March 9 to April 14, 2018
504 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, lissongallery.com

By the time of Ted Stamm’s premature passing in 1984, his Wooster paintings were becoming known in the New York art world, especially among younger aficionados in the SoHo art district (then the center of the avant-garde in New York). While Stamm rarely traveled outside the metropolitan New York area, the Wooster paintings were often seen in group and occasionally solo exhibitions, including Documenta 6 (1977), and were presented at the Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA – PS 1, and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, among others. Thanks to the tireless advocacy of Danish New York-based curator Per Jensen, a stalwart against years of art world neglect, we have a show at Lisson Gallery that affords these works some interpretative clarity. Stamm was born and raised in New York. He was an avid conversationalist and a faithful correspondent. His manner of letter writing was always in longhand and seemed to follow a comparable direction to the Woosters. At the outset the paintings appeared more static, but as they developed after 1979, as in the Lo Woosters, they began to take on the appearance of speed. By comparison, his hand-written letters also began to extend laterally to three or four words stretched across one line on the page. In the process, the speed and intensity of the words took on a new meaning. A further example of his speed might be attributed to Stamm’s consistently dressing in black except for his glistening white tennis shoes. I have few recollections of Stamm sitting still, but many of his appearance standing in a conversation continually in a state of motion as if transporting words through the sudden movements of his body.

The Woosters employ an unusual rectangular theme that extends into a triangular hinge on the left side. These works were both drawn in graphite and painted in black and white (and, later in silver). At the outset (1978), it seemed that few observers were aware of Stamm’s discovery of this rather obtuse form. Given the analytical orientation of the times, many assumed it was based on some complex mathematical derivation; but, in fact, it was quite the opposite. Stamm, being a man of the streets, with bicycle in tow, discovered this abbreviated form one day on the sidewalk near his loft. The fact that he could not decipher its use or origin piqued his curiosity enough to accept it as what might be called an unknown readymade.

The exhibition catches both the artist’s consistency as well as his complex reprieve from an all-over spatial reduction, replacing it with a series of modular variations. Examples of this would include 78 W – 4 (Wooster) and 78 SW – 22 (Small Wooster) (both oil on canvas from 1978). The difference between the two is not only the shift in scale in relation to identical forms, but also the enclosure of the black band that moves around the edge of otherwise white paintings. In the first, larger version, the band descends from the upper side and follows along the upper diagonal slide of the triangle before it extends back along the bottom edge. The second, smaller form carries the exact same proportions except that the black band completely encloses the white surface, which makes the interior shape a smaller version of the larger one that extends outside the black frame.

Beyond these modular variations, Stamm began to move from stasis to kinesis. LW – 2H (Lo Wooster) and LW – 2A (Lo Wooster), both graphite on paper from 1979, are flattened versions of the rectangle and its adjacent triangle that optically incite leftward movement. In either case, this suggests they are studies that precede the large low-hanging oils mounted at the entrance that dominates the wall as one enters the Lisson Gallery.

The space within the Woosters was gradually evolving into space/time. By 1980, he had returned to the origin of the Woosters as he became conceptually involved in placing red stickers of his familiar sign, which he called “Wooster Designations,” on bumpers and license plates of parked cars with the intention of transmitting the message throughout New York in the directions in which they would drive.

Some two years later (1982), Stamm began sending out cards on which the message “Painting Advance 1990” was printed. In my reading of this, Stamm was saying that painting would move towards another level, a higher level of sensory cognition, in less than a decade. Sadly, Ted never reached 1990. But he showed the potential of painting to move beyond stasis and connect with urban time – not simply as a representation, but as bright new awareness of how we think and see and how we come together through painting.

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October 12 to November 11, 2017
531 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, masseylyuben.com

I can think of few sculptors at work today who have a greater respect for their materials or their craft than Claire Lieberman. She was the subject of a recent show at the Massey Lyuben gallery. The center of the gallery was dominated by nine sculptures carved from single blocks of black marble and placed waist high on white pedestals. The daunting regimentation of their arrangement in rows of three by three lent a sense of high seriousness. Together they formed UDBO Playground in which UDBO stands for Unidentified Dangerous Beautiful Objects.

Unlike so many contemporary artists, more concerned with the message of their work than with its material or form, Lieberman rejoices in the sheer, irreducible objecthood of her works, and that enthusiasm is infectious. It is hard to stand near them, each about the size of a large watermelon, without wanting to engage them—against one’s better instincts and art world decorum—in some tactile way, to revel in their absolute smoothness or even to lift them in order to assess density.

Lieberman is not an abstract artist. Each of these nine works suggests something that might exist in the real world. But at the last moment the sculptor pulls back from that hint of familiarity to render the objects alien and inscrutable. The title, UDBO Playground, provides some clue as to how we should interpret them. They are indeed beautiful objects that resist identification. At the same time, a sense of danger lurks about them. In addition to their unyielding density, several of them resemble grenades or the sort of generic bomb that might explode in a vintage Looney Tunes cartoon.

That association brings us to the other component of these works, the element of child’s play, but with little of its presumptive innocence. Often these objects recall the little metal objects in a Monopoly set or the trinkets that one might attach to a bracelet. In this respect they playfully resemble schematic flowers or children’s tops. Only one, shaped like a gourd, suggests something organic rather than machine made. All of them have been burnished to a degree of superhuman smoothness, although one work—a sort of oblong orb—does betray a few fleeting, consoling glimpses of rough stone on several of the protruding bosses that enliven its surface.

What is Ms. Lieberman up to in these UDBOs? In part she is invoking the inveterate game of the Minimalists as she plays with scale in tiny trinkets enlarged to the size of mid-sized mammals. At the same time, and more importantly, she derives from Surrealism an appreciation of the dreamlike strangeness of her objects, at once present and familiar yet inscrutably elusive, as well. And yet, overriding all of that, I suspect, is a deeper reverence for the pure materiality of the stone and also for that transcendental quality that stone, with its awesome permanence, holds for us evanescent creatures of flesh and blood.

While the nine objects in UDBO Playground made up the core of this show, it also included several of the artist’s prints and blown-glass objects. These latter, in particular, share thematic elements with the stone sculptures. They combine an element of danger—often resembling guns—with a sense of inscrutability and of play. Their spectral fragility played off against the density of the stone objects a few feet away.

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May 14 to November 13, 2016
1 Museum Road, New Windsor, NY 12553
stormking.org

In the late 1960s, a group of young artists in New York wanted to display outside of the art gallery and museum system. Dennis Oppenheim was one of them. Along with Bill Beckley, Walter de Maria, Dan Graham, Michael Heizer, and Robert Smithson, he reacted against minimalism, which at that time was essentially art for indoors. He was interested in creating what he called a “terrestrial studio.” It was singularly appropriate, therefore, that this summer seven Oppenheims joined the 130 sculptures in the permanent collection sited outdoors Storm King Art Center. Oppenheim’s works were scattered around the grounds, which cover 500 acres in upstate New York, which made locating them into a treasure hunt, a pleasurable pursuit in which the maps provided for visitors were essential. There was also a display of photographs and a video of his early art in their museum building.

Some major artists have a signature style. Every Roy Lichtenstein sculpture and every Dan Flavin is a recognizable variation on their familiar concerns. Others, however, are more restless, and so what defines the unity of their oeuvre is some concept of art making. Frank Stella is one such figure—and so was Oppenheim. To understand Stella, you need to explain how he moved on from the austere early black striped minimalist paintings to his baroque painterly assemblages. And to identify Oppenheim’s achievement, you need to trace the thematic development which took him from the now classic Directed Seeding/Canceled Crop (1969), a photograph of a Dutch grain field cut in a diagonal, with the cut material packed in a 25 pound bag, displayed as art, to Alternative Landscape Components (2006), which consists of a group of trees, bushes, and rocks made of painted steel. Along the way you will need to discuss Entrance to a Garden (2002), a steel sculpture in the form of a man’s suit jacket, shirt and tie, which allows you to enter through the arches and sit inside. And you must also describe Wishing the Mountains Madness (1977/2016), group of wooden stars, each 48 inches wide, scattered on two acres of land, a constellation fallen to earth. Oppenhein, who was teaching in Missoula, Montana wanted to bring some of the madness of New York City to this remote area. He created another such an interaction in A Sound Enclosed Land Area (1969), a recording of his footsteps in Milan, which shows that sound alone can constitute a work of art. And, coming closer to the present you will need to deal with  Architectural Cactus Grove, #1-6 (2008), cactus plants made of fiberglass and aluminum, and also  Electric Kiss (2008), a walk-in onion dome, vaguely Islamic-looking, made of stainless steel and color acrylic rods. What a challenging artist Oppenheim is!

As I see it, Oppenheim’s development involved a radical rethinking of the very concept of sculpture. What, he asked, is the relationship of a work of art to nature? But to understand the dazzling originality of his answers to this question requires a rough-and-ready sketch of sculpture’s recent history. Following David Smith’s breakthrough, some  sculptors—Mark di Suvero and Anthony Caro are the best known—explored ways in which sculpture, removed from its pedestal, could become radically abstract. And at that point, the minimalists (Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Robert Morris) identified the ways in which geometric forms functioned sculpturally within a gallery setting. Oppenheim changed the rules of the game, opening up new possibilities.  These other sculptors created works that could be sited either indoors or out of doors. But as his titles indicate, many of Oppenheim’s works were created to be outdoors. Alternative Landscape Components and Architectural Cactus Grove in effect constitute a second, man-made nature, a supplement to the natural vegetation of Storm King. Wishing the Mountains Madness is a piece of the sky fallen to earth. And Dead Furrow (1967/2016) is a wood structure modeling the furrow left behind after plowing a field, which he turned into a platform for viewing the landscape. But explaining how Oppenheim’s other more recent art also extends this pregnant way of thinking would take us beyond the bounds appropriate to a review. And so let doing that be left as an exercise for the reader—go to Storm King, walk around and look for yourself!

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February 27 to April 10, 2016
205 Hudson Street (at Canal Street)
New York, 212 772 4991

“Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni,” an exhibition of work by the short-lived group BMPT (Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni) now at Hunter College, is sparse. It consists of only four artworks and two vitrines of documentation, mainly in French. Yet, given its subject, it is complete, though also thoroughly lacking. The show in the main gallery consists of one painting by each of the group’s members; in this sense the exhibition is complete. As for the deficiency, the show’s smallness is in part compensated for by the exhibition “Critical Gestures & Contested Spaces: Art in France in the 1960s,” which documents the varied groups, artists and political practices that constituted the neo-Dadaist and high Modernist art scene of ‘60s France (mainly Paris). This exhibit recounts the context from which BMPT emerged. For some, this history and the artists and groups that participated in it may be fairly unfamiliar. The inclusion of this exhibition demonstrates that BMPT was not unique in their endgame strategy, its political endeavors, or, for that matter, were they the most radical.

In the main gallery, one painting consists of alternating vertical green stripes and bands of raw canvas. At each end, the stripes are hand-painted opaque white. The stripes are all of equal width. Another painting has a black circle with a pristine white dot at its core, which marks the center of the canvas. The stripe painting and the painting of the black circle are both on stretched square canvases of equal size. The third work, un-stretched canvas pinned to the wall, consists of five alternating horizontal bands of gray and white. The last white band, at the bottom of the canvas, is about a third of the width of the others. The fourth is a piece of oilcloth pinned to the wall and imprinted with uniformly spaced, brick red, marks made using a number 50 brush at 30-centimeter intervals. (It is important to note that all four paintings in this exhibition vary slightly in format, size, proportions and dates, yet are representative of each artist’s motif.)

BMPT’s works structurally consist of a horizontal, a vertical, a configuration, and mark-making, respectively. Buren paints vertical stripes, Parmentier horizontal ones, the black circle on a white ground is made by Mosset, and the uniform brush marks, repeated at 30-centimeter intervals, are Toroni’s. Each of these artists was committed to producing only their own motif, which serves as a logo. While these works are handmade and authored by different artists, they are stylistically anonymous. Together, these four paintings by BMPT represent an index of a type of abstract painting that is identified with the anti-relational, anti-compositional ethos of Minimalism in the States, and in Europe it would be understood to be derived from Art Concrete, or perhaps Zero.

Between January and December 1967, BMPT had the opportunity to manifest their critical stance in four highly public events. The nature of these events was influenced by the Situationist notion of intervention — a disruption of the norm. The documentation of these events is displayed in two vitrines, and they’re described in a supplement, which also supplies us with BMPT’s manifesto of January 1967 in which they conclude “We are not painters.”

In all four events their paintings serve as tropes; in the case of the 18^th Salon of Young Painters, they produced their works in public under a banner with their names. This was accompanied by an audio tape that advised their audience to be more intelligent. At day’s end, they took their works away, installing a second banner so that the two banners together stated “Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, and Toroni Do Not Exhibit.” In another, their paintings served as décor, the setting for a performance that never occurs: the audience sits waiting for 45 minutes, staring at their paintings. In their fourth and final manifestation, slide shows of traditional painting subjects — such as landscapes, nudes, etc. — were projected onto their works. These projections were also accompanied by an audio track that admonished their audience that “Art is an Illusion,” “Art is a Dream,” etc. With the fourth manifestation BMPT’s artistic and political experiment came to an end. Parmentier, in December of 1967, denounced Buren, Mosset, and Toroni for their willingness to deviate from the agreed upon formula; he proclaimed that by abandoning strict repetition they “situate themselves in a regressive manner with respect to this moral position.”

In each of their manifestations, BMPT reduced their works to mere props, and in doing so, sought to expose art’s commodification, the rendering of culture as spectacle under capitalism, as well as their own complicity (and that of everyone else). Problematically, with this exhibition, we are given a painting show: an exposition of trophies, emptied of their critical function. BMPT works have been captured, and tamed and are now loaded (down) with the aura of art — the very thing these works were meant to escape. Consequently, the critical nature of BMPT’s position is lost. They now signal some other message, one more aesthetic and formal than political. We are shown examples of the standard motifs agreed to in 1966, and even these diverge from BMPT’s standard model in that they do not adhere to their initial commitment to uniformity and repetition. In this, exhibition, BMPT’s radical proposition, meant to challenge notions of artistic authorship and originality, is also lost.

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“Wonder” and “beauty” by now are clichés we’re bound to encounter when discussing visual art. How else is one to talk about it, but to opine what’s wonderful? One obvious, however difficult, answer would be to describe what one naturally sees. As Heraclitus tells us, via his curious philosophy, nature has a passion for hiding from us. With this in mind, it’s helpful to remember that even what’s defined as “natural” can be in itself an enigma; think of the eerily exact still-lifes done by countless artists throughout time. Parmenides later says that all of what’s real is alike, and that furthermore, if you find something real here, you’ll likewise find the same amount of it over there. Open to all influences, artists have found more to attend to than what’s plainly visible. And so, what’s difficult about this? Artistic independence bears its garbage as well as its gifts. Thanks to assiduous contemporaries like Richard Tuttle, whose works are motivated by both nature and imagination, viewers can throw off the visual strain of having to guess at what they’re seeing, and simply admire Tuttle’s objects for what they are.

With such an unrestraining ontological setup as the above, we can agree that what artists have to work with has no limit, and art is really a game and nothing more. In this game, the only thing to do is discover and understand — or, in the case of Richard Tuttle, to simply ask questions. Artists have always the problem of showing what it’s like to live during the time of art-making. It’s here, where very little makes sense, we can appreciate works by artists of the current milieu; here and now you can really say whatever you like. Richard Tuttle says and makes whatever he pleases. His is a polarizing endeavor, but certainly worthy of anyone’s time when done with such a steady and varied output as evinced by the new publication, Richard Tuttle: Prints, published by JRP|Ringier.

In this book, perhaps in reply to our aforementioned Classical philosophers, Tuttle reminds us that “to learn what something is, you sometimes have to reference what it is not,” a statement telling of his ever-quixotic process of making art. The book’s publication was occasioned by the exhibition “Richard Tuttle: A Print Retrospective” at Bowdoin College Museum of Art from June 28 through October 19 of 2014, and it demonstrates Tuttle’s sheer prolificacy and his bent for the mechanisms and outcomes of printmaking. The book is organized chronologically by exhibition, from 1963 to 2014, and from its beginning through the duration of Tuttle’s career, he makes no bones to remind us that what we’re seeing may not be what’s actually there, and questions the acts and objects we’re often to understand as being Art.

Throughout Prints, it’s difficult to discern whether a reproduced work of Tuttle’s is a drawing, a painting, a silkscreen, a woodcut, a sculpture, or a collage: a trait of diversity which remains at the center of his oeuvre. Stating that “a print is not a drawing,” we can be grateful to Tuttle and the editors for giving us examples of just what is a print. Even in the Classic example, Tuttle is making connections and analogies to the print process, such as “when Homer has Nestor ask his men to choose between fighting the Trojans or dying on their way back home, their choice is a space for a print.” To guide us along, we are given statements from the artist himself, like the dictum that “science exists to resolve problems; art is there to raise problems.” Tuttle’s approach to art is often eccentric and always investigative, to the bafflement, bemusement, and excitement of his audience.

One especially puzzling series from Prints, consists of seven woodcuts printed in colors, entitled Galisteo Paintings (1993). These prints, based on delicately painted watercolors done by Tuttle in Galisteo, New Mexico, were “translated” in the process of the woodcuts being printed. This series is an example of how Tuttle’s process is never limited to one definition or specific outcome, as it “conflates both the printing and painting techniques.” These prints appear as watercolors of flowers and birds, and the process of their making is startlingly imperceptible.

Now more than ever are categorizations like “Minimalist” or “Post-Minimalist” fitted best out the open window, and Tuttle seems to know this well. For his chosen medium of printmaking, the printing plate’s function is to deliver “information as a pen does for the writer,” and Tuttle allows a view into this work as being comparable to language, specifically with the surprising connection the book draws: through the transformation of drawing into print via its plate, a “translation” is taking place. These prints ask questions, raise them, and are meant to be dialogues in print without language.

Editor Christina von Rotenhan mentions (in a nod to Tuttle’s being an artist through-and-through) his “residing in border zones,” when interestingly, he uses even the borders and “empty” spaces in the way that one could view the spaces around letters in typography as important rudiments of the composition. Tuttle sometimes includes all parts of the printing press machinery as elements for the final object. One section of the book features a 1998 exhibition entitled “Edge,” inspired by botanical prints from the 18th century. Here, the intaglio printing plate’s edge is seen embossed on each finished print, thus obscuring “our understanding of the order of printing and the emergence of the printed images,” and making an allusion to an actual frame within the borders of each print. Funnily enough, these dynamic and colorful lines appear less botanical, and more like sketches for needlepoint in fragments. One could stare at these particular works for hours, guessing at their beginnings and endings, and the junctures at which hues blend and never really come up with any answers, because Tuttle has altogether relieved us of what we’re “supposed” to see in (or even say about) his prints.

If we’re forced to bear the old bearers of beauty, let them be of the Tuttlean stock, which adheres to the poetic rule wherein the art requires as much from you as you require from it. Richard Tuttle’s prints are startlingly neutral; his methods are totally efficient, and yet they have the capacity to lead the viewer from any individual print in a thousand other directions and spaces without indulgence, which would in any case fade. Meanwhile, Richard Tuttle’s exhibitions continue, giving viewers the close-up view of what this book tantalizingly foretastes.

Richard Tuttle: Prints (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, in co-edition with Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2014). Ed. Christina von Rotenhan. English edition. ISBN: 978-3-03764-365-5, 144 pages, $80

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The room smelled like rain-softened wool and leather at Issue Project Room on Saturday September 13th. The tightly packed audience, half of them sitting and half standing — the chairs normally occupying the back of the space were cleared to allow for the performers’ mobility — waited in humming excitement for experimental composer Yoshi Wada, his son Tashi Wada, and their accompanying musicians, David Watson and Jim Pugliese. Yoshi, born in 1943 in Kyoto, Japan, studied sculpture at the Kyoto University of Fine Arts before moving to New York in the late 1960s where he joined the Fluxus art movement and studied with its founder, George Maciunas. Though Maciunas acted as a catalyst to Yoshi’s early experiments in music, Yoshi maintains that he did not carry the movement’s influence into his later career. In a 2008 interview with The Wire, Yoshi commented that Fluxus appealed to him at the time, however his independent interests in sound and music directed him elsewhere. His departure from Fluxus led him to study music composition with La Monte Young, and by extension North Indian signing with Prandit Pran Nath, and Scottish bagpipe with James McIntosh.[i] In Yoshi’s most recent work, Fluxus’ democratic consideration of the artistic potential in objects and actions, the tonal precision of North Indian singing, and the emotive qualities of Scottish bagpipes all merge into a sensory environment thickening with the sense of urgency and approaching danger.

The unnamed performance began with the sound of an alarm. Yoshi churned a low whine from a worn, metal hand siren, which grew to an anxious, undulating howl, then stopped abruptly. He then focused his concentration on a small switchboard. With each definitive press of a button he rang one of the alarm bells installed in various unidentifiable locations throughout the performance space. The warning sounds compounded further as Pugliese’s bass drum and Tashi’s organ drone joined in. Pugliese’s mallet attacked the drum in sporadic intervals while Yoshi watched avidly, waiting to ring the alarm bells precisely in or out of synch with the echoing percussion. Like the slow, elongated footsteps of a giant or an army marching in unison, the drumbeat spread ominously into the air as the shrill bells quivered erratically in sonic contrast. The hum of Tashi’s organ crept into audibility, seeming to emanate from beneath my feet. Watson exhaled a mournful note from his bloated bagpipe, which hung heavily in the air. Later in the performance, Watson and Yoshi — who began playing his own bagpipe — circled the perimeter of the space. As elongated tones followed them around the space like half-deflated balloons attached to their instruments, the growing amalgam of sounds created a formless narrative specific to the evening and location.

In addition to its inextricable link to duration — unlike static two- or three-dimensional objects that can be experienced at various points in time, we only hear sound while the sound waves vibrate — the performance of sound also greatly involves the space in which it is presented. At Issue Project Room, sounds bounced around the cavernous ceiling, and from where I sat, the reverberations created a spinning sonic halo above my head. Further amplifying the sensory experience, the room, crowded with radiating bodies, became gradually hotter and more humid as the performance went on. At the point of swampy discomfort, the climate heightened the effect of the instruments and I became acutely aware of my corporeal sensations: everything blended into a bath of perception. The bagpipe, siren, and organ combined into a polyphonic discord while the drum rumbled on the side. The tones resonated so deeply it became hard to distinguish whether they were being heard or felt.

Yoshi’s composition filled both the walls of the architecture and the bodies of the attendants as it wove periods of intensity with ones of meditative restraint. The interludes allowed my mind to calm and wander, but never for too long as Yoshi continually reintroduced the siren and the corresponding crescendo of the other instruments. The utilization of sound’s ability to resonate within the body, through both high and low frequencies, combined with sounds that connote impending danger, created a foreboding psychological event. The lack of contextualization further disconnected the audience from an opportunity to interpret the elements. The only specific information Issue Project Room gave about the nameless composition is in Yoshi’s words: “I search for deep and ringing sound that travels deep into my cells. Where does this sound exist?” The question posed by Yoshi requires a heightened awareness, not just of what we hear but how it feels to hear. By blurring the lines that distinguish individual senses, Yoshi created an open space for unadulterated sensory perception.

[i]Haynes, Jim. “Piper’s Lament.” The Wire June 2008: 20-22.

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I visited “Platform: Maya Lin” at the Parrish Art Museum after spending a couple of days in my hometown of Frenchtown, New Jersey (located on the Delaware River, population roughly 1,200). I was perhaps more receptive to the urgency of Lin’s environmentalist sculptural works than I normally would have been had I arrived by way of New York City. As a kid, one of my favorite places to explore was a rocky peninsula on the Delaware that my father and I dubbed Clam Beach because its shore was littered with sun-scorched freshwater clamshells. One could always count on finding live clams in the small pools that formed along the riverbank. Today, the little peninsula on the river is unrecognizable. Half of it is underwater and the other half is overgrown by a thicket of unruly vegetation and piles of driftwood.

The work presented in “Platform” consisted of three sculptures for which scientific imaging software was used in shaping familiar sculptural materials like marble, steel and silver. The strength of Lin’s approach has always been her ability to reduce seemingly incomprehensible phenomena to a direct, often quiet, physical encounter. A gesture as simple as folding paper is made monumental in her Wavefields (a series begun in 1995, comprised of three undulating mini-mountain ranges in Ann Arbor, Miami and at Storm King Sculpture Park in New York). The wavefields were based on wave patterns that Lin recreated as site-specific earthworks using 3D modeling software. At her best, Lin subverts the frank materiality of Minimalism by tethering her work to science and politics. These recent works allude to geo-spatial boundaries that, since Modernity, have on the one hand been strengthened and fortified through war, politics and Capitalism, and on the other, have deteriorated as a result of excessive consumption and expenditure of natural resources.

Pin River — Sandy, (2013) was the most effective work in Lin’s exhibition. In Pin River, the diffuse boundaries of the floodplain along the coastline of New Jersey, Long Island and New York City are rendered in thousands of steel pins, forming a slightly blurred wall drawing of the section of the Northeast where Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. The regularity of the construction almost absurdly orders and regularizes the chaos of the eponymous “super storm.” With this work, Lin points straight ahead at the map and tells us, “This is where the storm hit, these are the floodplains,” and the echo that follows is, “It will happen again.”

Latitudinal coordinates take the form of marble rings in the tripartite floor sculpture titled Around the World (2013-14), Each nested ring represents the topography of the ocean floor in the three works, titled Arctic Circle (the innermost ring) Latitude New York City (the central ring) and Equator (the outermost ring), The marble structures show the hills and canyons found miles below sea level: they make visible the unpredictable beauty of the Earth’s unexplored topos. But how does the gray-veined Vermont marble used in Around the World relate to the latitudes of New York City, the Arctic Circle or the Equator for that matter?

A similar dissonance between form, concept and material is felt in Lin’s wall-hung renditions of three East End lakelets titled Mecox Bay, Accabonec Harbor and Georgica Pond (all 2014) These small, fragile bodies of water were mapped and their lacy perimeters were used as the outline shape of the sculptures, though I’m not convinced that these works live up to their aspiration as talismans for environmental awareness. Silver is precious, yes. These lakes are precious, of course. But how does this precious metal connect to the ecology or topology of eastern Long Island? The works’ diminutive scale makes them look more like gilt ginger roots than fragile bodies of water. Lin wants poetry, but in this work her slick materials threaten to eclipse the conceptual urgency of her subject. In her monuments and earthworks, Lin acts almost like a choreographer who guides bodies through space. The import of her work is absorbed not simply through the visual but likewise through corporeal engagement and movement. And although one can circumambulate Around the World, Lin’s small sculptural works neglect the elements of encounter and surprise at which she is so adept.

I sat in the atrium with Lin’s work on the last day of Fourth of July weekend and watched a cavalcade of cars inch along Montauk Highway through the museum’s picture window. I would like to think that the three concentric rings that comprise Around the World might act like sonar beams radiating outward from their point of origin (Lin) — out into the world of environmentally-minded art-admirers and weekenders alike. In the waning daylight, the pins in Pin River — Sandy cast a westerly shadow that suggested the wiping away of the coastal regions of the floodplain. With this gesture, Lin subtly advances her environmental warning, one straight pin at a time.

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Comedian Louis CK points out, with his characteristic ethical generosity and pragmatism, “A lot of people wonder what happens after you die. Lots of things happen after you die — just none of them include you.” The recent death of On Kawara ends the brief but significant line of a life and of an exceptionally powerful artistic contribution. Human life is a rarer accomplishment than most of us, living day-to-day, sometimes remember. Most of the world is uninhabitable. Probably far greater than 99% of the entire Universe is completely inhospitable to life. Figuring out how to organize the mind and the body into some kind of harmonious, eudaimonic state is an ongoing struggle. Just getting up each day can feel like a victory. And, after any life extends for its short span, it ends. Thereafter everything else continues in its absence. That someone lives and is known at all, is momentous.

Kawara was 81 years old. Born in Japan in the midst of the 20th Century’s great upheavals, he moved to New York in 1965 where he remained until his death last month. Early in his career he showed figurative paintings, but moved toward conceptual art by the early 1960s. He exhibited his work regularly at Paula Cooper in New York, Yvon Lambert in Paris, and other galleries from the late 1960s onward and was included in one of the first large surveys of conceptual art, “Information,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. There’s a permanent installation of his work at Dia:Beacon and a large retrospective to be exhibited at the Guggenheim early next year. His New York gallery, David Zwirner, announced his death on Thursday.

Kawara had a group of friends and colleagues, but he was known for being retiring. He emerged alongside conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth, a close friend. Kawara shared their interest in language and its ability to frame or shape human perception, to describe and to conceal. Only bits and pieces of his life are available, recounted by those who knew him and as documented in works such as his postcards and telegrams. It is likely that he was influenced by American and Japanese fluxus artists who helped develop and formalize (if that’s the right word) mail art in the 1950s and ‘60s. Correspondence evinces his familiarity with John Baldessari, John Evans, Sol LeWitt, Michael Sesteer, numerous curators and dealers in Minimalist and conceptual art of his era, and collectors. But such connections connote only a very hazy portrait of Kawara.

In his best-known series, Today, he documented every day of his life from January 4, 1966 (two days after his 33^rd birthday) until, perhaps, very recently. This project highlights the impossibility of notating one’s life adequately. Even as recording technology has improved and expanded the personal and professional archives of those living in the developed world, when a person dies that’s essentially it. Kawara never published any statements about his work, didn’t grant interviews, never gave speeches, never sat on public panel discussions, wasn’t photographed. And yet with the Today series he recorded his existence by making one painting for every day, consisting solely of a complete date, rendered in white on a monochromatic background. It’s a simple act that gets straight to the heart of a lot of complicated stuff about our existence, experience and finitude. The sum of his archive is paltry in comparison to any person’s life, to Kawara’s life indeed, with a minimum of context provided for each date: a newspaper clipping stored with the painting and a record in a diaristic calendar. But it’s a rich testimony. It was as fleetingly temporal as anything, though it remains.

A parallel to the Today series, Kawara’s One Million Years (1969) is comprised of a 20-volume book that lists the million years that preceded the work’s inception, as well as the million years that are in the process of succeeding 1996 A.D. The subtitle for the first set of volumes reads “For all those who have lived and died.” This is a small addition to the annals of billions of people, long lines of humanity stretching over horizons of space and time, the known and the unknown. And barely overlapping those two dates lays an infinitesimally small span of time — the life of Kawara himself. It was carefully cordoned off and diligently recorded, until it’s not there anymore.

In another series, Kawara sent telegrams to friends and acquaintances, simply proclaiming, “I AM STILL ALIVE.” That affirmation, in the face of the difficulty of being a person, both ontologically and just physically, is deeply affecting. They are messages filled with love and tenderness, a recognition that something mundane and approaching the miraculous has happened, again. Finitude, and our resistance to it at each moment, is something that Kawara noted with exceptional concision and dignity. That is now finished. His death marks both the succinctness of his work, and serves as its ultimate frame. It was the only trajectory the work could have ever taken, but that doesn’t make its sting any less acute. He was alive. That’s important. The world preceded him and time continues. We (other people) continue — an equally valuable recognition. But he will be missed.

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November 3 to December 15, 2013

41 Orchard Street
New York City, 212-226-7108

Mike Yaniro’s debut solo show at Room East consists of eleven wall-mounted works, which exist in some cosmological place between drawing, painting, and sculpture. The pieces varyingly traffic in recognizable language, figurative images, and obscure, process-based forms. Ultimately, what keeps them from fitting easily into an established artistic category–especially that of drawing–is the same characteristic that could be said to unite them: a persistent and formally esoteric philosophical logic.

There are four identifiable series in the show. The upstairs gallery features two similarly-sized rectangular text-centric works installed in the center of adjoining walls, and between them, a pair of graphite drawings on paper which portray high-contrast renderings of what appear to be hands and fingers. On a third wall there are two framed works on stretched latex that each crudely depict eight line-drawn versions (or is it stages?) of a caricatured animal-like form. In the downstairs space, four unframed abstractions, also on latex, present a formal and thematic counterpoint to the latter.  In the center two-thirds of these large-sized hanging latex sheets, hazy clusters of rectangular grey impressions have been printed.

In contrast to the majority of word-based art, Yaniro’s pieces are not immediately “readable” on either a conceptual or a linguistic level. In the two examples upstairs and a third downstairs, flat monochrome fields of acrylic (red, beige, and grey) are interspersed with stenciled-out snippets of word-forms, numbers, and punctuation. These figures make little syntactical sense in any way one might try to read them; for instance “URAccato” runs into  “91/151/”, line break: “ADR/rid SPRAY.” Ultimately though, something emerges in their lack of lucidity. A few words or recognizable fragments of words, such as “Spray. “Local.” “Plate.” “Exhau,” seem to reference technical writing and industrial objects. The strangeness of this is complimented by something unorthodox in the facture of the objects; the substrate of the work is off-white PVC plastic sheeting commonly utilized in sign-making, and it shows through where the letter shapes have been masked off.

These pieces are almost commercial signage turned inwards, and an association is bridged between their non-communicativeness as artworks and the ubiquitous world the material and the language comes from. By and large, the works in the show seem to result from something similarly searching and analytical. Just as the red beige and grey pieces fixate on language, other equally abstract works can be said to linger over the dynamics of imagistic representation. The untitled hanging latex pieces downstairs, created through the transfer of xerox toner onto  rubber sheeting, at first glance resemble indefinite printerly accretions. In actuality, the impressions are formed from a mimetic practice in which Yaniro transfers specific images from his personal archive unto the surface of the latex. But this process is an operation that in technical terms doesn’t work; the selected images lose their content, and what we are left with is the distinctive knotty and textured amalgamations of their traces.

The work tests the communicative potential of the subject matter and processes at hand, and in the resulting deformations–in other words, all of the pieces–there is an inherent, latent psychology. This manifests distinctively in the two framed works that feature repetitive drawings of rabbit or snail-like forms, described in thick ink lines (Rickling 1 and Rickling 2, both 2013). The figures are derived from facsimiles of drawings found in a historical book detailing the outlawed practice of psychotherapy in Nazi Germany. Without knowing the charged images’ meaning or derivation, Yaniro has reproduced it in a manner that builds on its mysterious but purportedly therapeutic back-story.

It is not easy to delineate a single meaning or endpoint to the work.  Potential references and intimations of emotion cycle through it in spite of the austerity. But as is the case with the Rickling drawings, the art inhabits a crossing-place between culture, the objects found in the wider world, and an individual’s cogitation of symbols, images, and messages. This all stands somewhat in contrast to the seductive and purportedly meaningful surfaces that seems to dominate the work of many young artists. Yaniro uses language and images to conflate symbol with gesture in a way that palpably relates to Jasper Johns’ maps, flags, and cast faces. Another artist called to mind is Bruce Nauman, whose work seems also to prevalently break down communication, most often to the underlying human urgencies of internalizing and externalizing.

Yaniro’s work could also be said to advance a root awareness of the borders of a self. The most clearly defined figurative representations in the show can be understood as a coda to this idea. The drawings Caric 1 and Caric 2 (both 2013) depict close-ups of fingers and sharply defined fingernails in the midst of uncertain tasks or gestures.  Because of something strange and clinical in the perspective, what should be familiar and human appears foreign and uninhabited. The image is clear and isolated but the subject is deconstructed.

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Maccarone
September 7 to October 19, 2013
630 Greenwich Street
New York City, 212-431-4977

Carol Bove does not consider her art in terms of its site-specificity, which might come as a surprise considering her recent projects for institutions such as the Highline and the Museum of Modern Art.  Hers is a more holistic approach to site specificity as a call-and-response between a sculpture, its materials, and the surrounding environment. In an interview with Art in America in May 2012, Bove explains: “My sculptures can and must be taken apart and then put back together. Disaggregation is important. Therefore, each element needs to maintain its individual identity, its autonomy.” This is why I find it particularly worrisome that the press releases and texts in situ introducing two of her ongoing sculpture installations in New York City, Caterpillar at the Highline Park (through May 2014) and Equinox at MoMA (through January 2014), recommend allegorical interpretations of the art based solely on their material or textual components.

It is Bove’s solo show at Maccarone, her second with the gallery, titled RA, or Why is an orange like a bell? that most thoroughly escapes this trap of over interpretation. The work in all three exhibitions share materials: concrete, brass, cast steel, and powder-finished steel; unlike the outdoor installation on the Highline and the show at MoMA, the gallery pieces are not physically bolted down and hence not corralled by a specific space and its host of references. RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?  confounds traditional notions of artistic authorship and object category. Only six of the twelve works listed are attributed to Bove herself, who regularly folds the works of others into her own shows in what she calls “forced collaborations.” Among Bove’s six works, a large percentage of the materials were industrially fabricated or found, and their identity as “artworks” is complicated by this sense of previous history. Just past the gallery’s entrance is one of Bove’s simplest and most eloquent works—an untitled sculpture in the round, made in 2013, in which a slab of petrified wood is fastened to one edge of a steel beam towering almost a dozen feet tall. Here, the support structure is an essential armature, and the fossilized organism an animated protagonist in comparison.

One of her most virtuosic displays is Peel’s foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep (2013). The work consists of delicate brass open cubes and rectangles screwed into intricate formations and woven into the openings of a concrete pillar. Even though not all the shapes implemented are regular cubes, the edges of both materials contribute to the contours of a regular grid when viewed straight on. As one walks around the piece, however, the tidy geometry ebbs into formal chaos before straightening itself again. The same could be said of her two white powder coated steel sculptures, Solar Feminine and Hieroglyph (both 2013), whose forms yawn and contract when observed in rotation, and I-Beam Sculpture (2013), which is set low to the ground and becomes nearly indistinct from it at certain angles.  In all these works, Bove’s aforementioned notion of disaggregation is not merely a physical phenomenon, but an optical one.

The remaining works in the presentation were made by Lionel and Joanne Ziprin, Harry Smith, Richard Berger, and other unnamed members of their Lower East Side bohemian circle from the 1950s and ‘60s. Their contributions include a glass vitrine of anonymous doodles, scraps, and more complete works on paper (ca. 1951-1955). These, the list of works informs us, are not meant to be scrutinized for their content, but to be “illustrative of the creative atmosphere of the Ziprin circle”—much in the way the books in Bove’s iconic George Nelson shelf sculptures operate as cultural indicators rather than texts.  The centerpiece of the show, if such a work exists, is Harry Smith’s Design for Qor Corporation (ca. 1960), a diminutively sized painting on cardboard sporting a brash red and green grid-like pattern with Celtic affinity. It is suspended high between two large panes of glass—a two-dimensional vitrine—such that one can’t look at the Smith painting without seeing other works in periphery. In a brilliant multi-dimensional play, this work is at once a motif, a shadow, and a physical intervention, imprinted upon the show without leaving an actual trace.

The artist does not make explicit why she chose the Ziprin circle’s works to feature alongside her own. The choice was certainly not incidental or merely aesthetic; in conjunction with her Maccarone show, Bove co-curated with Philip Smith a reading-room of Ziprin and Harry Smith ephemera a few blocks away at 98 Morton Street. In this appendix-like exhibition are works from the duo’s short-lived design company Qor Collective and other eccentric commercial projects like Inkweed Studios. When Lionel Ziprin passed away in 2009, he left behind an epic volume of poetry, which included the autobiographical lines: “I am not an artist. I am not an / outsider. I am a citizen of the / republic and I have remained / anonymous all the time by choice.” Nine years ago, Bove offered a companion statement in an interview with the curator Beatrix Ruf: “It has to be apparent that the piece was put together for this particular occasion, in this particular space, which exists in a particular cultural context at a particular moment in time. […] The objects are assembled from non-art objects and my fantasy is that they could return to a state of non-art.”

The show probably leaves room for an essay to be written about the link between Ziprin and co.’s Kabbalistic undertakings and the spiritual inflections in Bove’s titles, but I believe that it is unwise to give too much emphasis to cross-interpretation. Rather than looking at either body of work as an index, allegory, and appendage to the other, we should regard RA as a staged meeting of kindred objects that we are invited to observe before everything disbands again.

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