despising the grinning goons who interrupt the jugglers and the lion tamers is to admit to not having a soul.

Clowns are a natural synthesis of Ms. Sherman’s familiar preoccuptions. Her meteoric ascent in the early 1980s came with fictional “film stills” in which she posed in artfully contrived stereotypical scenarios as the ubiquitous dumb blonds of B-movies. Rather ingeniously, this established intentional vacuity as her emotional affect of choice, a less is more aesthetic that allowed nonchalence to be classed as “subtle” and clichéd gestures as “subversive.”

In the 1990s, Ms. Sherman absented herself from the picture to pursue still-lifes that tested the taste endurance of viewers with lurid assemblages of detritus and vomit. Sex toys and sexually-posed prosthetic limbs became a favored motif to complement her pukey palette, and then gender warfare broke out between battered and besmirched Ken and Barbie dolls.

More recently, the performance artist returned lense-side to star in a series of stereotype-castings, as assorted middle-aged losers, personifying Hollywood wannabees and sexually past-it housewives. In her latest, clown incarnation, sick color, sad gesture, slick technique, nonchalance, and nihilism are brought together in a pantheon of the pathetic. Her large format tableaux fill two floors at Metro Pictures, where the artist has shown from the outset of her career: elaborately costumed, affectless behind grimly determined smiley masks, with artful, computer-manipulated backdrops, she is truly the sagging bore she seems to want to be.

The impression I had, trying my utmost to be moved or intrigued by these images, is of meeting the wealthy aunt of Ronald McDonald. Each is as corporate and ubiquitous as the other, and the product they push about as nourishing.

Spencer Tunick is an action painter in the tradition of Jackson Pollock, only instead of dribbling paint on canvas with bravura speed and in all-over configurations, he uses naked people as his medium and city streets as his support.

The photographer puts out the word for volunteers who in burgeoning force agree to strip and arrange themselves in ways that vary from random gestalts to serial patterns. Sometimes his naked collaborators are an inchoate crowd, other times a disciplined regiment.

Mr. Tunick, who has been persuing this line for several years, has become something of an institution. Like Christo, whose career also proceeded from, essentially, a single antic (wrapping up edifices in his case), he has seen his motif progress from a spontaneous, somewhat anarchic gesture into something officially sanctioned across the globe. Once, speed was of the essence: participants had to get into their birthday suits, adopt the requested pose, and dress again before the bemused cops arrived. Now, artist and models can take their time; the events, carefully scheduled by contemporary art centers from Melbourne to Basel to Sao Paolo, are increasingly a focus of civic pride.

In art-historical terms, it is as if Mr Tunick is passing from an art informel phase to hard-edge abstraction. The earlier poses had an existential angst and tragi-comic urgency to them; nowadays, precision and formality are of the essence, the ever-dirigible mass arranged in artfully slick, tidy swathes of skin. The effect of the new orderliness ranges from absurdist humor, as in “London 5 (Selfridges),” (2003), where massed ranks ascend department store escalators, to touching, almost poetic decoration, as in “Melbourne 3,” (2001), where the figures on a river bank are like swaying reeds.

Some works in this new show at I-20, his first in New York since 1998, recall the earlier scatter pieces, like the melodramatic interior group portrait of HIV-positive New Yorkers in a diner. In “Finland 2 (Helsinki Art Museum),” (2002), the affectless, nonchalent expression of the sprawling, crouching figures is powerfully ambiguous, recalling his earlier work. The effect is precariously poised between humor and horror, with conflicting associations of free love and catastrophe, bacchanal and Buchenwald.

Hilary Harkness is a deliciously perverse absurdist in paint who brings together the unemotional nastiness of Ms. Sherman and the crowd addiction of Mr. Tunick. The somewhat precious display of just three smallish pictures at Mary Boone’s Chelsea barn, Ms. Harkness’s first show with this dealer, is a perfect complement to the masquerades and mass actions explored in these other exhibitions.

Ms. Harkness’s all-female S/M orgies and girl’s own adventures at sea are a chilly marriage of medievalism and the comic strip. In “Matterhorn,” (2003-04) for instance, Hieronymous Bosch and Lucas Cranach team up with Quentin Tarantino, Henry Darger, Balthus and his oddball occultist brother Pierre Klossowski, gay illustrator Tom of Finland, and vintage bandes-dessinées pornographer Eric Stanton. In what reads like a sliced-open doll’s house, she offers cross-sectional, compartmentalized views of an army of skinny young women kitted out in black with sexy boots, hotpants, bikinis, and military caps who in each room torture, abuse, molest, and mortally dispatch sartorially and anatomically similar fellows. In fact, as no discerible emotion is displayed on the perfunctory faces or standarized bodies of any of the participants, it is not too easy to say what criterion, fate, or preference determines whether you are a perpetrator or a victim, although the majority of the latter are wearing white socks, which might signify something. No one registers much by way of pleasure or pain on their cute, dumb faces.

In painterly terms, Ms. Harkness favors a flat, nerdish, swiftly dispatched naïvete, in harmony, some might argue, with her moral maturity. What does actually make these sick, silly pictures interesting beyond the shlock-horror inventiveness of her abuse fantasies, and her nostalgic eye for period charm, is a compellingly crafted ratio of detail to whole, a weird sense of decorative balance and all-overness. Mind you, once you allow so formalist a take of scenes of rape and pillage, the artist’s warped values are obviously working.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 10, 2004

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A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 5, 2004.

Mark Greenwold has a problem. Actually, judging by his bizarre symbolist pictures, he has a few. But from a career perspective, his problem is what to put in his exhibitions. A painting apparently takes him at least a year to complete, and sometimes as long as four. At such a rate, his lifetime retrospective might end up being his first regular show.

One solution – an effective means to dramatize the adagio intensity of his production – is to stage a one-picture show, which is what his then new dealer did for him in 2002. “You must change your life” (2002), a 16-by-22-inch panel whose title presumably came from the last line of Rilke’s sonnet “Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” was given one small side gallery while male wet dream academic nudes by the late Paul Cadmus filled the rest of DC Moore’s midtown premises. Cadmus and Mr. Greenwold made an odd couple: It was as if the almost gothic mannerism of the tortuous, psychologically obsessive, narcissistic Mr. Greenwold was knowingly mocking the slick, patrician proficiency of the “gay lord” of conservative American realism.

This time around, Mr. Greenwold has opted for another exhibition strategy, curating a group show that features his latest piece in the company of artists who exemplify a principle at stake in his own work. He did this once before, in “The Risk of Existence,” his 1998 parting show at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in SoHo. But “Endless Love” creates more of a technical than an existential community. The selection brings together artists of diverse style, tendency, and touch who are united by their penchant to ponder.

Mr. Greenwold’s own new work, “The Need to Understand” (2002-03), literally puts three peers into his allegory: Hovering over the heads of the human protagonists (two women and, as ever, the artist himself, this time wearing the same dress as one of the women) are what read like haloes or thought bubbles. Each one is made up in a recognizable trademark device of a fellow painter. The woman entering from the back corridor has Lucas Samaras rays of light emanating from her cranium; the woman in the duplicated dress has a James Siena puzzle oozing from her Medusa-like hairdo; and Mr. Greenwold himself seems to be thinking in the wobbly lozenges of a Chuck Close grid.

Mr. Greenwold was famously the subject of Mr. Close’s “Mark” paintings and prints, based on a gormless 1970s photograph, while Mr. Close has in turn been depicted with equal unflattery in a number of Greenwolds. (For whatever it might signify, Mr. Siena and Mr. Samaras have also been depicted by Mr. Close.) Mr. Siena is the only of one of the three shown in his own right in “Endless Love.”

There, he is given pride of place on the wall where Mr. Greenwold himself hangs, along with ceramicist Ken Price and, sandwiching the Greenwold, Thomas Nozkowski and David Brody. By placing himself in this abstract power corner, Mr. Greenwold has ingeniously cosetted his own hyper-realist style: With no competing mimesis in proximity, the eye has its arm twisted – so to speak – into recognizing the abstract element of so overtly representational a painting.

For what makes Mr. Greenwold so slow a producer – and at the same time entices slow viewing of his work – is the mind-boggling minisculism of his painterly touch. At first sight, he seems to be the kind of painter who is rendering each hair of the cat and mouse that gracefully co-habit the foreground of the picture, not to mention each grain of the parquet of the library in the distance. But on closer inspection, a compulsion to pixilate is revealed at an even deeper level, in tiny, pinpoint, feathery strokes of complementary color. The result isn’t the pearly, opaque finish you might expect from hyperrealism but its opposite – an almost impressionistic fuzz: A Renoir painted under a microscope.

In “Endless Love,” Mr. Greenwold has created a salon of the self-absorbed. Within this group, there is more divergence than commonality, as he notes in a curatorial statement. While for some, he writes, labor-intensity is “compulsiveness bordering on pathology,” for others it is “merely the systematic intensity and dailiness of the professional, applying his or her craft in much the same manner as a good root-canal specialist.” Modernism, Mr. Greenwold argues, has made the craft element in art taboo, just as, correspondingly, it has made spontaneity a fetish.

This manifesto show presents a compelling case for compulsion: The artists gathered may lose themselves in craft, but the good ones (and those are the majority) find their vision in the same place.

Charles LeDray, for instance, makes exquisitely nutty miniature clothing – in “Hole” (1998), a punctured jacket, shirt, and tie hang on a minutely fabricated hanger and hook. Xenobia Bailey creates vaguely tribal-looking, overlapping spirals of crocheted yarn build up to psychedelic patterns. In both cases, a sense of the marginal that comes with slow, technically absorbing activity folds back into the meanings of the work.

Some artists aren’t such slow producers but seem enlisted for moral support. Alexi Worth is represented by a painting from his series charting the allegorical wanderings of an artworld nebbish; Mr. Worth’s alterego could be the cousin of Mr. Greenwold’s projected self. Like Mr. Worth, Hilary Harkness achieves intensity through knowing naffness, her cramped illustrational rendering sealed in by a coppery smoothness that recalls the German mannerist Adam Elsheimer.

For many artists in “Endless Love”, obsessive pattern-making or craft leads to a kind of negation of self, a mystical otherworldliness. Mr. Greenwold’s peculiarity is to arrive at a similar place himself despite-or who knows, maybe because of-so gross an involvement with his own psyche. Equally “anal” in what he depicts, and how, his painting represents a kind of tantric exorcism.

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“Online”
Feigen Contemporary until August 9
535 W. 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-929-0500

If Paul Klee could famously “take line for a walk,” then James Siena has taken it to the wild side. A stunning, extensive display of 78 of his drawings fills the spacious Chelsea premises of Gorney Bravin + Lee. While some works date back to the mid-1980s, the majority are from the last few years. During this time, Mr. Siena has regularly exhibited paintings. Although he works on a pronouncedly small, sometimes even miniature scale, his prolificacy is remarkable precisely because of the mind-boggling feats of concentration his work entails. (The works on paper, incidentally, have an untraditional relationship to the paintings in that they tend to be larger, are no more exploratory, are equally colorful, and are at least as sharply defined.)

Mr. Siena has the involved totality of vision of an outsider or a primitive. Not that this stops him from being art-world savvy, of positioning himself in relation to recent art and current issues. Like his peers Bruce Pearson and Fred Tomaselli – with whom he shares an almost retro penchant for “trippy” psychedelic effects – his idiom collapses the division between process and product. There is an intensity of craft that undermines the quaint critical notion that how the work was made is merely the artist’s business. On the contrary, recognition of the meditative detachment that went into their facture puts the viewer into a similar state. This is art that makes you want to say “Om!”

Mr. Siena’s mind is a museum without walls. Cultural references and associated sensibilities range from African textiles, the decorative lozenges in Gustav Klimt, Bridget Riley’s swirls, and Moghul miniatures, to the outsider visions of Friedensreich Huntertwasser and James Castle, Tantric art, Escher, Aztec architecture, Haring’s grafitti-inspired notation, and Maori tattoos. Any list is partial, yet the more eclectic it gets, the more, counter-intuitively, it affirms a unity of purpose in the artist. All this stuff is not so much source material as points of affinity. It is as if, in his higher aesthetic-meditative state, the artist tapped decoration’s collective consciousness. The beauty here, however, is that he doesn’t lose sight of the cultural value of diversity. He unironically reconnects abstract painting to a deeper wellspring of pattern generation. The minimalist grid mutates into a spider’s web.

The key to understanding Mr. Siena is to see that he works algorithmically. In classic pictorial aesthetics, form is discovered in relations between static components. Without necessarily overriding this criterion, Mr. Siena’s art sets a different dynamic in motion, one that has to do with the rhythms of unmechanical repetition. In his scaled-down, slowed-down pictorial world, fluctuation is a subtle equivalent of gesture, mutation a kind of narrative.

At best, narrative incident reveals itself quietly and unforced, as in the accordion-like bulging and squashing rows of “Double Recursive Combs, Red and Black” (2003), a gouache that recalls African design motifs. Other times, however, narrative seems imposed, as in the graphite drawing, “Partially Coffered Unknot” (2003), which has a dense knottedness at the top, almost depicted in perspective, that gives way to a single thread at the bottom: a heavy-handed plot by Mr. Siena’s standards, threatening his gentle equilibrium.

This is not to say that his art conveys a single mood. On the contrary, there is a welcome range of temper. But formally speaking, all-overness suits Mr. Siena best, as it frees him to introduce a subtle play of layering versus flatness. In a dense, pulsating arrangement of interlocking shapes entitled “T-Ramparts” (2003), for instance, modulations in the pressure of the pencil send a shimmering wave across the sheet, to magical effect.

***

OnLine, a sprawling 38-artist salon at Feigen Contemporary, was curated by Charlie Finch, the subtlety of whose contribution to aesthetics is indicated by the title of the book he co-authored: “Most Art Sucks.” On the evidence of this show, he has a correspondingly robust appetite for the trashy and the illustrational. Which isn’t to say his taste is necessarily uninteresting: Walter Robinson’s washy porno playing cards and Hilary Harkness’s coyly lesbian comic-strip adventures are enormous fun as ever. Luckily, Mr. Finch enlisted two highbrow friends, George Negroponte and Rob Storr, to co-select with him. Three distinct sensibilities brought diverse talents to the table; undiplomatically, published statements by each name names.

The theme of line and drawing does not seem to have held back any selector from artists pursuant of neither. But there are fine works and surprising juxtapositions that vindicate their efforts. For instance, the sharp, primly architectonic wall drawing by Storr-choice David Brody at the front of the gallery relates in its circumscribed mutations to the fey, ethereal, but in its way equally obsessive romanticism of Negroponte-nominee Eric Holzman, hanging downstairs.

Two artists who usefully test definitions of drawing here are Karin Davie, whose “Separations in Deep Yellow” extends her Op Art interest in curvy, wavy lines into sculptural relief, with pigment and zippers sunk into cascading paper, and Alexander Ross, whose giant untitled gouache with acrylic from 2002 pushes the linear and the painterly up against each other in an energizing collision of languages.

This article first appeared in The Sun, June 26, 2003.

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