November 1, 2019 – March 22, 2020
1109 5th Ave, at 92nd Street
New York City, thejewishmuseum.org

To experience Rachel Feinstein’s survey, “Mother, Maiden, Crone,” at the Jewish Museum through March 22, is to walk through crowds of women and sometimes spot yourself. Feinstein, through her sculptural works, explores dualities and extremes, and the binaries of fantasy versus reality, maximalism versus minimalism, and community versus isolation, all through archetypes feminists have historically been eager to both reclaim and resist.

Much of Feinstein’s work refers to fairy tales targeted at little girls, and at first glance seems like an indictment of those fantastical stories. From menstruating shepherdesses to castles that rape, there is something perverse about all of Feinstein’s works that reference fairy tales. Upon closer inspection, however, this distorted nature demonstrates not fantasies dashed, but nightmarish realities realized. In the case of Sleeping Beauty (the focus of Feinstein’s film Spring and Winter, 1994/96), Feinstein is most interested in the story’s parallels in reality. The original tale of Sleeping Beauty is one of rape at the hands of her rescuer, a fictional account that mirrors real cases of sexual assaults.

Feinstein’s mirror is more than an allusion; reflective surfaces appear throughout her work, further critiquing the idea that fantasy exists outside of reality. In her works of enamel paint on mirror, such as her portraits of elderly women, the viewer is forced to examine their own reflection as they consider the fantasy before them—a fantasy that teeters on the brink of collapse. Feinstein’s elderly women are styled as 18th century grande dames, but the faux expressive paint style is more mid-20th century pulp fiction cover than Fragonard or Gainsborough portrait. Similarly, Feinstein’s costuming of her muses does not disguise their age or emotions, or the viewer’s own projections about women over 50. It’s impossible not to see the women as variations on the ever-familiar crone, from Shakespeare’s witches to Bette Davis’ Baby Jane. Physically, the mirrored negative space of each of these portraits provides a literal reflection of the person viewing the work, and the textural application of paint on mirror links the concept of creative artifice with the act of applying make-up.

Feinstein’s Goldstein (2019), a 40-foot long, monochromatic white wall relief, pairs a similar set of extremes, this time juxtaposing maximalism and minimalism, pleasure and shame. Like Louise Nevelson’s work, which infuses monochromatic wall sculpture with baroque intensity, Feinstein’s Goldstein is a shrine to pleasure, despite its monochromaticity. It depicts the opulence of a lively and tropical landscape – perhaps the drug-fueled, materialistic Miami of the 1980s, where Feinstein grew up. The style is both cartoonish and joyful, almost daring the viewer to feel ashamed at its tawdriness. For Feinstein, her Jewish Museum show is intertwined with the idea of shame – her shame at being a woman, at being Jewish, and her desire to reclaim those identities by displaying them in their most extreme forms. Naming her fresco “Goldstein,” she argues in an interview with Phong Bui in the Brooklyn Rail, is one way of doing this.

Feinstein’s other “room-encompassing work,” as the Jewish Museum describes it, is by definition maximalist and baroque, but also serves to highlight one of Feinstein’s most puritan pieces in contrast. Panorama of Rome (2012) wallpapers the entire second room of Feinstein’s show, reflecting the works within, as well as the viewers themselves. The mural is meant to mimic decorative 19th century wallpapers, and depicts aging Roman ruins alongside shining statues of heroes on horses, contrasting the aging glory of Rome and the mythological figures of that time with vibrant depictions of joyous everyday life. Like Goldstein, the energy of Panorama of Rome is grand and extravagant, reminiscent of a baroque 18th century depiction of a Dionysian feast or marketplace.

In contrast to this revelry, Puritan’s Delight (2008) sits surrounded by the panorama, but is a sobering ode to minimalism and the Puritan message and aesthetic. Puritan’s Delight depicts a monochromatic black, deformed carriage, symbolizing increasing Westward expansion and urbanization taking place in the “New World” in the 19th century. The vehicle’s wheels have come off, and some are warped, bending like a surrealist’s melting clock. Christian crosses jut out from the base of the statue, perhaps commemorating lost passengers. Puritan’s Delight is literally reflected in the mirrors of Panorama of Rome, but the panorama itself also depicts a nearly identical mirror image – another black carriage (this time intact), sits in the Roman plaza.

Like Panorama of Rome, Puritan’s Delight deals in mythology, or, we might say, fantasy. The fact that the passengers of the carriage are absent forces the viewer to construct their own narrative of what occurred, perhaps drawing on nationalistic understandings of American history and the extreme archetypes perpetuated in those tales. Implicit in the broken carriage and the memorial crosses is the myth of Manifest Destiny, and the idea that European settlers who lost their lives taking land from indigenous people were victims, themselves. Puritanism and the act of purification requires the existence first of people, ideas, or objects that are initially dirty, savage, sensual, or corrupt. Thus, the Puritan’s “delight” comes from the tragedy of the carriage disaster, itself, because without such a tragedy, the myth of American nationalism cannot exist. Feinstein’s use of the word “delight” – which calls to mind pleasure over shame – is again a contrast, forcing the viewer to contend with the opposing pieces in the room, sculptures that depict rainbow women in sexually provocative stances, as well as the grand panorama. In this way, Feinstein demonstrates one extreme giving life to another, calling to mind other Puritanical dichotomies like the slut and the innocent, or the witch and the saint.

If the room wallpapered in Panorama of Rome is Feinstein’s depiction of society and the warring ideologies that command conformity, the room that houses Feinstein’s video depicts the alternative: complete isolation. In Spring and Winter, Feinstein plays both a young slumbering seductress and an old woman emerging from hibernation. The connection between these two characters mirrors the link between the slut and the witch, two feminine archetypes that have historically been punished for their nonconformism. Seen through the lens of Spring and Winter, this storied tale takes on another dimension. The punishment of isolation becomes a gift – the freedom to embrace one’s sluttiness or witchiness without prying eyes.

The ovoid room that houses the film Spring and Winters serves as a meditation on isolation and its effect on women and artists, but also as a sort of love nest. Because Feinstein’s video, which deals so powerfully with the theme of isolation, is surrounded by sculptures of couples, it’s impossible not to draw a parallel between the strong influence Feinstein attributes to being alone and her understanding of romance, sex, and partnership. In Alice (2008), two flattened, biomorphic, stained-wood figures engage in sex. The visibly feminine figure, presumably Alice, sits with legs spread, atop her lover. Her face is bent, as if folded in half, creating both a profile and a frontal view. Alice’s hands are carved from negative space, and rather than reaching for her partner, they reach for her own body. Thus, Alice’s pleasure is fleeting – existing only for the viewer who sees her hands in the negative space. Because the sculptures in this room are the only depictions of consensual sex in the show, together they present the idea that romance, and perhaps the heterosexual romance in particular, can only thrive in isolation from, and in resistance to, sexist society.

Feinstein has said, in an interview for Gagosian Quarterly, that she believes in “a world of dualities,” and “Mother, Maiden, Crone” celebrates this universe. But, her show also questions the concept of the binary, embracing the slippery matter within overlapping opposites, and interrogating the ideological polarity within popular feminism that the feminist must choose between reclamation or resistance. Instead, Feinstein’s work manages to view feminine archetypes through the lenses of resistance, reclamation, and acceptance – sometimes simultaneously all within one work.

The post Fairy Tales and Feminism: Rachel Feinstein at the Jewish Museum appeared first on artcritical.

July 30, 2016 to February 12, 2017
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th avenues)
New York, 212 708 9400

In a small, square room that branches diagonally from MoMA’s second-floor hallway, Teiji Furuhashi’s 1994 installation, Lovers, projects mutely dancing figures as dusky light onto gallery walls. Glistening like ice or the slick sterility of hospital vinyl floors, a white expanse of Marley unfurls across the gallery to meet black walls. Eyes adjusting to the low illumination, the glossy surface’s glare dominates vision, creating a sense of strange suspension. In the room’s center, the apertures of seven projectors, stacked in a spine-like tower, trace beams of light across the room’s varied contours. The hum of these machines is background and breath to the chirping pulse of the installation’s accompanying audio.

With steps that drag over the resistant surface, my motions are a material echo to the pale shadows that sidle over the surrounding walls. Starched white by the projectors’ thin lights, the dancers of Dumb Type — the artist collective that Teiji helped found in 1984 — patrol the room’s perimeter, moving along the screen-like walls. The nude figures of men and women move in synchronicity or lethargic pursuit of each other through the room’s corners and planes. One man dashes with long, dramatic strides through the rectangular frames of the walls, trailing a woman who, like Daphne to this young Apollo, is ever just beyond reach. Her short hair alive with the staccato of hurried steps, she moves counter-clockwise through the encircling walls to fade out, eroded by the harsher light of the exit. Following and overtaking the nude figures, vertical lines inscribed “limit” and “fear” rove the space, mapping the geographies of bodies and walls alike as though scanning barcodes.

As the room grows close with people, these specters move through their choreographies on a stage of flesh, illuminating viewers in a fluid projection whose bare feet are just visible through the legs of onlookers.  This shifting crowd dances with the flickering lights, which hurry the periphery to catch intimate movements even as the audience reciprocally turns to trace their gleaming paths. To enter the space is to join in the motions of the work. A man exits the room and a luminous dancer hastens to follow. I am looking down at my notebook when a figure passes over me and through me.

The installation’s austere design recalls an early ‘90s vision of futurity, imagined by one who would never get to see it; Teiji passed from AIDS-related illness in the month following the work’s original installation at MoMA in 1995. The barren simplicity of the installation hosts cruel contrasts: alive with motion and sound, but grave-like in darkness and intimacy, playing across viewers’ bodies, but aloof in the hollowness of its engagement. There is a sense of having entered someone, only to be confronted by the loneliness of fear, vulnerability, and unrequited desire. A man and woman are projected to overlap, bending towards one another, arms cradling air. The Venn diagram of their intersecting bodies is a thin, elongated silhouette, a symbolic convergence that only approximates union.

In spite of the title and the dancers’ nudity, Lovers does not emphasize romance or physical closeness, but rather the uncomfortable coupling of loving and dying, the intoxicating terror of the “little death.” Tracing their movements like memories repeated over and again, the dancers pass through the installation without leaving impressions, ghosts as ineffectual as they are impotent. Do their fleeting pursuits seek the comfort of touch or flee the realization of solitude? However, the desolate fear of abandonment is overshadowed by hints of a more final end; in prone bodies and flat horizontals, reminiscent of the flat line of a cardiograph gone flat, is the recognition not of losing but of being lost. Musing on the hope of forever that is implicit in the creative act, Lovers asks what our gestures — in life and in love — amount to when all is said and done? Despite, and perhaps because of, these grim indications of mortality, Teiji dances on in this cyclical video work, a dream ever in danger of obsolescence. We see him moving alongside his fellow dancers. Flickering into sight, he stands crucified with arms outstretched at the crosshairs of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines. Wavering in and out of focus, he hesitates before falling away with the grace and control of a diver, passing into nothingness beyond museum walls.

The post So Slow It Stopped: Teiji Furuhashi at MoMA appeared first on artcritical.

May to October, 2016
941 North Street (at Hurlingham Drive)
Greenwich, CT, 203 869 0611

“My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

Guests to the opening of Jonathan Horowitz’s “Occupy Greenwich,” at the Brant Foundation, may have been very surprised: whereas the multimillionaire paper magnate Peter Brant and his wife, Stephanie, typically open the spring exhibition at their art and study center with a pig roast, the carcasses of dead animals forced open and staked on the grounds, this year’s attendees were greeted with vegan catering. Horowitz is vegan, and dressing as a slaughterhouse the beautiful Connecticut estate surrounding his show seems likely to have undermined his work, some which speaks to the politics of what people eat and why.

Even before it opened, the show embraced some surprising contradictions. It runs the gamut, in a way, speaking to a number of social and political problems. It was promoted with a full-page ad, reproducing Horowitz’s print Go Vegan! (Stephanie) (2016), with the slogan underscoring the portrait of a seductive young woman. Horowitz is gay, but he also understands that pretty girls sell better than pictures of cute animals, which are often paired with that exhortation. (Though women are also often referred to with metaphors for penned animals, obviously.) At the bottom was the show’s sardonic title, equating the carefully executed exhibition of expensive collectibles with an anarchist takeover of the exurban enclave.

“Occupy Greenwich” touches on a number of seemingly partisan themes, often with messages that are superficially evangelist but which also include a subtext of uncertainty or perhaps even irony. That’s especially useful as America’s political discourse has grown increasingly polarized, in spite of the fact that people don’t lead polar lives and usually have beliefs and practices that differ radically from common stereotypes about, say, vegans, Republicans, working class voters, queer people, gun owners and so on.

Hillary Clinton is a Person Too (2008), staged in one early room, is a cartooned, life-sized bronze sculpture of a woman being crowned by a small boy standing on a chair, with the sculpture’s title cast into the base, in a corny comic font. Next to it, a whole wall of similar figurines — the size of paperweights and cast in the style of 1970s Sillisculpt statues, titled We the People are People Too (2008) — are marked with affirmations that “Young Mothers Are People Too,” “Socialist Medics Are People Too,” “Donald Rumsfeld Is A Person Too,” “Ellen And Portia Are People Too,” “Fetuses Are People Too,” and others. It’s not at all obvious how sincere Horowitz is being in his parodic coronation of Mrs. Clinton and the insistence on a common humanity shared alike by working people and Rumsfeld et al. It is absolutely essential to remember that everyone is a person, but it’s also important to recall that both of those politicians were managers of massive death, and putting them on the same scale as mothers, doctors, and embryos, etc., is discomfiting.

A stairway leading to galleries downstairs is lined with Go Vegan! (200 Celebrity Vegetarians Downloaded from the Internet) (2002/10). Each low-resolution-pictured person eats (currently, formerly, occasionally) a vegan or vegetarian diet, including Vincent van Gogh, Prince and Franz Kafka, among many others. Similar mosaics are found in vegan restaurants, online, and on posters produced by PETA. But they’re also dubious; Horowitz commends the plea and also slyly digs at its cheesy, superfluous celebrity endorsements, which seem to put animal-cruelty-free eating in the same basket as Coca-Cola and Nike.

Downstairs, a large room recapitulates Horowitz’s November 4, 2008 (2008) installation, originally staged at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, wherein viewers watched live election returns in a room divided between red and blue, FOX News and CNN, on back-to-back LCD screens. Here is the same set up, balloons poised to drop from the ceiling. The TV monitors are still playing the ‘08 election, and all of 24-hour cable news’ on-screen signs of urgent immediacy — rapidly moving graphics, breaking updates, a scrolling crawl at the bottom, and more — all this stuff that’s meant to convey nowness, is, eight years later, manic, diminutive, impotent.

The last installation, I, Hillary (2016), is a room empty save for a spare white bench, desk and chair, and an ink-jet printed and framed low-res portrait of Mrs. Clinton. From a small PA system comes Horowitz’s voice, giving a meandering, rational and sort of defensive account of the show and his support for Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. He describes how capable she is, and that her policy aims seem pragmatic and reasonable. Although Horowitz sounds like he’s speaking extemporaneously, if haltingly, his remarks also seem canned, robotically parroted from Clinton surrogates, partisans and pundits. Many of the same claims were repeated at the Democratic National Convention in July and have been found in the opinion media for the past year — the thrust being basically that he’s not crazy about her, but thinks she’s capable and will do a good job and have you seen how insane the alternative is? Horowitz’s minimizations of Clinton’s closeness to Wall Street money and influence are followed by preemptive defenses about working with the Brants at their ostentatious estate, drawing a sharp parallel between her compromises and his own.

“I guess I am not a big proponent in general of supposed ideological purity,” says Horowitz in his monologue. Probably few people are. More than that, though, Horowitz seems deeply interested in apparent contradiction, performativity, appropriation and allusion, both in politics and culture, and in his own life. One can hope that poking at those conflicts and misconceptions might lead to better elections, or maybe more civility. Or perhaps even just a few more vegans.

The post Go Vegan!: Jonathan Horowitz at the Brant Foundation appeared first on artcritical.

July 2016
Avenida Central (at Calle 11)
San José, Costa Rica

Despacio ( “slowly”) is an independent art and residency space located in the Costa Rican capital of San José. Suspended above the chaotic atmosphere of the city, Despacio highlights individual explorations of the temporary, the absent, the forgotten, the mis- or dis-translated, the transience of things. The recent appointment of curator Sandino Scheidegger, founder of the Random Institute and gleaner of time, has slowed things down even more devotedly.

Many of the previous exhibitions at Despacio — such as Julien Prévieux’s collection of obsolete books, or Diana Abi Khalil’s space-addled notebooks — were library based, and the gallery’s most recent project continues with this leitmotif. On July 26, two separate solo exhibitions opened simultaneously under Despacio’s roof: Florence Jung’s “Nadie Nada Nunca” (“nobody nothing never) and Thomas Moor’s “Herencias” (“heirlooms”).

Jung is a French artist who’s enjoyed many recent successes; currently, she is showing at Manifesta 11 in Zurich, and received the Swiss Performance Prize in 2013. These are notable accomplishments considering her principled refusal to photograph or publish the work. Jung is a conceptual extremist who handles, smuggles and muffles the media of experience and thought, pre- and post- conception, with precision. Her happenings, installations or interventions are undocumented, ensuring that they remain as transitory as they are un-tweetable. Take, for example, Jung43 (2015): exhibited this spring in a North Korean hotel room, the work — a conceptual thought alone — demanded it was not to be thought about. Upon consideration, she insisted, it would be destroyed. For the sake of art conservation, I’ll leave it at that.

In Jung’s exhibition, a pale wooden platform showcases a scatter of thick white texts. Arranged with as much care as retired phonebooks, the cover of each reads: “El presente libro recopila todos los Quijotes retirados de Costa Rica” (“This book collects all the Quijotes removed from Costa Rica”). In a mix of quixotic quest and Reconquista, Jung has traveled across Costa Rica to gather or steal every possible copy of Don Quijote from bookstores, libraries, second-hand shops and flea markets; the fruits of this labor are indexed within these unassuming books. As is characteristic of Jung, the details of each acquisition are listed, but the physical object (and its visual evidence) is missing. Despite the negating proclamation of “Nadie Nada Nunca” — perhaps notably, a title shared with a novel by the Argentinian author Juan José Saer — Jung approaches a great deal of who and what and when in these archives, be they invented or accurate.

Jung’s project seems at once like a symbolic effort to decolonize, de-tongue, and a compulsive act of love (that is, possession). It certainly echoes Francis Alÿs’s ongoing Fabiola Project — an endeavor started in the 1990s that brings together reproductions of a long-lost 1885 painting of 4th-century Roman Saint Fabiola, collected from junk shops around the world. Like Fabiola, Don Quijote is a cult figure who pursued honor and charity with charming persistence. Unlike Alÿs, Jung does not display her collection, but hides it away in a clandestine location. Knowing her past work, we could go so far as to question if it truly exists — after all, Cervantes lends Don Quijote credibility through the invented gravitas of “The Archive of La Mancha” and the bogus Moorish translator, Cide Hamete Benengeli. Is Jung pulling a Cervantes? In a favorite adaptation of the novel, Man of La Mancha, Cervantes asks: “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?” And I wonder. Across the street from Despacio, on the corner of sea foam green rooftop, lies a large box. On the side it reads: “Nadie Nada Nunca.”

Swiss artist Thomas Moor is a collector of the intangible as well. His past work includes the installation of a false Starbucks franchise (Trojan Horses, 2016), a newspaper Kiosk (2013) installed mid-air on an apartment balcony, and Touching Tangibles (2013-2014): a full body cotton suit, the same material used for art handling gloves, worn by the artist that allows him to hug valuable artwork, such as Jeff Koons sculptures.

Bubble wrap that once protected artwork, discarded carpeting from an art fair, receipts from past transactions, museum paraphernalia — Moor gathers these laminations of the art object for “Herencias” (“heirlooms”), his exhibition turned inside out. Cargo Veils, a project begun in 2015, is composed of the discarded duct tape and bubble wrap previously used by galleries to transport art. Baby blue sheaths, immortal padding and the familiar, fragrant brown tapes join to become strikingly modern works (surely every artist has admired the molted Mondrians that accompany their shipped art). Like sticky cicada shells, the works hangs with characteristic lightness, depending on namedropping titles — VonBrandenburg002, Malevich001, Weiner001 — for weight. Strangely, looking at Cargo Veils, I immediately though of Roland Barthes’s beautifully belabored description of Japanese tempura, in The Empire of Signs (1970):

“The contour is so light that it becomes abstract […] It has for its envelope nothing but time […] on the side of the light, the aerial, of the instantaneous, the fragile, the transparent, the crisp, the trifling, but whose real name would be the interstice without specific edges, or again: the empty sign.”

Yet just as Jung’s nothing is a something, Moor’s empty sign still echoes of the absent object’s dual artistic and monetary auras. Indeed, Moor is an art handler, and Cargo Veils finds the shape of value without containing it; this applies equally to the installation of “Heirlooms”: a collection of coffee mugs — filled to the brim with coins — from the world’s museum gift shops. Naturally, coffee is a major cash crop for Costa Rica, so the artist has created a connection between two economic and highly branded cultural forces.

The mugs are arranged across three low pedestals, Islas De La Felicidad (“islands of happiness,” 2016), that float in a sea of discarded and wrinkled art fair carpet (Flying Carpet, 2016). Moor, who shares his name with another maker of utopic islands, collaborated with Sabrina Röthlisberger to create the fragmented poems that line the islets. Her words are sourced from a delayed baggage receipt — American Airlines had lost, or stolen, the original bag of coins intended to fill Moor’s mugs. The vinyl letters stutter: “We sincerely apologize everything possible.”

When reading up on Despacio, I came across an old Spanish proverb: “Vísteme despacio que tengo prisa.” In unforgiving English this advises to do things carefully even when hurried — “make haste, not waste,” and the like. It has been attributed to Napoleon, Emperor Augustus, Charles III and even — according to the tangential wanderings of the Internet — Don Quixote. “Nadie Nada Nunca” and “Herencias” beg the same, asking us to consume them slowly, like a beloved novel. And like good writers, these artists think in circles, following the natural shape of time: Jung tilting at windmills, Moor tracing their movements.

The post Not for Nothing: Two Exhibitions at Despacio appeared first on artcritical.

Dia: Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, NY, 845 440 0100

“Isn’t she so kind and warm?” Dia’s PR staff swooned as they took turns leaning into me. I watched the artist and host Isabel Lewis float past her guests while circling her wrists into widening arcs. “Hi, welcome.” Lewis cooed as she spun around and drifted through the clusters of curious people sipping their Summer Ale, lovingly provided by Brooklyn Brewery. I myself held an eco-friendly carton of water, which I had plucked out from one of the ice buckets scattered around the back of the immense space.

I was at Dia: Chelsea’s garage party loft, like one of those factory-turned-nightclubs in Williamsburg where you are a minority if you don’t have a tattoo. The music, interior, and vibes felt hip, too. Chic white couches were scattered throughout the space where exotic plants (Spanish moss and air plants) hung from the ceiling or sat on top of the furniture. Some visitors clutched their beers around the round tables with wiry legs. Mysterious speaker-like boxes emitted a faint scent concocted by the artist’s collaborator Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian chemist and olfactory researcher. The bass-heavy music (composed by Lewis herself) began as quiet pulses and escalated into mobilizing booms. A few couples got up from the long white couches to step to increasingly dance-friendly beats. I declined to take from a plate of vegan hors d’oeuvres; pickled vegetables, said one of the PR staff flanking me. The air felt sultry after the rainstorm had passed — the lingering humidity fit the environment created by the artist.

Berlin-based artist Isabel Lewis comes from a background in choreography and literary criticism. While she lived in New York City from 2004 to 2009, she presented her dance works at major hot spots such as Dance Theater Workshop, the Kitchen, and New Museum. She has created and presented site-specific “occasions,” such as this one commissioned by Dia, to choreograph not just the movements of people’s bodies, but also their olfactory, visual, auditory, and gustatory experiences.

At first I was skeptical. Wasn’t this just another party with some pretentious art people? The hostess and DJ happened to be an artist, but this Friday night “occurrence” didn’t seem so different from other exhibition openings, aside from the original music and some interrupting philosophical lectures. Surely this work is a reference to the happenings of the 1950s and ‘60s. But Allan Kaprow did weird things like throw tires; nothing seemed weird in Lewis’s occurrence at all.

Shortsighted judgment. Nothing weird is precisely the point of Lewis’s work. The artist had created a modern-day happening in a way that addressed our contemporary climate and needs. In the late 1950s and ‘60s, throwing hundreds of tires into a room made sense because it radically merged mundane everyday life with so-called elevated art. On the other hand, strange acts now do not merge the everyday and “high” art, but rather create a greater disparity between real life and the mysterious luxury called art. This is now truer than ever with the post-1980s art market and celebrity culture surrounding a select number of big-shot artists. Art is an inaccessible luxury of the 1% who can afford to visit a gallery or museum during work hours. Art is an inaccessible language spoken and understood by a select few — the more cryptic and exclusive that language, the better and truer the art it refers to.

Lewis brings art back to the rest of us. She understands the function and purpose of art to be a connector — among ourselves and between us and the cosmos. I agree. Art was once a practical necessity for survival. Art not only helped the people of the pre-writing age pass down wisdom, but also brought a community together through collective sensory experience.

During one of her lecture interruptions on the Friday night occasion, Lewis spoke of “erotic sociability,” a concept articulated by scholar Roslyn W. Bologh in Love or Greatness (1990). To the artist, erotic sociability can guide us back to where art should take us, but often no longer does. She invites the rest of us — the ones with full-time jobs to support ourselves and our families — to unwind after another day when we had to sacrifice true connection in the name of practical survival. She invites the rest of us to follow her on a short escape from the city to a languid waterside upstate, where we are allowed quiet contemplation and a return to the larger universe where we all belong.

The artist prepared an aperitif for our one-and-a-half-hour trip to Beacon. On the way to the occasion, Lewis primed us with a streamable mixtape with tracks that correspond with each stop, beginning at Grand Central Terminal. The mixtape is meant to be a companion to her occasions, and was a collaboration between the artist, Dia, and the MTA. The tracks begin with voices and familiar sounds of the city but slowly ease into a gentle rhythmic beat that continues at the site up north. At Scenic Hudson’s Long Dock Park in Beacon, the host didn’t work the room like on Friday, but stepped back after providing the tools for each of us to fulfill our private but neglected tasks of connecting to the cosmos, the natural world.

Lewis, leading us from the city to upstate, brings us back to where we must return, a place to meditate and to connect back to each other and the world. In the midst of human priorities, we often forget the importance of true connection to each other and to the natural world, so much that we become blind to the destruction that our oblivion and negligence has caused to ourselves. In a contemporary society in which screens and devices increasingly distance us from each other, feigned connections destroy genuine empathy and lead to destructive hatred. Lewis — as host, as choreographer — directed us to that place where she waited with music that beat to the splash of waves. She directed us to a place where 15 dancers came and went, swaying with their eyes closed as though they were intoxicated from the salty air and regular beat under the sound of water.

Lewis’s background as a choreographer is clear in her latest work at Dia: her aim is to direct people’s movements into a carefully drafted trajectory. And she succeeds. She does for us what we need from art. We often forget one of art’s most important functions, which is to unite us through a collective sensory experience. She provides us this platform, not through years of expensive art education or through knowing all the right people, but through something all of us do — eat, drink, dance, talk, and play — at a time when most of us can be there to do it together. Lewis gives us what is usually a luxury for the few who can afford not to work during gallery or museum hours: art that the rest of us can partake in too.

The post Back to the Rest of Us: Isabel Lewis at Dia appeared first on artcritical.

May 5 to June 25, 2016
525 West 19th Street
New York, 212 727 2070

At David Zwirner, Jordan Wolfson’s puppet, totally helpless against the insistent tug of thick chains, inspires a deep sympathy. Yet, its vulnerability springs precisely from its lifelessness. The title, Colored sculpture (2016), fails so utterly to encapsulate the presence and experience of this work. Yet, simultaneously, this overly simple characterization reminds a viewer of the objecthood of this figure, which can, at moments, feel so terribly real. The disappointing artificiality of its intelligence swims into evidence in the bouncing, unnatural animations that dance through the figure’s deep-set eye sockets. Both point to empathy, but also mark him as an object of contempt; Colored sculpture shifts in and out of the semblance of sentience. Even as Wolfson takes advantage of our susceptibility to perceive humanity everywhere, the emotive response is interrupted by the cruelty with which this uncanny figure is tossed about on his scaffold stage. Does the perception of humanity precede or emerge from the violence that is being wreaked upon the body that Wolfson presents?

Heavy steel chains and a limp form clatter and scrape across the gallery’s concrete floor. Mechanized pulleys move back and forth across parallel tracks, distributing and retracting the chain supports in a stilted choreography. The chains withdraw and the metal body ascends to reveal the caricatured form of a boy whose eyes, made of LCD screens, dart around the room to meet onlookers’ stares, tracking them in real time with face-recognition software. Mouth fixed in an expression that is both grimace of pain and hostile affront, this boy — less Huck Finn than Pinocchio, sans-nose — sways, suspended. The strange grace of this figure, as he is gently raised, toes seeming to articulate a regretful caress as they leave the floor, becomes even more fragile and poignant when, a moment later, this precious burden falls unceremoniously, clamorously to the ground.

The thunder of metal is joined precipitously by the Percy Sledge’s swelling vocals as “When A Man Loves a Woman” unexpectedly blasts from speakers overhead. The gallery is filled with a carnival’s promise of seedy spectacle and thrill; here though, you don’t have to pay to watch a chained bear, or boy, dance on chains from behind the security of a metal fence. The uninhibited violence of this display — expressed in the punished surfaces of the floor and the clown’s chipped, ravaged face — breaks brutally upon a viewer. An attendant, earbuds securely inserted, stands watchful, lest visitors stray too close.

Colored sculpture is a study in sadism. However, it remains unclear on which side of the fence the viewer identifies: as aggressor and instigator of this pathetic display, or as with empathy for this vulnerable humanoid creature. In one sense, Colored sculpture is its own master and puppet, wielding the whip to its own torturous destruction. After all, the boyish form is one with the chains mechanism that pulls it about in a self-contained cycle of violence and suffering. In a 2012 interview with Stefan Kalmár, Wolfson said that, “imagining something is a way of understanding to decide if it’s wrong or right,” posing his works as trials of moral fortitude. This sculpture comes to us as a question, a curiosity, about a world in which we can treat people as objects and objects as human beings.

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June 8 to August 7, 2016
643 Park Avenue (between 66th and 67th streets)
New York, 212 616 3930

Middlebrow culture has long been a contentious territory: it was critically viewed by Modernists as an ineffective attempt to water down and vulgarize innovative cultural endeavors, to produce a faux intellectual lifestyle that can be mass-produced for its status and entertainment value. Post-Modernists deemed the middlebrow edgy, clever, knowing, stylish, and formally inventive in its eclectic appropriation of the pretenses of a high culture, and their insertion into the everyday world of its audience. Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed embraces middlebrow culture: his art is for those who want to be in on the joke. One painting is a joke about Jackson Pollock, a video refers to Piero Manzoni’s cans of the artist’s shit, stacked chairs and battered cardboard boxes nod to Sol LeWitt and Minimalism, his paintings in varied styles are about taste(less-ness).

“The Back Door,” now at the Park Avenue Armory, surveys work from Creed’s more than 20-year-long career. The exhibition’s title can be taken in any number of ways — servants, trades people and less than respectable visitors come to the back door. It also has some naughty sexual connotations as it refers to anal sex. While I’m sure that this title was meant to conjure up these associations, in this case it quite literally, refers to the actual rear door of the Armory, which Creed has motorized so that it continuously opens and closes. That piece is titled Shutters Opening and Closing (2016) and offers three events in one: the slow opening of the doors, the simultaneous dramatic shedding of light into the almost empty, cavernous interior of the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, and finally a glimpse of people walking by on Lexington Ave. This brought to my mind the allegory of Plato’s Cave, in that Creed implies that we, the audience, live in a shadow world and that without his reminder, we would not be aware that just outside, real living beings go on with their lives unconcerned with what is going on in the Armory.

There are four other pieces scattered throughout that employ the on/off, open/close theme; one is in the big corridor, where a massive set of curtains, usually decorously tied back, hang loose, endlessly opening and closing. In the elaborate Veterans Room, a white grand piano on an oriental rug, slowly opens only to immediately slam shut with a resounding bang. The other is the backdoor to the Parlor Room, called A Door Opening and Closing (1995), behind which, in the Parlor, The Lights Going On and Off (1996) is enacted by two rows of white, globular lights hanging from the ceiling. In combining these two works he has synchronized the so when the door is closed the lights are on and when the door is open the lights are off.

The only thing that occupies the Drill Hall is a large screen hung from the ceiling on which six videos are screened. These three-minute-long videos play alternately with the opening and closing of the rear door. The videos are of different women of various ages and in varied settings. The camera slowly zooms in on each woman’s mouth; when it arrives at its destination she opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue to reveal half-eaten foods stuffs, then closes her mouth to swallow. The seemingly obvious reference for these benignly undignified videos are those porn films in which women showily take cum in their mouths and then swallow.

In a series of small rooms along one side of the Drill Hall, a retrospective of Creed’s videos has been installed, one to a room. In one, against an immaculate white ground, young Asian women squat to take a shit, in another video we are again given a clean, white space in which different women enter the frame to repeatedly induce vomiting so as to produce a Pollock-like “painting” on the floor. A third video gives a close-up of a single female breast as a disembodied/decontextualized sex object. As for videos of men, there is one in which a man angrily smashes bouquets of flowers against the floor and another, shot like a home movie, in which the artist in bathing trunks is shown at the beach, wiggling about striking various pin-up poses that allude to both male and female, soft-core porn. These videos, which are meant to represent Creed’s investigation into the basic tenets of human existence, though often pathetic and dehumanizing, actually verge on the banal.

Beyond the videos, Creed has painted the upper walls of the Armory’s grand corridor and staircase with a pattern of diagonal black bars, which break for the many portraits, architectural woodwork, display cases and his own paintings. In the rooms along this corridor, Creed has installed his paintings and sculptures. Subsequently, in the Colonel’s Reception Room he has installed Work No. 2497: half the air in a given space (2015). It promises to be a crowd pleaser, the room half-filled with large white balloons is a tight squeeze for visitors moving through it. The work is akin to an oversized ball pit, like those children play in at Chuck E. Cheese restaurants. In other rooms, such as the Library and the Field and Staff Rooms, he has installed sculptures made by stacking battered cardboard boxes on top of one another in descending size. Others consist of likewise stacks of secondhand furniture. Other sculptures use stacking and repetition, as with an 8 foot high stack of half-inch-thick sheets of plywood, which is as high as the sheets are long. In the Library, he has placed numerous small objects, among them a progression of potted cacti (Work No. 2376, 2016), and a nod to the days of protest against the military and war, he has installed in a display densely packed with mostly silver trophies, two small clenched fists — one gold-plated, the other bronze — as such reminding us that context is everything.

Creed is part prankster, designer, dilettante and entertainer, and he’s completely serious about the sampling of borderline banal contrasts, ludicrous situations. So much of Creed’s work refers to easy art, and to easy, tchotchke-like “folk” forms — virtuosity is antithetical to his homemade mode. Staged as a non-spectacle, this survey of new and older works is intent on engaging and potentially provoking his audience to consider each work or encounter as an act of (perhaps bad) faith. All of this is so well balanced as to be indeterminable as to whether it is implicitly culturally critical in its silliness, or if the joke’s on us for thinking so. All of this brings me to the conclusion that Creed is clever in the ways he turns the challenging endeavors of his predecessors into something accessible and playfully minor. But, then again this is part of the definition of what it is to be middlebrow.

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April 21 to May 21, 2016
508 W 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 0890

Stacked vertically on the page, black-and-white thumbnails of photographs and sketchy drawings survey flat, domestic, suburban environments. Although gallery documentation is rarely more significant than the titles and materials it catalogs, Greene Naftali’s checklist communicates the stakes of William Levitt’s “Telemetry,” in which sculptural installations are shown to be as iconic as two-dimensional drawings. Leavitt has filled the gallery’s first-floor space with a series of works on paper, as well as three installations: the interior of a modern home in Telemetry Set (2016), a crimson-lit collection of contraptions and plants in The Small Laboratory (2015), and French doors opening onto a video of a rotating planet in Arctic Earth (2013).

Drawing influence from an industry that is pure façade, Leavitt’s work is informed by the Los Angeles milieu in which it has developed. The artist’s choice to work in installation is pointed; this medium permits a living space and requests bodily interaction from the viewer, while also denying reality and existing only in simulation. From afar, the forms and colors of these sets suggest an atmosphere laden with familiarity.

The artist is explicit in his pretense, orienting these mirage-like sets so completely towards one angle that they are immediately disrupted by the sight of a wooden backdrop’s unpainted backside or the view of the projectors from the side. As one’s engagement with the works inevitably deviates from the preferred perspective, one approaches an illusion that intentionally falls flat.

Such compositions and details belie the familiarity of these scenes — spaces accessed either on the screen or in real life — and removes illusionism from this world. Leavitt’s sets motion at action without permitting or even tempting use; the stage is not set for life, but for one’s gaze upon it. Leavitt captures the idea of the house that is not a home, an engagement with the familiar that is detached, functioning as a telemeter — a device that transmits environmental readings from afar — to communicate intimacy in distance. The closer viewers approach and the more they yearn to enter the world that Leavitt paints, the more it collapses before that desiring gaze. In Telemetry Set, a slick, modern seat solidifies into a cushion smudged with dirty handprints. A multi-stemmed lamp to the chair’s left is the same kind sold at my corner store. Leavitt furthers the superficial references latent in these articles of furniture with a pointed interest in formal correspondences. In Telemetry Set, the thick boughs and rosy leaves of an artificial tropical plant are mirrored in the branching metal limbs and pink tone of the floor lamp that stands beside it. An analogous correspondence exists between the bamboo posts and a striated cylinder to the far left. These symmetries, immediately evident in color and form, bridge the binary of interior and exterior that these objects contain.

In this synthesis of spaces, bringing the unstable identity of the installation in dialogue with the extant environment of the gallery, Leavitt weaves a collage of locations that is clear in both drawn and sculptural works. In large part, the transparency of this union emerges from the contrast of the elements brought together; the gallery is set in opposition to clear signifiers of home, laboratory, and outer space. The clarity of this spatial fragmentation allows Leavitt to compose pseudo-collages out of partial environments. The exhibition follows the mood set by drawings such as Landscape with Exercycle and Interior (1991), which create conscious confusions within the space represented. In this pastel drawing, three different kinds of spaces are spliced, bringing together a landscape of mountains, a view of a forest, and a curving modern interior. An exercise machine hovers in the foreground, bridging the space between the forest and the interior but belonging to neither. This exercycle cannot exist in simultaneity with the architectural elements and landscape that are detailed beside it. Nonetheless, Leavitt brings them incongruously together to signal the uncertainty of the space in which they exist. The projections in Telemetry Set function similarly, presenting a shifting orientation and confusing the space represented in installation with images of garden plants and ceiling fans.

Leavitt makes no attempt to veil the discontinuities of space: the lights that frame A Small Laboratory are plain to see, the cut-out quality of Arctic Earth is immediately evident. Leavitt’s interest lies in the union of these intertwined spaces, in the transparency of the simulacrum. Arctic Earth directly addresses this discrepancy of time and space, abandoning mimesis for magic and imagination. Raised from the cold concrete of the gallery floor by wooden platforms, slats guide viewers into this pretended space. Both distant and close, a rotating planet is visible through open French doors on a projected screen that is partially obscured by dark, heavy curtains. Behind, the planet Earth rotates sideways on its axis, the sun glinting coldly in the distance. Though the image is compelling and suggests the narrative of science fiction, viewers are never wholly taken in, nor are they meant to be. Leavitt manipulates space as another medium that may bring its own formal qualities to a composition. In spite of their impossibility, these sets also necessarily engage a narrative structure, implying actions that go unfulfilled. In eroding realistic representation, Leavitt returns the set to its purpose as a space in which viewers may suspend their own reality in order to enter one of possibility and alterity.

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April 7 to September 5, 2016
700 Independence Avenue SW (at 7th Street NW)
Washington D.C., 202 633 4674

“All the Rules Will Change,” a retrospective Robert Irwin’s art is the first to survey his oeuvre in the 1960s, and his first museum show outside of California since 1977. We get a thorough survey of his astonishingly swift development in that tumultuous decade. And there is a major new site-specific installation, Square the Circle (2015–16), which shows how Irwin made art after he abandoned painting in 1970.

In the late 1950s Irwin responded to, and critiqued, New York School Abstract Expressionism. From 1958 to 1960 he painted small, gestural abstractions, using oil paint, set in heavy, dark wooden frames. One, Form for Tomorrow (Gray) (1960) looks like a diminutive Cy Twombly. Sometimes, as in Lucky U (1960), Irwin depicts a painted form against a field of color. But he also constructed fields of gestural painting, as can be seen in works such as Untitled (1959–60). Irwin wanted that these hand-held paintings be picked up and examined from all angles; now, of course, when that’s not possible, they are mounted in a vitrine. Soon he did much larger paintings: Ocean Park (1960-61), just over five-feet square, is a good example, with heavily painted horizontal lines in brilliant background fields of color.

By 1962 he was making radically simplified large pictures, with a small number of parallel horizontals running almost the width of the painting. And within a couple of years he did near-monochromes in white — the dot paintings. When you stand back, they look pure white; when you get close, you see tiny red and green dots, concentrated around the center and thinning out at the edge, optically mixing colors that cancel each other out. Then, in 1967 Irwin did untitled acrylic paintings on thin shaped aluminum discs, four or five feet in diameter. Finally, at the conclusion of this period, Irwin painted columns, like Untitled (1970-71) in this show, which were illuminated from above with natural light. One can see in this development the seeds of Irwin’s later, large-scale installations, which create austere spaces that manipulate viewers’ perceptual facilities.

The Hirshhorn is a notoriously difficult site, more difficult even than Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling Guggenheim. The building is elevated on stilts and is shaped like a donut — the toroidal, curving walls presenting a significant challenge to a medium like painting. The best part of the museum is outside, in the sculpture park extending towards the mall. Irwin proposed an installation on the plaza beneath the museum. Judging just from the two small images in the catalogue, this would have been a marvelous use of a rebarbative site. Unfortunately, though, his plan was rejected. And so we have instead Square the Circle (2015–16), a scrim that runs along the inner wall of the galleries for about 120 feet in a straight line. Looking through the scrim, you see the curved inner wall; on the other side, you view the museum’s curved outer wall. I remember fondly Scrim Veil — Black Rectangle — Natural Light (1977), a transparent, bisecting wall reconstructed at the old Whitney three years ago. Suddenly a gallery in that too-often-claustrophobic museum was opened up in a liberating demonstration of the pleasures made possible by physically empty rooms. Square the Circle isn’t that good. Where Irwin’s Whitney installation drew your attention to the visual potential of the Breuer Building’s galleries, Square the Circle just reminds you of the problems inherent in the Hirshhorn’s architecture. This exhibition very effectively reveals Irwin’s dramatically swift development in the 1960s, and the essential continuity of his concerns since that time: having moved from quirky Abstract Expressionism to near-monochromatic paintings, his subsequent installations, removing any painted objects, draw attention to the setting itself.

A special genre of history writing is devoted to alternate histories In that spirit, imagine an alternate history in which in 1960, the New York art world disappeared, but with its concerns taken up by Irwin. Then the history of Modernism might look quite different. Art historians would explain how the Abstract Expressionists’ interest in gestural paintings led inevitably to the disappearance of the art object in favor of focusing on the gallery setting. It turned out, they would argue, that all the distinctive aesthetic features provided by the abstract paintings of the New York School could be presented more economically by scrims. And so the history of Modernism would take us from Henri Matisse through Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, forward to the singular figure who worked out the implications of that Modernist tradition: Robert Irwin. One reason that this exhibition is challenging is that it asks us to imagine that the entire recent history of art might have been different.

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April 3 to May 8, 2016
155 Suffolk Street (between Houston and Stanton streets)
New York, 646 429 9073

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in his 1942 essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” referred to a zoological taxonomy translated from a Chinese encyclopedia. The citation was in fact invented but reportedly, this system divided the animal kingdom into 14 categories, including “Those that belong to the Emperor,” “those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush,” and “those that, at a distance, resemble flies.” Borges parodies the irrationalities of classification systems, which govern biological science. In his current shows at Pierogi, “The Felicific Calculus and “The Last Library” (a collaboration with Douglas Paulson), Ward Shelley presents two bodies of work — a series of acrylic paintings on Mylar and an installation, respectively — that draw on the absurd beauty that can be found in the visualization and classification of knowledge by presenting different views of its organization.

The term “Felicific Calculus” emerged as part of Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of Utilitarianism: it was a pre-digital algorithm for determining the degree of pleasure, or greater good, a given action would cause, providing an illusion of rigor in judging the ethics of any action. This method of turning something abstract, like pleasure, into a quantifiable value predates today’s mania for “the quantified self” by about two centuries. Today, similar processes are used for “sentiment analysis,” a method of analyzing speech to get a quantifiable value of the feelings expressed in a corpus of text, albeit for marketing purposes rather than for Bentham’s “greater good.” Shelley’s “Felicific Calculus” paintings are similarly intertwined with the material history of consumerism. Work, Spend, Forget (Dissected Frog Polemic), v.1 (2013) renders a timeline of the 20th century as a dissected frog, its guts and limbs spread horizontally and labeled with political, social, and technological developments; the mass media forms its nervous system, its arteries are labeled as “mass production.” At the far right of the chart — the present day — the organs merge together to form a incomprehensible pink soup devoid of any obvious organization.

The chaos of the current moment is a recurring theme in these paintings, such as Extended Narrative (2014) — a painting that expands on and re-imagines Alfred Barr’s canonical schematic of Cubism and abstract art as a weather chart, with the ominous thunderhead of “Postmodernism” looming over the present day. Most of the charts are organized as timelines, with events illustrated in a linear fashion with historical time as its X-axis. Events are shown merging together or branching off into further nodes, but all of them are constantly moving forward. This merges the imagery of these paintings with their subject matter, a consumer culture that values such “progress,” and the profit it brings, over life itself.

The body of work that accompanies the paintings, The Last Library, takes a Borges-like view of time. Interspersed with the paintings, the walls of the gallery are lined with shelves, each filled with “books that should have been written, but have not,” according to the press release. The spines of these books all recall mid-20th century graphic design tropes, featuring muted colors, black text, and conservative typefaces. Their titles are variously absurd (I Sniffed Your Wife), anachronistic (Puppies, Kittens, and the Internet), and self-referential (The Felicitous Calculus). This body of work recalls a similar project by Agnieszka Kurant, Phantom Library (2011-12), in which non-existent books that had been mentioned in other literary works (such as a volume by Pierre Menard, described by Borges) were written, printed, bound, assigned ISBN numbers, and put on display. Unlike Kurant’s piece, The Last Library doesn’t feature actual books: any illusion is destroyed by a simple shift of the viewer’s perspective, revealing the thin strips of paper-covered wood that constitute each “book.”

Like most libraries, The Last Library is organized and categorized, but rather than using the Dewey decimal system, Shelley has opted for a scheme that recalls Borges’s Chinese taxonomy of animals. The various classifications are written on bookplates placed on the shelves: “Pointing Towards a Singular Truth,” “No Missing Pages,” “Books With 12 Chapters,” and “With Teeth Marks” are some of the categories by which the library is supposedly organized. The Last Library presents a different view of space and time than the paintings do: Shelley’s charts are representations of systems that can be drawn in two dimensions, while the Library’s idiosyncratic organization pokes fun at these methods of visualization. Each body of work provides a perspective through which the other, and the world at large, could potentially be seen.

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