June 21 to August 5, 2016
519 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 7100

In 1975, Bas Jan Ader disappeared while sailing the Atlantic. This sail was the second part of his trilogy In Search of the Miraculous. Part one is comprised of 18 black-and-white photographs of the artist walking through various parts of Los Angeles at night. The third part never happened. Metro Pictures’ exhibition includes several photographs, two wall-drawing installation pieces, and two short films and reveals that Ader’s work is still relevant, pointed, droll, and strange — perhaps more so now than in 1970s California. The mysterious details of his disappearance create an added allure, even over 40 years after his death. However, it’s not necessary (and perhaps impossible) to separate the details of his death from his life and work, as his work is a confluence of autobiography and conceptualism wherein the viewer follows the artist while he walks, searches, and falls. While I was in the gallery, I overheard someone ask the attendant: “So what do you think, is he dead or not?” I couldn’t make out the response.

Ader’s work edges action and inaction. He illustrates what happens when gravity takes over: the elements get free and the body falls. This might be why his work feels so natural: it feels more like a practice than a performance. In the understated photographs of documented falls, I feel as if I’m watching a person practice falling. Another way of saying this might be: I’m watching a person decide to let gravity take over. Or, finally: I’m watching a person practice dying . It’s funny. Ader’s body is lean and tree-like, making the falls comical and graceful. He falls off of a roof, off of a bridge and into water (one frame depicts only the aftermath, a splash), and he falls from a standing position to a lying down position with no middle information. We never see him get up from the fall. Instead, the photographs end at the bodiless frame — all gravity.

These understated photographs line the walls leading to Please don’t leave me (1969). In this first installation, light bulbs and wire highlight the title’s words, painted on the wall. This politely sad command reminds me that Ader is the subject of his work and he is never not alone. And it’s not only the artist who falls, it’s everything. In Untitled (Tea Party) (1972), six color photographs are aligned vertically. In this first image, Ader sits outside under a cardboard box. The box is propped up by a stick and Ader sips from a teacup. The sequence shows the box’s fall after the stick’s removal. The final photograph depicts a box in the field. The artist is presumably under the box. He makes a situation and then allows for its undoing. He sets himself up as the subject and then leaves.

The gallery’s passageway holds a monitor, which plays a short color video, Primary Time (1974). The frame holds the middle section of Ader’s body. The artist is dressed in all black, arranging a set of flowers in a vase. The flowers are red save for a few yellow and one blue. This repetitive action creates a bridge to the second installation piece, Thoughts unsaid, then forgotten (1973), where a tripod, a vase filled with flowers, and a clamp-on lamp sit around the title words. The work is melancholic but is not weighted with gravitas. Untitled (The Elements) (1971/2003), depicts a large seascape with a cliff at sunset. Ader’s body stands in the approximate middle. He faces the camera and holds a sign reading “Fire.” He is pointing to the only element not present in the photograph.

The show toggles between revealing and hiding, searching and giving up. Hollywood tropes mix with Ader’s absurdist gestures. In thinking about the aftermaths of these practices — a big splash (Ader’s body is out of the frame, in the river) or an empty roof (Ader’s body is out of the frame, on the ground) or a cardboard box (Ader’s body is inside the box), I return to the idea of practicing falling — practicing leaving — the Earth. This is maybe the most useful practice one can engage in.

The post Practicing Falling: Bas Jan Ader at Metro Pictures appeared first on artcritical.

September 10 to October 24, 2015
519 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 206 7100

An opening shot reveals a green field with geodesic domes in the distance. The camera zooms in; the domes shimmer in the heat against a hazy white sky. The scene changes to an ocean overlooked by a rocky cliff. The tip of a satellite antenna can be seen over a hill in the distance. As the camera zooms, more antennas are revealed scattered among farmers’ fields. The next view is outside of an upscale condominium building at night: some windows are lit, some are dark. A single window comes into focus. People go about their evenings, cooking dinner and pouring drinks as the camera watches from somewhere outside.

These scenes constitute the first few minutes of Trevor Paglen’s two-channel video installation, Eighty Nine Landscapes (2015), part of his current solo exhibition at Metro Pictures. In the video, Paglen films the government’s “black sites” of internet and phone traffic interception from as close of a vantage point as possible. This video serves as a microcosm of the exhibition’s examination of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs: like the oblivious condominium residents in the video, people across the world are being watched without their knowledge or consent, and the antennas, domes, and satellite dishes are just a few of the instruments used in this monumental monitoring scheme. Paglen’s exhibition chronicles his quest to watch these digital watchmen, a journey that has led to the depths of the ocean and across the globe.

Two diptych pieces dominate the gallery’s front room: each consists of a photograph of a misty seascape next to a nautical map of the region. Pinned to the map are snapshot photographs and transparencies of news articles, leaked memos, and downloaded material regarding the construction and surveillance of the undersea fiber optic cables that connect America’s networks to the rest of the world. NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, New York City, New York, United States (2015) has pinned to it a snippet from a Washington Post article about the NSA that reveals the agency’s code names for Verizon (“Stormbrew”) and AT&T (“Fairview”). These names join countless others in Code Names of the Surveillance State (2015), a four-screen vertical video installation in the next room. Previously exhibited as projections on gallery walls and outside on monuments and buildings, the piece consists of an endlessly scrolling litany of alphabetized codenames purportedly used by the NSA. Each of these names stands for something, but its exact significance is lost on the viewer, appearing as something benign (“Starfish,” “Turquoise”) or nonsensical (“Turtle Biscuit” or “Squirrel Accumulator”).

The bulk of the work in this show consists of large 60 by 48-inch photographs of undersea cables in the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic. The sea floor is murky and hazy, and in some cases the cables can barely be distinguished from the silt and reefs around them. Shot while scuba diving, these photos show the artist getting as close as possible to the sites where the NSA’s regime of information control is executed. Like the black sites in the video installation, the artist’s proximity to these places is a kind of communion with the surveillance state, an attempt to reach out and touch the physical appendages of the untouchable.

With Internet and voice traffic being intercepted via undersea cables and from installations across the globe, is there any means of resistance? A possible solution sits, encased in inch-thick Plexiglass, on a pedestal in the middle of the gallery. Called Autonomy Cube (2015), the piece’s naked circuit boards are a functional router that connects the user’s phone or laptop to a TOR network, a kind of shadow Internet used by dissidents, whistleblowers, and criminals alike. TOR has the advantage of being anonymous and nearly untraceable; Autonomy Cube is thus thought to be outside of the networks of surveillance shown in the exhibition. Even so, pinned to the wall behind the router is a patch depicting a stack of green cubes. Its embroidered letters read: “AFCYBERCOMMAND: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.” TOR may potentially be a tenable loophole for now, but how long will it be until the NSA figures out a way to extend its surveillance to all of the dark shadows of the Internet?

Paglen’s show may not provide any absolute solutions to the issues surrounding digital surveillance, but his quest to shed light on this hidden world has resulted in a body of work that blends the didactic with the paranoid aesthetics of conspiracy theories. But, in the aftermath of the NSA’s highly publicized leaks, is the conspiracy still just a theory? After all, you’re not paranoid if they’re actually watching you, right?

The post The Squirrel Accumulator: Trevor Paglen and the NSA appeared first on artcritical.

January 10 through February 14, 2015
519 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 7100

John Miller: Here in the Real World at Mary Boone Gallery

Curated by Piper Marshall
January 10 through February 28, 2015
541 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 752 2929

Contemporary society is being constantly “bombarded by images” if the tiresome cliché is to be believed. It’s the cost of living in an information economy in which every moment of every person’s attention has been monetized and commodified. Practitioners of “old” media like painting occasionally invoke this platitude to make the “slowness” of their chosen medium seem transgressive or revolutionary in comparison to our “fast-paced culture.” John Miller, in a two-part exhibition split between Mary Boone and Metro Pictures, takes our attention economy as his baseline and, rather than trying to define himself in opposition to it, plays a game of trompe l’oeil that uses personal and media-sourced images to toy with notions of the materiality of art and the value of human, mechanical, and digital labor.

While Miller has embraced a wide range of materials throughout his long career, painting is the focus of both exhibitions. At Metro Pictures, a series of shaped Dibond panels depicting anonymous pedestrians fill one room: while these pieces may look like cut-out black-and-white photographs from a distance, they are painted in a thin acrylic grisaille that barely hides the artist’s preliminary pencil marks. The figures cast shadows on the walls behind them and seem to float in a featureless void. Carrying shopping bags, staring into space or gazing down at their phones, Miller’s pedestrians present themselves for the gaze of others while simultaneously looking oblivious to their excised surroundings. The pedestrian paintings are an offshoot of Miller’s “Middle of the Day” project, an ongoing endeavor in which the artist takes a photograph every day between 12 and 2pm. While his original photographs aren’t shown in either exhibition, the pedestrians and two murals, one in each gallery space, originate from this larger project.

From across the room, each mural appears to be a black-and-white photograph of a Chinatown street scene (at Mary Boone) or a back-alley loading dock (at Metro Pictures). The originary photographic images have been subjected to heavy manipulation that may not be obvious at a distant glance. Each image has been reduced to flat grayscale shapes, fragmented, and printed on vinyl wallpaper. Pedestrians, windows, and signs have been duplicated and cloned within the street scene: a stretched-out sign repeats the same Chinese characters a half dozen times, while a man and his doppelganger each cross the street with identical strides. One side of each scene is a mirror image of the other, with enough exceptions that this process isn’t immediately apparent (words and street signs aren’t mirrored along with the rest of the image). The mirroring is more obvious in the loading dock mural, which has its reflective axis placed in the corner of the room. The stones and debris on the ground beneath the platform are not mirrored; neither is the graffiti on the otherwise identical walls. Somewhere in there is an image of reality, something depicting the actual world, but we have no way of knowing which fragments, if any, retain that indexicality.

Instead of pedestrians, Mary Boone has a series of paintings of game show sets, depopulated of any contestants and presented as garishly colored stages. Unlike the pedestrians and the murals, these pieces appear to be photographs from afar, and still appear photographic rather than painterly when inspected up close. While the gallery checklist records them as “acrylic on canvas,” they look more like inkjet prints of digitally compressed YouTube screenshots. The twist is that this series was made between 1998 and 1999, several years before such technologies became widely available. Like the murals (which could have been made equally well using a quick Photoshop cutout filter or painstakingly rendered by hand) we have no way of knowing how much (if any) human, mechanical, or digital labor went into the production of these paintings. If the artist and gallery are to be taken for their word, it’s a clever “Mechanical Turk” trick: the paintings look digital but were apparently painted by hand. One piece, Labyrinth I (1999) has a motion-controlled speaker mounted above it that plays the garbled sounds of a crowd whenever anyone walks by. The canvas is rounded on the edges, giving it the shape of an old CRT television set. Labyrinth I could pass for an abstract geometric painting if not for a fragment of a sign, reading “HOME GYM,” a prize that gives the bright colors and curves their meaning as game show stage elements. Despite the dated references to The Price is Right and obsolete televisions, these pieces have aged surprisingly well: they may have greater resonance today thanks to Miller’s apparent prognostication of the explosion of streaming Internet video services that chop up, compress, and reconstitute images without requiring human intervention.

While the technique behind the game show paintings is mysterious, a more recent series of paintings, split between both galleries, offers a more transparent view of the artist’s process with depictions of reality show contestants in moments of apparent emotional collapse. Like the aforementioned cliché regarding today’s saturation of images, denigration of reality TV has become a trope among those who feel their own cultural consumption is above such base programming. A number of artists have engaged this medium without being so patronizing: performance artist and writer Kate Durbin’s book E! Entertainment (Wonder, 2014) consists of scripts, screenplays, and retellings of reality show scenarios written in the deadpan style of a stenographer. Miller’s reality-show paintings deal with their emotionally charged content with a similar detachment. Close-up shots of heads dominate the canvases, looking more like preliminary underpaintings in umber and white than like finished works. Much thinner than the similarly toned pedestrian series, each painting’s grid and pencil marks are visible even at a distance. While many painters strive to cover up their sketches, Miller seems to embrace the honesty of this technique, stripping away figure painting’s veil of naturalism and presenting these paintings as records of his manual labor.

The games Miller plays with manual, mechanical, and digital reproduction disorient the viewer, calling into question assumptions about the ways in which our sense of reality is mediated through the images and programming to which we are “constantly exposed” (to use another cliché). While the grisaille paintings of pedestrians and reality TV stars emphasizes the hand of the artist and his process, the murals and game show paintings disrupt such fetishization of manual labor by making us agnostic to the actual nature of their production. The pieces on view in both galleries bask in the paradoxical history of their materiality and production: some are naked paintings that plainly exhibit the marks of their creation while other paintings may or may not be “paintings” at all. Miller’s games may be rewarding to some and frustrating to others, but the disorientation he channels is the essence of our age: the loss of distinction between fact and fiction, original and copy, humanity and digitality.

The post This is Real Life: John Miller’s Crafting of Mediated Vision appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201583930″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Svetlana Alpers, Phong Bui and Linda Nochlin joined David Cohen to review Silvia Bächli at Peter Freeman, Inc., Michal Rovner at PaceWildenstein, Catherine Sullivan at Metro Pictures, Jeff Wall at Marian Goodman Gallery, and Dan Walsh at Paula Cooper Gallery.

The post March 2008: Svetlana Alpers, Phong Bui, and Linda Nochlin with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

ALEX MCQUILKIN: Joan of Arc
Marvelli until November 24
526 West 26th Street Second Floor between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 627 3363

ISAAC JULIEN: “Western Union: Small Boats”
Metro Pictures until November 17
519 West 24th Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 206 7100

What are the chances of two concurrent shows of emerging artists both being based directly on classic French movies?  About the same, you could say, as the rival magazines Art Forum and Art in America running the same artist on their cover – which happened in November for abstract painter Mary Heilman.

Karen Yasinksy is an animator whose practice grew out of drawing.  Eschewing new technologies that enable swiftly produced, fluent computer animation, she retains her distinctive line and touch through the arduous, labor intensive processes as drawing animation and stop-motion animation.  The artist Laurie Simmons, writing in a brochure that accompanied Ms. Yasinsky’s 2002 exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, described the way in her awkward and anatomically wayward figures that “their arms and legs twitch restlessly, and then suddenly stand up and twirl like jewelry-box ballerinas.”  She has an exquisite touch that offers a kind of girly aesthetic – cramped and cloying in equal measure – with edge.  Ms. Yasinsky shares with Ms. Simmons a feminist-informed admiration for the Surrealist puppeteer Hans Bellmer.

Her first exhibition at Mireille Mosler, “L’Atalante,” offers reworkings in drawing, collage, and animation of Jean Vigo’s 1934 movie of the same title. “La Nuit,” (2007) a six minute stop-motion video installation, uses puppets to depict an alienated, loveless first night of newly-weds on board the barge that gives the movie its name.  As if taking their cues from the titles, “Le Matin” (2007) an animation made from 2000 individually drawn frames, and screened on a vintage television set, is as light, whimsical and optimistic as its pendant is dark and uncomfortable.  This four-and-a-half minute video is based on the opening sequence of Vigo’s movie in which the happy couple leave the village church and walk through fields to their barge.  The drawing has a fey simplicity that recalls Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s illustrations for his own “Le Petit Prince” (1943).  Ms. Yasinsky interpolates whimsical, unscripted flourishes: an individual within the crowd of onlookers, for instance, stands apart from his fellows and transforms momentarily into a donkey; or bursts of psychedelic color emenate from Juliette, the heroine, as she encounters the barge that is to be her new home.

Alex McQuilkin, showing in the project room at Marvelli, bases her piece on Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Joan of Arc” (1928).  The installation uses two-channel projection, allowing for images of Maria Falconetti burning at the stake, of crows flying ominously overhead, of the martyr’s head being shaved to be juxtaposed with color frames of the artist herself cutting her long hair and shaving her head.  While Dreyer’s silent movie is accompanied by stirring liturgical music, Ms. McQuilkin adds verbal commentary that borders on banality.  She opens with the statement that, although there are no photographs of her, Joan did exist, but concludes more interestingly with the observation that Joan was the only woman both canonized and burned at the stake by the Catholic church.

While the production values of this work moves Ms. McQuilkin’s video up a notch, in other respects it is of a piece with her earlier works, which include shorts of herself applying make up as impassively as possible while being sexually penetrated from behind; of her and a girlfriend enacting the death scene of Romeo and Juliet, to the soundtrack of Wagner’s Liedestod from Tristan und Isolde, both wearing her trademark plain T-shirt with lettering (in “Joan of Arc” her T says “OK,” enigmatically); and of her holding her breath under water nearly to the point of drowning.  Wrist cutting is also a persistent theme in her work.

Where Ms. Yasinsky (born 1965) accesses early girlhood through dolls and dinky illustration technique, Ms. McQuilkin (born 1980) seems dedicated to a perpetual state of teenage angst in her self-presentation and thematic explorations.  The specific identification of both with early cinema relates to a broader trend in feminist-influenced art, from the work of Cindy Sherman through — in recently seen exhibitions in New York –Georgina Starr reenacting Theda Bara silent movies (Tracy Williams) and Dawn Clements fusing drawings of her own living space with elaborately reconstructed movie stage sets (Pierogi).

For a further cinematic reference in a contemporary video, consider Isaac Julien’s “Western Union: Small Boats” and its nod to Visconti. This rich, lyrical if problematic video installation is the final installment of a trilogy by the British artist exploring issues of migration.

It claims as its specific point of departure the tragedy of impoverished Africans risking the treacherous 100 mile crossing from West Africa to Sicily on small fishing boats, though it is dealt with in mythopoeic fashion.  In the first gallery the viewer is confronted by a screen hanging at a diagonal on both sides of which is projected a slowly panning shot of a picturesquely decripit vessel marooned on a Mediterranean shore.

In the next space, the crux of the exhibition, has a film playing on three screens arranged in the corner of the room.  This juxtaposes scenes of beautiful women – one black, one white – wandering around the Palazzo Gangi (familiar from Luchino Visconti’s classic movie, The Leopard), balletic enactments of death throes by drowning, shots of despondent Africans adrift at sea, and scenes in a poor African village.  Minor key African music provides a suitably somber, elegaic sound track.

Like much of his work, Mr. Julien’s film exudes profound feeling, an impeccable sense of timing, and a sumptuous palette.  Incidents segue with great finesse from screen to screen, with suggestive contrasts of scale, color and locale.  But ultimately, there is – for so harrowing a subject – perhaps a little too much craft.  The migrations have been dubbed the “Sicilian Holocaust.”  The use of all-too artfully choreographed dancers and tourist board-worthy locations seems dubious, although the intention of universalizing a current event, of making a timeless, classical memorial for these poor people, is laudable.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 1, 2007 under the heading “Double Dose of French Film” (Yasinky and McQuilkin) and November 16, “Tragic Love” (Julien)

The post Karen Yasinsky at Mireille Mosler, Alex McQuilkin at Marvelli, Isaac Julien at Metro Pictures appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201583464″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Arthur Danto, Vincent Katz, and Linda Yablonsky joined David Cohen to discuss Kara Walker at the Whitney and Sikkema Jenkins, Karen Yasinsky at Mireille Mosler, Isaac Julien at Metro Pictures, Kate Shepherd at Galerie Lelong, and Antony Gormley at Sean Kelly.

The post November 2007: Arthur Danto, Vincent Katz, and Linda Yablonsky with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

June 21 – July 31, 2007

Yuri Masnyj’s art bears the burden of historical self-consciousness unwaveringly. The modernist style permeates his compositions, the cartoonish yet exacting watercolors of interior spaces and the hybrid sculptures. Masnyj transforms modernist formal devices and elements of genre painting into a new system of signs and symbols. After all, as the title of the s

how indicates, “The Night is Still Young.” Many modern masters such as Picasso and Matisse and Morandi recycled shapes and themes throughout their oeuvre. Masnyj’s art represents a self conscious hyper-recycling, in that the references to the past are excessive. He does not appropriate other artists’ work but he quotes the stylistics of modernism, almost but not quite reducing it to kitsch.

Many of his drawings use a Matissean picture within picture format. Like Matisse’s painting “The Red Room” Masnyj often quotes his own oeuvre. The drawing “All In Colors” (2007) includes a picture of a head and shoulders made with Paul Klee like multicolored stripes. In “Big Books” (2007) a Noguchi paper lamp makes an appearance. Cubistic faces and bodies appear in many of the drawings. In his sculptures references to Russian Constructivist poster designs, Kasimir Malevich, and Alexander Calder, among others, abound.

In his drawings of interiors, instead of walls Masnyj often draws white skeletal frameworks and he fills in the interstices with complete blackness. It is almost as if these “rooms” are floating in deep space. This strange isolated quality epitomizes the ahistoricity of the contemporary art world. The lines that describe the walls and floor don’t always match up. The perspective is askew. This makes the interior spaces he invents, which are sometimes little more than a drawing of a single picture hanging on a wall, conceptual rather than descriptive. Although they do have a certain naiveté, a lighthearted aspect to them, reminiscent of a cartoon appearing in the New Yorker, the drawings represent Masnyj’s thoughts about twentieth century pictorial space and the ways in which the present is constructed with fragments of the past. He obsessively recycles his own symbols, reconfiguring them in pictorial space, and adjusting their relationships to one another.

Masnyj uses a set of handcrafted shapes over and over again in these sculptures: black bottles (wax casts), imaginary books (They are hardcover books that look like coffee table art books or “important books.” Their pages are thin sheets of cardboard and the covers are made from the same materials real hardcover books would be made from, but only some of them have words or letters on their spines.), stringless replicas of acoustic guitars, wooden cube or orb shaped beads on long strings, modernist geometric sculptures, and pieces of wood (these shards of wood relate to the shards of history visible in the sculpture) that are painted in such a way as to suggest backward or forward movement in space. Many of these objects have appeared in still-life paintings throughout the ages. Since we are reminded of the utopian intentions of so much modernist art when we look at these sculptures it is reasonable to compare them to memento mori. There is a cannibalistic quality to his work, in that he points out how contemporary cultural artifacts feed off of past creations. The drawings are a transmogrification of past sign/symbol systems and formal devices.

Often Masnyj’s sculptures have off-kilter proportions and spatial relationships. They are hybrids in the sense that they are simultaneously stand-alone sculptures, furniture, still-lifes, and serial forms. The viewer awkwardly approaches the work because there is no focal point. A long black bookshelf shape filled with faux books, beads, sculptures, and bottles, with a Constructivist-like wood sculpture placed on top of it “Books and Sculptures” (2007), is a humorous twist on the concept of the pedestal/base.

The imaginary books that appear in Masnyj’s drawings and sculptures have words and letters on their spines that could have been lifted from Russian Constructivist posters. They are fragments and emphasize the visual qualities of letters. Very few pre-postmodern artists made books the primary subject matter of their compositions. It appears that Masnyj is taking on the long-standing battle between language and images. This quote by Carter Ratcliff perfectly embodies the pre-postmodernist attitude towards language: “[E]very object of vision eventually exhausts the resources of language.” Even though words have static “forms, pronunciations, functions, etymologies, meanings, and syntactical and idiomatic uses” they have myriad connotations. It is unarguable that words and letters, whether written or spoken, are as integral part of our unconscious life as images are. Therefore they make just as rich metaphors as objects and people do. A word, a letter, a sentence, can have just as many potential meanings and interpretations as physical objects.

The fact that Masnyj’s “books” are products of his imagination, even though they are well made or rendered well enough to pass the reality test, shows us that Masnyj’s art represents a struggle, a constructive one, between the impulse to make a unique art work and an almost self-conscious recapitulation to what has come before. Masnyj makes art that is cognitive rather than expressive in that it celebrates conscious intellectual activity. Stacks of faux books are monuments to the potential change and growth hidden within the pages of real books, but they are all closed, never open, in the sculptures and drawings. So these crowded bookcases represent an everything/nothing duality. We can treat this as potential liberation from the dilemma put forth in the title, “There Is A Lot To Read To Understand What The Fuck Is Gong On” (2007), or we can see these books, these imaginary archives, as empty pages to be filled in by future artists.

The post Yuri Masnyj: The Night’s Still Young appeared first on artcritical.

“Spencer Tunick: Public Works 2001-2004” through June 19 at I-20 Gallery, 529 W 20th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-645-1100).

“Hilary Harkness” though June 26 at Mary Boone (541 W 24 Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-752-2929).

Now that the doyen of feminist performance photography has taken to masquerading as tacky, pathetic circus performers it seems a good time to come clean with a double confession: I have never found clowns or Cindy Sherman remotely entertaining.

Make no mistake about the gravity of these failings: Within polite art-world company not to “get” Ms. Sherman is tantamount to not having a brain, rather as despising the grinning goons who interrupt the jugglers and the lion tamers is to admit to not having a soul.

Clowns are a natural synthesis of Ms. Sherman’s familiar preoccuptions. Her meteoric ascent in the early 1980s came with fictional “film stills” in which she posed in artfully contrived stereotypical scenarios as the ubiquitous dumb blonds of B-movies. Rather ingeniously, this established intentional vacuity as her emotional affect of choice, a less is more aesthetic that allowed nonchalence to be classed as “subtle” and clichéd gestures as “subversive.”

In the 1990s, Ms. Sherman absented herself from the picture to pursue still-lifes that tested the taste endurance of viewers with lurid assemblages of detritus and vomit. Sex toys and sexually-posed prosthetic limbs became a favored motif to complement her pukey palette, and then gender warfare broke out between battered and besmirched Ken and Barbie dolls.

More recently, the performance artist returned lense-side to star in a series of stereotype-castings, as assorted middle-aged losers, personifying Hollywood wannabees and sexually past-it housewives. In her latest, clown incarnation, sick color, sad gesture, slick technique, nonchalance, and nihilism are brought together in a pantheon of the pathetic. Her large format tableaux fill two floors at Metro Pictures, where the artist has shown from the outset of her career: elaborately costumed, affectless behind grimly determined smiley masks, with artful, computer-manipulated backdrops, she is truly the sagging bore she seems to want to be.

The impression I had, trying my utmost to be moved or intrigued by these images, is of meeting the wealthy aunt of Ronald McDonald. Each is as corporate and ubiquitous as the other, and the product they push about as nourishing.

Spencer Tunick is an action painter in the tradition of Jackson Pollock, only instead of dribbling paint on canvas with bravura speed and in all-over configurations, he uses naked people as his medium and city streets as his support.

The photographer puts out the word for volunteers who in burgeoning force agree to strip and arrange themselves in ways that vary from random gestalts to serial patterns. Sometimes his naked collaborators are an inchoate crowd, other times a disciplined regiment.

Mr. Tunick, who has been persuing this line for several years, has become something of an institution. Like Christo, whose career also proceeded from, essentially, a single antic (wrapping up edifices in his case), he has seen his motif progress from a spontaneous, somewhat anarchic gesture into something officially sanctioned across the globe. Once, speed was of the essence: participants had to get into their birthday suits, adopt the requested pose, and dress again before the bemused cops arrived. Now, artist and models can take their time; the events, carefully scheduled by contemporary art centers from Melbourne to Basel to Sao Paolo, are increasingly a focus of civic pride.

In art-historical terms, it is as if Mr Tunick is passing from an art informel phase to hard-edge abstraction. The earlier poses had an existential angst and tragi-comic urgency to them; nowadays, precision and formality are of the essence, the ever-dirigible mass arranged in artfully slick, tidy swathes of skin. The effect of the new orderliness ranges from absurdist humor, as in “London 5 (Selfridges),” (2003), where massed ranks ascend department store escalators, to touching, almost poetic decoration, as in “Melbourne 3,” (2001), where the figures on a river bank are like swaying reeds.

Some works in this new show at I-20, his first in New York since 1998, recall the earlier scatter pieces, like the melodramatic interior group portrait of HIV-positive New Yorkers in a diner. In “Finland 2 (Helsinki Art Museum),” (2002), the affectless, nonchalent expression of the sprawling, crouching figures is powerfully ambiguous, recalling his earlier work. The effect is precariously poised between humor and horror, with conflicting associations of free love and catastrophe, bacchanal and Buchenwald.

Hilary Harkness is a deliciously perverse absurdist in paint who brings together the unemotional nastiness of Ms. Sherman and the crowd addiction of Mr. Tunick. The somewhat precious display of just three smallish pictures at Mary Boone’s Chelsea barn, Ms. Harkness’s first show with this dealer, is a perfect complement to the masquerades and mass actions explored in these other exhibitions.

Ms. Harkness’s all-female S/M orgies and girl’s own adventures at sea are a chilly marriage of medievalism and the comic strip. In “Matterhorn,” (2003-04) for instance, Hieronymous Bosch and Lucas Cranach team up with Quentin Tarantino, Henry Darger, Balthus and his oddball occultist brother Pierre Klossowski, gay illustrator Tom of Finland, and vintage bandes-dessinées pornographer Eric Stanton. In what reads like a sliced-open doll’s house, she offers cross-sectional, compartmentalized views of an army of skinny young women kitted out in black with sexy boots, hotpants, bikinis, and military caps who in each room torture, abuse, molest, and mortally dispatch sartorially and anatomically similar fellows. In fact, as no discerible emotion is displayed on the perfunctory faces or standarized bodies of any of the participants, it is not too easy to say what criterion, fate, or preference determines whether you are a perpetrator or a victim, although the majority of the latter are wearing white socks, which might signify something. No one registers much by way of pleasure or pain on their cute, dumb faces.

In painterly terms, Ms. Harkness favors a flat, nerdish, swiftly dispatched naïvete, in harmony, some might argue, with her moral maturity. What does actually make these sick, silly pictures interesting beyond the shlock-horror inventiveness of her abuse fantasies, and her nostalgic eye for period charm, is a compellingly crafted ratio of detail to whole, a weird sense of decorative balance and all-overness. Mind you, once you allow so formalist a take of scenes of rape and pillage, the artist’s warped values are obviously working.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 10, 2004

The post Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures, Spencer Tunick at I-20 Gallery, Hilary Harkness at Mary Boone appeared first on artcritical.

Stephan Balkenhol at Barbara Gladstone Gallery until May 31 (515 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-206-9300). Prices: The gallery declined to disclose its prices

“Tony Oursler: Recent Works” at Metro Pictures until June 6 (519 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-206-7100). Prices: $45,000

“Bruce Gagnier: Sculpture, 1989-2003” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art until June 13 (50 E. 78th Street, Ste. 2A, between TK, 212-439-9605). Prices: $6,000-$12,000

Anyone who takes an interest in sculpture can’t fail to notice the yawning gulf between “public” artists and their art-world peers. You can be fêted by museums, collectors, and the press and yet never get a bite of the commission cherry. Yet those who *do* often crave the recognition of gallery shows and reviews. Harry Roseman is rare in this split profession: Respected within the art world, he just completed a 600-foot-long frieze at JFK’s International Air Terminal. Millions will breeze past “Curtain Wall,” like it or no.

I haven’t seen the piece, but on the evidence of his current show of related materials at Davis & Langdale, I’m tempted to book Kennedy next flight – Newark man though I am. Mr. Roseman invests his curtain motif with formal and psychological depth. From photographs, the Kennedy commission, characteristically circumspect for this artist, looks to be rich in metaphors of arrival and expectation, theater and homeliness: a Statue of Liberty for the postmodern age.

Mr. Roseman’s curtains reference old masters – Schongauer’s engravings and Piero’s paintings – as much as the drapery of medieval carving. But he also “draws” – with a camera – from life. Exhibited alongside his sculptural reliefs are perceptive but unpatronizing observations of drapery surreally at play in the world: Louche, bordello-red window dressings in a French café thêatre; incongruously high-chroma tarpualins amid old-world rickety farm equipment. The netting around a crop of tobacco in Connecticut becomes a canvas, making what’s behind seem painterly.

Unfortunately, too much is crammed into this show for its own good. Davis & Langdale is an ambitious gallery in pokey premises. The photographs and a harassed-looking wall drawing over-determine how the sculptures are to be interpreted. Their true marvel, especially in the non-colored reliefs in clay or gypsum, is a subtly harnessed anthropomorphism that needs space to flutter.

Stephan Balkenhol’s latest show of free-standing sculptures and carved reliefs closes this weekend at Barbara Gladstone. The German sculptor, who lives and works in rural France, is internationally and deservedly renowned. Marshalling incredible technique with understated force, he can be thought of as a young sculptural counterpart of Alex Katz. There is an aloof poignancy common to them that is at once tough and vulnerable. They similarly reconcile opposites: Awkwardness and fluency, bruteness and sensitivity, economy and detail.

Rough and smooth cohabit effortlessly in a Balkenhol. Sometimes he seems, literally, to draw with an axe, and even where he obviously is using a more delicate implement, he manages to balance tender specifics – especially in hand and face gestures – with an all-over robustness. A couple of large architectural reliefs that depict Chartres cathedral and a castle balance intricacy and consistency in a way that’s worthy of Canaletto. Mr. Balkenhol likes soft, blond woods like ply and wawa, which he keeps fresh-looking with bright paint, rough finish, and pentimenti.

Another relief, this time of a “man in space” from 2003, places the figure in a deeper register than the “ground” – outer space – creating an energizing optical ambiguity. Often his carving technique leaves behind burr, making the chippy surfaces at once vulnerable and animated, like the mortals he depicts. Mr. Balkenhol is alive to the meaning of his means to a degree unprecedented in the current scene.

Tony Oursler is showing a couple of doors down from Gladstone, at Metro Pictures. Like Stephan Balkenhol, he has a trademark style, but comparison of the two artists is an object lesson in the distinction between originality and novelty. It’s the American, with his gimmick worn thin, who comes across the loser.

Mr. Oursler’s contribution to the world of forms is the “video effigy,” a projection of faces onto abstract sculptural objects. In this new body of work, in contrast to the looser, more ghostly puppets familiar from earlier in his career, the knee to waist-high supports are solid structures. These include a donut and various balls and biomorphs. “Coo” (2003) arranges two smaller egg shapes on a bigger one beneath to read like a Mickey Mouse head (an apter metaphor for his artistic project than was perhaps intended). Three separate videos project – in disconcerting misregistration of a mouth and eyes – a person in green makeup squeaking away in plaintive baby talk. The pinkness of a salivating orifice and the whiteness of teeth and eyeballs aid and abet the surreal nastiness of the piece. Technically clever, moderately amusing, and easily forgettable, Mr. Oursler’s is the mannerism of an art-world moment.

Speaking of mannerism, what on earth is to be made of the sculpture of Bruce Gagnier, showing in a packed installation at Lori Bookstein? Mannerist in an art historical sense, this work brings to mind the bodily contortions of the later 16th century. There is also something of the grotesqueness of the modern American painter Ivan Albright: Mottled surfaces read literally as gruesome skin disorders.

If Mr. Gagnier were exhibiting in Chelsea or Williamsburg, might the veteran sculptor be mistaken for a young protégé of hot button appropriationist John Currin and master of the abject Paul McCarthy?

It is a subversive thought, but also a misreading that falls away with calm appreciation – which, for all their weirdness, these pieces compel. Underneath the existential angst of Mr. Gagnier’s disconcerting surfaces and deeply awkward anatomies, a genuine classicism yearns to break free. The real fusion here is of late Roman bronzes and Giacometti.

This article first appeared in The Sun, May 29, 2003

The post Harry Roseman at Davis & Langdale, Stephen Balkenhol at Barbara Gladstone, Tony Oursler at Metro Pictures, Bruce Gagnier at Lori Bookstein Fine Art appeared first on artcritical.