March 19 to September 5, 2016
11 West 53rd Street (between 6th and 7th avenues)
New York, 212 708 9400

In 2000, a miracle occurred in the blue-collar town of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. On a window of Ramona and Marcelino Collado’s second floor apartment at 103 Washington Street, the Virgin Mary appeared. As news of her advent spread through the neighborhood, scores of the Catholic faithful lined up outside the little house with peeling vinyl siding in order to troop up the stairs and pay homage. At the time, artist Rachel Harrison caught wind of the event and traveled to Perth Amboy with her camera to document the worshippers. Seeing is believing.

The photographs resulting from this pilgrimage currently line the walls of the Museum of Modern Art’s second-floor Dunn Gallery, a component of Harrison’s larger installation Perth Amboy (2001), marking the first time MoMA has displayed the work since acquiring it in 2011. Large sheets of corrugated cardboard form a winding labyrinth throughout the room, and a guard controls entry to the gallery. (To have such a respite from MoMA’s infamous crowds is reason alone to spend time with the work. The relative quiet fosters meditation and augments the contemplative quality of Perth Amboy.) Because freestanding cardboard is intrinsically precarious, the viewer is especially aware of her body as she moves through the space, taking extra care not to accidentally brush up against the boards, lest one tips and sends the whole thing toppling like dominoes. Rounding the corner of a cardboard sheet she might be surprised by another body on the opposite side. The installation choreographs these chance encounters, where a stranger is obliged, even if fleetingly, to regard another.

“People see what they want to see,” Harrison has said of her own work, and here, it’s the act of looking itself that is being plumbed. In a neat metaphysical sleight of hand, Harrison sets up moments throughout the installation where the very action the viewer performs is also what she is challenged to consider. Upon carefully placed pedestals interspersed within the maze are coupled objects: in each case one half of the pair is distinctly figurative while the other represents a “work of art.” On one pedestal, a “Becky, Friend of Barbie” doll, sitting in a wheelchair and with a camera around her neck, gazes upon a chromogenic print tacked up on the wall before her. Elsewhere, situated on a mirrored base that reflects the lower half of a viewer’s body, a cheap figurine family of Dalmatian dogs stares up collectively at a common cardboard mailer, which has been bent so that it stands upright. A plaster bust of Marilyn Monroe — plunked into a Stor-All box and perched on a small, wheeled platform that has been shoved into a cardboard corner of the labyrinth — is unexpectedly moving. The objects themselves are garish and sometimes tawdry but in each instance Harrison investigates the visceral experience of looking at something, really stopping to consider it. This “something” might be anything: a work of art, celebrity culture, the Divine. Suddenly the kitschy objects are suffused with a more profound resonance—like Marilyn, the classic icon of fashion and Hollywood who epitomizes what it is to be seen, slung low to the ground and sliding towards the informe on a warehouse dolly.

And then there are the photographs. Taken from a vantage point somewhere across the street from the Collado family’s anointed window, most of the images capture believers who have come to witness the Blessed Virgin. Depending on the angle of light, their faces are not always visible through the glass; most often we see only hands pressed against the pane. The images evoke another biblical reference: the tale of Doubting Thomas. According to the story, after Jesus rose from the dead, he appeared to all the disciples but Thomas. When the others informed him of Christ’s return, Thomas replied he couldn’t believe it until he saw for himself. It’s from this story that the common idiom “seeing is believing” originally derives, and which proves especially prescient to Perth Amboy.

Non-believers may scoff at Virgin Mary sightings in unusual places, and the gullibility of those who are certain of their truth. But Harrison’s unexpectedly beautiful photographs reveal the poignancy of religious pareidolia, and the believers who are heartened by the perceived emanation. Faith is an intense, sometimes overwhelming emotion, and the sense of sight is often its most powerful incubator, regardless of whether the idol is religious, political, celebrity, aesthetic, or something else entirely. With Perth Amboy Harrison interrogates the unequivocal, and in so doing challenges viewers to examine their own dogmatic beliefs whatever they might be. What aspects of our own convictions might only be mirages on a pane of glass?

The post Faith and Formalism: Rachel Harrison at MoMA appeared first on artcritical.

The abundance of self-anointed anti-establishment shows reminds us that nothing in the art world is sacred, least of all art history. We’ve been served notice; taboos will be busted, idols smashed and sacred cows slaughtered. Sculptors will challenge our outdated notions of painting, installation artists our outdated notions of sculpture, and performance artists our outdated notions of installation. In the noisy crescendo of art that screams at us to rethink things on its terms, one message rings loud and clear; the canon is under fire!

So what are we to make of this curious industry in which the path to success seems so heavily greased by its practitioners’ insistence that they are a challenge to its authority? What is the meaning of a world in which the very rejection of its values seems as clear a path to acceptance as any? Is there a parallel world in our society that mirrors that of the contemporary art world as seen through the eyes of Chelsea? Imagine a law firm vying for your business by claiming a particularly irreverent attitude toward the law, or a politician cultivating votes on a platform of autocratic rule. To be sure, questioning our value systems is one of the chief roles of an artist (if he or she, unbound by the directives of others, cannot speak the truth, who can?), but it seems that we’ve arrived at a point where the act of questioning has become the greatest currency of all. Cézanne’s re-examination of painterly perception was a game-changer with implications about how we see the world (as were the developments of the Impressionists, Fauves and Cubists), but much of contemporary art seems unconcerned with real world implications. Art that adopts a full-blown revisionist take on the art-historical canon invariably fails to resonate beyond gallery walls. Take for example the show of Fahamu Pecou’s paintings at Lyons Wier Gallery, which “questions the concepts of inclusion and exclusion within the historical constructs of fine art,” by “appropriating famous images from the twentieth century and reinterpreting them through his own self-portrait prism.” In a painting titled The Treachery of (media) Images: After Rene Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, the artist’s cursive phrase “Ceci n’est pas Fahamu,” accompanies his self-portrait. While the appropriation is obvious enough, the reinterpretation remains unclear.

It’s been a while since Duchamp displayed his urinal, Rauschenberg erased his de Kooning, Warhol made his ready-mades and John Baldessari commissioned sign painters to create work for him, sign their own names to it, and present it as his own. Kehinda Wiley’s reinterpretation of 18th- and 19th-century history painting has become so familiar that it is now more surprising to see Jacques Louis David’s white and sallow-cheeked Napoleon atop his war steed than Wiley’s African American stand-in.

These conceits all served in various ways to challenge notions of creativity, originality, and authenticity. Each was also interpreted, in its own way, as a sort of “joke on the art world,” the most recent iteration being the Banksy film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” Here the street artist makes a documentary about his would-be documentarian Thierry Gueta, who in Banksy’s narrative is transformed from cameraman to street artist to art-world darling himself. The work produced by Gueta under his street name Mr. Brain Wash is pretty lousy by nearly everyone’s admission, but the fact that it sells well at a show in Los Angeles is presented in the film as the ultimate joke on the art world. But is it a joke? In a telling moment, Banksy’s dealer Steve Lazarides chuckles nervously, “I think the joke is on . . . I don’t know who the joke’s on, really. I don’t even know if there is a joke.”

If there is a joke it has little meaning. The film suffers from a sort of self-imposed impotence. The breadth of its meaning is a function of its scope, and in putting one over on the art world, it has few implications for the world beyond. The group show “Entertainment,” currently on view at Greene Naftali, offers a sort of litmus test of the resonance of art inspired solely by art world reference. Rachel Harrison’s piece Zombie Rothko, is a free standing block of sculpture splattered with vaguely Ab-Ex paint and topped by a doll’s head. From the press release: it “suggests an embodied version of painting (a kind of “walking dead”).”  Next to this is ITEA (International Trade and Enrichment Association), Michael Smith’s fake trade show booth “parodying the synergy of arts and business collaboration.” It works as parody, but nothing more. This is the affliction of the navel-gazing worldview: it’s a bite we’ve grown accustomed to.

Thankfully, we still have that second stack of press releases, those that make no claims to historical revisionism. Instead, they correspond to a different kind of show, where the work on display feels altogether more comfortable with itself. Rather than trading in art-world reference, this work opens itself up to reference the world at large.

Take two sublime shows of painting currently on 24th street, those of Lynne Woods Turner at Danese and Rudolf Stingel at Gagosian. Each artist creates work imbued with an emotional maturity that allows it to stand autonomously and remain open to interpretation. Woods Turner’s paintings rely on their own narrowly defined formal parameters to present a luminous world that remains accessible at its core. Stingel takes the self-assuredness a step further. Employing silver and gold (and what could be better fodder for a revisionist re-evaluation of our cultural mores?) as the primary materials for minimal paintings of maximal visual appeal, the lasting question Stingel poses to us is one that artists have asked for centuries: can you imagine anything more beautiful?

The post The Canon is Under Fire: What Press Releases Tell You, and What They Don’t appeared first on artcritical.