September 4 to October 18, 2014
509 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-680-9889

Sculpture once had no other task than to render convincing simulacra of passing phenomena in permanent materials.  If this is “familiar conceptual territory,” as Ken Johnson wrote in his New York Times review of Roxy Paine’s current exhibition at Boesky, all the more impressive is Paine’s relentless, scrupulous, and highly personal exploration of it.  Superstars from Ai Wei Wei to Jeff Koons are using sculptural substitution effectively, if indeed familiarly, with herds of lesser lights toiling in the genre.  But for more than 20 years, Paine has been digging deep: his abiding interest is in how the ideal transformation from one material into another is achieved, and why the artist’s physical touch keeps hanging around as part of the answer.  On the one hand, Paine has painstakingly hand-crafted botanical portraits of astounding variety and detail, and on the other, he has engineered machines that produce gorgeous, or in some cases intentionally grotesque, sculptures, paintings and drawings, works whose authorship is thus unstable. Paine is both the John Henry of contemporary art and the machine against which he is racing.

Paine’s art-making machines were only slightly more beautiful than they needed to be.  With the new work, seductive landscapes of surveillance instruments, tools and equipment carved with uncanny precision from buttery maple, Paine circles back to ponder the machine aesthetic, this time more explicitly.  At least, there can be no functional argument for the solid wood valves and circuitry of his new sculptures, collectively titled Denuded Lens.  But aesthetics are never neutral, and here Paine’s close-to-the-vest hyperrealism invokes the bewitching taxidermies of lost wilderness found in natural history museums – along with their inadvertent prophecy.

The largest piece in the show, Checkpoint (all works 2014) is a full-scale AMNH-style diorama of a typical airport security set-up.  It is the third in a new body of work that freeze-dries contemporary workplaces, absent its humans.  The previous two dioramas (shown at Kavi Gupta in Chicago) depicted idealized, pristine replicas of a power plant control room and a fast food restaurant – all of these rooms are prisons of a kind.  Sterile and still, the only trace of movement in Checkpoint are the rubber flaps of the luggage belts arrested stiffly in mid-bend, as if they’d settled that way years before.  The ensemble carries a skewed perspective through every object along the architectural grid, including ceiling tiles with functioning fluorescents (the only objects in the exhibition rendered in a material other than wood). Checkpoint’s subtle, easily-swallowed perspective distortion is a feat of visual remapping that artists from Hans Holbein to Robert Lazzarini have used to diverse ends.  Paine has said that he was alluding to the spatial –and informational – compression of clandestine snapshots, from which the ghostly scene was, in part, synthesized.  Maybe he was also thinking of the anamorphically skewed skull hidden in Holbein’s The Ambassadors.  Certainly viewers will have no trouble finding a memento mori in this chilling portrait of public space askew.

In the smallest work in the show, a hand-held bullhorn is seamlessly engineered onto the back of a chain saw – again, as modeled in blond maple at actual size, down to tiny dowel pins along the chain of the blade.  To fire up the bullhorn, whose electric power supply is implicitly grafted to the chainsaw’s gas motor, you have to fire up the blade, thus drowning out speech with amplified brute noise.  In any event blade and horn face opposite directions, so leaning in to speak would be suicidal.  An image of this angry object, however double-edged, would work perfectly as a political cartoon – say, above an Op Ed piece about bullying tactics by lumber company lobbyists.  Paine’s title, Speech Impediment, even provides the caption.

If Speech Impediment and Checkpoint are moralistic in tone, other works in the show are more cryptic.  Machine of Indeterminacy and Scrutiny are elaborate, imaginary conflations of scientific-industrial apparatus, with exposed tubing and non-consumer interfaces that call to mind Paine’s own art-making machines.  A central irony of the current sculptures is that many viewers will assume they are simply spit out of a 3-D scan like the myriad luxury readymades now ubiquitous at art fairs.  You have to look closely, and know something of this artist’s extensive record, to decipher the conflation of hand and machine in Paine’s sculpting.  As always, precisely where hand begins and machine ends is very much the question – especially since Paine is no civilian when it comes to computer-controlled carving: ten years ago he custom-built his own Erosion Machine (2005), which turns thick slabs of stone into mini-Bryce Canyons.  That precision sandblaster, implementing statistical data sets, produced a more convincing facture than the “computery” striations of commercially available cutters and extruders executing 3-D digital files.

Theoretically Erosion Machine could go on making gorgeous carvings forever –– thus “eroding” labor-value in art.  On the other hand, it might take a hundred years of production to pay back Paine’s Herculean investment in his one-of-a-kind prototype ­.  A bipolar take on labor is visible in the very woodgrain of these new sculptures.  In Scrutiny, amid a threatening omnigatherum of investigative instruments from telescope to voltage meter, a humble pencil rests on a notepad.  The contrasting grains show that pencil and pad were carved independently and then joined.  Follow the grain through the five works, as you resist the urge to touch the tiny valve wheels, toggles, keyboards and knobs, and you become alert to the situational carving and carpentering of every detail.  At the same time you begin to realize that, despite their seeming exhaustiveness, Paine’s compositions are never too detailed.  Rather, they are pruned and arranged with Poussin-like discipline. “Machine of Indeterminacy,” with its elegant contrasts of orthogonal housing, spiraling screw blade, and pliant tubing, is a kind of Arcadia.  It has no logic as a machine, only as ideal landscape.

Where Paine does use a computer router, its characteristic texture is purposeful: in a wrinkly garbage bag in Checkpoint, which only heightens the lifelessness of the scene; and in the rock faces that replace a pinball machine’s playing and scoring boards in Intrusion.  Here the artificial look of the rock, which is emphasized by stripes of wood lamination, adds to the Magrittean enigma: is it modeled on genuine igneous intrusion or on a faux-rock climbing wall?  Either way, the urge to pull the plunger and launch a ball is palpable.  An especially synthetic gulley begs for a wayward pinball to spiral into its too-smoothly rounded contours.  In vain one checks one’s pockets for a perfectly notched and faceted maple quarter.

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Dore Ashton, Joshua Mack and Stephen Maine joined David Cohen to review Julian Hatton at Elizabeth Harris, Byron Kim at Max Protetch, Alexander Ross at Marianne Boesky and at David Nolan and Tabaimo at James Cohan.

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ALEXANDER ROSS
Marianne Boesky Gallery
509 W 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-680-9889

ALEXANDER ROSS: Recent Drawings
David Nolan Gallery
560 Broadway at Prince Street, 212-925-6190

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 27, 2008 under the heading “Alien Resurrection”

The art of Alexander Ross is contagious on many levels. Highly prolific, his labor-intensive paintings and drawings fill both the voluminous, museumlike Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea and the Soho premises of David Nolan. There is, too, a proliferation of mediums and processes, especially in his works on paper, which have now come to include collage. His imagery is concerned with strange growth patterns, with odd cellular structures metastasizing, imparting an ominous sense of alien substances spreading like the plague. Above all, though, it is his aesthetic impact that feels diseaselike. His giddy surfaces are icky, sickly, and yet addictive.

Mr. Ross, who was born in 1960, came to art world attention in the late 1990s with imagery and a modus operandi that arrived fully-fledged and has remained you might almost say relentlessly consistent, as the display at David Nolan, which includes a room of earlier work, demonstrates. His work is populated by structures that are poised disconcertingly between the organic and the synthetic. A typical painting depicts a cluster of gooey, globular shapes that could equally be thought to have been pulled together by some erratic gravity, or else to have grown out of each other, following their own perverse morphology.

Irritatingly, for viewer and reviewer alike, the works are all untitled, but, somehow, that is of a piece with Mr. Ross’s unlovely aesthetic: These are anonymous, alien forms that discourage familiarity or empathy at any level.

Mr. Ross has evolved a way of working that entails a back and forth between specificity and generalization. He constructs elaborate models from Plastecine, photographs the models, then paints from the photographs. The drawings would seem to entail a freer, more improvisatory method.

He uses paint in a way that captures the forms’ sweat and has them glow in an intense, sickly light. His palette, like the forms themselves, trades in ambiguity, with greens that suggest vegetal growth but avoid healthy, terrestrial associations: It is the unnatural nature of a science-fiction imagination. The compositions are completely scaleless: These forms could be microscopic or the size of planets. But while scale cannot be determined, the view is always cropped: Whether honing in or offering a long view, it is implied that the form or constellation of forms continues. The implication of bigger forms intruding into the space of his drawings is accentuated, in a series at Nolan from 2007, where the bottom left corner is diagonally “amputated” as artist Carroll Dunham describes it in the exhibition catalog.

Using the gallery’s accession numbers, “Boesky 1729” (2007) is an 8-foot-high canvas in portrait format, a close-up that fills the whole composition with meticulously rendered skin. “B2071” (2007), by comparison, is a tight cluster of irregularly shaped little green nuggets wedged together in an almost circular shape, with a set against a pale blue (sky-like) ground. You get the sense of each form’s having been pinched or perforated. Similarly, in “B1212” (2006) the grooves and faceting of each form has connotations of folds and creases that are more animal than vegetable. In this composition, six distinct personages cluster together in a closely cropped all-over view, and unusually include, along with the familiar green hues, a purple, an orange, and two blues. “B2273” (2008) looks like a corner of a much bigger constellation that might be moving into the picture space. While the surrounding space is the sky-like pale blue, achieved in scumbled, painterly brushstrokes, at the bottom left of the composition, a negative space between green blobs is brash scarlet, put down in a jolting matte finish that suggests a totally different space, in a different dimension.

At multiple levels, Mr. Ross is a collapser of dualities. Stylistically, he combines high and low artforms, relating equally to art historical precedents and popular science fiction illustration. His nebulous forms hover between abstraction and representation: At a literal level, they are representations of abstract forms, painted as they are from his photographs of actual, made objects; within the realm of imagery, however, they are abstractions of somehow credible forms with a life of their own.

Art historically, Mr. Ross’s touchstone is Surrealism, but, there again, in his embrace of a movement that contained competing attitudes towards method and mode, he offers synthesis in place of dialectics. Surrealist painters were split between those, like René Magritte, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dalí, who depicted surreal themes — dreams, desires, the uncanny — in tight style, whether illustrational or academic, and others, like Joan Miró, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, who, though dealing with similar imagery, embraced modernist approaches that embodied the Surrealist ideals of automatism and chance effects as ways of triggering unconscious forces.

Mr. Ross’s method combines elements of both tendencies, and looks to or like images of all the artists mentioned. There is a stand-off sense of cool, rational depiction at work in the realization of images that exist a priori. But there is also a sense that the act of making in turn triggers ways that forms can grow. In Mr. Ross, in other words, there is an organic unity between form and content.

A consistent feature of Mr. Ross’s paint handling is that in selective areas he builds up what register as contours on a weather map or gradational models. This impasto is highly deliberated and therefore conceptual rather than painterly. And yet, it has a visceral effect, making for engaging, present surfaces that trigger emotional responses.

If his skill and calculation as a painter makes for workmanlike, unloved surfaces, they also make sense of his project, his coolness, his weirdness. In graphic works, Mr. Ross comes back to a different sort of life. More freely inventive, they encourage him to collide languages. Ever medium-specific, he taps different sensibilities with each tool or substance, allowing for contrastive emotional distances and degrees of investment. But still, in his production-compulsion he is like an automaton. It is as if his own, weird creations are extraterrestrial taskmasters.

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March 23 – April 23, 2005

Rachel Feinstein’s exhibition is made up of paintings executed on oval mirrors, pastel drawings under glass in large platinum-colored frames and sculptures made from wood or from polyurethane. A long wall was built to accommodate the latter sculpture, which nudges the exhibition partially towards the state of an ensemble. The painted images, of which half a dozen or so are mounted on the walls around the main space, all depict a wizened crone attired in dress appropriate to some aristocratic salon of the ancien regime . This figure holds various props, such as a furry pet in one image or a parasol in the other, in her unusually large, masculine-looking hands. The pastel drawings in the smaller room appear to be studies for these paintings.

In the literature accompanying the exhibition there is a photograph of the artist scowling at the camera. Feinstein made herself up to look like a grotesquely ugly old woman, which points up the underlying narrative of the images on display as being like the Picture of Dorian Gray. (The press release makes reference to ‘The Picture of Rachel Feinstein”).

Feinstein is making pictures and in one case a self-portrait as a ravaged dowager. The artist is now young, beautiful and has a glamorous life. It’s out of character for Feinstein to directly provoke. What has been most pleasing about her work is its formal qualities. Feinstein’s work distinguishes itself from that of her peers Currin and Yuskavage in its lack of insistence. Where most neo-grotesque figurative work strains to reach its affect to the point of pandering, Feinstein appears comfortable to engage her rococo-meets-arte-povera quasi-figuration as a language to be examined at one’s ease. Feinstein’s best quality is her blitheness, she pleases herself first, the viewer second.

Feinstein acknowledges the late Pino Pascali of the arte-povera group as an influence. This great, largely unknown artist died in 1967 after producing a body of work that included realistic, painted wood replicas of slightly below scale military equipment, semi-abstract architectural sculptures made from steel wool pads and abstract sculptures of cloth stretched over wire armatures. It is clear that this license to traverse materials and idioms has freed up Feinstein to make her own forays into unknown territories that exist between conventional categories.

Feinstein’s three-dimensional work jumps from two freestanding rosewood-stained plywood sculptures in the front room to the more fully developed enameled hinged sculpture in the smaller gallery. The erected wall has an arched opening in which rests a partially realized, lumpy mound of vague figuration. Here, as in every work there, is dialogue between installation, material and depiction.

The paintings on mirror are executed with an array of painting marks: swipes, dots and dashes of wet on wet and wet on dry brushstrokes. Feinstein limits her colors to pasty beiges, whites, browns and some blue. It may mean something that the figurative paintings are executed on mirrors, the preferred surfaces for doing cocaine. The whole show is an oddly likeable pseudo-salon.

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September 6 – October 4, 2003

Guns blazing, Barnaby Furnas returns for his second solo show at Marianne Boesky, offering, in three dozen works on paper, a spectacle of guts, glory, and an occasional orgy.

In colors that have become archetypes in today’s print media, Furnas obsesses (and rightfully so) on issues of political paranoia, personal excess, and a resolute, national impulse to self-destruct. Shady operatives lurk in the tall reeds; they twirl their guns. Bacchanals play out on the world stage; we can hardly differentiate the orgy from the bloodbath. Battle scenes are extravaganzas of Homeric proportions; to die the good death is to be “Blown To Bits.” Vanity and violence are the sexual currency of our lives. Rock concerts are convocations of blood cults. We shadowbox, shirtless, on the beach.

With the present global situation-terrorism, rampant religiosity-equations of violence=ecstasy become particularly compelling. The unsettling relationship between fundamentalism and war/murder is, as they say, right on target. Furnas’s false prophets, however, are not bunkered deep in deserts. They are rock stars and, surprisingly to many, U.S. politicians. Honest Abe, the most lauded of all U.S. presidents, earns the ire of Furnas’s brush. As Lincoln is worshipped by faceless masses, the questions form: And what about the civil war? Was all that bloodshed really necessary? Perhaps, suggests Furnas, that is a part of the American psyche: the will to unnecessary war. Lincoln, in the second to last work in the show, shoots off his own head. In the final image of the show, Furnas gives us, “Killing the Dead,” a depiction, not so much of the dead being killed, as the dead being maimed. This, to Furnas, is the advent of history: the celebration of the wars and murders we accept.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out New York September 29, 2003

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Kara Walker: Drawings, at Brent Sikkema, through July 25
530 W 22nd Street- 212-929-2262

Kara Walker and Lisa Yuskavage are showing right on the same block (West 22nd Street). Are they a chip off the same block, too? They both take postmodern intention-bending to new extremes, pitting authenticity and expression against style and posture. And for both, ambiguity is stock in trade: kitsch and craft collide in art that sets out to dazzle and unsettle.

Kara Walker is best known for her costume-drama silhouettes. Installations of Beardleyesque cut-out figures at first seem like joyous circus parades but on closer inspection are revealed to depict appaling acts of “blaxploitation.” Hieronymous Bosch meets “Gone with the Wind” in fiercely political, erotically fantastic meditations on the legacy of slavery. A profound subject is brought to a slick surface.

In terms of ideology, it’s hard to tell where her first allegiance lies: with Frantz Fanon or the Marquis de Sade. You’d think such imagery was cooked in a bubbling cauldron of rage. Her poetry, crudely (if artfully) typed on reference cards, bears vivid witness to depths of indignation. But, far from resulting in a radical call to arms, Ms. Walker’s art deposits maker and viewer alike in a limbo of moral bewilderment.

Ms. Walker doesn’t merely depict victimage; she embodies it, in the way her methods are always and pointedly labor intensive. The dexterous, exquisite cut-outs, especially, seem to require calm, patient, loving skill. Ambiguity, in other words, is as present in the fabrication as the product. The artist is alienated labor and wants us to know it.

In harmony with her cool skill, her sexual imagery – for all the grabbing and penetrating that goes on – entails little in the way of passion, for givers or receivers alike. (Again, Sade is a useful point of reference, for in “le divin marquis” sexual extremity is measured in numbers and times, not degrees or intensities.) A favored motif, drawn from medieval art, is that of Aristotle and his mistress, with the venerable philosopher ridden like a horse.

Ms. Walker’s graphic mark-making, in contrast to the silhouettes, can be rich in affect. In this show of works on paper of various sizes, including smaller cut-outs, at Brent Sikkema, there is considerable variety of line and texture. She has taken up a kind of smudged brass-rubbing technique, for instance, that recalls Larry Rivers. Her mannerist figuration brings to mind Paul Wunderlich and Pierre Klossowski. Recent forebears aside, some of her most scatalogical and psychologically involved drawings seem genuinely Goyaesque. A monstrously disengaged head, for instance, is endowed with a priapic nose which penetrates a passing naked “negress” (her caricature justifies the word) who nonchalantly holds on to her bucket of soapy suds.

The most acute ambiguity in Ms. Walker has to do with the free and easy manner with which she traverses the line between racist stereotype and an attitude of “black is beautiful,” as in a giant, voluptuously worked-up, graphite “Afro.” It is as if she is lost in iconography the way artists talk about being lost in form. But the deliberately unresolved tension of style and content in her work, an endless loop between what could equally be artworld posture and true feeling, ultimately denies any possibility of catharsis. Greek tragedy may have had its origin in the Dionysian orgy, but at the end of the day, Sade ain’t Sophocles.

***

From tragedy to farce: Lisa Yuskavage’s absurdly big-busted, saucy postcard girlies are sisters under the skin of Yale classmate John Currin’s monstrous muses. The art world, it seems, will never tire of would-be alchemists extracting from the base matter of low culture a clever-clever fools’ gold.

What”s most depressing about the meteoric success of Ms. Yuskavage, however, is that champions and detractors alike have taken on trust her “masterful technique”, whereas actually all she boasts is the kind of nerdish facility high school students admire among their peers. A critic sharply upbraiding her for her content could compare her lurid luminosity to Georges de la Tour – of all artists! If an old master can be defined as the deceased author of painting with life in it, then Ms. Yuskavage, very much with us, is the opposite on both counts.

But we surely know where this critical malaise comes from. The ironic revival of painting – conceptual art had deemed the medium passé – presupposes that “technique” is something separate from an engagement with form, as if the laying down of brushstrokes is to a picture what production values are to a pop record.

The recent paintings, on view at Marianne Boesky, suggest that even on her own intellectually lethargic terms, Ms. Yuskavage is running out of steam. Since exchanging her old source material, vintage copies of Penthouse, for a live model (an old high school chum) a vacuous softcore humanism has crept into her work. But it is too little, too late. Her bead bikinis in “Couch” (2003), are blessed with a vague hint of Wayne Thiebaud, but elsewhere her dry-brush flowers are dead on arrival. In “Groom” (2003), there is a hint of painterly interest in the billowing pink clouds and in the skin against the servant’s purple bodice, but nothing where you’d expect it, the drapery folds or the mistress’s breasts. In truth, Ms. Yuskavage doesn’t have the stakes for any kind of high wager with ambiguity. Her technique is flimsy, and her imagery is boring. Neither her paint nor the flesh it purports to depict is remotely sexy.

This article first appeared in The New York Sun, June 19, 2003

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27th October to 18th November 2000

Sarah Sze is my pick of the week, month, so far year even. Her earlier installation-agglomerations (for example, the window piece in the Whitney Biennial) could sometimes seem too determinedly whimsical, edging towards the cloying. This time, though, they’re more dynamic, stretching and soaring across the airspaces of the gallery. They’re also simpler. Most are essentially a single piece of furniture – a bureau drawer, for example – capriciously disassembled and reanimated. Sze owes debts to people like Jessica Stockholder and Judy Pfaff, even to Robert Rauschenberg and Alexander Calder, but her work, with its fusion of cartoon surrealism and hardware store materialism, feels utterly fresh. If you’re skeptical about the connection to Calder, by the way, ask to see the tabletop piece hidden away in the gallery’s offices.

David Cohen writes:

I share Alexi Worth’s view that we haven’t seen better from Sze yet. I first admired her work at the Fondation Cartier in Paris where she filled an already exquisite space with a sculptural exuberance at once funky and precious. But these pieces at Boesky are both more focused and resolved, and more wittily interactive with the space. I love in particular the futuristic-cum-comic strip star-shaped points of impact which puncture the walls. You can almost hear the word “Whaam” as the indentation occurs. Her inventiveness is protean, and to my mind she leaves Pfaff and Stockholder behind in her understanding of the dualism of the found object as thing-in-itself and pure shape/color: electric cable, desk lamps, clamps etc. But while at times we can marvel at the tension between structure and the density of components out of which it is composed, she loses us in the decorative footnotes, those prissy, pointless and poorly soldered plastic test tube things, for instance, clustering and fussing at her edges.

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