Thursday, April 8 at 7 PM

JENNIFER COATES and DAVID HUMPHREY join DAVID COHEN to discuss

Julie Mehretu at the Whitney and Matthew Bollinger: Furlough at Zürcher Gallery, plus musical bonus

Timed reservations are required to view exhibitions at the Whitney

Whitney Museum of American Art: 99 Gansevoort Street, between Washington Street and 10th Avenue
Zürcher Gallery, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery

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April 14 to May 19, 2017
2130 Magnum Circle
Lincoln, Nebraska

Nestled amidst repair shops within an industrial stretch of “O” Street in Lincoln, Nebraska near the overpass of Highway 77 (the Homestead Highway), is an establishment that fits the very definition of Wallace Shawn’s line, in My Dinner with Andre (1981; dir. Louis Malle),“ I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out!” The cigar store in this case is a gallery, Fiendish Plots. Since 2013, this space run by Charley Friedman and Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez is generating a local cultural renaissance. . Following a strong exhibition of paintings by New York-based Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Fiendish Plots now presents Phrogz, a show of collaborative works by Jennifer Coates and David Humphrey. The show takes its title from a band in which the two, who are married, perform an eccentric mix of folk, jazz, and original compositions.

Greeting the visitor are singular paintings by each exhibitor, introducing them as independent artists. Side walls of the gallery hold collaborative works: on one side, a pair of similarly modest-sized rectangular canvasses, and facing them, 42 works on paper of varying sizes installed salon-style. David has created the stack of quirky hand-drawn and photocopied price sheets, provided near the front door, which map out the numbered, but untitled, works on display in the exhibit. He has even included electrical outlets to help visitors maintain their orientation.

Although these two artists present very different imagery in their individual pieces, they share a cartoonish graphic approach and a highly attuned painterly touch, which make them ideally suited to create a totally cohesive collaborative work of art.

The image of a giant pink-skinned nude fertility goddess standing in a landscape dominates Humphrey’s Nature Girl. The main focus of the figure is her upper torso and head (her legs are cut off at the knees). Numerous breasts dotted with cadmium red nipples fan across and balloon out all around her body. They morph together in sections and frame her head like an awkward crown. Her sexual orifices are also plentiful. Seemingly, the figure’s only fully functioning appendage is her left arm, which bends upward, presenting an unenthusiastic power fist. Punching out awkwardly from the right side of the woman is what I find to be the most mysterious and disturbing aspect of this figure, an outgrowth that is a combination of a fist and an ass. This bulbous pink form contains black oddly shaped cavities sitting within its fleshy form like watermelon seeds. Cadmium red marks are skillfully scored in and around these orifices, which remind me of the type of hieroglyphic lines that one might find in a comic bubble used to describe a pissed-off character. This body part seems to carry the bulk of the woman’s emotional weight, since the expression on her generically attractive face—with its red lipstick and medium-length, brown hair—appears to be without thought. Behind this mysterious goddess are the standard trappings of a landscape: a brown tree with green foliage and red blossoms. Some lighter-toned green triangular trees sit deeper in the picture plane, and some grey, stone-colored mountains cut across the horizon. Quick, bold strokes of two bright-toned blues define a sky.

Painterly, swooping, brushed-in greens activate the bottom of the canvas, and blocked-in areas of violet and grey hug the right and top edge of the picture plane, nicely framing the aforementioned bright blues of the sky.

Besides my strange intrigue with the woman’s “orafist,” I was equally fascinated by a grey-bricked short end of an odd, long, low wall, painted in extreme two-point perspective. Sitting in the middle ground of the landscape, this barrier seems to be blocking a brown dirt mound. I haven’t a clue what it’s doing in the painting, but without its odd grounding and mysterious presence, the entire landscape in the painting would become fragmented and lost.

Coates’s painting, Snickers Bar, presents a bold cross-section of the iconic candy. The core composition of this bar’s interior, with a chocolatey brown skin framing its interior ingredients, fits tightly within a neutral photo-grey background. Painted over a neon-orange ground, Coates allows the glowing color to penetrate the caramel and peanut upper strata. A warm orangey-brown and bright-toned violet hold warmer-hued yellows that define peanut-shaped forms and crunchy bits. The painting’s lower section of nougat is more muted. It reads like an area that was once flooded by thinner and quieter passages of purples and greens. The impasto brush marks create a stronger physical presence in the middle of this murkier section. In contrast with the warmth of the caramel and peanut layer, the defining marks of nougat have dried into raised scars. The only things that could be perceived as still “wet” in the lower part of the cross-sectioned form are some runny oily lines that have trailed off the lower left corner and bottom of this slice of candy, linear stains that add nice stickiness. The candy bar structure conveys what is clearly the artist’s deeper interest and historical reference: abstract form and non-objective painting. To quote the catalogue from her show, All U Can Eat, which took place at Freight + Volume in New York in 2016, she advised, “Please consider communing with your ancestors the next time you enter the Snickers.”

The dream-like scenarios of Jennifer Coates and David Humphrey open up endless possible narratives and illuminate an enormous depth of pictorial invention. The reason I have concentrated on the descriptions of their individual efforts is because their collaborative works present such an array of variations in surface invention, graphic intelligence, and figurative ingenuity, painterly experimentation. In his book, Blind Handshake: Art Writing + Art, 1990 – 2008, David has quoted his 1998 essay, Hi My Name is Artwork, that I think perfectly encapsulates the nature of these collaborative paintings.

Works we love often seem to aid insights that come from us, not necessarily about ourselves, but our best self. These special works seem to have significance above the others by virtue of their capacity to bring us a heightened sense of our singularity on the shared plane of culture. Some works almost seem to recognize themselves as we change over the years; they grow with us and share our power to resist to assimilate.

Yes, you’ll find many works in this show, but this is the kind of exhibition where each image unveils new surprises and presents new questions with every viewing. I will touch on just two of the collaborative works to illustrate the artists’ combined invention. Consider their image of two clothespin-shaped, pinkish-colored nudes with scrubby beards wearing tube socks in a forest of painterly brown and violet grey-toned foliage-free trees. Their shadowed faces look like grey Halloween masks turned up onto the top of one’s head. They stare in open-mouthed amazement at something above them and out a view. A series of thin, strategically-placed cadmium red lines of varied curves seem to give a surprising volume to these otherwise flat individuals donning only socks. A group of somewhat forlorn-faced white sheep have come out of the acidic yellow and green sunny background, and into the slightly cooler aqua green ground cover of this same forest. Standing to the right of these stunned nudes, they stare out at the viewer and provide a nice pause that both stokes the humor and adds an opening read to this absurd painting.

In a somewhat lager work on paper, a highly abstracted warm blueish violet-toned figurative form seems to be bathing in the darkness of a clearly defined deep blue, violet, and green night sky filled with connect-the-dot constellations. Sitting on a bright blue and white gingham-patterned tablecloth, a strange illuminating light reveals this figure’s pink butt cheeks. After viewing this painting, I kept thinking of the prison cell scene in the film noir The Killers (1946; dir. Robert Siodmak). Staring out through from a little cell window, one character says to the other, “You see that bright star in the center. . . brightest star in all the heavens. Only it’s so far away, it don’t seem like it.”?

Matthew Sontheimer is Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His work is represented by the Talley Dunn Gallery, in Dallas, Texas, and the Devin Borden Gallery, in Houston Texas, and can be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York.

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September 21, 2008–January 5, 2009
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
between Fifth and Sixth avenues
212 718 9400

September 2 to December 6, 2008
Hunter College: The Leubsdorf Art Gallery
68th Street and Lexington Avenue,  SW corner
212 772 4991

September 25 to November 15, 2008
Hunter College: Times Square Gallery
450 West 41st Street
between 9th and 10th avenues

Nightfall can inspire fascination with the starry sky, optimistic hopes for fulfilled sexual desire, or at least anticipation of  sleep. But it can also cause anxiety if you are lonely, which is why van Gogh described The Night Café (1988), at MoMA, as showing a place where “dark forces lurked and suppressed human passions could suddenly explode.” As Joachim Pissarro, the curator of the  MoMA show and co-curator (with Mara Hoberman and Julia Moreno) of the two-part Hunter show explains, the forty-some Hunter artists in effect answer the question: How would van Gogh respond to night were he to have available our sensibility and artistic media?

Van Gogh might enjoy the way that Vija Celmins, Jennifer Coates, Lauren Orchowski, and Pat Stein show the night sky, in their contemporary versions of The Starry Night (1889). And he could be fascinated with how such works as Gregory Crewdson’sUntitled (penitent girl) (2001-2002), which shows a young woman in her underwear facing someone (her mother perhaps)  in a suburban driveway, and Kohei Yoshiyuki’s 1970s photographs showing men watching nighttime sexual activity in Japan’s parks, all extend the social commentary of The Potato Eaters (1885). The worker in The Sower (1888) deserves comparison with the man in David Hammons’s video Phat Free (1994-1999), who is kicking a can through the streets at night and in the gay nightclub in Love is all Around (2007), a video by Marc Swanson and Neil Gust. If Laurent Grasso’s Infinite Light (2006/2008) mounted on the college’s pedestrian bridges, which repeats the words “night for day” can be associated with the Enlightenment,  so too can Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon (1889). And Stan Douglas’s Every Building in 100 West Hastings (2001),  a long narrow image of a street in Vancouver,  is a photographic version of Terrace of a Café at Night (Place du Forum) (1888).

But none of these van Goghs show a person asleep,  like Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963), the film of his lover John Giorno, and no image seems ominous enough to match the title of Claude Lévéque’s neon La nuit pendant que vous dormez je détruis le monde (2007). Van Gogh did not depict ecological disaster, like Susan Crile in her Charred Earth (1994), an image of the oil wells set on fire by the retreating Iraqis. Nor in his nighttime images does he show such extreme light and darkness as in Grasso’s L’éclipse (2006), a video montage of a solar eclipse and sunset. In some ways, then, the ways  that night is experienced and represented in visual art have changed dramatically. Vera Lutter uses a camera obscura to create photographic negatives, 30th Street Station, Philadelphia, II: April 17, 2006 (2006) while Thomas Ruff deploys a night-vision enhancer to give an uncannily menacing feeling to the apartment building photographed in Nacht 2 I (1992). And yet, we can recognize real continuities between van Gogh’s world and ours, for his Wood Gatherers in the Snow(1884) presents a setting not entirely unlike that of Barney Kulok’s digital transparencyStillman Avenue, Queens, NY (2004).

Almost inevitably, the representation nighttime invokes political metaphors, as Kant’s seminal essay “What is Enlightenment?” (1784) recognizes. To become enlightened, to move into the well-lit world of reason, he explains, “all that is needed is freedom . . freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.” After you walk into David Claerbout’s installation, when your eyes adjust to the nearly complete darkness, the photograph inNightscape Lightbox (second) (2002-2003) becomes visible. But how do we understand this metaphorical association between reason and light? In his Kantian reading of the origins of modernism, Clement Greenberg associated avant-garde art with  our capacity to become self-critically enlightened. Nowadays our post-historical art historians are more likely to appeal to the authority of Hegel and his successor, Marx.

But for Hegel, so Pissarro observes, night is disturbing because we see only the black sky, while by contrast for Kant, in looking at the stars we also find within ourselves an awareness  of the sublime moral law, which, Pissarro continues,  anticipates the way that night can liberate “pent-up drives . . . . from voyeurism to exhibitionism to the endless peripatetic cruising through bars and clubs of all kinds” that we see exhibited in these pictures. For Hegel, then, the absence of light at night marks absence, the absence of light meaning that the world has become invisible to our sight, but for Kant it is possible to respond to night in a more excited and positive way. In  drawing attention to the manifold continuities between van Gogh’s art world and ours, by identifying the ways that we need to think politically about the meaning of representations of night, these exhibitions offer very challenging speculation on our situation, suggesting that Kant has more to offer art writers right now than do Hegel and Marx. Making that journey at nighttime through central Manhattan from MoMA to the Hunter galleries, which are within easy walking distance, inevitably inspires many reflections about the subject of this extraordinary three-part exhibition.

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“brush, pencil, chisel, knife”
511 Gallery, 511 West 25 Street (212.255.2885).

Industrial Beauty
George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street (212.645.2621).

Synthesis: Experiments in Collaboration
Axel Raben Gallery, 526 West 26 Street, (212.647.9064).

Joan Brown: Painted Constructions
George Adams Gallery, 41 West 57 Street, 212.644.5665).

Versions of these reviews originally appearedThe New York Sun on Thursday, July 22 and Thursday, July 29, 2004

Willard Boepple: Sculpture

Willard Boepple is a sculptor whose vocabulary draws from the look and language of architecture. Architecture is a social art, a reflective instrument of the society for which it builds. Any sculpture that aggressively refers to it, leaning on the prestige of the architect’s craft, makes itself vulnerable to distinctions between the communal aims of architecture and the more individualistic ones of fine art. It risks the charge of mimicry, which is what remains once structural complexity, weight-bearing concerns and purposes of shelter and assembly are removed.“Room” (2000) is a nine foot high skeletal house-shape in patinated aluminum. Light on its feet and open like a trellis, each of its four sides resembles the leading of Frank Lloyd Wright’s characteristic stained glass windows. Here are the same closely paired verticals on each side of a broader rectangle, joined at intervals by short parallel bars. Where quadrangles of colored glass might be, Mr. Boepple drops aluminum panels perpendicular to their posts to serve as shelving.

Viewers are likely to wonder where on the lawn this shining gazebo would show to best effect. Seen straight, unfiltered through the lens of stylish discourse, it is unmistakably an upmarket garden folly. Picture it covered with wisteria vines, shelves stocked with dahlias and wild strawberries in Italian pots. Yes, I know the thought is inadmissible “in the ateliers of any pedantic fine art,” to use Wright’s phrase; and it is hardly what Mr. Boepple intended. But what an artist intends and what he achieves are not identical. It is a fallacy to confuse them.Mr. Boepple’s three dense, painted poplar “temples”, each from 2003, suggest compressed tabletop rearrangements of David Smith’s rectangular forms for “Cubi IX” (1961). Anyone interested in modern sculpture will be reminded also of the cubical variations of Jacques Schnier and Hans Aeschenbacher from the same period.

Designated as temples, Mr. Boepple’s block configurations assert kinship with the ancient megaron, precursor to Doric structures. (The megaron informs Wright’s Unity Church, which he referred to as a temple.) But Mr. Boepple’s suppressed entrances do not lead to any interior sanctum; they go clear through to the other side. Sacred space is displaced by a box puzzle, a simplified maze that exposes its own blind alley. If you rest a drink on top, no deities will be offended.

brush, pencil, chisel, knife”

511 Gallery (formerly Miller/Geisler) celebrates its name change with a group show of 13 of its artists. The exhibition is ambitious, aspiring to stretch common understanding of what constitutes painting and sculpture. It promises art that moves beyond crusty constraints to become more elastic in definition.

Lurking here is the assumption that tradition is an antique, like the stiffened antimacassar on the back of great-grandpa’s chair. It is an attitude aimed at audiences who comprehend tradition as a reiteration of the past rather than an inheritance to be interpreted by each generation for its own purposes.

511 showcases the fruits of that mistake. Post-industrial folk art is the reigning genre. Unlike the pre-industrial kind, made by untrained individuals, the post variant is a mass product forged in an art school vernacular. Outsider art is now insider art, a reversal enabled by pundits, promoters and academics for whom artwork exists as a mere incident en route to the commentary.

Jennifer Odem dyes a cheap crocheted table cloth red, soaks it in acrylic medium, then flops it on the floor to set. Ed Fraga takes the votive path with “Cathedral” ( 2001), a crude plywood construction that cobbles a headless Christmas ornament with a tiny landscape cut to the shape of a palladium window. Epoxy is his crucial medium. Matt Ernst’s series of small “Guideboats” (2002) gives a good imitation of the sort of thing children carry home from camp. Mark Cooper’s “Endless Column” (2002) is a roadside totem, cousin to ones that appear along the East River Drive under the overpass to the Triborough Bridge.

The most persuasive works are by those artists who are not straining for a style. Bryan Le Boeuf’s “Trois Bateaux” (2004), the centerpiece of his recent solo show, gives evidence of maturing to certain artistic convictions, something quite different from style. He combines sympathy for the human figure with a quirky, mildly surreal compositional wit. Watch to see where he takes it.

Sculptor Mark Mennin is similarly satisfying, mindful of the traditions of his craft. His single, small marble “Head” (2003) is a finely worked mask of a fleshy, homely male elevated by materials to a solemnity the model might lack in life. It projects from the wall at a slight angle, reminiscent of medieval gargoyles or a portrait head from the sedilia in Westminster Abbey.

Popular appreciation of landscape hinges on the romance of a good view. By contrast, the scenery of urban infrastructures—the natural setting of urban artists—is more challenging.

Even middling painters can produce attractive pictures of beautiful places. It takes more robust sensibilities to seek order and grace in city sights readily ignored. Easy pleasure is not available. Viewers are on their own to discover the emotional keynote to scenes that have nothing picturesque about them.

Industrial Beauty

“Industrial Beauty” exhibits cityscape paintings and drawings by 24 artists. So much intelligent work is here that there is not enough column space to give it its due. Let me start with Stephen Hicks who impresses with the beauty of his paint handling and the vigor of his perceptions. He brings emotional depth to ordinary street corners and mobile homes. Pitch-perfect color and careful drawing, disguised by the fluidity of his paint, elevate these small paintings above the random realities they depict.

Elizabeth O’Reilly draws magic out of the 3rd Street Bridge and derelict buildings on the Gowanus Canal. True as her paintings are to their locations in and around Red Hook, they serve as microcosms of the effects of modernity on the outer boroughs of every city. She shares with Mr. Hicks a lively brush and an optimism toward her subjects. Nicholas Evans-Cato’s wide-angled “Panorama” (2003) captures the atmospheric damp of rain-washed streets. Shadowless gray light, cool tonalities, gleaming puddles and sweep of space evoke Gustave Caillabotte’s Paris on a rainy day.

Ron Milewicz’ “Court House Square” (2003) is a coloristic tour de force, subordinating naturalism to the geometric structures of his motif and a high-keyed palette. The Citicorp building in Long Island City looks glorious in yellow. Geometry is also the hallmark of Rick Dula’s imposing cement factory, mathematical clarity of form taking precedence over subjective sensations.

Andrew Lenaghan negotiates the complexity and visual clutter of urban scenes with an ease of concentration that reminds me of Antonio Lopez-García’s great views of Madrid. So much is depicted, you barely notice how much is merely indicated or left out. Sudden touches of subtle color move the eye around the canvas; smooth surfaces belie the actual density of his paint.

Lois Dodd’s characteristic insouciance lends a hint of whimsy to factories in Jersey City. Richard Orient’s Long Island fish hatchery is touched with the same melancholy that informs rural barns. Thomas Connelly reveals the controlled order of a loading dock; his nightscape of a commercial lot is a harmony of brooding tones.

Diana Horowitz’ courtesy toward the man-made landscape is a constant pleasure. So is the work is Roland Kulla, Stephen Magsig, Constance La Palombara, Andrew Haines, Stanley Goldstein and others here.

Apart from Ms. Dodd, the show contains few names known outside New York painting circles. If celebrity is your guide to quality, you might as well catch the next Hampton jitney. But anyone with eyes will be glad to have seen this show.

Synthesis: Experiments in Collaboration

Collaboration in the arts has a long tradition; and pooling skills to extend the range of individual talent is a worthy activity. So I had hopes for this show.

I should have known better. Unlike the anonymous cooperation of the old workshop system, contemporary couplings exist to produce a two-headed prima donna. In Axel Raben’s exhibition of nine artist pairs, art work takes a rear seat to the synthetic dyads which are the true artifacts. Viewers are thrown into the faithless arms of the press release for guidance.

David Humphrey & Jennifer Coates have a game going: one suggests a subject; the other draws it. Thus, a “composite authorial self” is created. Drawings include a bare-bottomed Santa squatting to pass snowflakes; a cartoon cat biting a bunny beside a plateful of maggots. In this way “habits are disabled, inhibitions are dissolved … and skill-shortcomings encouraged.” Precisely.

Laura Lisbon & Suzanne Silver investigate “the mutual interference of layered mark-making.” They take turns scribbling on legal paper and post-it notes with colored pencil, likening their process to the Talmud (compiled over centuries by multiple commentators). To support their self-assessment, they exhibit their email correspondence, a text inclining to the grand.

Creighton Michaels, an otherwise attractive abstract painter, foregoes painting here for a conceptual gig. He inserts twig-like dowels individually into the wall, creating visual patterns similar to those in a kid’s book of mazes. Mr. Michaels’ installation is lit, sort of, by James Clark’s fluorescent bulbs in plastic bags. Bulbs are spotted with thumb prints, like a perp sheet. Team effort is deemed “an environment … a land of a thousand dances.”

Craig & Sean Miller provide handmade miniature shipping crates topped by a doll house gallery exhibiting a nano-sample of another artist’s work. These may be interpreted as “sculptures, performance pieces or a group portrait of contemporary art practice.” Unless a crate is just a crate.

The unspoken aim of all this conspicuous mutuality is to demonstrate that the artists make the grade as intellectuals. Art making is largely a platform for self-centered egos; the work of hands is a minor interest.

Joan Brown: Painted Constructions

Joan Brown ‘s work was a fey offspring of Bay Area figuration and funk art. Making and breaking rules to suit herself, she could be exasperating but she never bored.

On view at George Adams are works from the early 70’s: cardboard sculptures (begun in her kitchen from household materials while her studio was under renovation); a metal cutout; and large-scale paintings and drawings.

The more distant the post-60’s counter culture becomes, the more the paintings recede into the era and movements that generated them. But the constructions, rarely exhibited in her lifetime (1938-90), convey in full Ms. Brown’s distinctive inventiveness and humor. The fun of their making is still there to be seen.

Assembled here for the first time as a body of work, the constructions articulate a nimble faux-naif sophistication that survives the tropes of their times. Cutout couples dance around the deck of “Luxury Liner” (1973), a Noah’s Ark for party animals. The smokestack belches a musical score. “Divers” (1974) hangs from the ceiling so we can see the swimmers from above and below the water line. “Dancers on a Car” (1973 is just that: a couple waltzing across the hood of a 1940’s-style sedan, a Florine-Stettheimer-like fantasia in 3-D.

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