June 22 to July 27, 2018
291 Grand Street, at Eldridge Street
New York City, jamescohan.com

Spoiler alert: Description of the standout piece in Berlin-based Helene Appel’s second solo show with James Cohan might blow the best thing about this painter’s work for those, like myself, who missed the first and have not been paying attention to this international art star. Upon gravitating towards Blue Net (2018), the largest work in this spare, reductive show, I “realized” that something was protruding from the support, a fine filigree of some kind of mesh or netting. Turning to other works on display – images of, for instance, a puddle with soapy bubbles or of sandy beaches with shell fragments and manmade litter – it became evident that Appel, in fact, depicts various motifs, however much surface increments feel like appropriations of actual matter. Sent back to Blue Net, I realize I’ve been had: It is all just paint.

The ekphrastic moment “suffered” (enjoyed) by this critic won’t, thanks to my reporting it, be your experience, too. For that I’m truly sorry. I’m sure we all recall that ancient Greek who wrote about a bird so taken by the verisimilitude of a bunch of grapes by Zeuxis that, poor thing, she pecks at them. Ornithology for birds, I hear you say, but the headline here is that Cohen pecked.

A subsequent chat with a knowledgeable gallery assistant made me feel a little better about my gullibility. For it transpires that, in addition to painstaking efforts in acrylic and sometimes oils, our trompe l’œilist adds watercolor to selected passages to ever so slightly imply shadow. Ms. Appel has worked hard at her trickery, certainly in the almost 13 foot wide Blue Net. But where do we go, once we’ve gotten what’s going on?

Critical appreciation of Blue Net makes one wonder at the allegiance of this artist born in Karlsruhe in 1976, who studied in Hamburg and London, for the work is in equal measure Brice Marden and Catherine Murphy. Even once we register the skill and patience of their rendering, these loops of netting continue to exalt in their reductive alloverness. It is not a rigid grid, for sure, but a lifelike, arbitrary deposit all the more composed in the casualness of the conveyed heap. But maybe the generational privilege of a younger German painter is to be freed of any implied antimony between Minimalism and Hyperrealism; that at this stage of art history we can have our cake and eat it; that old battles are lost and won. Freed, one might venture, from Fried, because an opposition between absorption of touch and a theatrical demand for attention to the literalness of what is depicted are forcibly dissolved in Appel’s images.

These are highly intelligent paintings, not just in the ways they are learned in art lore, but because they are filled with local and particular decisions that earn respect with time spent with them even after the pecking punch line has been delivered. This has to do with variety of approach from one motif to the next. Blue Net is the tour de force of verisimilitude here. A close second is Shell Pasta (2017), a tiny canvas at three by one and one half inches. Dimensional extremity, in either direction, is perhaps a strategy for Appel to think of herself as respectably conceptual rather than academic in her realism (not – please note – for this critic, but others are concerned by such niceties). Shell Pasta, like her other pasta paintings, is an instance of realism, but not of trompe l’œil: we are impressed, perhaps, but not deceived, as unlike netting, pasta wouldn’t stick like this.

There is actually more to say about scale, in particular its literality. A remarkable fact is the lifelike size of all the things depicted: It is a plausible explanation for the diminutive proportions of Shell Pasta. The implausibility of the spaghetti being anything other than a painting of spaghetti – despite the same care bestowed upon it and its shadows as on the netting and the netting’s shadows – is the stylized way this cluster sits on its expanse of linen.

In the sand paintings things actually get more interesting, from a painterly perspective, by being less literal, in a depictive sense. While the watercolored dunes are quite astounding in the way they seem to take us to an actual beach, almost the way a Daniel Spoerri takes us to someone’s actual lunch, the shells in these beach paintings and other surface incidents are replete with the artist’s almost expressive touch, with delight in materiality divorced from paint’s second life as some depicted corollary. The glints of color in the foamy bubbles in Washing (2018) are an instance of sheer delectation in the overlooked, in what is perhaps something hitherto unrepresented in painting (even though bubbles per se have a rich art history) that brings to mind the quirky mannerist realism of Alexi Worth. The color serves to elicit a sense of bubbles in the round, but they are also abstract in the way they deploy spots of synthetic color across the composition.

The range of modes of realism within this one tight display impresses me, though I can see how to others it might suggest a dissipated outlook—that what I take to be range others might construe as inconsistency. But in terms of intentionality, I get the sense that she is supremely aware of the implications of each stylistic move. The “post peck” experience that keeps me interested in this painter in a way that I’ve never been remotely interested in, say, Glenn Brown or Tauba Auerbach, to both of whom she bears comparison, is that while she depicts banalities, she is not banal in the means of depiction.

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April 28 to June 17, 2018
291 Grand Street, at Eldridge Street
New York City, jamescohan.com

This is the fourth exhibition by Yun-Fei Ji at James Cohan Gallery and the first in their Grand Street location, in New York’s historic Chinatown. One could say, for this reason, that Ji’s recent ink paintings constitute a site-specific artwork given that they are being viewed not only by art world cognoscenti but by the local community as well. My guess is that the neighborhood Chinese will have a more in-depth understanding of these works than other viewers, less because of the academic context than the raw intuition these images will exert over people who remember the ghost stories, often combined with familiar folktales, they were told growing up in China, the subject of Ji’s magnetic new body of work.

Paintings like At Sundown and At Midnight (both 2017-2018) are essentially nightmares based on the dire conditions currently found in hundreds of rural villages in China today. In these ink and watercolor paintings on xuan paper viewers encounter ghosts and ghouls from a past world who have returned to these chaotic and impoverished villages and are milling about the inhabitants.

For Chinatown residents, Ji’s paintings may serve as an allegory of what is happening elsewhere; but for Chinese farmers and their families it is reality, one they are forced to confront as an everyday occurrence. In rural China today , extreme poverty has become a fact of life. This has much to do with the fields formerly used for growing crops that have been flooded to produce electrical power or polluted to the extent that farmers no longer have land to work and water to fish and drink, thus leaving their families in a desperate state constantly fighting for survival. Their fields are now dumping grounds for antiquated computer parts that poison the furrows they once tilled.

These harrowing conditions are at the source of what Ji paints and through the act of painting in a style reminiscent of the Southern Sung Dynasty (1127 – 1279), the artist reminds himself of the China that few urban residents have actually seen. Consequently, these ghouls and ghosts, first shown in a hand scroll, The Village and Its Ghosts (2014), and then again three years later in the chilling They Come Out Together, are indirectly focused on new-born refugees living an iterant life of poverty. As the artist has made clear in interviews, the urban centers are where the power exists that systematically contributes to the downgraded conditions that determine the chaos and perpetual tribulations found in countless nomadic peasant villages.

The emotionally distraught protagonists of Eight Neighbors (2017-2018) gather at a stopover camp amid the ghosts and debris to discuss their options in terms of where they will go next.. Before the Long Journey deals with a related subject in which bundles of clothing, sacks of rice, and cooking items, have been sparingly packed, based on extreme necessity. Meanwhile, the “neighbors” mill about as they prepare to depart from the campsite. Whereas traditional Chinese ink painting pays considerable attention to the facility of the brushwork involving closely scaled harmonies in subtle darks and lights, Ji’s watercolor and ink paintings, lay flat, relatively subdued, as they are absorbed by the xuan paper. The figures are painted in a semi-Western style, while the all-over perspective is closer to an obverse space where the distances between things are more uniform as opposed to radically separated from one another.

In Break Camp (2017-2018), the obverse perspective is more pronounced and possibly more obvious to the viewer. This and Family Bundles and Batches (2017-2018) deal directly with the underlying theme of economic migration. While the obverse perspective is clearly more pronounced in the former, it still lingers in the second more muted ink work, implying a disruptive psychology within the ensemble. In either case, the mood of these pictures suggests an anxiety and expectation of what might happen as these people walk interminably together as an itinerant village tribe presumably in search of a place to live.

As an exhibition of paintings Yun- Fei Ji’s haunting performance manages to throw another light on how the approach to ink painting remains closely bound to Chinese history. In doing so, Ji makes clear that which is most important to him draws intentionally and purposefully on the past as a means to exorcise the hidden realities of the present. Put another way, there is no overt political theme in these paintings other than the tension by which Ji’s brushwork is embedded within the representation of each figure, object, and landscape. In this sense, the brush becomes an indirect signifier of revolt.

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December 9, 2016 to January 22, 2017
291 Grand Street, between Eldridge and Allen streets
New York City, jamescohan.com

What is skin color detached from a body?   What is the residue of trauma disambiguated? Such questions came to mind in Byron Kim’s recent exhibition at James Cohan – Lower East Side. Of these stained, dyed and pigmented canvases Kim has said:

The thing that became analogous to me was how much the bruise can look like something celestial. Like photos of deep space taken by telescopes, or from satellites. I am always trying to relate the very small and the vast.

The inspiration of the bruise itself initially emerged from a poem by Carl Phillips (Alba: Innocence), in which Phillips describes sunlight illuminating a bruise on the body of his sleeping lover.

Kim’s work has often taken on subject matter which brings together the macro and the micro, translating the encompassing into a single color or corresponding abstraction. His ongoing series Synecdoche, included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, places 10 by 8 inch painted panels of the skin color of friends and strangers into an ever-reconstituting grid of monochromes. Another body of work, largely from 2010, attempts to capture the exact color of the night sky.

Despite a similar use of abstract imagery to conflate scale, it would be easy to read the physicality of process and distinct materiality in the works exhibited in Mud Root Ochre Leaf Star as somewhat of a departure for Kim, who has traditionally worked in oil paint. Coming out of a group of paintings using pigment on steel, in this new process Kim dyes and stains raw canvas, sometimes many times, with natural dyes and pigments such as indigo, sandalwood and ochre. The paintings, which range in scale from chest to body size, are then rubbed with rags soaked in hide glue and oil.

By negating a distance between the hand and the canvas, Kim gives the paintings both a sense of their own physicality, and a memory of being touched. In Distant Ancient, for instance, the dye has sunk so deeply into the fabric that the weave of the canvas has become as striking a presence as the colors applied to it. In Innocence over Blue, the wrinkles are preserved like veins, emphasizing a relationship to a woundable body. Throughout the installation, one becomes aware of how the unexpected smears – marks of blue, brown, and magenta – speak to an activity of the studio, revealing that these works have emerged from an environment that was neither sterile nor segregated.

It is in how Kim negotiates a response to the activity and unpredictability of process, as well as through his relational subject matter, that I locate these paintings not as a departure at all, but as a translation of a continuing discourse. As a conceptually driven painter, Kim often directs our contemplation to how close looking at specific imagery can begins to intertwine with an endlessly unfolding, often unbounded subject matter. I see this within his efforts to paint the sky, or in how Kim’s paintings of his children’s hair whorls – for example, Whorl (Ella and Emmett) (1997),  not in the current exhibition — could easily be mistaken for galaxies.

In his new works, Kim’s compositional response to material happenstance functions similarly, emphasizing both the literal matter of pigment, and the possibility of something celestial. In Blue Lift Sandalwood Fall, for example, the dye is allowed to fall back on itself, leaving the radiating color to resemble either the haloes of Renaissance saints or the residuals of radiation. When the paintings are installed together, each corresponding stain begins to pulse like the nimbus of a star.

Taking influence from Robert Smithson’s writings on deep time, as well as Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu’s The Inner Chapters, Kim interweaves intimacy with vastness to encompass both the specific (the bruise, the exploding supernova), as well as qualities of non-referential abstraction. A bruise, like the instance at which we are reached by starlight, is the momentary at ease with the continuous. A mark of traumatic happening that is, simultaneously, a sign that the body has begun to heal. When I look at these paintings I feel as if I am able also to diminish the conditions of dichotomy within my own body.

I am given permission to experience the mark of my trauma as trauma, and simultaneously to celebrate my own ability for transformation. My ability to be bruised is a reminder that I am in constant reconfiguration, as is my world, as is my universe- it is our living bodies, not our corpses that visually transform the vestiges of collision. Without simplifying or pacifying violence (just because it is complex, doesn’t mean it isn’t painful), Kim’s paintings bring me to a more empathic understanding of impact.

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The Propeller Group: The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music at James Cohan Gallery
April 8 to May 15, 2016
291 Grand Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York, 212 714 9500

In the West, many people are privileged to maintain a distance from the visceral effects of economic and social inequalities. The Propeller Group, however, wants us to confront them. Their work around branding and marketing strategies, notions of nation building, propaganda, and the collective vs. individual, will help viewers consider those systems and recognize how we might be complicit in them and, perhaps, undo them.

Their collective — comprised of core members Phunam, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and Matt Lucero — began working together officially in 2006, but had met and worked together in graduate school at CalArts (Nguyen and Lucero) and upon meeting back to their home country of Vietnam (Phunam and Nguyen in 2005). The members, each an artist in his own right, formed the collective to realize ambitious art projects and large-scale productions with Vietnamese artists. Their first solo museum exhibition, featuring seven videos and installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, highlight the importance of the convergence of the fine and commercial art worlds in their practice. The group’s ability to shape shift and code switch among genres, traditions, and cultures from the East and West helps them make meaningful critiques of consumer culture, politics and the effects on the human condition.

As young men coming of age in the ’90s — all three cite hip-hop and graffiti culture as important to their mode — The Propeller Group carry the residue of the social and cultural context of the time. In art schools, scholars tended to focus more on theories like deconstructionism, institutional critique, and identity politics over examinations of the discrete art object. During their time at CalArts, Lucero and Nguyen were students of Daniel Joseph Martinez, whose installation at the controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial included distributing admission buttons spelling out “I CAN’T EVER IMAGINE WANTING TO BE WHITE.” Migration is an important influence too: All identify as people of color, Lucero a California native, and Nguyen and Phunam as refugees whose families fled Vietnam during the war.

Guns serve as an important motif in their work, particularly Cold War-era Russian and American assault rifles: the AK-47 and M16. (They’ve even made a feature length film out of montaged YouTube clips, Hollywood films, documentaries, and promotional video about the firearms.) A 21-minute video, The AK-47 vs. The M16 (2015), most recently on view at James Cohan’s Lower East Side location and originally conceived for the 56th Venice Biennale, features a series of blocks made of ballistics gelatin embedded with discharges from each rifle fired simultaneously, and a video of the blast. The video captures the bullets penetrating the gel blocks and colliding with each other. At one point a gun misfires and the discharge creates a smooth trajectory; in another, both guns fire on each other, creating a collision manifesting like ink blots or paint pours. The gel blocks, sealed in resin under vitrines, are often used in ballistics tests and are designed to mimic the qualities of human flesh. While the blocks capture the violence of the blasts and freeze it in time, the effect is diminished after watching the live firing in the video, making the sculptures feel like a redundant let-down. But this can be a shortfall of overtly political art: how to create effective — not overwrought — affect. Works like the sculptures of The AK-47 vs. The M16 or Television Commercial for Communism (2011) fall into such didactic trappings, but that cannot be attributed to the fact that The Propeller Group also has another life in commercial art and advertising. Their work is simply more effective when they collapse the distance between the politics and the person.

Collateral Damage (2015), for example, also mines the theme of guns and violence, but the simple gesture of capturing the pattern of stippling and bullet fragments skipping and tearing across black paper is haunting in its austerity. The Guerrillas of Cu Chi (2012), which uses a propaganda film as part of the installation, is very successful at underscoring the human costs of war. In a darkened room, two videos on opposite walls depict scenes from the Cu Chi district in Ho Chi Minh City where Viet Cong fighters built a complex of tunnels — critical to defeating the US military in spite of its technological superiority. In the black-and-white propaganda film, the narrator describes how the people enjoyed picnicking in Cu Chi, “Until the merciless Americans began dropping their bombs […] on it.” Facing this film, modern day tourists are shown taking photos and selfies at the shooting range that currently stands on the site as captions from the black-and-white film flash across the bottom. The juxtaposition, while seemingly moralistic on the surface, highlights the differences in the way histories are remembered depending on who remembers them.

The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music (2014) is perhaps the group’s most lyrical statement to explore the central concerns of their work. Part of this lies in the aesthetic: The Propeller Group used an “overcrank” technique to shoot frames at a higher rate than normal, allowing the footage to appear like slow motion when played back at standard speed. If you’ve ever seen the movie Chariots of Fire (1981) or nearly any shampoo commercial ever, you are familiar with this technique and know that if done poorly, overcrank can appear hokey and amateurish. The film was originally created for Prospect.3, the third Prospect New Orleans biennial, held from 2014 to 2015, and one wonders: is it the film’s focus on funerary practices in Vietnam and their echoes to those specific to New Orleans, the abundant images of water, references to mysticism, transformation, and change that make it effective, or something else? The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music leaves room for the consideration and contemplation, the joy and sadness — the range of human emotions the world often asks us to elide. Facing the feeling, sitting with the rage, discomfort, confusion or sadness, however, is exactly what The Propeller Group may intend for viewers. These are not the cynical acts of ad men, but the hopeful ones that only artists make.

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Lee Mullican: The Fifties at Susan Inglett Gallery
April 28 to June 4, 2016
522 W. 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 647 9111

Undaunted by the challenge of the New York School, in the early 1950s on the West Coast there emerged an approach to abstract painting that did not participate in the conflicting vision of the Romantic (painterly) and Classicist (geometric) traditions. On the East Coast, this battle had led to the idea of an “abstract” art that was to represent nothing more than itself. The West Coast variant was instead rooted in a mystical tradition in which the task of the artist was to reveal the truth behind appearances. Using non-Western and Native American sources, Lee Mullican, and contemporaries such as Mark Tobey, was interested in the pictorial, and the imagistic power of abstraction, rather than the all-at-once-ness sought by their East Coast contemporaries. Two recent exhibitions of Mullican’s work, at Susan Inglett Gallery and James Cohan Gallery, show his development of abstraction on the West Coast. The Susan Inglett show deals with Mullican’s work of the 1950s, while James Cohan features work from the late ‘50s through the ‘60s.

Though there is a long history of transcendental abstract painting in the US, seldom is it as formally radical as Mullican’s. What differentiates his approach from that of his East Coast counterparts, such as Richard Pousette-Dart, is that Mullican, rather than trying to give representation to the non-objective realm, sought instead to stimulate the sensations of reality as perceived by the senses and the mind. To this end, Mullican employed the intense visual patterns associated with migraines, epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness — e.g. states that produce mind-numbing optical patterns and hallucinations.

Mullican didn’t differentiate between abstraction and figuration and as such was mainly an abstractionist who distorted the codes of representation for expressive ends. Though aware of the importance of form, he comes to the abstract via his ambition at producing visionary images through which one could aesthetically experience the power and force of the world of mind and energy. Mullican’s vision therefore, contrasted sharply with the existentialism of Barnett Newman, the Gothic vision of Clyfford Still, or the primordial imagery of Mark Rothko. All of these artists envisioned an external reality capable of overwhelming and dwarfing the viewer, an experience of the Sublime meant to remind viewers of the raw power of nature and human fragility. Mullican’s sublime is objectless: fields of color and sensation, and his paintings are therefore intended to deliver up a sensory overload that will induce in the viewer an awareness of still another realm.

In San Francisco, where he moved following World War II, Mullican met the British-born abstract-Surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, who is credited with making some of the first poured paintings in the late 1930s. Austrian Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen also had a significant effect on Mullican during this period. Mullican came to share these artists’ interest in Eastern and Native American mysticism. Bound together by a desire to make works that would tap into altered consciousness that could serve as a doorway to infinite possibilities, they formed the short-lived Dynaton Group. Its name was derived from Paalen’s influential journal called Dyn, published in Mexico City between 1942 and 1944.

Mullican’s earliest works, shown at Susan Inglett Gallery, combine references to Aboriginal dream paintings, Native American iconography, and sci-fi-like cosmic explosions. Paintings such as The Age of the Desert (1957) are like colored drawings and consist of disjointed cosmic and landscape imagery, pictographs, as well as abstract patterns. Significantly, Mullican introduces into these works an aerial point of view, the source of which was his experience as a cartographer making maps from aerial photographs for the US military during World War II.

Formally more important than the ethnographic references, and the flattening effect of an aerial perspective, are the patterns of matchstick-like slivers of color Mullican began to use in the mid ‘50s. These short, raised lines of color — produced with the edge of the knife used by printers to ink rollers — were a distinctive feature of his work over the course of his career. Mullican distributed hundreds, if not thousands, of these colored striations across the surface of his paintings, forming a field of sensations that detached itself from the picture plane, creating a new dimension: an optical space that was divorced from the underlying imagery and abstract forms. At times, his striations lend themselves to creating tapestry-like effects that bring Gustav Klimt to mind. In works such as The Arrival of the Quetzalcoatl (1963), shown at James Cohan Gallery, Mullican shows one can be fearless when it comes to the decorative, in that it need not become a liability. In this work the tapestry effect and the multiple erratic zigzag patterns, intense colors produce a hallucinatory optical effect. An earlier artwork, Transfigured Night (1962), with its tonal sonorities, harmonic reds and oranges, and pattern of pictographs, is tasteful and hip to the point one can image it as album cover for the cool jazz of Dave Brubeck and Lee Konitz.

Only a handful of the works of the ‘60s and ‘70s are truly abstract and these, such as Mediation on the Vertical (1962), are predominantly monochromatic. Rather than creating spectral symbols or camouflaged figures, Mullican fills the plane with agitated and convoluted patterns, forming overall rhythmic fields of intense color and fluctuating densities. His signature matchsticks of color optically attach and detach themselves from the surface creating pathways, trajectories and patterns that float in the space between viewer and the painting’s surface. These works are no longer dependent on graphic imagery but on forms that are a result of color and the density of marks. The Arrival of the Quetzalcoatl, with its aggressive field of jostling patterns and forms, and its greater spontaneity, is one of Mullican’s most accomplished works. Though not included in these two exhibitions, Mullican’s paintings from the same period — in which stylized ethnographic imagery dominates, rather than painterly effects — appear to verge on kitsch. Yet I wonder if this preference is a consequence of my viewing them with prejudiced eyes, schooled in the style and history of the New York School. Despite these limitations, Mullican’s works still resonate, and demonstrate that during the ‘50s and early ‘60s, AbEx and New York were not the only game in play.

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March 25 to May 7, 2016
533 West 26 Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 714 9500

It requires at least two hours of lurking in darkened spaces on less than comfortable seats to really appreciate 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011), Continuity (2012), and Spring (2016), the three films by Omer Fast at James Cohan. It is definitely worth the effort. But this show also raises important questions about the changing role of art galleries and viewers, and the accessibility of art when most video is just a click away. These three projections in three separate rooms are digitally produced, at obviously great expense, with professional actors and cinematography. Though the term film seems archaic, they have a richness that is closer to the cinematic experience of movie theaters, than a DIY video installation by a lone artist in a gallery.

This exhibition offers a jarring experience, both intellectually and emotionally. Intellectually, because these films are all open and circular narratives — events occur, but there is no definitive dramatic arc, more like dramatic waves. There are climaxes, but they reoccur from different points of view. Each projection can be entered at any time, and the sequence of events initiated by one’s particular time of entry will influence their emotional impact. There is no resolution in these, questions are raised and not answered. But their content is thrillingly political, psychological, sexual, racial, and resolutely contemporary. We get involved, because the ambiguities Fast creates contain intriguing mysteries that are never explained.

And emotionally. At two separate times in Spring, we see a bicyclist very suddenly plowed into by a black Porsche from two different points of view, from both distanced overview and driver perspective. And it is shocking both times, even when you know it’s going to happen. We watch a middle class white family taking a road trip, which the narration makes clear, is really taking place in an occupied foreign country in Asia. They suddenly become collateral damage from an unexpected drone missile strike, and bloodied, they get out of their vacation stuffed station wagon and walk away holding hands, though the narration states that, “their bodies are never found.” The father of a young man on leave from the military, sticks his finger in his grown son’s mouth. A mother turns an affectionate kiss with the same son into a make-out session at the dinner table. An incongruous camel ambles down the middle of the road in the German countryside, approaches a suburban couple in a car and leads them to a scene of horrifying devastation.

All of these videos contain stories within stories, a postmodern gambit with narrative roots as far back as Don Quijote. 5,000 Feet is the Best concerns an interview in a hotel room with a troubled drone operator stationed in Las Vegas and blowing up people in Afghanistan. He relates stories that then become the visual reality of the film. Apparently it is based on an interview Fast made with an actual drone pilot. In the film, Denis O’Hare, an actor from True Blood, portrays the pilot while another actor plays the interviewer. But we also get narration from a digitally blurred face — the real pilot, or just another actor whose blurred face is used to make it seem like actual documentary footage? Instead of being shown drone tapes from Afghanistan, we are shown elevated shots of American suburbs to bridge the mental distance between what we do here, and what it might feel like over there.

What kind of cultural arena does an art gallery provide, and to whom? Who are these cultural experiences for, how are they financed? These films are all produced in editions of six. We know that multimedia art, and even performance art can be owned like a painting or sculpture. But we are also used to the platform fluidity and accessibility of cinematic experiences from movie theatre to home TV screen to laptop and tablet. The profitability and accessibility of this populist medium require millions of paying customers. Going to art galleries on the other hand is a privileged social activity, which, though free, requires arranging one’s time — in this case, as noted, at least two hours. And Fast’s films need to be seen more than once. Someone will buy it and then it will disappear. It won’t be available on Netflix. This question of privilege is exactly what Fast’s work seems to investigate.

Fast is now producing a feature length film, Remainder, based on a Tom McCarthy novel. Remainder will probably be seen in theaters, for the normal price of a movie ticket. In interviews Fast has bemoaned the loss of freedom required to answer the constraints of producers of a feature length film. “Can you make this character more sympathetic?” is not his usual concern.

So this is the conundrum. Fast is an important artist whose work contributes complex thinking to a range of intellectual and cultural issues. But it is not for the fans of the Marvel franchise. Go see this at Cohan Gallery. But this work also needs to find an available outlet for the huge number of sophisticated viewers who might not have access to it, though they easily could. We have experienced this phenomenon before with Christian Marclay’s The Clock. But in that case, the spectacular nature of the appropriated content led to huge public screenings. This is art that is more modest, but more disturbing, and certainly no less compelling. The transition from elitist high culture to more accessible but still elevated culture is a pressing issue that artists of the caliber of Omer Fast must address.

This exhibition was discussed at The Review Panel, Brooklyn Public Library, April 2016

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Three Brooklyn-based critics join David Cohen at the podium April 12 for The Review Panel at Brooklyn Public Library in what should be another stormy, contentious evening of critical debate: Lance Esplund, Kara Rooney and Robert Storr. And as added spurs to liveliness, a radical feminist twist or two. Judith Braun, subject of a two-part (and two-borough) show at McKenzie Fine Art on the Lower East Side and Simuvac Projects in Greenpoint, was one of the original “Bad Girls” in Marcia Tucker’s thus titled 1994 show at the New Museum, while the title of Betty Tompkins’ show at the FLAG Art Foundation, “WOMEN Words, Phrases and Stories,” gives a fair flavor of the feistiness to expect there. Also prone to the prodding and probing of the panel, shows of Omer Fast at James Cohan and Molly Lowe at Pioneer Works.

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January 22 to February 21, 2016
291 Grand Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York City, 212 714 9500

Mernet Larsen has been teasing us for a long while now with enigmatic, spatially-warped interiors: are they pure constructions or abstractions from daily life? Her bewitchingly plain, boxy people, the only possible inhabitants of such regimented spaces, are perhaps distant descendants of David Bomberg’s anxious Vorticist personages and Oskar Schlemmer’s utopian Bauhaus ones, as well as the lay figures of how-to-draw manuals and avatars in computer games. But they might not be as generic as they seem. Some have identifying features like beards and glasses that could hold keys to identity. Often their clarified, repressed gestures distill emotion. A recent show of Larsen’s paintings at the new downtown outpost of James Cohan Gallery staked a claim to conquered turf, freshly restating the terms of her practice. Clearly this lately minted star — it was the septuagenarian artist’s first show at a big-name New York gallery, and it sold out — is only just getting started.

One of the new paintings, Alphie (2015), substantially obeys what Larsen calls reverse perspective, her trademark disrupter of conventional pictorial space. This algorithm, in which objects get larger as they recede, is not easy to intuit. You can start by noting that normal perspective paintings, like Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ (ca. 1455–1460), use the very same grid, with parallel lines converging to a point. But Larsen knows how to booby-trap this grid so that, should she choose, she could restore the scale of Piero’s famously upstaged man-god, relegated to the rear, to his rightful priority.

Larsen’s eccentric viewpoints, if plotted conventionally, would actually be closer to Ed Ruscha’s Standard station or a vertiginous Jack Kirby Fantastic Four panel than to centralized Renaissance mises-en-scène. In Alphie, a perfectly logical, if Marvel Comics view of a brick wall hung with a foreshortened portrait rises obliquely on the left of a cafeteria scene. We are looking dramatically up, and can even see a bit of the ceiling. Yet figures sitting at tables — the main subject — are rendered on the grid as if viewed from above, the liquid in a wine glass and a coffee cup attesting to this dissonant gravity with level calm. No matter what you tell your eyes to see, the mapping of up onto down, and thus near onto far, feels dizzying and uncanny, quite aside from the weird proximity of the portrait-hung brick wall’s “normal” space, which somehow seamlessly amalgamates with the rest.

Reverse perspective began to appear in Larsen’s already spatially disruptive compositions around 2007. Patches of the technique’s compelling illogic might be construed in Roman and Byzantine painting, and in the work of El Lissitzky (whom Larsen acknowledges as a source for many of the compositions here), as well as that of Josef Albers, M.C Escher, and Al Held. Larsen’s fully worked-through reverse projections, however, are unprecedented, aside from in the fascinating paintings of Scott Grodesky, who has also made powerful use of the device for many years. On the other hand, no space is ever quite global in Larsen’s world, and in the group of paintings shown at Cohan, the artist seemed at pains to display all the tricks up her sleeve.

Punch (2016) is a variation on the dining theme, an interior of five rather bored friends around a circular table. As in Alphie, the nearest figure is the smallest, but it’s more that he and his two neighbors go upside down, ceiling-wise, while the table above bends magically back into an alternate, isometric gestalt.

With Chainsawer and Bicyclist (2014) Larsen explores even fresher ground. The ostensible subject is a suburban idyll or, alternately, a horror film depending on how one resolves a visual pun. Saul Steinberg would stage incompatible incidents along a single horizontal line, casting it sequentially as a marine horizon, the upper edge of a viaduct, a laundry line hung with clothes, and so on across a dozen pages. Larsen’s humor here is more devilish. The woman with the chainsaw is ominously poised to sever the bare linear logic of the room that contains her, and which also functions as a roadside curb to the oncoming, plunging bicyclist. With fewer shading cues than usual, Larsen lets axial geometry rule; we infer the bike’s front wheel only from a straight black swath, as if the wheel happened to be pitched and yawed just so. The imperiled line under the teeth of the saw barely holds the woman’s and the cyclist’s disparate spatial worlds together. Should time begin to flow, the speeding saw teeth would cut this slender fulcrum like the string of a balloon.

Such tensely buoyant dynamics are the rule of the new paintings. At any rate, they seem airier than Larsen’s previous acrylic canvases, which regularly included zones of impasto. Her current textures — degrees of astringency — are, if not quite as delightful, all the more decisive. Freehand or ruled pencil lines, as always, get the last word along crucial edges of figures, furniture, and architecture; the steely graphite joins Larsen’s smartly shaded planes of color, where needed, into Superflat inlay. Further evidence of the gnarly intellect of the artist’s hand was seen in a number of careful studies, collaged and gridded-off for transfer.

Along with thinner paint quality comes a new lightness of spirit, even overt parody. At any rate, the subjects have emerged from the claustrophobic basements of academe­­ — seminar rooms, linoleum-tiled corridors — into the great outdoors. Frontier (2015) with its rifle-thin riflemen quotes Barnaby Furnas’s Civil War figures almost too closely, substituting for Furnas’s angular bloodbaths the liquefied, queasy undulations of a deforested landscape. Misstep (2015) doesn’t depict the accident of the title so much as it cartoons the crisis of graduation, wherein a sturdy man and woman are sequentially falling forward, lemming-like, from a pixilated Minecraft cliff. Or, if you prefer, they roll off the end of an assembly line into the unknown.

In opening up and broadening their horizons, it must be said that many of the new paintings relinquish the uniquely pressurized sensation characteristic of Larsen’s previous work. But Reading in Bed (2015), in compensation, takes the psychological remapping of space to a new level, by bringing us into the quotidian intimacy of a couple’s domestic blahs. The wrongness of scale is right at home in the brooding disconnect between enormous, watchful wife and diminishing, distracted husband. As with the best of Larsen’s twisted, inverted interiors, one finds oneself — rather in the manner of the film Being John Malkovich (1999) — passing impossibly to the inside of another person’s head.

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Dear Art Editor,

I was shocked to read the review of Michelle Grabner’s exhibition by Ken Johnson in last Friday’s NYT, in which he basically summarizes Grabner’s show as that of a bland and witless mom. Grabner has an extraordinary CV: besides being an artist, and as he noted, a Professor at a major art school, and one of the curators of the last Whitney Biennial, Grabner is also a regularly published critic, co-curator/director of two experimental art spaces, and the subject of a museum survey show last year. Yet the NYT apparently saw no problem in printing a piece of writing about her whose primary criticism is her seeming lifestyle, and in which the characterization of her is not only the somewhat demeaning category “mom,” but the further boiled-down, more dismissive category of “soccer mom.” Johnson doesn’t even get his facts right: for example, he omits entirely the information from the exhibition’s introductory video about Grabner’s study of math, science and philosophy. It’s simply lazy to overlook this, and to mis-state the work’s own terms. Johnson concludes that Grabner has no satire: the two art spaces that Grabner co-runs are called “the Suburban” and “Poor Farm.” Does Johnson really think that Grabner is so naïve that when she portrays herself making a pie, she is doing so without any self-consciousness about her position in the world as a Midwesterner and a mother, as well as artist/curator/professor? (And hasn’t he ever heard of “normcore”?) This kind of condescending writing is a pattern with Johnson. Major complaints of racism and sexism have been lodged before about his writing, most recently two years ago when he was called out widely in public for “irresponsible generalities” regarding women and black artists. Once again, Johnson hangs his so-called criticism on his subject personally, in terms that seem to both diagnose her and reduce her to a cliché of her demographic. That’s textbook sexism. Johnson has the right to say whatever he wants about the work, but the point is how and why. What does it mean that the NYT does not seem to care about the politics of his language? I’m not surprised by Johnson’s writing at this point, but I am surprised that this insulting review could pass muster with the Editor of the New York Times.

Amy Sillman

[Johnson’s response]

Taking Sillman’s points one by one:
1. I don’t think Grabner’s resume should place her above criticism. Sillman doesn’t mention, by the way, that Grabner curated her (Sillman’s) paintings into this year’s Whitney Biennial. She’s not exactly a disinterested observer.
2. I thought that in a short review, simply describing the works in the show would be enough for an informed reader to get the underlying conceptual/feminist dimension of Grabner’s project. Had I spelled it out, it still would not have changed what I felt was an irritating spirit of self-satisfaction and obliviousness to her own privileged social position in the exhibition. Normcore or not, I still think the works in the show are bland and not in an illuminating way. They certainly didn’t make me care about the math and science of paper weaving.
3. I may have underestimated the degree to which Grabner intended the show as self-satire. If so, I’d say the show wasn’t satirical enough. That would only slightly modify my basic criticism. If Grabner did intend self-satire, than why would Sillman object to my idea of satirizing what I characterize as “the comfortably middle-class, tenured professor soccer mom”? This seems to me contradictory on Sillman’s part and humorlessly so. (I once was a soccer dad married to a soccer mom who also was a tenured professor of art. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a soccer mom.)
4. Sillman’s charges of racism and sexism are slanderous and based on misreadings of two of the thousands of things I’ve written for the Times over the years. You would think that Sillman would be more sensitive about tossing around such accusations after Grabner was much criticized for including in the Whitney Biennial works by Joe Scanlan that were supposed to have been made by the fictional African American artist Donnelle Woolford and for not including more works by real black artists. It’s a serious thing to accuse someone of racism and sexism. If someone claims there’s a pattern of racism and sexism in what I’ve been writing over over the past 30 years, then that person should be obliged to prove it. I don’t think it’s provable in my case. I think it would be easier to prove the opposite.

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September 12 to October 19, 2013
533 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212.714.9500

Aldo Tambellini’s show at James Cohan harkens a return of a prophet of the Space Age. An upcoming screening of his films at MoMA is eagerly anticipated and is prefigured in a revelatory way in this exhibition of restructured projections. The show, elegantly curated by Joseph Ketner, also includes single-minded cosmic abstractions on paper, old and recent. Tambellini was in the thick of pioneering efforts in the 1960s with cameraless film and total projection environments, and most originally, with video signals treated as dancing, self-immolating kinetic spirits. To achieve these last works –– very new media at the time –– Tambellini “prepared” cathode ray technology along the lines of a John Cage piano.  On view, aside from real-time performances of these altered TVs preserved on video or film, is a remarkable set of unique electrostatic contact prints, which don’t quite freeze the instant.  These are genuinely spooky and luscious, almost in the way of Victor Hugo’s or Roland Flexner’s uncanny ink fantasias.

Multiple projections make for the central event here, a new assembly comprising films, videos, text and light pieces past and present, now spliced together with digital facility, and perhaps giving a taste of Tambellini as an impressario of downtown avant-garde cacophony in venues such as the Black Gate Theater in the mid-1960s. Here the main room’s overall texture is like a rush-hour crowd in Times Square on a snowy winter evening: dark, teeming, and competitive, yet from a certain distance, statistical and atomic in its behavior. Tambellini’s resolute palette of black and white, along with his obsession with cosmic expansion traced in short shamanic phrases and by the recurring form of the spiral, unify the competing voices to some degree; we might even notice how a historic audio clip of a rocket launch countdown is echoed by a 3-2-1 strip of film leader (equally the relic of another era).

Looking past the wry suspicions cast on spirals and mystic truths by Bruce Nauman in 1967 with his iconic neon sign, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, Tambellini’s revival may help us reconnect to a time neither nostalgic nor ironic. The advance of the Space Age was terrifying, yet full of potential. A key phrase of Tambellini’s, “We Are The Primitives Of A New Era,” serves for the show’s title.  Perhaps it can help us to imagine a more sublime destiny for mankind than the one that now muddles toward Bethlehem to be born.

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