Good exhibitions are designed to create a visual program of content and experiences that communicate affect most effectively. Curators and designers consider a number of factors to ensure that the visual experience — the look and feel — of the space accurately conveys the story they want to tell about the work: What if the art is lighted from below or above? How might the object look hanging from the rafters or on the floor? What if the walls aren’t white? What if the physical environment is not rectinlinear?

In March 1947, renowned dealer Alexander Iolas — then director of Hugo Gallery — sought to push the boundaries of curatorial license through a breathtaking environment for modern art in the exhibition “Bloodflames.” The show featured art curated by Nicolas Calas installed in the unconventional Fredrick Kiesler-designed environment filled with bright, bold colors and sloping walls. Works by Gorky, Noguchi, Lam, and Matta among others lay propped against walls, hanging from the ceiling, and jutting out at odd angles. Paul Kasmin, in collaboration with Rail Curatorial Projects, revisited this seminal exhibition through “Bloodflames Revisited,” curated by artist, writer, and Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui.

Filling the expanse of both Kasmin galleries, “Bloodflames Revisited” features work from more than 20 artists, including Will Ryman, Cindy Sherman, Chris Martin, and Roxy Paine. While certainly not as radical and disruptive to the senses as the original — you’ll find no sloping exhibition walls or amorphous blobs interspersed between works of art at Kasmin — this contemporary response to “Bloodflames” presents an effective and thoughtful alternative to the traditional white-cube exhibition as we know it. Upon entering the galleries, viewers are jarred by Crayola-colored walls that stretch from the hay-covered floor to the ceiling. “Bloodflames Revisited” is filled with artwork, although the orange-yellow of the walls and the earthy smell of hay trigger the senses to conclude the opposite. Walking into the exhibit spaces takes a bit of re-orientation that immediately calls into question the visual cues we associate with the display of cultural objects. Is it the color on the walls the risers or the hay beneath our feet that suggests everything we experience and see in this space can be questioned?

I walked through the 27^th Street gallery as if down a pirate’s gangplank and felt a relationship to the artworks that unsettled me. When we go the gallery or the museum, we stand apart from the art and typically view it from eye level. Standing on the riser, I looked down on Tunga’s sculptural assemblages, and my eyes rested on the top third of Deborah Kass’s and Alex Katz’s paintings. I decided to surrender to the moment, realizing that the exhibition was successful in its premise: it had indeed forced me to interrogate ideas I had internalized about what my relationship to the art should be as a viewer.

Glenn Ligon’s electric blue and neon green Niggers Ain’t Scared (1996), from the Richard Pryor joke paintings series is still jarring, even when viewed from above. “Alot of niggers ain’t scared, youknowwhatImean?” the text begins in Ligon’s signature stenciling style of imperfection. “I mean like when the Martians landed and shit white folks got all scared.” In an additional act of visual violence, the stenciled words smear down the canvas drawing more attention to the textual dissonance. “Nothing can scare a nigger after 400 years of this shit,” the joke concludes.

Nearby, Lynda Benglis’s giant half sphere of red-orange tinted polyurethane protrudes off of the wall as if floating in space.Benglis developed the brain matter-like forms of her metal and polyurethane half-spheres after combining elements from her work with knotted metal in the 1970s and glass in the 1980s. After discovering she could make knots of glass with her hands using technology, she gained a greater understanding of the material’s properties and began casting concave and convex forms. D’Arrest (2009) is mesmerizing, due in part to its relationship to light. The pigmented polyurethane seems to absorb light while reflecting it, causing it to act like a proprioceptor. The form appears to change as its jelly-like squiggles catch the light from various angles.

On Tenth Avenue, my viewing experience was altered still. The exhibition continued to use bold colors and elevated platforms, but the limitations of the physical space were brought into view more sharply. The snaking riser connecting the two viewing spaces here felt especially distracting, which encouraged me to step down and freely traipse around through the hay. As I examined Do Ho Suh’s stove from the Specimens series, I was reminded of the relationship between belonging and assimilation. In the series, the artist explores his own relationship to cultural displacement and belonging by making scale replicas of items from his New York apartment using only polyester fitted over wire armatures. The translucent material reveals while it conceals, showing some of the internal structure of the object yet protecting the vulnerable insides.

Much of our visual viewing experience is guided by subtle contextual clues: the height of the walls, the lighting, the props on which art objects reside, etc. What other stories do cultural objects reveal through the environment in which they are presented? How can altering the visual context of an artwork allow us to see it fully? The ideas presented in “Bloodflames” and its modern-day re-imagining emphasize the possibilities in disrupting how we relate to art through the physical space where it is presented. Bui fiddles with some of the contemporary conventions of exhibition design by swapping out sterile white walls and employing our other five senses in the viewing experience. It is a welcomed disturbance. Though Kasmin’s gallery spaces will return to their familiar spotless white and polished concrete in a few weeks, “Bloodflames Revisited” serves as a reminder that the relationship between viewer and art object can — and should be — personal and visceral.

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March 10th to June 5th, 2011
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York City, 212 570 3600

Glenn Ligon’s mid-career retrospective is prolific in both scale and perspicacity, spanning nearly 30 years of work with over 100 individual pieces.  Curator Scott Rothkopf stresses Ligon’s formation as a Whitney scholar and his relationship with the museum beginning shortly after his graduation from the Independent Study Program and an invitation to participate in the 1991 Biennale.  The following years marked a creative partnership with Whitney Department Curator Thelma Golden, who featured Ligon in the seminal 1993 Biennale as well as the ambitious exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art. Always situated at the intersection of black and queer visual representation, Ligon is perhaps most well-known for his text-based works exploring construction and dissolution.  AMERICA, while directly addressing these issues, spotlights the painterly concerns of the artist, emphasizing Ligon’s facility with form and his strength in editing.

Opening the exhibition with paintings realized in 1985, Rothkopf cites Ligon’s graduation from the Whitney ISP as a catalyzing artistic and political influence.  Drawing from the expressionism of Cy Twombly, Ligon’s earliest works with text feature a mixture of enamel and oil paints overlaid with gestural scrawls, quoting gay porn magazines.  The transition to his previously unconstituted “Door” paintings marks a move towards stenciled lettering as Ligon found handwritten text too personal.  Working in black oil stick over readymade white doors, the artist reproduces quotes written by figures as diverse as Zora Neale Hurston, Jesse Jackson, and Ice Cube.  Ligon’s lettering becomes increasingly more smudged, then illegible, as the eye moves down the panel.  Through repetition the letters blend together, losing their literal meaning and pointing to a discursive construction of language and a susceptibility to slips in identification.  The elegant sophistication of these paintings points to Ligon’s expressionist roots while the evocative texts (“I feel most colored when,” “wrong nigga to fuck with”) affirm a deep interest in collective black identity.

While these notions of identification and typology remains central to Ligon’s work, his quiet meditations on the human body resist the tendency towards the densely theoretical, instead grounding his practice in the intimately relational.  First evidenced by the door paintings, which respond to the scale of a human body, these works reference the self as implicit subject matter.  This notion of artist as subject is made literal in Ligon’s ambitious 1993 installation, To Disembark.  The work cites the compelling story of Henry “Box” Brown, who, in 1849, shipped himself in a wooden crate from slavery in Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia.  First displayed at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC, four of the original nine human-sized crates are on view in the center of the gallery.  From these packing crates reverberates disparate musical recordings dealing with blackness, including Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit and KRS-One’s Sound of Da Police.  The accompanying portfolio, Runaways, is on view as part of the installation.  The series of lithographs imitates 19th-century advertisements for the return of escaped slaves.  For the project, Ligon casts himself as the runaway, employing friends to draft posters from the voice of slave-owners describing their missing property.  Designed as a reminder of the way in which the past lives in the present, the work points to the singularity of individual experience as it relates to a shared cultural history.

Ligon’s first work situated explicitly at the intersection of black and queer visual representation, Notes on the Margin of the Black Book was first displayed at the Whitney as part of the 1993 Biennial.  Realized in the twilight of the 1990s Culture Wars, the ingenious work still resonates as it addresses the complicated aesthetic ambivalence associated with black masculinity and its representation.  For Notes, Ligon dissects Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial 1988 publication, Black Book, which features highly elegant, sexualized photographs of black male bodies.  At its origins, Black Book exists within a visual tradition of fantasy and desire stemming from the western trope of the passive female nude.  Ligon’s Notes places captions from drag queens, conservative senators, and museum curators alongside these images, addressing them within a multifarious cultural framework.  Removed from their indeterminate socio-historic contexts and grounded within larger frameworks of identification, these images allow the viewer’s fears and projections of black masculinity to be played out in their totality, multiplied, registered and refracted through a mirror of social construction.

Ligon’s “Joke” series marks his return to text paintings after an examination of the photo-document.  The devastatingly hilarious 1993 work Cocaine (Pimps) consists of a sumptuously red painted canvas stenciled with text of a Richard Pryor joke, performed during a stand-up routine in the mid 1970s.  When taken out of its spoken context, the reader is forced to repeat Pryor’s lewd words, however silently, gaining a sense of authorship over the message. Within the context of the gallery space, the viewer becomes the silent performer, and is forced to confront and identify with the text before her.  This quality of performance speaks to the construction of race and sexuality that the artist questions throughout his career.  By taking Pryor’s jokes off the stage and into the gallery, Ligon points to the ways in which language is reclaimed through history, and the effectiveness of words in producing group identity.

Before closing the exhibition with Ligon’s most recent series of neon sculptures, Rothkopf devotes a small gallery to the artist’s lesser known works, many of which have never been exhibited.  Ligon’s Self-Portrait at Seven Years Old from 2005 features a young Michael Jackson, pointing to the complexity of black collective identity as it relates to individual history.  2003’s End of the Year Reports consists of a suite of eight screen-prints on handmade paper which reproduce Ligon’s own grammar school report cards.  Mixed in are the grades of Glenn Ligon’s brother, again questioning the notion of authority and individuality within a group.  Though Ligon’s text-based works are far from antiseptic, with their painterly surfaces and evocative quotations, these small nods to the artist’s childhood and personal history were an interesting shift away from the artist’s works dealing with essentialism and collective politics.  Ligon finds his voice in the appropriation of images and text, subverting dominant racist and homophobic ideology by situating himself at the complex intersection of race, masculinity, and sexuality.

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Yes Bruce Nauman

Of all the avantgarde artists to emerge in the 1960s, Bruce Nauman is the most deserving of the epithet “counter-cultural.”  Be it high or popular culture you are talking about, Mr. Nauman’s emotionally difficult, intellectually forbidding, visually ungenerous art has a masterful ability to alienate.  Sometimes dull, sometimes pretentious, his art is remorseless.

He has not merely been consistently disdainful of traditional, expressive mediums and of conventional expectations. He has also been relentlessly dismissive of anything that smacks of aeshetic experience, whether capturing beauty or intimating the sublime.  As bewildering to this critic as is Mr. Nauman’s status with museum professionals (he is widely considered a genius), even more strange is that so anti-art an artist is also, one has to concede, an artist’s artist.

This point is proved in a sprawling, menacingly dull show of Mr. Nauman in the company of nineteen acolytes and imitators. “Yes Bruce Nauman” is titled after a 1989 painting by Jessica Diamond consisting of these three words, written placard style in black acrylic on a ground of metallic silver paint.  There is added irony in so affirmative an expression for an artist of unremitting nihilism.

The first work to greet the visitor is a car sticker-type slogan in letters cut in holographic vinyl applied to the gallery window.  Mungo Thomson’s “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths” takes this high falutin quote from one of Mr. Nauman’s first neon works, from 1967, which presented this phrase in blue letters along a red spiral in emulation of a beer logo, and which was displayed in the window of his former grocery store studio in San Francisco.  The stated aim of the original work was to communicate an esoteric notion to a broad public while not initially looking like art.

If Mr. Thomson shies away from neon because Mr. Nauman has made this non-art medium ubiquitous in the artworld, choosing instead a tacky, downmarket communication product in emulation of the spirit of the 1967 work, then plenty of others in the show pay homage to Mr. Nauman in his trademark neon.  Glenn Ligon, whose most familiar and accomplished work uses text in black and white to explore racial and linguistic issues, acknowledges Mr. Nauman in “Warm Broad Glow,” one of a series of neon pieces that quotes a pregnant, enigmatic phrase from Gertrude Stein: “negro sunshine.”

Peter Coffin’s “Untitled (Line after B. Nauman’s The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths)” (2004) posits a sprawling mangle of neon in an illegible line that—until you discover the title, and with it the conceptualist credentials of the work—looks like a dutiful, uneventful abstract sculpture.  Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “Untitled (Paul writing my name, No. 3)” is also a scrawl, this time wall-bound, based, we are told, on the artist’s young nephew’s mimicry of language.  Stefan Bruggeman’s “No No No No” (2005) presents it eponymous line in neon capitals, the first three words in white, the fourth in red.  This is a quote from the soundtrack of Mr. Nauman’s performance video, “No, No, New Museum (Clown torture series)” (1987) a continuous loop of the artist dressed as a medieval knave, with red leggings and cap, and green bodice, jumping up and down furiously, stamping both feet at once, and screaming—you guessed it—“No, no, no, no,” with the emphasis, as in Mr. Bruggeman’s color coding, on the last negative.  All these “no”s put Ms. Diamond’s “yes” in context.

The neo-neon imitators keep company with two Nauman neon pieces, “Eat/Death” (1972) and “Suite/Substitute” (1968).  In these, the shorter word alternates with the longer, from which it takes its letters, flashing in different colors. Mr. Nauman’s preoccupations—the mystic truth he reveals—will, by now, be clear: life is a bore, art is no different from life, look at me.

Besides neon, Mr. Nauman’s favored processes include filmed performance, entailing banal repetitions of activities centered on the artist’s body, and deliberately uneventful, unexpressive castings in wax of body parts, often his own.  Mr. Nauman was of the same generation as the minimalists, and while his own art is often reductive, he eschews any of the spiritual or aesthetic connotations of minimal art, often actively mocking such pretentions.  This iconoclasm in taken up, in turn, by Charles Ray in “Plank Piece I-II” in which the artist has himself pinioned against a wall by a plank, a performance documented in dingy black and white photos to give it a period look.

“Bouncing Balls” (1969) a 9 minute, 16 mm film (since transferred to DVD) of Mr. Nauman fiddling with his private parts is the inspiration for Francesco Vezzoli’s video of the same title which, true to neo-conceptual form, adds new meaning to a vintage conceptual gesture through slicker production values: the artist commissioned a porn-star, with well toned muscles and shaved legs, to swing his genitals back and forth with balletic grace.

Mr. Nauman’s penchant for buffoonery clearly marked him as a precedent for the Californian artists and sometime collaborators Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, whose works explore abjection and abasement.  Mr. McCarthy is represented by a selection of short black and white films from the early 1970s, including “Face Painting—Floor, White Line” (1972) in which he paints a line with his own face, crawling through the paint; “Ma Bell” (1971) in which he vehemently feather-and-tars each page of the phone book, creating a mucky, visceral accumulation in the process; and various schatalogical and genital titles that revel viscerally in futile, absurdist actions.  Mr. Kelley has a relatively tame though no less forlorn installation of stuffed animals on a blanket.

Futility, negation and self-regard, the Nauman standbys, are the order of the day in the remaining exhibits: Jan Mancuska has a stencil of negative words like “no,” “nowhere,” “nobody,” “never,” register on his self-portrait face via light shining through a stencil; Aaron Young circles black and white reproductions of a Goya firing squad painting in marker pen, identifying one prisoner awaiting execution as Bruce Nauman; the late Jason Rhoades’ “Black Hole, Poontain” (2005) constructs a figure out of detritus and neon; Martin Creed’s “Work No. 312: A lamp going on and off” is and does what its title proclaims.

The evidence suggests that Mr. Nauman has spawned a veritable academy of denigratory pranksters whose antics consist in repeating his own enervating gestures.  It is ironic how close they are to the master not just in spirit, but formally—despite the anti-formal premise of Mr. Nauman’s enterprise.  The counter-culture has actually produced a system of emulation that recalls Byzantium or ancient Egypt in its formal strictness.  Do positive repetetions of negative gestures amount to something affirmative?  No Bruce Nauman.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, August 24, 2006

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