Manifesta, the European biennial of contemporary art, is held in Western European cities — most recently in Genk, Belgium. This tenth edition, hosted by St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, was housed in the Winter Palace and New Hermitage, the two main buildings of that institution and, across the enormous Palace Square, the city’s main plaza, in the newly renovated General Staff Building. The Hermitage, an encyclopedic museum celebrating its 250^th anniversary, is devoted to world art, going up to Post-Impressionism and the paintings by Henri Matisse; another collection of Russian art is in the State Russia Museum. Because visas are expensive, Russia is not readily accessible to many Americans and West Europeans, so the primary intended audience was Russian. There were a great many foreign tourists in St. Petersburg when I visited in late July, but relatively few of them focused on Manifesta.

Some of the artists responded to specifically to contemporary issues in Russian society. Alexandra Sukhareva, who is Russian, presented photographs from World War II archives. There is a video of a Russian dance class by Klara Lidén and a video of young dancers by Rineke Dijkstra. Boris Mikhailov presented photographs of a protesters’ camp in Kiev. The late Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, a gay artist who had been beaten up in the streets, was represented with Tragic Love (1993), a series of photographs of the artist dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Some foreign artists also offered Russian themes. Yasumasa Morimura made photographs based on drawings of the Hermitage when its art was removed during World War II. Marlene Dumas showed portraits of famous gay men including three Russians — Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Diaghilev and Rudolf Nureyev. Thomas Hirschhorn, whose Abschlag (2014) was designed for “Manifesta 10,” showed a gigantic collapsed building in which works by the revolutionary Russian Constructivists are installed. Erik van Lieshout presented the story of the Hermitage cats, longtime residents of the museum; they perished during the siege, but today are back in the museum basement, controlling invading rodents. And Francis Alÿs, whose boyhood dream was to travel from his native Belgium to the other side of the Iron Curtain, crashed a Russian Lada, a now-obsolete model of car into a tree inside the courtyard of the Winter Palace.

Facing controversy about Russian anti-LGBT laws and, also, about the country’s action in the Crimea, in interviews Manifesta’s curator Kasper König, who described Russia as “a repressive and authoritarian country,” articulated frankly the difficulties he faced. So far as I could see (I was not able to attend the performances or public performances, which were held outside the central exhibition site), much of the art, including most of the art by non-Russians was the kind displayed at such exhibitions in America. Certainly this is true of Olivier Mosset’s large, handsome monochromes; Ann Veronica Janssens’s very beautiful installations of floating liquids; and Vladim Fishkin’s A Speedy Day (2003), which compresses the twenty-four-hour light cycle into two-and-a-half hours, an effect especially evocative in far-North St. Petersburg, where the summer days are so long. The same can be said of Joseph Beuys’s Wirtschaftswerte (“Economic Values,” 1980), a commentary on food shortages in East German stores; Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage, 2001); Susan Philipsz’s piano recording inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which was played on the main staircase of the New Hermitage. Lara Favaretto’s installation of concrete blocks in the gallery for ancient Greek sculpture; Tatzu Nishi’s temporary wooden living room built around a chandelier in the Winter Palace, creating a home with the museum; and a painting from 1966 by Gerhard Richter made similarly affecting use of the site.

As the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, rightly notes in the catalogue, “Displaying contemporary art alongside the classics is a common occurrence.” The logic of this procedure deserves discussion. In the gallery of the Hermitage devoted to Nicolas Poussin you can see the relationship between his early Joshua’s Victory Over the Amalekites (1625-26); Moses Striking Water from the Rock (1649), painted more than 20 years later; and his Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1655-57), a marvelous example of his late style. Normally we thus find visually connected works in one gallery. When, however, the physically contiguous works are historically distant, imagination is then called upon to identify connections. This is true when Louise Bourgeois’s silver sculpture The Institute (2002) is installed alongside an etching by Piranesi and when Katharina Fritsch’s sculpture Frau mit Hund (“Woman with Dog,” 2004), which alludes to the life of Russia’s historical high society, is displayed in the former emperor’s private quarters. In a challenging variation on this familiar procedure, Maria Lassnig, Dumas and Nicole Eisenman occupied the two rooms of the Winter Palace usually dedicated to Matisse. (His paintings were removed to the General Staff Building.) They too deal with the female body and its sexuality, and so temporarily giving them his privileged place in the Hermitage counted as a political gesture.

The post A Dispatch from “Manifesta 10” appeared first on artcritical.

July 1 to September 15, 2013

The occasion of my first visit to the Gramsci Monument was a three and a half hour “Art School” led by its creator, the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. I had read his brief text introducing “Energy: Yes! Quality: No!” — the title and doctrine of the workshop — so I knew that each participant would present a work to be judged by this criteria. Skeptical, I stuffed a few loose drawings into a manila folder and set off. I located Forest Houses with the help of my smartphone’s GPS device, first mistakenly wandering around the adjacent McKinley development. I realized at this point that in my thirty years of nearly-continuous residence in New York City, I had walked hurriedly through housing projects only by accident. As I entered Forest Houses not scanning for the nearest exit but intending to stay, I experienced my first sensation that something brand new was happening. And in, of all places, the domain of contemporary art.

Taking my seat in a circle of plastic patio chairs scrawled with the words “Gramsci Monument” in Hirschhorn’s signature thick black Sharpie, I observed my surroundings: a group of mostly 25-35 year-old art types, like myself, and a handful of older folks. Three of the roughly 15 were residents of Forest Houses, and Hirschhorn addressed them familiarly because among the group, only they had participated in the Art School before. After releasing us for 45 minutes so that people who had not brought a work with them could generate one on-site, Hirschhorn began a critique more organized and truly democratic than any I endured while earning my MFA. A work was placed in the center of the circle, and each person answered “Yes” or “No” (with a few phrases of explanation) to the question of whether it contained Energy. By the end, I learned a number of things: 1. I am lot more generous in the assessment of Energy than Thomas Hirschhorn. 2. Judgment is always personal but a sum of judgments can approach the Universal (in other words, Democracy Works!). 3. The condition of Energy is complicated. 4. Judgment is always preceded by assumption. 5. Structural precision, when sustained, can be very productive.

In the following weeks, I attended a number of other events, activities and informal gatherings at the Gramsci Monument: three daily philosophy lectures (with Marcus Steinweg); three weekly Gramsci Seminars (visiting scholars speaking about his work and legacy); one Running Event with Jamar Foster; one Field Trip to Walter’s de Maria’s Earth Room and Broken Kilometer; and one Open Microphone. Events I was sad to miss: the weekly Gramsci Theater (local high school students performing an Absurdist script with philosophers as characters), Fields Trips to Dia: Beacon, Yankee Stadium, the United Nations and Socrates Sculpture Park; and the weekly Poetry Session (Reading and Workshop). To utilize this Monument in its entirety was impossible for any one individual.

Totality and (near) excess characterize the project in a number of aspects: presence, transparency, sincerity and documentation. There are copious photos archived on its extensive website (gramsci-monument.com) including every artwork presented in every Art School over 11 weeks and high-resolution images as part of a press kit downloadable by anyone. These gestures are in stark contrast with fellow Relational artist Tino Sehgal, who famously forbids the circulation of images of his work. Total presence is not just that of the artist, but of a large crew of staff and collaborators (residents and non-residents) whose activities seem to fluctuate between and around these roles. I never once visited the Monument and did not see Hirschhorn himself; Ambassador (and Dia curator) Yasmil Raymond, Art Workshop leader Lex Brown, emcee DJ Baby Dee, a young man relentlessly taking photos, at least one librarian, at least one cook, and various others assisting and/or participating. In addition, there were always residents, visitors, and children utilizing the facility in a range of ways (sometimes a crowd, sometimes a handful; depending on the day): listening to a lecture or performance, reading in the library, painting in the Art Workshop, using the Internet, having lunch, inspecting Gramsci’s slippers, exploring, chatting with friends, playing chess, climbing on jungle-gyms or running through sprinklers. The Monument was a truly multi-use space for a truly multilateral public.

Hirschhorn’s total transparency is manifest in his willingness to talk to whomever will listen about his values and goals in this Monument and beyond, and his wide release of texts which make explicit every aspect of the project’s origins, operations, conceptual framework and philosophical implications. Words that recur in these texts as values and aspirations include: Form, Equality, Resistance, Positiveness, Universality, Energy, Belief. Words that recur as adversaries: Quality, Culture, Tradition, Exclusivity, Identity, Particularism. As well as (surprise!): Collaboration and Participation. (These words, Hirschhorn writes, have a way of diffusing responsibility, which he, as an artist, wishes to fully assume.) His texts match classic manifestos of the 20th century avant-garde in their rhetoric, grandiosity, theatrics, redundancy and revolutionary zeal. He diverges from this tradition (pardon the word), and from most of contemporary art, in his total sincerity. While the classic manifesto is always hyperbolic for dramatic effect, even humorous (recall Hugo Ball performing the Dada Manifesto in his cardboard hat and cape), Hirschhorn, I believe, is dead serious. There is no sideways smirk — irony, satire — when he writes “I believe in Universality, and in the universal power of art to transform each human being.”

With its inevitable clashes of race, ethnicity, class and culture, the Gramsci Monument is a land mine of potential problems. But isn’t it better to confront these clashes, however difficult, than to pretend they don’t exist? The novelty and discomfort of visiting a housing project for many of the art- and philosophy-minded is proof that we live in “a tale of two cities,” the oft-repeated credo of likely mayor-to-be Bill de Blasio (who I saw in the audience with his son Dante at a Gramsci Monument lecture). Hirschhorn has written: “To address a ‘non-exclusive’ audience means to face reality, failure, unsuccessfulness, the cruelty of disinterest and the incommensurability of a complex situation.” He found a catalyst in his personal hero Antonio Gramsci, whose Marxist philosophy is worth reinvestigating as class divisions in New York City, and around the world, worsen.

Gramsci’s assertion that “All human beings are intellectuals,” a prominent slogan of the Monument, serves to introduce his theory of “organic intellectuals” — the kind not determined by class or profession, but through thought and activity in one’s own community. This is an empowering notion, but access to it (like most advanced philosophy and art) is usually gained through higher education, where the target audience will not likely be. While the Monument may not get every participant (resident or visitor) reading Gramsci, it does bring these ideas into a new kind of circulation — library books, banners, brochures, web and radio — in the unique context of a NYCHA development. Robert Smithson also extrapolates the Monument-form, albeit in a different direction. For him, it expands (or contracts) to include a barren sandbox and other such “ruins in reverse.” While Hirschhorn is a soldier of Energy (Yes!), Smithson celebrates entropy or “energy-drain” as reflected in the works of Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, and the landscape of Passaic, New Jersey. Earning the title by ironic pronouncement, these “monuments” have very little to offer, and Smithson means to critique the systemic failures that created them. Hirschhorn takes the opposite approach: injecting the Monument with more giving-power than its ever had before.

I have seen and heard firsthand what this project has offered to Forest Houses. For me personally, benefits gained from the Gramsci Monument include: discovering the work of “Afro-Pessimist” scholar Frank Wilderson; bumping into all kinds of old friends; re-reading Gramsci for the first time since college; finding the perfect birthday gift for my boyfriend at a Conway department store on the advice of a Forest Houses resident; sitting beside my Dad at a lecture called “For the Love of Philosophy,” and many more. It made me proud to be an artist and a New Yorker — because this is what art can do, and it can still happen here. William H. Gass wrote, “The successful monument has offspring.” In the sense of ongoing activity, dialogue and friendship born of the Gramsci Monument, I have no doubt. In the sense of future projects that approach its monumental ambition — here’s hoping.

The post Not on the High Line: Scenes from the Gramsci Monument appeared first on artcritical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Storms before the Storm: Pre-Sandy, Chelsea Awash with Disaster appeared first on artcritical.

Life on Mars is the title of a David Bowie song and now, too, the 2008 Carnegie International.  The oldest exhibition of international contemporary art in North America, it has taken 55 incarnations for the show to bear a title.  “Is there life on Mars?” is a question curator Douglas Fogle asks as a way to explore “what it means to be human today,” “investigate the nature of humanness,” and “demonstrate hope for humankind.”  Uh-oh.  It doesn’t take an extraterrestrial perspective to realize that stating an artwork is an exploration of human nature is just a touch more specific than claiming it is about life.  Fogle’s big questions, however, guided a selection of works that share material concerns recently associated with less unwieldy notions.

I am thinking in particular of two other survey shows of the past year: the much-discussed inaugural exhibition of the Lower East Side’s New Museum, Unmonumental, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.  Unmonumental offered up the informality of assemblage and collage as the proper antihero for our times.  Shortly thereafter the Biennial made much the same proposition, with one of the show’s curators, Henriette Huldisch, adding the catchphrase “lessness” to the New Museum’s “unmonumental”. And so a style was born, or rather, codified.  Life on Mars shares a number of artists with Unmonumental, including Mark Bradford, Cao Fei, Thomas Hirschhorn, Matthew Monahan, Manfred Pernice, and Susan Philipsz.  For a show of only 39 artists, that makes nearly a sixth.  This is perhaps unsurprising considering the New Museum’s Eungie Joo served on the advisory committee for the 2008 International, but is rather suspect for a show that purports to be global in its representation.  Suspect as well is that all but seven of the artists are from the US or Europe and only twelve are women.

Fogle furthered aligns himself with Unmonumental by stating “these artists are inheritors of an artistic legacy that seeks to produce not the monumental but the momentary, the ephemeral, and the modest”.  The problem with speaking in terms of inheritors and legacies   is that it can make for rather reductive relationships between works.  Paul Thek’s Untitled (Earth Drawing I), an acrylic on newspaper painting of Earth as seen from space, has become the signature image for Life on Mars.  Besides this work’s obvious play with the show’s title, Thek’s inclusion among the others artists in the exhibition presents his use of ephemeral materials as a precursor for a younger generation.  But pairing Thek with an artist with a similar materials list, like Mark Bradford, flatters neither.  At his best, Bradford’s mixed media collages seduce with a dense, dark physicality.  When he uses quotidian materials it feels simply as if the work pulled them in with a gravitational force.  Attaching any meaningful metaphor to the fact that Bradford assembles map-like images out of scraps of paper that you would commonly find on the street leaves one with a lot of overly obvious and not so useful metaphors.  Thek, on the other hand, hardly used materials in a way that could be described as seductive, but the information those materials bring to the work is always pointed.  At the time of its making -1974, just five years after the first human contact with the moon- his painting of Earth featured an image that had recently and frequently graced the pages of many newspapers.  Thek’s rendering of this icon with his characteristic light and fast touch leaves much of the newspaper underneath exposed.  What could be a poetic image, Earth seen from a distance so great that all its features become abstract, is interrupted by information about the US Army building a golf course or an oil company’s profits.  The pleasure of such wry humor isn’t transferable to Bradford.  His work’s sexiness starts to feel like so much art school posturing in comparison, while Thek uselessly becomes the enigmatic outsider.

The prevalence of what was being termed “scatter art” in the 90’s also renewed interest in Thek.  Ironically, the very person to have written extensively about the problematics of such resurrection jobs, Mike Kelley, is included in the Life on Mars as well.  His contribution, seven architecturally-based works from his Kandor series, cleverly capitalize on their incongruous relationship to the doric columns and marble austerity of the Hall of Sculpture in which they are housed.  Noticing that Kandor, a fictional city in the Superman comics, is represented differently in one issue of the comic to the next, Kelley presents the conflicting depictions of this fictional locale as a series of miniature cityscapes covered in glass domes and basked in glowing synthetic lights.  Each dome is connected via respiratory tubing to an oxygen tank of candy-colored hue and displayed amongst sleek platforms, pedestals, and partitions, with the occasional random decorative element, like a throw pillow, tastefully placed in their midst and video projections of similar set-ups on walls nearby.  In other words, the life of a pop-cultural fiction, Kandor, is being sustained by a parody of contemporary reworkings of modernist forms.  Perhaps Kelley is suggesting Modernism is a sort of Superman: a constantly evolving fiction rendered invincible through endless resuscitation and regurgitation.  In any case, Kandor 1, 4, 6, 13, 15, 17, and 20 are ephemeral only in the jokey sense that they are connected to respiratory tubes.  The work seems to critique rather than support the claims made on its behalf by our curator Fogle.

Other works in the 2008 International are also well worth seeing, but gain little from their placement in the show.  Fischli and Weiss please as always with a scene built of fabricated items that would be common to any workshop, everything from a plate of peanut shells to workman’s boots, and please as well with a dizzying video of double-exposed and constantly moving images that is as mesmerizing to stare at as a gasoline spill or a rave. Bruce Conner more than pleases with Angel, a series of stark and beautiful photograms made using the artist’s body and a slide projector, appropriate photographic portraits of someone who always played with ideas of artistic authorship.  However, thinking of Vija Celmins star-filled skies as evoking life on Mars is the least interesting context I can possibly imagine for works that otherwise play with the very limits of representation.

And yet, Fogle is not without my sympathies.  The job of curating a survey show of the magnitude of the Carnegie International is a thankless one; such exhibitions make it structurally impossible to appease all or even most expectations.  The history of the International is a complicated one, with the exhibition first beginning as a convenient way for Andrew Carnegie to build the museum’s collection.  Rather than traveling to find work for the museum, the International brought work to Pittsburgh that then could either be added to the permanent collection or shipped back home.  In its current position, the International serves as one of Pittsburgh’s only points of exposure to a larger art world.  A rather big job, but not one at which it has been wholly unsuccessful.  I grew up in Pittsburgh.  When I was fifteen the International was the cause of my first seeing Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close, and Tony Oursler, artists with whom I can no longer imagine a lack of familiarity.  I’m sure to many seeing the 2008 Carnegie International this exhibition is similarly revelatory.  However, in order to avoid appearing to be guided primarily by an unimaginative ploy to escape provinciality, the next curator of the International would do well to take less cues from New York, show a less predictable group of artists, and contextualize their work in a less uselessly broad way.

The post Life on Mars: The 55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh appeared first on artcritical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Thomas Hirschhorn: Superficial Engagement at Gladstone Gallery and Roxy Paine at James Cohan Gallery appeared first on artcritical.