With her installation at the Brooklyn Museum, entitled “Submerged Motherlands,” New York-based artist Swoon (Caledonia Curry) has come home in full force. For the better part of the last decade, Swoon has brought her particular brand of socially conscious and thoughtfully impermanent street art around the globe, from the banks of the Hudson to New Orleans to Venice to Haiti. Her creations, like a turn of phrase by poet Ann Lauterbach, powerfully convey “something in the mix of habit and hope.” They’re lavish yet down-to-earth, full of youthful dynamism and the fragility of time. Swoon combines found materials, expressionistic figure drawing and intricately detailed patterns on a grand scale, layering personal narrative and community crises into a dense, dramatic outpouring of lovingly curated objects. Of late, she has emerged alongside such artists as Ai Wei Wei and Shirin Neshat as a master of a kind of civic-minded, positively impactful art activism that is often as exquisite as it is challenging.

“Submerged Motherlands” has engulfed the entire Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery on the Museum’s fifth floor, transforming it into a dreamy ad hoc jungle village where the sea has crawled up to marry the land. An enormous tree stands tall at the center of the gallery’s rotunda, reaching gracefully up to the skylight, its limbs draped and dripping with delicate circular paper cutouts. Flanking the tree’s massive trunk — which is woven from long, vertical strips of fabric, each dyed a different muted tone — are two ragtag boats that the artist previously floated down the Mississippi River (in 2006), the Hudson River (2008) and into the Venice Bienniale (2009). Sets of mirrored cardboard figures radiate outward from the heart of the installation, looming large like sentinels or sphinxes, deities that bless and protect the space within. One is a pair of Incan mothers, arms outstretched as they gaze skyward, with matching crowns made of tentacles and breastplates of crabs’ legs; another couple resembles plump, seated Buddhas, each sporting a careworn grimace and a bandaged hand. Here, the mundane and discarded have been invigorated and made beautiful; waste has been turned to want.

Everywhere the viewer looks there is something new to see: on the walls, the floors, the ceiling, in every nook and crevice. The forms are sundry and precise, and the textures and colors created by the play of light are splendid. According to the artist, the piece was conceived as a response to Hurricane Sandy, which struck the Atlantic Coast in 2012, and to the great tsunami that destroyed Doggerland, a landmass that once connected Great Britain and Europe, 8,000 years ago. References to the sea are pervasive: ornate mandalas and medallions made of thick lines sketched in marker on cardboard echo shells, aquatic plants and cephalopods, while the walls have been splashed with various jewel tones of blue. By fusing these maritime elements into the larger landlocked installation, Swoon rhythmically reiterates the simultaneous life-giving and life-threatening force of water, reminding us that the key to our existence and extinction lies curled in the crest of every wave. And while the artist’s style of mark making is decidedly street, embodying a frenetic sense of forward movement, the overall effect is calm, almost otherworldly, as though viewed from the quiet recesses of the ocean floor.

When faced with this magnanimous installation, one realizes the aptness of the artist’s pseudonym: Swoon. It is little wonder that standing in this space evokes a rush of emotion, like falling in love or the flush before a faint. There is a sense of safety, but no comfort, for to swoon is the body’s defense against perilous circumstance — extreme heat, fear, or fever, say — the moment when consciousness becomes too much to bear.”Submerged Motherlands” feels like the moment before that moment, or perhaps the one just after, when delirium sets in and sends the mind reeling, everything at once impossibly fuzzy and terribly clear. You focus on a single spot at the core of your vision while mirror images bloom along the periphery. Shapes and shadows swirl and flutter, multiplying and expanding until all dissolves into the unknown.

On a more literal note, the installation is also meant to be a memorial to the artist’s mother, who became ill and passed away during the gestation phase of the project. Swoon is very aware of her loss, and that awareness (and wariness) presses her toward an intimate way of making art that both embraces and cautions the viewer. Every aspect of the installation feels personal, and poised just so, as though it could collapse at any moment. Like a site-specific sculpture by Sarah Sze, the work is elaborate and immense but also vulnerable, forever on the verge of falling apart. In it, ideas of shelter and exposure, past and future, life and death are folded together into the very real, often difficult, often lovely median state where we live. The figure of a mother breast-feeding her child, or a skeletal woman whose bones are wrapped around the artist’s self-portrait are enough to convince this critic of the integrity of Swoon’s means, whatever (and whenever) the end.

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“In the beginning everything was dead,” chanted a voice from Camille Henrot’s mesmerizing video Grosse Fatigue (2013) as it leaps off to 13 minutes of throbbing inquiry. There is something slightly contradictory about this statement: death is the cessation of life, so how could death precede the existence of living things? An attempt to trace the history of the Universe usually leads to a brutal confrontation with the limits of one’s perception and ability to comprehend infinity, and describing the endpoints of a creation story seems essential and grounding. Or perhaps this doesn’t matter so much.

Henrot’s exhibition at the New Museum, “Restless Earth,” is one of the most energetic and rejuvenating installations to visit New York this season. It expands upon her explorations of culture, history and informational systems in her earlier works, deliberately toying with the artificially established boundaries between disciplines of study, research and perception as Henrot masquerades as anthropologist, scientist, librarian, sociologist and artist. She explores how the material world and culture is formulated, acknowledged, recorded, organized and standardized, but more prominently, it demonstrates all the chaos and energy these processes exhale.

A large section of the exhibition is filled with sculptures inspired by various works of literature, guided by Ikebana, the Japanese practice of flower arrangement. In these engrossing displays, Henrot attempts to visualize literature through slightly absurd compositions of flowers, grocery vegetables, other seemingly arbitrary ingredients, such as USB cables, Japanese newspapers, sheet moss — all exposing their physical and socio-economic connotations, their roles as food, decoration or mechanical devices, the stories of their discovery or their taxonomy. Each work is labeled with a quote from a work of literature, as well as detailed, hilariously scientific lists of its components — this interest in cataloguing and factual archiving is noticeable throughout her exhibition. These terse, contemplative canopies sprout from countertops, drape from the ceiling and crawl past the walls (Melville’s epic Moby Dick, 1851, is reduced to a few scattered crescent-shaped palm leaves), to form a little jungle ecosystem of their own, a buzzing room of dialogue. There is something strange and attractive about nature jolted into unnatural juxtapositions, considering these fragrant, vivacious arrangements are of amputated flowers and leaves nearing the end of their lives — “at death’s door” would be melodramatic, but their drying edges and fading color carry a hint of ephemerality and urgency.

Her fascination with appropriation and biological material is extended to another room of the show, containing a long table of neatly arranged pages from a 1995 Christie’s catalogue, Jewels from the Personal Collection of Princess Salimah Aga Khan. Henrot illustrates the descriptions on each page with dried bookmark-like flowers and leaves stolen from residences on the Upper East Side. The magnificent gems and luxury uptown urban herbarium are both deliberate demonstrations of excess, but also, to their owners, decidedly necessary measures that define their social status. The catalogue pages only note estimated prices, rendering the values of the jewelry — and whatever they signify — speculative until juried by the auction attendees. This small sense of instability is perhaps furthered by spare, conspicuous slices of opaque tape affixing immobile and dried leaves to the pages, as if to restrain their plot to escape.

Then there are Henrot’s videos. The exhibition features several earlier videos that study the role of various symbols, practices and material objects across different cultures: Coupé/Décalé (2011) documents the origin of bungee jumping; Le Songe de Poliphile (2011), of the semiotics of the snake; and Million Dollars Point (2011), on World War II materials abandoned in Polynesia and the “cargo cults” that subsequently formed. Grosse Fatigue is the most conceptually ambitious (and probably low-budget) of them all, a series of desktop windows appearing on a computer screen, propelled by a groovy rap song that stitches together various origin myths, scientific presentations and annals of anthropology with the coherence of a surging music video. The deluge of imagery in today’s Internet age is a popular topic for artists, but few successfully conjure much beyond some purposefully collaged frenzy. Henrot’s selection of images (animals of from various phyla, different cultural practices, shots of mundane activity such as a manicured hand rubbing an orange) is not unpredictable, but they provide more than a simple sensation of distress and visual saturation. She consciously demonstrates the gaps and limits that still (and might forever) exist in our already overwhelming knowledge of history, a vault of information that could be more reasonably experienced through the momentum and innate disorder that weaves it all together.

Grosse Fatigue was made at Henrot’s 2013 Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian, during which she collected footage of animal and plant specimens, obscure digital archives, blank hallways and anonymous office workers. She paired that imagery with the unending reach of the digital realm, which, in many ways, is an archive and simulation of the immense universe beyond the monitor, but also feels oddly tangible as it is fully manmade and portable (one shot features an iPhone with a green croaking frog parked on top, held by a hand). This strategy allows her narrative to swell with felt urgency and inscrutable complexity, and also the leisurely nimbleness of aimless web surfing. Queues of browser windows at times pile up like flashing torrents of spam advertisements, but they can be readily clicked shut like full drawers of ghastly, vibrantly preserved tropical bird specimen. In the beginning and end there were both uncluttered Mac desktops.

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Artist Matt Freedman’s written and drawn memoir, Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal, is not your typical chronicle of illness and rehabilitation. Neither recovery drama nor tear-jerking tragedy, it’s instead nearer to comedy. Both the tone and the format are semi-comic, with fluid illustrations, diagrams, and panel-like sequences floating on waves of hand-written text. Sometimes Freedman’s drawings take the foreground, with words functioning as captions, but mostly text and image create a hybrid that is surprisingly seamless — and absolutely compelling, since his wit is always to the point, even in extremities of hellish pain, anxiety, or drugged oblivion. Equally sharp is his draftsmanship, honed by the self-imposed mission to fill four notebook pages a day during the two months in 2012 when he underwent intensifying radiation and chemotherapy for cancer of the tongue, neck, and lungs.

If traditional illness narratives tend, understandably, to be lacking in humor, Freedman’s over-analytic mind cannot but go there, even with death looming. (The current health of the author, a beloved friend of this writer and many others, is thankfully vigorous, though still endangered.) At his first radiation treatment, with proton guns firing at his diseased throat, he smells the back of his tongue burning. “I’m cooking,” he realizes. The sting of the observation is eased by the cartoonish rendering of his prone head’s cross-section, a Dristan^® ad gone rogue. Similar images get more anatomically precise yet more gruesomely hilarious as the treatment progresses: razor blades, scissors, and swords through the tongue; a burn pattern on the skin resembling a map of Russia; stripes of loose flesh in his neck, “like from a hot pizza cheese burn.” Color appears rarely but to strong effect, primarily when felt-tip red is used as bitter punctuation to locate this widening gyre of pain. But when associative portals open onto vistas of memory Freedman can wield the same color like a fireballer’s change-up –– as when the number five (a parking stall at the hospital) recalls Joe DiMaggio’s uniform number, and thus a lush image of the Yankee Clipper kissing Marilyn Monroe’s flaming red lips.

“It’s remarkable what a trivial little person is revealed when everything is stripped away by drugs and pain and fear,” Freedman remarks. Sports trivia, at any rate, assert a weird priority in the book, with other hospital parking slots calling forth Ted Williams’s .406 batting average in ’41 or –– more borderline autistic –– Lyman Bostock’s .388 or Rob Deer’s 230 lifetime homeruns, each such jog of memory occasioning a fluent sketch of the player’s trading card apotheosis. Power hitters loom with similar iconic weight above Raymond Pettibon’s punk-erudite obsessions, although where Pettibon is occult, Freedman is communicative, leading us by the hand through the educational zig-zag of his thoughts.

Freedman has often played with academic mannerisms in his performances and collaborative instigations. They are absurd events, such as a recent conflation of the French Revolution and the U.S. Open tennis finals, re-enacted shot-by-shot in real time, with losers guillotined; or live lectures with an easel and Sharpie^®, covering obscure historical subjects, accompanied by a jazz drummer. Even in his primary medium, sculpture/installation, Freedman never loses touch with caricatural literalness, nor with a sense of pedagogical mission. His 2012 solo show at Valentine Gallery in Queens, “The Golem of Ridgewood,”included numerous papier-mâché props, some humble and some lavish. The bluntly beautiful, chromatically rich sculptures helped tell the true story of Jewish resistance to the Nazification of Ridgewood’s German immigrants during the early 1940s, a forgotten local history that Freedman utterly entangled with tall tales, myth, and farce.

Relatively Indolent is full of similar entanglements, side-trips from his daily accounts of inscrutable doctors and protocols. We travel backwards in time to harsh assessments of Freedman’s childhood self; and to the day he met his future wife after accidently cutting off his finger in a sculpture studio. (She drove him to the hospital.) We witness Hurricane Sandy through the lens of Freedman’s exile at a Boston hospital, sharing his frustration and guilt at having to focus narrowly on his own pain.

Still, the unprecedented ravages of Sandy call forth affectingly drawn montages, distilled from CNN videos and news photographs. Not only does Freedman’s utilitarian, seat-of-the-pants draftsmanship manage punchline humor and informational razzmatazz (as with the anatomical cut-aways), but it efficiently captures each of the five stages of grief. Crucially, the publisher’s preservation of the hand-written notebook text –– sometimes scrawled on a bus ride or under the effects of strong painkillers, but always legible –– slows the eye, just enough, from reading to looking. That allows Freedman’s resolutely unstylish drawings to sail past an initial repellency, while we learn to read his distinctive, sketchy line. Even as we become addicted, Freedman bears down, expanding his inky range and power, gaining confidence as the work progresses.

Throughout, Freedman records unsentimental self-evaluations, of his work, his thoughts, and his life. The book’s title refers to the slow but steady growth of his rare form of cancer, but “relatively indolent” also serves as a thematic self-assessment, especially as regards his career. Even as he wonders about his lack of focus and killer instinct, the title’s sardonic pun typifies Freedman’s relentless approach: to milk doubt, failure, and anxiety so as to transcend the pretensions of artistic ego and careerism. In all his activities, Freedman remains a truth teller and a joke teller, a principled dreamer in cynic’s clothing –– never more so than in this brilliantly honest and defiantly funny book.

Matt Freedman, Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014). 240 pages, illustrations, ISBN 978-1609805166. $24

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Madison Square Park Conservancy

May 2 to September 8, 2013
23 Madison Avenue, between East 23rd Street and East 26th Street
New York City, 212-538-4071

Primary colors and monumental organic forms comprise Red, Yellow and Blue, Orly Genger’s installation in New York City’s Madison Square Park, on view until September 8.  Genger, a thirty-something New York-based artist, takes the daintily domestic art of crocheting to a powerfully dynamic level, using only her hands to construct loops of thick, rough lobster rope into gigantic strands.  Industrial rope of this quality became available for communities beyond fisherman several years ago when floating lines for lobsters had to be replaced by sinking rope to protect the rare right whale.  The Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation has since cleaned tons of rope, distributing it for various projects.

Genger revels in the physicality of her process, from crocheting to stacking, curving, and spray-painting her massive strands of 1.4 million feet of rope, which required 3500 gallons of paint. For this artist, the work is a “physical manifestation of time”—two years in this case.  Just as the artist engages with her material, she also wants the public to have a feeling for it. Obviously, the rope is quite durable as well as being waterproof, and Genger encourages visitors to interact with her installations by sitting on the lower sections, leaning against the fibrous walls, and gathering inside the curving forms. All the sections are quite stable, with the taller segments laid on steel supports. (However, the park does prohibit climbing on the art.)

A sweeping wall of blue rope creates the most formalized environment, encircling an expanse of the lawn except for a wide entrance welcoming visitors coming in from the west side.  When viewed from its exterior in midsummer, Blue most perfectly complements the park’s foliage, looming up behind floral bushes with blooms in purple and blue.  The enclosure assumes an importance and dignity, becoming a destination rather than a vista. Genger could have made a narrow entrance that would have seemed claustrophobic. Instead, her structure embraces those venturing inside.

In Red, toward the southern end of the park, the installation seems to contain and support several trees as it soars up majestically, far beyond human reach.  This structure has the closest relationship to natural objects.  The wall dips in one section to frame a tree’s spreading branches so that they can be viewed from the exterior, and it brushes up against the largest tree at that end of the lawn.  Red provides a sheltering environment, blocking the afternoon sun for those sitting against the inner wall.

Unlike the stately profiles of Blue and Red, in Yellow the undulating contours introduce a jaunty rhythm to the east side of the park, similar to the lift and drop of a roller coaster.  By far the brightest color of the three, yellow seems most appropriate for this installation as it romps around the lawn.  Because of its lower levels, Yellow appeals to children, who can easily sit on the rope, and to adults who can sit and lean back against the top.  This part of the installation best fulfills Genger’s interactive goal.

Although Genger explains her choice of primary colors as being familiar to everyone, one can’t help but think of De Stijl artists and the graphic clarity of red, yellow, and blue in Modernist painting and design.  Genger’s involvement with repurposed material resonates with the productions of environmental artists, such as Jeff Schmuki’s nylon tubes, and her landscape art—recently compared to the stark steel slabs of Richard Serra—embraces an aesthetic closer to works like the curvilinear installations of the Finnish artist and architect Marco Casagrande, notably his woven willow Sandworm on the Belgian coast. Orly Genger successfully mediates between painting and interactive sculpture, managing to wrestle Color Field extravagance into coherent, appealing constructions on a very human scale, in tune with both nature and art.

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June 19 to August 4, 2013
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue, between 66th and 67th Street
New York City, 212-616-3930

Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy: Reble Dabble Babble

June 20 to July 26, 2013
Hauser & Wirth
511 West 18th Street
New York City, 212-790-3900

Life Cast

May 10 to July 26, 2013
Hauser & Wirth
32 East 69th Street
New York City, 212-794-4970

Stepping into Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory, currently hosting Paul McCarthy’s multimedia installation WS, feels a little like falling headfirst into a terrarium. That is, if the terrarium has vaguely pornographic, quasi-violent, and definitely not-safe-for-the-kids videos projected on its sides.  WS, which stands for “White Snow,” is loosely based on the story of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Actually, it might be more accurate to say that WS takes liberties with that story. McCarthy’s version, for example, expands the cast to include nine dwarves (some of whom appear to top six feet), three Prince Charmings (compulsive masturbators, one and all, if the video evidence is to be believed), and three Snow Whites. And then there is Walt Paul, a paternal(istic) figure, obviously evoking Walt Disney and subtly suggesting Hitler (it’s the mustache), who either presides over or is subject to the mayhem unleashed during what appears to be a fairly traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

Oh, and then there is you. Whatever else the show is about, one of its most accessible pleasures is the chance to watch other visitors observing the spectacle. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, people ringed the cavernous space, positioned around a platform holding up the half-magical, half-infernal forest that is simultaneously the show’s physical centerpiece and the set used for filming much of the screened footage. These spectators’ attention was split between the screens on either side of the forest and the faces of the other spectators. (Were cameras permitted inside, WS would likely produce some compelling YouTube reaction videos.)

A less stationary delight of the show is the chance to look around its many nooks and crannies. That forest, with its nuclear-neon foliage and flora, its scatological trees, and the three-quarters scale house concealed in its middle—a replica of McCarthy’s childhood home—demands exploration. Within the house, you will find a Christmas tree, birthday streamers, bottles of liquor in various stages of consumption, a spent container of Hershey’s chocolate syrup, and a nearly-exhausted Heinz ketchup squeeze-bottle. (The last two of these have been frequently deployed as material in McCarthy’s work.) There are also various recognizable Disney figurines scattered around the house—a Snow White with a dwarf, a Bambi, and a Prince Charming riding his horse.

The feel-good Americana of all that Disney detritus is juxtaposed with two disconcertingly accurate bodies: The artist himself and White Snow, stripped naked, apparently dead, and covered in what at first glance seems to be blood and excrement, but is actually the aforementioned ketchup and chocolate. (A series of life casts, four of Elyse Poppers, the actress playing the main White Snow in WS, and one of the artist, are currently on view at Hauser & Wirth’s uptown space.) What it all means is well nigh impossible to say. And, at seven hours, it would be difficult to absorb WS in a single seating. It is generally agreed that McCarthy confronts the falsely feel-good pieties of American myths, that he takes on viscerally recognizable symbols and upends them by splattering them with a variety of (bodily) fluids. WS, his largest installation and most ambitious project to date, unfolds with the madcap logic of dreams, and every little bit of content is overdetermined. This is a convulsive form of Surrealism, which, of course, has a certain kind of beauty. That’s the thing about McCarthy. No matter how gross his work—and this is an artist who has never shied away from the grotesque—no matter how disconcerting, how disorienting, there is nonetheless something appealing about his aesthetic, with its visual pungency and sense of humor.

McCarthy’s fairy-tale world is tethered to reality by its references to history: The artist’s childhood, with the inclusion of the house in which he was raised; art history, particularly the rise of performance art, of which McCarthy has been both a student and a teacher; American history and its embrace of kitsch and myth. Striking an odd but effective balance between authentic and contrived, WS has more in common with a reality show than lived reality. Which is to say, if “Snow White” is the partial basis of so many looking-for-love shows, then WS is the looking-for-love show amped up to absurdity.

WS confines its most pornographic bits to the periphery, with the most sexually explicit material playing in rooms off to the sides of Drill Hall. (One of these rooms is also the site of some eerily beautiful footage, tracking White Snow and Walt Paul as they wander, Adam-and-Eve-like, through their polluted Eden.) But it is the most prominent feature of McCarthy’s Rebel Dabble Babble, a collaboration with his son Damon (who also co-directed, co-produced, and cast WS) on view at Hauser & Wirth’s mammoth Chelsea gallery. The exhibit consists of a full-scale two-story house, which visitors may enter, and a facsimile of the living-room staircase from the home of Jim Stark, aka the “Rebel Without a Cause,” from the eponymous 1955 film.  Around these are several video projections, most of which are quite pornographic. Disorienting and unnerving, the show is a reimagining of the psychosexual drama that was said to unfold between the film’s director Nicholas Ray and his young stars, James Dean and Natalie Wood. Like WS, Rebel Dabble Babble relies on our recognition of the building blocks of familiar American narratives. Both exhibitions undo the familiarity of those narratives, folding them over and over on themselves, until they become hallucinatory, at once a joke and something deadly serious, demanding that we tell the story ourselves.

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