July 8 to August 12, 2016
170 Suffolk Street (between Houston and Stanton streets)
New York, 212 274 0064

Sticky, squishy, felty, rubbery. Plush, plump, porous.

Part cactus, part snowman-shaped Peep candy, a bulbous form stands a shy distance from the front doors. Shaded a dusty aquamarine, slightly blanched like the surface of freshly cut silicone, three cylindrical volumes perch one atop the other. In tumid contours, this shape vaguely gestures to that the class of object that contains canine chew toys, children’s building blocks, and paraphernalia for the sexually adventurous. Jayson Musson infuses Pedestrian (2014) with unexpected life, bringing the object to the physical scale of the human form. In the placement of this work, curator Feelings (whose book on soft art was published last year by Rizzoli) prepares us for the wealth of sensations to come, abstracted in objects that become bodily in their engagement of ours.

Temptingly tactile, Justin Adian’s works echo gestures that feel intimately human; in Yabba Dabba Doo (2016) a mitted hand crunches closed, while 2^nd Cousins (2016) gives a sidling sway that closes the awkward distance between a baby-boy-blue rectangle and a girlishly pink wave. Spongy, enamel-coated forms cling to gallery walls, creating pastel pop-out patterns detailed by crinkled material and real-life shadow. John Chamberlain’s Untitled (1967) seems to complete these flirtatious motions on the second floor of the gallery, comprised of two partial spheres that kiss, tenderly embracing to become whole.

Guy Goodwin’s cardboard cushions resemble the dotted patterning and depressions of upholstery, an allusion borne out in titles such as Springtime for Henry Grimes (2016). However, we are made sharply aware of the distinction between content and form as Goodwin’s cardboard amoebas stiffly sail through stippled seas. Weirdly plush in volume, these rigid surfaces model structures that they cannot possibly match, distorting internal integrity to achieve the uncanny quality of plastic food or fake hair.

The humble moving blankets that compose Sam Moyer’s series of Night Moves (2009) are impeccably folded, the original patterning of gray and neutral-toned expanses are divided by neat seams, joining one region to another. Regular, orderly ripples traverse each square plane. As with Goodwin’s unyielding bubbles, Moyer’s compositions fall eerily flat, less interested as they are in tactile pleasure, than in clean aestheticism.

Retaliating against hard lines and geometry, Lynda Benglis’s Untitled (1970) makes the fluid discrete in a colorful spill that fails to mar the floor of the gallery. Uneven blocks of color seep stickily in this flow frozen in diffusion, movement caught in permanence. By contrast, Erwin Wurm’s Internal (2016) dissolves that which should have integrity, warping the sturdy exoskeleton of a toaster.

Samara Golden’s pillowy figurative sculptures are tattooed with patterns that feel distinctly, embarrassingly American. Here is the body politic, striated by squiggly bacon strips, foreheads emblazoned with law books and hammering gavels. If we sit too hard and long on the couch — watching conventions, of course — will we too soak up its dull, grandmotherly floral ornamentation? The American flag flourishes across arms upraised in the pose of one of Picasso’s demoiselles. Eyes, painted over these designs and illuminated by a track of fierce gallery lights, look at us coyly sideways. Walk around to other side, and these same limp forms are illuminated by a blacklight that causes a very different relief to manifest: glowing skeletons, skulls, and bones fluoresce. Yet, for these two fronts, there is no substance, no interior.

Airy, insubstantial, empty, hollow, these various works find life in the inanimate and the object in the human. There may not be a whole lot in the way of content here, but that is proudly proclaimed by the exhibition title. This is about substance, but not the intellectual kind; texture is the name of the game and we are awarded with a crunchy, crinkly, plushy show that gives to our gaze as easily and as generously as it would under the weight of a hand. Touch with your eyes. I dare you to feel something.

The post Soft-Core: A Show of Sculpture at Rachel Uffner appeared first on artcritical.

November 4 to December 23, 2010
113 East 90th Street, between Lexington and Park avenues
New York City, 212 987 4997

At Allan Stone Gallery, two artists we know well are caught in a less familiar and surprisingly compatible moment of aesthetic initiation.   In their mature oeuvres, John Chamberlain and Alfred Leslie are artists of markedly different sensibility, both from one another and from these, their own early efforts.  This fascinating and focused show is like a snapshot of smiling infants now famous in utterly different walks of life—a rock star and a politician, say, or a priest and a mobster.  Here are little John and Leslie in their Abstract Expressionist kindergarten, and the toy of choice in the sandbox is collage.

Leslie famously abandoned a budding career as an action painter to achieve renown, via a foray in experimental moviemaking, with precisionist nudes and with an extended, Carravagesque narrative/allegorical series on the death of Frank O’Hara.

John Chamberlain is a sculptural giant of the era of Pop and minimal art whose trademark material of compressed automobile body parts, though expressive and contorted, has formal clarity and chromatic sharpness that contrast with the murky period palette and scruffy, ambiguous layering that permeate these early collages.

Collage, according to Rauschenberg, was the drawing mode of the 20th-century.  Does that make it, to montage one dictum with another, the probity of modernism?  What is beyond dispute is the commonality collage provides to the early experiments of an array of American movements and individuals.  Collage was seminal to formative or transformative moves by artists as disparate as Robert Motherwell, Judith Rothschild, Lee Krasner, Alex Katz, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and – as demonstrated here – Leslie and Chamberlain.

These two men are artists who found themselves in finding.  Their collage is of the manifestly messy variety.  There was actually what could be called, in a nod to Clement Greenberg, an American type collage which is better defined as “cutout” in that it is clean, hard-edged, and reductive, having to do with carving out space and depth rather than modeling in juxtaposed and contrastive forms.

Leslie and Chamberlain, however, are anything but fastidious in their fifties collage.  In fact, somewhat brutalist results are redolent of mess and distress.  These collages can feel like randomly selected patches of an AbExer’s paint-splattered floor in which detritus has been stamped into the floorboards as the painter moves around his workspace.  Tellingly, Chamberlain actually uses acoustic board ceiling panels as his support in a couple of these images.

But in common with many American collagists, and in contrast to classic European experimentation, there is little that is associative about the materials that find their way into these works.  In one Leslie piece from 1953-54 we get a scrap of an ad with GE’s distinctive graphic logo, but this hardly makes him heir to Kurt Schwitters.  Interestingly, Chamberlain, whose future idiom, found and crushed car parts, is shot through to the core with rich and suggestive social meaning, is almost willfully non-objective in his choice of materials.  There are, granted,  a strawberry and a few leaves in a fragment of wallpaper in one piece from 1959-60.

The show includes a number of Chamberlains that are not actually collages at all, but the array of mediums (oil, crayon) and of contrastive washes and impastos brings textures into collision that echo a preoccupation with collage as surely as they prefigure his later infatuation with the car wreck.  His breakthrough into car parts occurred in an act of accidental collage when he grabbed a couple of fenders in Larry Rivers’s back yard that he only realized later belonged to a precious 1929 Model T Ford.

Leslie does, in one or two of his pieces, have something of that carving as opposed to modeling sensibility I’m identifying as “American type” cutout.  Gildo the Moore (Rose) 1951 is quite striking in this respect.  Half a dozen torn, black boulders of paper and two whites partially overlap as they are bolted together against a faintly-colored ground, the rose of the title, that is allowed to peer through the slivers of space between these defiant armor plates of paper.

One strategy the artists have in common is to make potent expressive use out of a functional mode of affix, namely the staple.  This comes across very forcefully in Leslie’s Gildo and an untitled Chamberlain of 1960.  In both images, the arbitrarily directed staples, spare but strategic in Leslie, allover and frenetic in Chamberlain, are like pentimenti that electrify the compositions.  Again, however, the way the staple goes down speaks to differing artistic personalities even as Leslie and Chamberlain tap a common period sensibility.  Leslie uses the staples to find, intuitively rather than geometrically, the corners of his rough-hewn quadrangles, or sometimes to tether the forms to one another.  Chamberlain is altogether more liberal in the way he scatters these boisterous accents across the picture plane.  That said, for all their exuberant abundance, almost every staple pulls its weight as a functional necessity.

That neither artist seems to have stayed with collage is in both their cases a moot point.  The young Chamberlain came of age intellectually at Black Mountain College where the company of poets prompted him to play with language.  When he put together poems on the basis of how the words looked, rather than sounded, he realized, he says, that at heart he is a collagist.  That in a way he remains.  The most recent piece in the show, a mixed media relief of 1961, forcefully signals the direction of his mature sculpture.

For Leslie, the idea that his AbEx career is a different man from the new perceptual realist he became is anathema.  Both bodies of work, he once explained to me, are defined by frontality, confrontation and all-overness.  Differences of look and behavior, so far as he is concerned, are of minor consequence.

The boy is father of the man, as the saying goes, and this is true too of collagists and the sculptors or painter/filmmakers they grow up to be.

The post The Probity of Modernism: Collages by John Chamberlain and Alfred Leslie appeared first on artcritical.

Booker: 30 April to 30 May. 2009
545 West 25th Street
New York City, 212-463-8634

Skreber: 9 May to 27 June, 2009
535 West 22nd Street
New York City, 212-680-9467

The automobile and the art world have engaged each other in a variety of ways during the past fifty years.  Los Angeles artists like Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Larry Bell, Bill Al Bengston, Dwayne Valentine, and Peter Alexander based a new Finish Fetish/Light and Space movement on their fascination with car finishes.  On the east coast, John Chamberlain used abandoned car parts to make sculptures as early as 1961.  In the auto world in1975, BMW began commissioning artists to paint images on its vehicles.  Four of these cars—painted by Warhol, Stella, Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein—were shown in Los Angeles (LACMA) and New York (Grand Central Terminal) this past spring.

Three exhibitions in New York this month show that despite lagging sales of American cars, the car’s role in art works remains undiminished.  Today, it is not the car’s finish that is of primary importance.  Rather, in two of these shows, it is the car parts that are recycled to make sculptures.  John Chamberlain’s impeccably installed show of Early Works at the L & M Gallery includes examples from the first twenty-five years of his career.  Chakaia Booker’s somewhat overcrowded third solo show of recycled tires at Marlborough Chelsea includes work from the past five years.  Both shows contain a wide range of work—large and small scale—presented on pedestals, as wall reliefs and as free-standing floor pieces.  A third show by Dirk Skreber at Friedrich Petzel Gallery uses the whole car, albeit smashed.

In the sculptures of both Chamberlain and Booker, you are not immediately aware of the materials used.  The forms are more obvious than the materials and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  It isn’t until you approach and walk around them that you realize what they are.  In Chamberlain’s case, the steel bumpers and body parts are angled and bent to powerful assemblages that transcend their humble origins.  There are largely monochromatic works along with others works that play with color to achieve lyrical passages that could be either found or painted—you’re not sure which. Relative to Chamberlain’s loud, more jazz-like works, Chakaia Booker’s are quiet, more like visual chamber music.  The tubes and treads seem beautifully balanced and appear to be woven together like the baskets Booker made early in her career.  The result is more mysterious, verging on the sinister, as compared with the more extroverted, playful Chamberlains.

Chamberlain (Miss Remember Ford, 1964) and Booker (Conversion, 2006) can both bring to mind birds or insects.  In addition, both have some anthropomorphic works. The scale and majesty of Chamberlain’s nine-foot tall Remnant Gardens (1986) is reminiscent of Rodin’s heroic The Burghers of Calais and the two smashed steel cans in Socket (1974, 1975) capture the alone-together tension in the relationship between Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”.  Formally, these cans also resemble Eva Hesse’sRepetition Nineteen—two versions of which are current installed at MOMA.    Booker’s 65-inch high, The Feeding of Men (2007) with its protruding steel pipes suggests a somewhat frightening many-breasted female life-giving form.

The ghosts of two dueling AbEx giants can also be found in these shows. Chamberlain’s use of color and dynamism (e.g., Big E, 1962) is reminiscent of DeKooning’s landscapes and seascapes—a point made convincingly in the side-by side exhibition of these two artists at PACE gallery in 2001.   Booker’s large and dense The Fatality of Hope (2007) resembles a Jackson Pollock all-over painting, but with thin lyrical rubber loops extending on all sides.   As with Pollack, her line is set free from form.

Dirk Skreber doesn’t recycle car parts in the same way.  But, like so many others before him, the car—specifically car crashes—is central to his work.   After colliding into poles at a crash test site at the speed of 50 mph, the two cars— each wrapped around a pole—yield riveting sculptures.  It’s hard to take your eyes off them as you circle them.  The red Untitled Crash 1 (2009) of the Mitsubishi Eclipse Spider 2001 enables you to see the entire underbody of the car and resonates with the large tool paintings of Lee Lozano and the late stacked discards of Philip Guston.  The black Untitled Crash 2 (2009) of the Hyundai Tiburon 2001 makes salient the light green cracked glass on the rear window evoking Robert Smithson’s Map of Broken Glass at DIA.  However, Skreber’s cars have a more one-dimensional impact than Chamberlain and Booker’s sculptures that gradually unfold, rewarding repeated viewing.

While the car companies may be on the brink of financial ruin, the artists who use their discarded parts are a long way from artistic bankruptcy.

The post Automobiles: John Chamberlain, Chakaia Booker, Dirk Skreber appeared first on artcritical.

“Dan Flavin and John Chamberlain: Sculptures” at Gagosian Gallery until December 20 (980 Madison Avenue, between 77th and 78th Streets, 212 744 2313)

To say that a show by John Chamberlain is a smash hit will inevitably sound like a bad pun, as the veteran sculptor has made mangled auto-parts his trademark medium. But the exhibition of his early work at Allan Stone, which now has been extended for another month, is a real stunner.

Taking in the period from the late 1950s and early 1960s, the show forces us (literally) to radically rethink this artist, sending us back to his aesthetic roots. The coincidence of a show at Gagosian of less than compelling work from the 1990s, however, arouses a desire to turn the clock on Mr Chamberlain backwards.

Appropriately, in view of his menacingly jagged materials, Mr. Chamberlain doesn’t fit neatly into a stylistic box. Despite his baroque exuberance, the use of impoverished materials and an emphasis on process have associated him with minimal art. Donald Judd was a critical champion and they traded works (a pristine steel cube by Judd actually ends up, suitably crushed, in a piece at Allan Stone by Mr. Chamberlain) while at Gagosian he is being shown with Dan Flavin, and he has a nave of his own at Dia:Beacon, the minimalist cathedral.

Likewise, because of the connotations of mass-production and consumer waste, Pop has grafted itself onto Mr. Chamberlain’s reputation. That the other modern artist who uses crushed autoparts, César, is “nouvelle realiste”, as the French call their pop artists, reinforces this connection.
The show at Allan Stone, however, emphasizes earlier allegiances in a way which makes better sense of of sensibilities and manifest intentions. A butch poetics of scrap comes straight from David Smith and Robert Stankiewicz, while Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline inspire a sense of gesture battling to burst free. The gorgeously convoluted “Nutcracker” (1968) is more like a de Kooning in three dimensions than any of de Kooning’s own (later) sculptures. Mr. Chamberlain had studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where many of the instructors were entranced by notions of chance, which perhaps explains the more than passing resemblance of his collages to the combines of Robert Rauschenberg.

“Hudson” (1960) is rightly extolled as a breakthrough piece, not just because it was apparently the first instance where he appropriated a crushed auto part but because of the substance and volume of this gesture. The earlier, more linear constructions in jagged iron and machine parts seemed to speak the language of modern art, albeit with a proletarian accent. The car accelerated him into something declamatory: Looking less like drawings in air or 3-D collages, his works have truly inventive sculptural presence.

Some of the pieces that immediately followed “Hudson,” while still bold, experimental, and advanced for their time, revert to the “modern art” look. It is hard to tell from a historical distance, for instance, whether the small, mixed-media reliefs and collages of 1960-61 are more disconcerting for their messiness or their order. On the one hand, they are made from nonchalantly arrayed, defiantly trashy materials. On the other, they seem artfully uncoordinated, composed both pictorially and in the etiquette sense.

You would expect Mr. Chamberlain’s art to be animated by a sense of tragedy or entropy in view of the suffering or waste implied by auto accidents. But the eye adjusts with remarkable ease to his choice of materials. You soon tell yourself that a Chamberlain is in crushed cars like a Rodin is in bronze, and you pay attention instead to the mood established by the gestures and shapes, which is invariably upbeat and gung-ho.

Where a Kline or a de Kooning implies speed of execution, a Chamberlain lives with – is perhaps energized by -an internal contradiction: apparent frenzy that, like a symphonic scherzo, requires brilliant orchestration and artful composition. The end result is that, rather than looking at a Chamberlain as a car accident, you look at auto-wrecks as works of art.

The gentle brutalist at Stone has poetic charm, whereas his gauche counterpart at Gagosian is a consummate vulgarian. The sculptural forms are still compelling, but not so the surfaces. Maybe the inherent beauty of rusting 1950s industrial parts was a happy accident, but the decision by the artist to start painting his own components has been a tragic one, In terms of taste, Mr. Crash crashed.

The components of these three works from 1992 have been individually pre-painted by the artist, for the most part in a hand better suited to decorating bar stools at a tropical resort than to making works of art. Again defying classification, they beg the question: Are these sculptures that happen to have painted designs on them, the way traditional materials might show patina or grain, or are they paintings on very unusual supports?

Ancient and medieval sculpture was usually painted, of course, so why not modern, too? But the objection to this objection is that Mr. Chamberlain is evidently invested in the whole issue of ontology: how the thing came into being, what came first, whether it happened fast or slow, whether it is animated by chance or by deliberation. What, in other words, it ultimately is.

Mr. Chamberlain’s early work contained similar questions. His sculptures and reliefs were “anxious objects,” in Harold Rosenberg’s phrase. In or by 1992, however, anxiety had given way to crassness. It is as if your favorite young jazzman had been recruited to a heavy-metal band.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 11, 2003

The post John Chamberlain at Allan Stone; Dan Flavin and John Chamberlain at Gagosian Gallery appeared first on artcritical.