February 22 to March 31, 2017
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
fordhamuniversitygalleries.com

Carleen Sheehan has curated a small but intriguing exhibition at Fordham that brings out new ideas from two fearlessly inventive artists, Diana Cooper and Lee Boroson, each better known for large installations. Cooper’s relentless assemblage practice, a thoroughly original kind of 3-D doodling that began with large felt-tip drawings but grew to encompass sculpture and photography, has been colonizing walls and floors since the mid-1990s. Here she shows a barely contained wall piece and projects a fascinating site-specific video, her first work in that medium. Boroson’s installations have often included enormous pneumatic elements that encroach from the ceiling. He outdid himself with a breathtaking installation in 2014 at Mass MoCA, Plastic Fantastic, which filled a football field-sized gallery with symbolic, alchemical transmutations of industrial materials back into base elements –– air, water, fire, and earth. For Prismatic Shifts he works comparatively fast, cheap, and out of control –– and small! –– but with the same drive to reclaim synthetic matter for nature, through organic metaphor.

It can work the other way around too. The maple twigs in Boroson’s Ruderal Object (all works 2017) are cut at zig-zag angles and reattached into bebop rhythms. A ruderal plant is one growing in wasteland; the breezy way the vivisected twigs are balanced on a slight steel armature, interspersed with mirrored disks and colorful foam-core placards, transforms forgotten weeds and studio leftovers, as it seems, into music. His Clear Cut also makes use of tree parts, with a forest of cut logs supporting an undulating tabletop. Here, though, Boroson digs into sculptural mass and patient construction. The curvy top element, extruded with accordion folds of paper like an automobile air filter, gives off a Roberto Burle Marx vibe, with tropical color provided by a collage of circles made from notion-shop ribbons, sliced into small angled sections and joined polygonally. The overlapping circles of vivid color standing out on the clean white table top recall tree growth rings, rain drops in a pond, and synesthetic Arthur Dove foghorns. Their psychedelic quality makes one also want to imagine them as beautiful drink stains from the aftermath of a party.

Cooper’s Undercover, a reworking of a wall piece first shown in 2010, serves as a sampling of her goofy constructivism, and of her color-coordinated palette of diverse materials –– most of them, as with Boroson, synthetic, including foils, gels and plastics; grids, dowels and corrugations; fasteners and tapes; and, as always, ink. Amid the dense, primarily black and white complex of layered silhouettes and graphic filigrees, a small photograph of a glass door recurs. Beyond the door is a curving pedestrian bridge, conceivably a campus-scape from the original installation site. A discreet black belt bars the way, however, and the phrase “Emergency Exit, Alarm Will Sound” is superimposed on the glass. She has shown increasing interest in institutional architecture and surveillance, simultaneously as critical subject matter and raw object matter. Here, the dysfunction of the glass doors, proffering escape while denying access, mirrors Cooper’s enigmatic, possibly absurd attempts to possess space through transparent films and overlapping framings. A sort of coda, detached to the right of the main body of Undercover, thrusts a kludged-together, “off the wall” extension arm forward holding a translucent version of the photo, as if the image were appearing on a security monitor.

The show is strongest where the artists respond to the site. For Breach, Boroson uses a high window in the gallery to hang sewn strips of velvet, a cascading coat of many colors, which spreads onto the floor like a waterfall. Boroson has re-imagined cascades of water in a number of impressive fabric works, but all of them have been monochrome. In the Bible, Joseph’s coat was torn, drenched in goat’s blood and shown to Jacob as proof that the favorite son had been killed by wild beasts. The more pertinent Bible myth put in play by Boroson’s hand-made elementalism is, of course, the Flood. Still, blood and betrayal can be read into Breach’s implicit warning about climate change, with the gallery’s high window resembling a basement vent from which nature’s spectacular wrath pours down, as if from rising seas.

As noted, Cooper’s untitled 9-minute video (2016-17) is the artist’s first work in that medium. It is so successful that one wonders what was holding her back. Using footage of an escalator bank across the lobby as raw material, much as she uses plastic gridding or multiple snapshots, she creates mesmerizing patterns through division and multiplication. Foreshortened close-ups of the meshing treads, repeated in mirror image again and again, produce uncanny spatial folds and faults across the visual field.

One minute, two conflicting shots share the screen; the next, a hundred video boxes of the same shot make a collage of grids. Just when a pattern achieves a kind of Rodchenko-like clarity or Jeremy Blake-like drama, however –– that is, when we forget about the escalator and see only abstract forms in motion –– Cooper changes things up, unhinging obvious symmetries and bringing us back to the curious facts of institutional architecture and artistic impulse. You can see the escalators through the gallery’s glass doors, and you can hear their lonesome mechanical breath. The sound track of the video is the site itself.

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Lance Esplund, Deborah Garwood, and Raphael Rubinstein joined David Cohen to review Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Elizabeth Murray at the Museum of Modern Art, Jeremy Blake at Feigen Contemporary and Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed at Zach Feuer.

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Can video become the new painting? Not just in the art scene, where video takes an ever larger slice of the exhibition pie, but in the aesthetic sense as well. “Autumn Almanac,” a recent show by Jeremy Blake at Feigen in Chelsea has me wondering.

Blake included some small paintings, as well as one of the terrific large photo collages that first brought him to attention. But as with his last couple of exhibitions the signature piece was a knockout video projection in the main gallery. Filling one entire wall, “Reading Ossie Clark,” 2003, is a nine minute loop of overlaid images obliquely referencing the life of 60/70s British fashion superstar Ossie Clark. It is Blake’s most representational work to date, and one of his most ambitious.

Images of Clark and Twiggy-like models, along with other pop imagery from the time, blend, merge, bleed, and seep into one another, all tied together by a psychedelic mélange of high key colors. More poetry than prose, the narration by Clarissa Dalrymple (viewers can choose to watch with or without the voice over) is a rambling series of excerpts from Ossie Clark’s diary, including references to the famous people that Clark mingled with and prodigious amounts of drugs consumed.

Blake’s references and quotations from Clark’s diary aside, “Reading Ossie Clark” is hardly just another episode of Biography. With its disembodied narration and jumbled images, one would be hard pressed to find literal meaning. But the texture of the times is indelibly etched; “Reading Ossie Clark” gives as full an impression in nine minutes of the milieu it covers as Ted Demme’s 2001 film “Blow” does in 2 hours. It can do this because, in spite of its physical resemblance to film, structurally it more closely resembles painting.

Film is linear, a structural characteristic it shares with music, literature, dance, theatre, and poetry. That is, they all have this in common: a beginning, middle, and an end. Because “Reading Ossie Clark” is a video, there is a logical tendency to think of it as film, with all of the critical and historical criteria that would naturally accompany that assessment. But there are key elements that belie that analysis and suggest that the more proper criteria for comparison may be painting.

Painting offers a system where the content is circular, not linear, a structural characteristic it shares with sculpture, photography and drawing. You can enter a painting anywhere and exit wherever you wish. Paintings can be viewed for minutes, hours, days, or merely out of the corner of your eye as you move through a room. In short, it affords a non-judgmental compression or expansion of the participant’s interaction time. Blake and a handful of other video artists would adopt painting’s circular content over film’s linear one.

When did video art begin to move away from film and toward a separate identity? As early as the mid-seventies, artists in universities began using computers to edit and manipulate video on computers – Dan Sandin’s Image Processor, created in 1973 at the University of Illinois, was one of the early examples. (Feeling nostalgic? click here). Even as primitive as the first Sandin Image Processor was by current standards, it allowed artists a way to easily alter and edit live video in real time – without the delay, limitations, or costs of using film labs. Today any artist with a personal computer and a couple of hundred dollars worth of software has nearly professional grade video editing at their finger tips. Jeremy Blake was born in 1971, he grew up using computers.Notes on… Jeremy Blake, by Deven Golden

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“Jeremy Blake: Autumn Almanac” at Feigen Contemporary through December 20 (535 W 20 Street, between 10 and 11th Aves, 212 929 0500)

“Aristides Logothetis: Speculative Grammar” at Cue Art Foundation through January 24 (511 W 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Aves, 212-206-3583)

“Augusto Arbizo: Rise and Fall” at Polytechnic at Michael Steinberg Fine Art through December 23 (526 W 26 Street 9F (between 10 and 11th Aves, 212 924 5770)

“Urban Baroque” is an astute, focused four-person show at Plane Space, the handsome, year old West Village gallery. London-based curator Lisa Ivorian Gray has brought together three established young Brits, Ian Dawson, Anya Gallaccio and Steve McQueen, and an emerging American, Drew Lowenstein, in a refreshing, intelligent mix.

While the title has a good ring to it, the use of the word Baroque doesn’t bear too close scrutiny. It ought to connote emotional excess, knowing rule subversion, and theatrical directness. Roman bells and smells can also help. The artist who best most evokes this last attribute is Ms. Gallaccio. She has been active on the London scene since the 1980s and has devoted her career, to the best of my knowledge, to a single idea. Luckily, it’s a cute one: She arranges fresh cut flowers in a modernist grid under a sheet of thick glass, either on the floor or, as on this occasion, on the wall, and leaves them, over the course of an exhibition, to their inevitable, inexorable decay.

Mr. McQueen is a Turner Prize winner and video artist of subtlety and depth. Alas, his somewhat slight contribution here conforms to a stereotypical (think Damien Hirst) view of young British art: pristinely executed renderings of vague nastiness. The seven C-prints sealed within plexi that capture rolled up rags rotting in gutters are hardly Carravaggio. On the other hand, Mr. McQueen and Ms. Gallacio set a tone of slick rot which the other two artists extend in more suggestive ways.

The juxtaposition of Mr. Dawson’s enigmatic sculptures and Mr. Lowenstein’s graffiti- and Sci-Fi-inspired lyrical abstraction is what makes this show worth the journey. Mr. Dawson, who was given a solo exhibition this summer at Chelsea’s James Cohan Gallery, subjects found plastic industrial containers to the blow torch to produce weird contortions, a kind of postmodernized Arp. The sense of nature reclaiming artifice with avengance connects with the flowers and rags, but Mr. Dawson’s rich, ambiguous work is more individual and laive than his copatriots’. His sculpture has just the right mix of banality and otherness.

Drew Lowenstein is genuinely Baroque in his collision of salon abstraction and street attitude. He favors raw canvas and seemingly arbitrary stains for his grounds and a highly developed calligraphy (plus occasional bursts of cartooning and graffiti) for his figure. His mark-making is at once fastidious, fiddly, expressive and aloof. It looks as if he has mastered some lost semitic script, and like Islamic or Jewish micrographers, who arrange text into motifs or geometric patterns, he has his marks accumulate into vaguely depictive forms: In his case, what could read as space ships or ancient cities are poised on the brink of legibility. By showing Mr. Lowenstein with three emissaries of Cool Brittania, Ms. Ivorian Gray has emphasized both the funkiness and earnestness of this underrated New Yorker.

If Urban Baroque puts you in the mood for perfidious Albion, be sure to catch Jeremy Blake’s retro riot of a DVD, “Reading Ossie Clark,” on show at Feigen Contemporary through this weekend. Clark was the great celebrity fashion designer of 1960s Swinging London.

Choice quotes from Clark’s recently published diaries (“Marianne bought a suede suit trimmed in python with a fluted peplum and never asked the price”) are narrated in a suitably plush, Julie Christie-like accent by New York artworld impresario Clarissa Dalrymple. Phrases like “She comes in color” and “One snort of cocaine makes me into a new man, and that man wants two snorts” rub up against a montage of period film clips and fashion plates over which abstract psychedelic animation is louchely layered in correspondingly gaudy hues.

The result would have been nine delectable minutes of an acid trip down memory lane were it not for the fact that you have to pass a display of puny paintings to exit the gallery. Mr. Blake’s whimsical and ephemeral vision is perfectly suited to the editing room, but his painting, in the now ubiquitous knowingly inept “it’s okay that it’s crappy because it’s only from photographs” style is a real let down. You need to watch your back if you’re painting Celia Clark, Ossie’s Missus and the muse of David Hockney.

For more fun and games with clothing, check out Aristides Logothetis at Cue, the admirable new non-profit space in West 25th Street’s Whitehall Building. Cue awards debut (or “too long since”) shows to emerging or neglected artists who are picked for the honor by guest curators. Athens-born Mr. Logothetis was the choice of William Fagaly, former assistant director of the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Mr. Logothetis orchestrates a rapturous interplay of forms in paintings and sculptures that reference DNA models, microscope slides, fashion, and Fifties decor. One piece, “Protein,” (2003), a five foot high open-form sculpture made from Bermuda shorts joined at the leg openings and filled with foam and cement, puts you in mind of a giant cell structure, perhaps the protein of the title. The pulsating blobs and lozenges of “Tabla Bubbly,” (2001), a riff on early Ad Reinhardt or Bradley Walker Tomlin, assume a new significance in company with the assemblages.

There is a cheeky subversiveness to the back and forth banter throughout this show between garish plaids and minimalist grids. The deft interaction of tennis balls and fabric in “Blorb,” (2000), in which bright colored stripes are suggestively pulled and stretched, looks like an unlikely collaboration between Louise Bourgeois and Ellsworth Kelly. There is all sorts of nifty play with biomorphized handbags and writhing neck-ties. Never has the modern sculptural convention of the “disagreeable object” looked so agreeable.

A more sedate set of connections, sanctioned by art history, nonetheless produces sumptuous and suggestive results in the work of the Phillipenes-born painter, Augusto Arbizo. His show, entitled “Rise and Fall”, marries the romantic landscape idiom and abstract expressionism.

Readers of Robert Rosenblum’s classic text “Modern Painting and The Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko” would be forgiven, however, for pointing out that this couple have already been living in sin for quite a while.

Mr. Arbizo starts his large, weird, glossy canvases with chance gestures which he proceeds to interpret, discovering in the congealing paint a glowing moon within forlorn trees or a dense forest of algae.

Of course, this strategy extends much further back than Professor Rosenblum and his romantics (original and latter day) to Leonardo, who extolled the suggestiveness of stains and accidental patterns to the landscapist. While Mr. Arbizo more closely recalls Rorschach tests, Max Ernst’s forests, and Jay DeFeo’s legendary Rose (currently on view at the Whitney incidentally) than Leonardo, he adds a welcome contemporary twist to the occult strain in landscape painting.

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