Catherine Opie has shows at both of Lehmann Maupin’s New York spaces — in Chelsea on 22nd Street, and on the Lower East Side at Chrystie Street. I kind of unexpectedly flipped for the one at the Chrystie Street location, with photos documenting Elizabeth Taylor’s home at 700 Nimes Road, near Beverly Hills, taken between 2010 and 2011. I say unexpectedly because although I anticipated that they’d be, like Opie’s portraits, gorgeous — they are — but I hadn’t anticipated how much I’d read from them. I don’t know much about Elizabeth Taylor or her movies; the films I like largely displaced her generation, starting in the 1960s and ’70s. I know she was glamorous and was connected somehow to Richard Burton and to Michael Jackson. Nonetheless, I find Opie’s intimate vignettes of Taylor’s opulent home and possessions, really revealing about who the actress was. That might be an illusion, but god, it’s a pretty one, and with diamonds, too.

“Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road” at Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie, through February 20, and “Catherine Opie: Portraits and Landscapes” at Lehmann Maupin, 536 W 22nd, through March 5; 212 255 2924.

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JESSICA HOLMES: Can you tell me something about the body of work in this show? Is there anything viewers might find surprising? 

BILLY CHILDISH: The paintings have been made over the last six months, so they’re very current. They are of subjects that have presented themselves and that I’ve worked through, or am still working through. People tend to have quite a lot of expectation, based on whether they are familiar with an artist or if they have ideas based on various misinformations that are available. Some people are surprised that I would work with the nudes. I painted nudes a great deal in the 1980s and 1990s and I haven’t painted them for the last five years or so — I think surprises are all down to expectations and knowledge.

I’d say that your paintings are deceptive because at first glance they are very straightforward, but there is great mystery once you really start looking. You frequently paint the natural world.

The natural world is a vibrating mystery of continual becoming and unbecoming. Within my paintings the bits that interest me are the abstracted parts. If I went round these pictures I’d say, “I like that bit.” It’s a love, an expression of my love of nature and an intense relationship with matter — vibrating, distorting matter, which is timeless and unable to be fixed in time.

I was going to ask you, since your work is so personal, how you feel when it’s released into the world, but maybe this is something that allows you to let it go.

My relationship with the art is making the picture and once that’s done, I don’t have much of a relationship afterwards. I’m not necessarily happy with my paintings when they’re finished. People hear my disregard for art and artists and they think I’m very satisfied with what I do. Not necessarily.

Does an idea ever morph into something else? Do you ever think you are going to make a painting and it becomes a poem, for example?

No, I know what I’m doing when I’m doing it. I paint on particular days of the week and I write poems in my notebook. I was in a British art show in the 1990s and they had some poems of mine painted on a wall, which is not something I would do, or which I considered to be art. And I said, “Well, I know what they are. They’re poems written on a wall.” I don’t see breaking down in categories as a freedom, I see it more as nonsense. There is nothing wrong with a poem being a poem. It doesn’t need to become a painting. I like all of my courses separate, so I don’t put my custard in with the roast beef. Not because I don’t like custard or I don’t like roast beef but because I do like custard and I do like roast beef.

Do you prefer painting to the other media?

Yes, it’s my natural ground. I’ve got works existing from when I was four or five, and I painted a great deal starting from when I was 12. I couldn’t really read and write until I was 14 [because of undiagnosed dyslexia], and I wasn’t involved with music until I was 17. Of all the other things, painting is the one where I don’t have those on/off buttons. I paint every Monday and Sunday, so I know what I am meant to be doing when I’m doing it. I had to discipline myself after I was expelled from art school, which fits my nature quite nicely. Going to art school doesn’t suit creative types.

Since you brought up your art school experience, which from what I understand was terrible, what would you say to somebody thinking of going to art school today, when there is so much emphasis placed on receiving an MFA?

When I went to art school, it wasn’t like the pressure now. Art schools these days seem to be there to try and create artists quickly, whereas I think an art school’s job is to give people stuff for their tool kit. I see it as much more craft-based or space-based. You’ve got to have quite a lot of self-will not to be run all over, or have them get rid of your real primal interests and send you on the course to being an Identi-Kit conceptual artist. What you need are the tools to actualize your vision. I’d say it might be better to be wary, ask questions, maybe not be like I was, and rather keep a bit of a low profile. I just fought with them.

What were some of the things you were made to do at St. Martin’s?

I had not been taught the type of obedience that they thought they should receive from someone as lowly as a student. I was required to take history of art and I found the person who taught it dull. You had to say things about canvas, or about art, using “art speak.” I told them I wouldn’t go, and they said I could sleep in that class if I wanted to, but I must attend it. I also refused to paint pictures at the college; I painted at home instead. I told them I didn’t want to become contaminated. I got into a lot trouble for writing what they called obscene poetry. I was talented and charismatic, which caused me more problems than if I hadn’t been. I was a good target.

You’ve stuck remarkably with your vision. How has that been beneficial, and how has it hindered you?

I think it’s in line with my nature, and it’s not an effort. I paint the pictures and, after the event, find out what psychological drive might be in there, which is far more interesting than having a prescriptive one. I just let it happen and then people can work out what fruitcake I am afterwards.

Or not!

Or not! Thank you!

[Laughter]

The thing is, there’s not many great thinkers in art. You have a few people like Picasso who always said smart stuff but you’re not going to get much intellectual stimulation from talking to artists. You can see how popular that opinion will make me! A curator asked me yesterday what I thought art was about, and I came up with a quote, and we wrote it down because I got the giggles. It was, “art is pornography and comfort food for the spiritually inept.” That doesn’t mean that’s true; that was yesterday’s definition!

Right! And what did she say?

She was in stitches!

[Laughter] 

Over the years you’ve used different names and pseudonyms. Do they represent different personalities?

In 1977, when I was 17, I was a punk rocker. I got the moniker Billy Childish from a friend of mine, which I used in bands. I didn’t like using that name in other areas so I always painted — and still paint — under my family name, William Hamper. When I was doing early exhibitions in German cooperatives, they knew I played music as Billy Childish, and it was forced onto me as a painter. Billy Childish has never made any paintings. Well, very rarely. When I was making films, I would use William Loveday. I was trying to compartmentalize so that I couldn’t be accused of trading off Billy Childish, a musician who now paints. It was self-preservation to stop people from categorizing me, but it didn’t work at all. 

I would love to hear you talk about your philosophy of Radical Traditionalism.

With Radical Tradition what I was trying to get across is that tradition, which I really like, is freeing because it is something you don’t have to invent. There’s this literal relationship with a history of painting, which used to be recognized and respected by artists as obvious. 

It’s a connection with antiquity in a way, right?

Yes. Nothing is as dated as the contemporary. Modern people want to lift the ego, but the ego is a block to creativity. Tradition is a way of subjugating the ego and allowing the thing to flow. Great artists, like Van Gogh for instance, wear their hearts on their sleeves. Van Gogh says whom he loves, and you can see whom he loves in his paintings. There’s no desperation for authorship. Really great art has got a timeless quality and it’s not narrow. You look at Van Gogh’s work, it looks contemporary, and it doesn’t look like it’s made in a mechanized age, either. When you are trying to be contemporary or relevant, to show us who we are, it’s like a rupture in time whereas if you give yourself to a tradition you dissolve time. With my music, we used to be pawned off as revivalists in the 1980s for playing guitar music and rock-‘n’-roll. Now people listen and say, “Your music doesn’t sound like any time at all.” That is what you want, for that thing to have a continued, timeless presence.

It’s got a life force.

Yeah. There’s still fight to it.

The post “The natural world is a vibrating mystery”: Billy Childish with Jessica Holmes appeared first on artcritical.

To refer to Do Ho Suh’s works on paper as “drawings” is not quite right. Yes, paper and sometimes pencil are involved, but in his employ these materials alchemically morph into sculpture, while the tools of sculpture — blueprints and string — flatten into two dimensions. This refusal to conform to the dictates of medium and space is gentle — a question rather than an edict. The artist’s thoughtful investigations into personal, communal and historical conceptions of home and memory have always been similarly untethered by gravity and undaunted by scale.

The artist’s oeuvre is gathered for the first time into an English-language monograph, with essays by Clara Kim, Elizabeth A.T. Smith, and Rochelle Steiner, and published in conjunction with dual exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin’s 26^th street and Chrystie street locations. The catalogue and shows are focused around Suh’s drawing: renderings and sketches of projects, poignantly wavery thread on paper, and the labor-intensive “Rubbing/Loving” series.

Throughout his work, Suh has recreated the physical environs of the various homes he’s lived in, reinterpreting the house he grew up in (a traditional Korean hanok); his first apartment in the US, in Providence, Rhode Island; and many more after that. They are reincarnated in translucent organdy-like fabric, suspended from the ceiling or as a tiny cottage crashing into the space between industrial buildings in Liverpool or a rooftop at UC San Diego. Sometimes, as in the series of colored-pencil-on-paper “Self-Portraits,” on view in the Chrystie Street gallery, the homes literally emerge from the head or the heart of the artist, bifurcating the chest cavity or sprouting from the frontal lobe — the meaning of place exemplified as biological organic extension of self.

Suh’s telling of his story of immigration and transience — of leaving home and finding a new or many new ones — invokes universal human histories. We all have left home to make our way, only to carry vestiges with us by design or by accident. This conjuring of collective experience is never more literal than in the “Rubbing/Loving” project, where the artist covers interior and exterior walls of homes with vellum and painstakingly rubs graphite or colored pencil over the surfaces, creating textured tracings of the walls, floors, tiles, light switches, radiators, toilet seats and all. In videos displayed at both galleries, we see the artist and his assistants at work, sometimes blindfolded, crouched in bathtubs, and perched on ladders, shoulder to shoulder, or alone in the rain, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing silently with dirty hands in an unsettlingly compulsive ritual. These projects began with the 2012 Gwangju Biennial, where Suh exhibited three rubbings from housing in the old part of the city as a reference to the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, news of which was censored by the government. The blindfold is not a punishment but rather an exercise in disciplined sensory integration — if we can’t see then we can feel and hear and discern together.

At the Chrystie street gallery we see the fruits of these efforts reconfigured in wooden structures: small, freestanding rooms lined with the rubbings made on the other side of the world. The rhythmic scraping sounds of their making are piped in — strange white noise not immediately connectable to the structures themselves. The effect is disconcerting though not altogether unpleasant, allowing the viewer a sense of participation in the making of the work — one can imagine even farther back to a life in the tiny room, living, working, looking out the opaque window through the gallery wall to the city of Gwangju.

In the 26^th street gallery is a ghostly recreation of the artist’s former apartment at 348 West 22^nd street, the open wall facing the street, and blueprint-like rubbings of walls and floor, covering the walls and floor. The apartment space is smaller than the gallery, but mapped out it expands to fill the room, inviting many more visitors than would comfortably fit in the small studio apartment. Apparently the artist took advantage of a gap between tenants to return to his old home with his team of assistants, capturing every mundane detail so that gallery goers might see what he saw every day, to share his space with him for a little while.

Suh’s themes of togetherness and shared past, present, and future recur movingly in his thread and watercolor drawings. Figures sprout other figures from their bodies, continuously mirroring or trailing as colorful ghost shadows. The lines swirl and waver from one body to another and beyond, as though eddying in currents or blown by the wind — hinting at a force beyond the picture, beyond the dimension, beyond our, or these, selves. Many of the works on paper have the word “Karma” in the title, though as expertly explained by Rochelle Steiner in her catalogue essay, “Do Ho Suh’s Karmic Journey,” it is karma not only in the colloquial shorthand definition of cosmic justice but also in a greater sense of the interconnectedness of all times and all people.

The “Drawings” book adeptly traces Suh’s exploration of these connections — person and place, group and individual, inside and outside. We see the evolution of the “Bridge Project,” a never-to-be-realized “perfect home,” situated equidistant from New York and Seoul on an impossible bridge that spans the continental U.S. and the Pacific Ocean, connecting both cities. In every depiction, smoke drifts upward from the tiny chimney. This is not just an unfeasible house — it is an unfeasible home. Another recurring ideal is the legged or many-legged peripatetic house, evoking an oft-quoted desire of the artist to carry his home with him like a snail, though, unlike a snail, in Suh’s depiction he has many helpers.

Suh’s work rewards mindfulness, inviting the viewer to contemplation. Standing in the Chrystie street show, my mind wanders to my own experience of space: of this gallery space and my memories here, and of other spaces in other times throughout my life where I similarly paused, knowing that seemingly fleeting moment would stay with me. We all carry our past places with us, perhaps just not as consciously as Suh.

The post Adventures Close to Home: Do Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin appeared first on artcritical.

In an eerie augury of Hurricane Sandy’s onslaught, Chelsea galleries in October 2012 were full of art about disasters. Three separate exhibitions put viewers face-to-face with the calamities, natural or man-made, of recent years. Although widely varied in their tone, each beckoned viewers to consider themes of fragility, vanity, and culpability.

At Lehman Maupin, the Japanese artist Mr. used a room full of clutter to depict the horror and chaos left by his country’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The installation Metamorphosis: Give me Your Wings packed the gallery’s center with furniture, toys, books, boxes and chattering television sets. The artist covered the surrounding walls with graffiti and canvases painted in the Manga style. Teen magazines, thick with soft-focus photographs of adolescent girls, were piled and strewn everywhere.  With the focus on aspects of Japanese culture that fascinate Americans—the magazines and the Manga illustration—the installation seemed quite like an alternative comic book store that had been run through a centrifuge. Rather than mourn, I felt I was being asked to browse.

Not far away, Thomas Hirschhorn’s room-sized display Concordia, Concordia at Barbara Gladstone commemorated the recent cruise ship sinking off the coast of Italy. Entry to the main part of the gallery was blocked by floor to ceiling wreckage. With paintings on the ceiling, flat panel televisions on the floor, and lamps hung sideways from the wall, the whole scene was topsy-turvy. Skeins of unwound videotape cascaded over piles of orange life vests, and in a reminder of the film Titanic, heaps of broken plates. Seen under the glow of unshielded fluorescent lamps, the installation’s tawdry materials—brass, Styrofoam, fake wood paneling—were a poignant reminder of cruise ships’ paper-thin luxury. That Hirschhorn took a stand on his subject’s banal materialism made his pile of clutter more effective than the previous one.

Ejecting myself from the airless nightmare of the Concordia, I found momentary relief in a serene and spare arrangement of curved metal bars at Mary Boone’s Chelsea Gallery for Ai Weiwei’s installation, Forge. A quiet interplay of form and void focused thoughts on the granularity of matter and how, viewed from a distance, disconnected bits add up to solid forms. Little did I know that the bits I was looking at were actually rubble from the deadly 2008 Sichuan earthquake.  Ai’s two-part installation, which continues at Mary Boone’s midtown location) featured twisted rebars recovered from concrete school buildings that had collapsed on their young occupants’ heads.  The artist’s orchestrated recovery of the rebar, depicted in a video shown in the back of the gallery, brought dozens of volunteers together to painstakingly collect, clean, transfer, and hand-straighten thousands of pieces of the material. His bold maneuver was at once performance art, craft, political defiance. The undertaking’s communitarian ethos effectively condemned the enforced communitarianism of China’s overlords (who use the word “harmony” as a euphemism for censorship). It also, of course, helped land the artist in jail.

By making disaster art that was not itself a disaster, Ai captured his subject the more effectively. Whether his approach differed from those of Mr. or Hirschhorn as the result of artistic sensibility or culture of origin I cannot tell. Regardless, this multi-national array of disaster exhibitions—and the recent horrors of Sandy—remind us that disaster does not respect nationality. Where human beings presume themselves to be invincible, nature is there to show them otherwise.

Exhibitions discussed in this article:
Mr.: Metamorphosis: Give Me Your Wings at Lehman Maupin Gallery, September 13 – October 20, 2012, 540 West 26th Street;
Thomas Hirschhorn: Concordia, Concordia at Gladstone Gallery, September 14 – October 20 , 2012,  530 West 21st Street
Ai Weiwei: Forge at Mary Boone Gallery, October 13 to December 21, 2012, 541 West 24th Street/745 Fifth Avenue

The post Storms before the Storm: Pre-Sandy, Chelsea Awash with Disaster appeared first on artcritical.

Mary Corse: New Work
February 2 – March 10, 2012, Lehmann Maupin Gallery
540 West. 26th Street, New York City, 212-255-2923

The concurrent exhibitions of Doug Wheeler’s environmental light installation at David Zwirner Gallery and Mary Corse’s light-infused paintings at Lehmann Maupin Gallery provide us with an exceptional opportunity to understand how L. A. Light and Space art can sensitize us to the subtleties of the world around us.  These two artists rely on fields of white, intense lighting and a mobile observer to provide some exhilarating surprises.  While both Wheeler and Corse privilege direct perception over thinking, there are also some significant differences in the ways in which their art creates heightened sensory awareness.

Over thirty years ago, the psychologist William Ittelson drew a critical distinction between environment and object perception.  In object perception, one surrounds the object; in environment perception, one is surrounded by it.  One observes an object; one explores an environment using many sensory modalities.  Ittelson noted that with environment perception “the very distinction between self and nonself breaks down: the environment surrounds, enfolds, engulfs….”  What makes the work of Wheeler and Corse so innovative is that it causes us to alternate between object and environment perception.   This is consistent with Venturi’s preference in Complexity and Contradiction for both-and over either-or.   As we will see, these two L.A. artists accomplish this balancing act in different ways.

Your adventure in Wheeler’s Infinity Environment begins in the antechamber where you appear to be facing a luminous translucent wall that makes you hesitant to move forward.  So you approach it very slowly.  Your initial surprise when you reach the “wall” is that it is not solid, but rather an opening into a space filled with what appears to be thick fog. The morphing of a diaphonous wall into a vaporous fog creates a shift from perceiving an object to perceiving an environment.  Once inside the space, you can’t see its perimeter, so you can’t figure out its shape without extended exploration.  As you reach out your hands in front of you, you can see your fingers clearly but your don’t know how much further the space extends.  So again you walk slowly.  The next surprise is that your feet provide you with some critical information.  Suddenly, the floor begins to curve upward and outward in front of you but your outstretched arms do not hit the wall.  Are you inside a giant egg?

The effects Wheeler creates are most dramatic and thrilling if you inhabit the space alone, but this has generally not been possible due to the popularity of this exhibition.  Indeed, your entire experience is radically altered by the presence of other people who appear to be crystal clear, almost hyper-real.  By observing the positions of the other people, you can see how far the floor extends in each direction. In this space, “you feel with your eyes” (Turrell) and see with your body.  The sensations created by this Infinity Space range from disorienting to frightening to exhilarating, often alternating within an individual.   And to heighten the experience, Wheeler gradually modifies the ambience by shifting the lighting from dawn to dusk and back again over some thirty minutes.  This extreme environment attunes our sensory-motor system to differentiate things it never noticed before, a major goal of the Light and Space artists.

Mary Corse’s wall paintings are essentially two-dimensional.  One would, therefore, expect them to function as objects and not environments.  But, almost magically, the tiny glass microspheres embedded in Corse’s five large white paintings invite you to treat them as environments to be explored.   You notice immediately that each painting changes dramatically as you cross in front of it so what you experience is not one painting, but multiple different paintings.  For example, the large work, Untitled 4 Inner Bands shifts from an absorbent matte cream-colored monochrome with barely perceptible vertical bands to a stark white mirror-like surface that glistens and reflects your head and body movements.  As you move back and forth in front of the painting, you see anywhere between two and five vertical bands which reverse their colors as you move, the darker ones becoming light and the lighter ones becoming dark.  From certain vantage points you can detect some horizontal brush strokes that first appear as ghostly vapors and then become eight defined horizontal bands that weave across the vertical ones to form a grid.   Careful looking and continual movement combine to provide an uncanny experience that simulates key aspects of environment perception.  The ambiguity of the overall encounter resembles a reversible-figure task used in Gestalt psychology research in which the  perceived image shifts dramatically from a vase to two figures or from a duck to a rabbit.  This effect results from the limitations of our perceptual apparatus that allow us to see only one of these images at a time.

Wheeler and Corse create different kinds of ambiguity to achieve their effects.  The ambiguity of Wheeler’s void is one of a homogeneous field in which you seek to discover its boundaries, so as to both find your place and try to locomote effectively.  With Corse, the problem is not lack of structure but competing structures.  Monochromatic surfaces, minimal geometric bars, and abstract expressionist brushstrokes inhabit the same canvas and alternate taking center stage.  However, in both Wheeler and Corse, what turns looking into seeing is the coordination between looking and doing.  What we do affects what we see; what we see affects what we do.

Finally, each artist takes you on a journey that explores the relationship between order and disorder in different ways.  In Corse, if conditions are right, one’s movements can control the fluctuation between order and disorder in a back and forth dance that can be highly pleasurable.  In Wheeler, there is a more entropic experience that, at least momentarily, is more frightening and disorienting.  Control is neither possible nor desirable for Wheeler.  In his “whiteout” environment a lack of control is central to the participant’s experience of boundlessness. Despite these differences, Wheeler and Corse provide something that is very atypical for the New York lifestyle: there is a slowing down of our internal clock.   We are able to surrender ourselves to a kind of stillness that sets the stage for retuning our sensory-motor system.  This sensory learning increases our ability to differentiate the essential from the unessential in the course of exploring realms where objects morph into environments and environments morph into objects.

The post See First, Think Later: The Art of Doug Wheeler and Mary Corse appeared first on artcritical.

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Faye Hirsch, Franklin Einspruch, and Christina Kee, join David Cohen to review  Mary Corse at Lehmann Maupin,  Ridley Howard at Leo Koenig, Glenn Goldberg at Jason McCoy, and Joyce Pensato at Friedrich Petzel.

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September 10- October 23, 2010
540 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th aves
New York City, 212-255-2923

Walking into Jennifer Steinkamp’s exhibition feels akin to the zero-gravity mission of Dr. David Bowman in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Oddysey. The work is powerful, disarmingly friendly and compelling, and supremely creepy,  as if made by the HAL 9000 sentient supercomputer.  In HAL’s words, “I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.”

Steinkamp’s large-scale video projections use the kind of 3-D animation software  employed in movies such as Avatar.  Avatar’s proudly animistic and naturistic plot combined with it’s paradoxical paean to digital technology are a point of comparison to the forces at play in her current exhibition.  In the semi-dark main room at the gallery are projected three large-scale works from the artist’s new series, Premature. Though Steinkamp states that the works are about the unpredictable timing of life and death, and is quoted in the gallery’s press release as saying the images possess a “meat-like texture” resembling veins, arteries, and tendons, the writhing coils on display resemble nothing so much as robotic worms – perhaps a cyborg’s conception of human anatomy.  The texture of the pastel-colored illuminated ropes is less “meat-like” than smooth and shiny, and there is no indication of pulse or any expansion and contraction mirroring breathing to evoke life.

Premature 3 reads as an oversized, nonsensical cursive: long tubular forms several inches wide loop around mimicking nonexistent letters as they slide down from ceiling to floor.  In Premature 2 on the west wall, liquidy-looking ropes twist vertically as though vainly trying to disentangle from one another. Premature 7 has skinny tangled worms the width of a finger that seethe and writhe, undulating like a seaweed-clogged ocean.  Around the corner Premature 6 snakes vertically in a corridor, the roughest-hewn of the series and the closest to any microbiological or organic depiction.

The back gallery houses a silent symphony of color and motion encapsulated in Orbit 7, a work separate from the Premature series, depicting swaying tree branches and swirling leaves in a brilliant palette.  Orbit 7 presents the four seasons  in a heady few minutes, cycling over and over as fictional years speed by.  It would be easy to lose a decade in the room, if not two.  Summer is a harmonious interplay of mottled pale green leaves springing from lithe branches swaying in powerful gusts of virtual wind.  In the quickly-arriving fall, yellow and light brown mix in, soon followed by red and orange.  Winter comes and goes in a split second (a subtle reminder that the artist lives in California) embodied by waving branches empty save for a smattering of bright red leftover leaves from fall.  Spring arrives with a bang as buds and blooms of pink, blue, and violet burst out from the briefly fallow branches and bright yellow dots rain down the wall like sun glinting off leaves after a rain shower.  While it is easy to be seduced by the visual delight of Orbit 7, with its glorious color and kinetic motion, it is also worth noting that this work, more than any other in the exhibition, depicts the cycles of life in nature, from birth to growth to death and decay in a few short minutes.  It is both magnificent and deeply unsettling as we seem to hurtle towards inevitable demise while distracted by the beauty unfolding before us.  Enjoy yourself, says Orbit 7, it’s sooner than you think!

The use of cutting edge technology—digital animation in particular – serves as an apt metaphor for fleeting life and its seemingly always “premature” end.  Planned obsolescence is inherent to technological advances.  With all of our progress, glitches and viruses occur, and even the HAL 9000 proved fallible, prone to a nervous breakdown.  Humans are still vitally necessary, if only to fix the computers.

It is nearly impossible to experience Steinkamp’s animations without inserting oneself into them, as the projectors are placed deliberately low so that upon approaching the work one’s shadow is cast upon it, rendering viewer and work as one.  Effectively erasing the boundaries between artwork, technology, and people, the artist creates her own virtual reality, where complete immersion and unmediated experience are the only viable options.  Androids may dream of electric sheep, but Steinkamp clearly dreams of electric trees.

The post “I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do” appeared first on artcritical.

Lush Life is an exhibition curated by Franklin Evans and Omar Lopez-Chahoud which takes place at nine Lower East Side (LES) galleries: Collette Blanchard Gallery, Eleven Rivington, Invisible-Exports, Lehmann Maupin, On Stellar Rays, Salon 94, Scaramouche, Sue Scott Gallery, and Y Gallery.  Lush Life adopts Richard Price’s 2008 novel to title and organize the exhibition.  The novel is set in the contemporary LES and through a murder investigation exposes the dynamically changing community of the neighborhood, which despite its evolution retains a ghostly and vital link to its layered past.  The deep and varied history of the LES now includes the LES galleries as new community members, and the premise of community is reflected in the cooperative nature of the galleries’ and artists’ participation in the exhibition which uses Price’s novel to critically consider concepts of neighborhood and change.  Each gallery will be a sub-exhibition reflecting the idea of one of the nine chapters in the book.

Sue Scott Gallery – Chapter One: Whistle.  June 19 to July 31
On Stellar Rays – Chapter Two: Liar. June 23 to August 3
Invisible-Exports – Chapter Three: First Bird (A Few Butterflies). June 25 to July 31
Lehmann Maupin – Chapter Four: Let It Die. July 8 to August 13
Y Gallery – Chapter Five: Want Cards. July 8 to July 25
Collette Blanchard Gallery – Chapter Six: The Devil You Know
Salon 94 – Chapter Seven: Wolf Tickets. June 29 to July 30
Scaramouche – Chapter Eight: 17 Plus 25 Is 32. July 8 to August 7
Eleven Rivington – Chapter Nine: She’ll Be Apples

Artists: Christopher Drager, Claudia Weber, Coco Fusco, Dana Frankfort, Dana Levy, Dani Leventhal, David Shapiro, Derrick Adams, Elisabeth Subrin, Erik Benson, Ezra Johnson, Ishmael Randall Weeks, Jackie Gendel, Jackie Saccoccio, Jayson Keeling, Jessica Dickinson, Joanne Greenbaum, Jose Lerma, Judi Werthein, Justen Ladda, Kai Schiemenz/ Iris Fluegel, Karina Skvirsky, La Toya Fraizer, Leslie Hewitt, Manuel Acevedo, Mario Ybarra Jr, Matthew Weinstein, Melissa Gordon, Nana Debois Buhl, Nicolas Di Genova, Nina Lola Bachhuber, Oliver Babin, Patrick Lee, Paul Gabrielli, Paul Pagk, Robert Beck, Robert Melee, Rudy Shepherd, Scott Hug, Tim Davis, Tommy Hartung, Xaviera Simmons, among others.

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June 1-July 14, 2006

All of Hellmich’s paintings include intentionally skewed architectural forms, buildings, staircases, facades, railings, escalators, warehouse interiors, cement partitions and roadways, doorways, garage doors, etc., and his use of architecture and perspective or orthogonals, is not haphazard or incidental. He carefully renders architectural details, but he leaves them unresolved in the name of high concept. The few loosely painted passages that appear in his paintings are tightly contained within an architectonic structure or they are intermittent, isolated, self conscious gestures. They are merely embellishments. Hellmich’s combining of painterly or abstract passages (drips, splatters, impasto, scraping) and representational passages has its roots in analytical and synthetic cubism, but minus the synthesis.

The catalogue essay written by Mark Gisbourne and the title of this show emphasize the idea that subject matter is inconsequential and that Hellmich is primarily concerned with process. “That the paintings are figurative is not in fact the most relevant of issues. That they are deliberately configurative seems to be more to the point.” According to the O.E.D. the definition of configuration is, “Arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form or figure.” The definition of figurative is, “Of a style of the visual arts; esp. applied to painting in which the forms are recognizably derived from objective sources without necessarily being clearly representational.” These definitions aren’t entirely exclusive. Both of them emphasize the importance of or at the very least the existence of forms and/or figures. The term configuration emphasizes process and figuration refers more to style.

But clearly Hellmich is not a radically abstract painter and his conceptual leanings prevent him from exploring representation or abstraction very deeply. What undermines the intellectual packaging of this exhibition is the fact that Hellmich places carefully rendered architectural fragments in his paintings. These paintings can’t be discussed without taking their representational aspects seriously.

His palette, which includes dour blue grays and yellow ochres, and his distortions of perspective are reminiscent of De Chirico. However, Hellmich use of architecture has no metaphysical undercurrent. He wants his cake and to eat it to, meaning he wants to come across as a high concept painter, self conscious about the painterly process, never completely abandoning himself to representation or abstraction, but he also wants to paint things he is interested in or good at painting, mainly architectural structures. His need to remind us repeatedly that art is artifice is tiresome because he employs realism and painterly abstraction in a disingenuous manner, to show us how smart he is, but not to make interesting pictorial spaces or variegated surfaces.

It is inaccurate to say that Hellmich is more interested in the painting process than the rendering of legible forms. While his spatial ambiguities undermine coherence our gaze is drawn into these paintings because of the use of perspective and the representational elements. The abstract passages, impasto, layering, scraping, drips and splatters, are unsatisfying because they act as little more than signifiers, or quotation marks. They disrupt the representational passages and reference other painting styles. Hellmich’s jumbling of painterly styles and ways of depicting pictorial space, his disjointed surfaces, do not cohere or become something greater than the individual parts. When working with fragments it is hard to create poetic resonances. Although Ken Johnson feels that the overall effect, “is to evoke a nostalgic mourning for the undelivered promises of modernity and for the unrealized possibilities of collective public life” I would say these paintings are more opportunistic than nostalgic.

Hellmich’s major at the University of Essen was free diagramming/painting. I went to the University of Essen website but could not find any information about this peculiarly named major. I would conclude after seeing these paintings that Hellmich is at home with geometric forms and technical drawing, and can’t paint organic forms very convincingly. His Frankensteinian architectural compositions do make the viewer aware of the constructive principles at work in the paintings, but without their recognizable forms and fragmentary yet coherent spatial relationships these compositions would fall apart. There is a collagist element present but there is too little variation in texture or interesting contrasting values between parts.

Hellmich is obviously good at painting architectural structures. The architectonic structures in the paintings are strongly reminiscent of the hideous, concrete, communist building complexes that litter (or littered) Eastern Europe (I am thinking of the monstrosities I saw in Prague a decade ago). Sometimes, as in “Kontainer,” (2006), he includes trees and patches of sky. I would assume that the awful way in which Hellmich paints trees and sky is supposed to be ironic or a not so subtle comment on our alienation from the natural world, but seriously, Bob Ross could do a better job. Ironic bad painting is an attempt to increase the idea content, but the strategy has become commonplace. The metal containers in “Kontainer” take on a monumental quality but the silly trees Hellmich places directly behind them are little more than self conscious winks at the viewer, which fall flat and undermine any good qualities found in the work.

Hellmich’s use of color is too clever and controlled. His canvases mostly consist of self consciously cool and bland middle tones. Hellmich is pretentiously bland. He always adds enlivening but small passages of bright pigment, swirling pinks and oranges which are stand-ins for fluorescent tubes, small passages of hot green, purple, and yellow (straight or wavy lines that disrupt the dismal fields of gray blue, blue gray, plain old gray, yellow ochre, and pale yellow and blue). These patches of bright color are oddly placed and activate the dull mid-tones, but they leave me wanting more. The intentional dreariness of Hellmich’s palette fails to sustain any mood or emotion in the viewer and his vacillating painting technique and deadpan renderings alienate to the point of indifference.

Hellmich generally tends to paint even and flat surfaces with the colors tightly contained within rectilinear forms, but with isolated passages of expressive painterliness. In “Eingang III” (2006) for instance we see splatters of paint in the glass panes of a crisply delineated door The painterly passages that often appear in a frame within a frame begin to make you feel uncomfortable, as if Hellmich is suppressing all urges to cut loose.

Hellmich uses othogonals and perspective to create a sense of place or specificity but he contradicts any sense of order or three-dimensionality these formal devices generate. He likes to play suggestions of depth off of pattern or flatness. He enjoys creating spatial contradictions. We are disorientated by them and they suck our eyes into the large expanse of canvas, but it becomes gimmicky fairly quickly. For me, the most successful paintings in this exhibition, “Trinkhalle,” (2005) and “Eingang IV,” (2006) are successful because of the clever use of perspective. We see a building or drink stand in the near distance in “Trinkhalle” and our gaze enters the composition through an expansive tiled field which switches between checkerboard pattern and receding plane. The weird floating structure generates a genuine sense of otherness. In “Eingang IV” our eyes travel down the length of a descending escalator while the walls and windows above and beyond the escalator appear in depth and as part of an asymmetrical geometric pattern. The first person perspective works really well and the shadowy spaces at the bottom of the escalator are very suggestive and eerie. The desolate industrial structures in the few successful paintings lend pathos to the compositions because we can all relate to barren urban landscapes, places dominated by rectangular structures.

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Joe Fyfe, Andrea Scott, and Roberta Smith joined David Cohen to review Gilbert and George at Lehmann Maupin and at Sonnabend, Jesper Jest at Perry Rubenstein, Richard Tuttle at the Drawing Centre and Sarah McEneaney at Gallery Schlesinger.

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