July 8 to August 12, 2016
170 Suffolk Street (between Houston and Stanton streets)
New York, 212 274 0064

Sticky, squishy, felty, rubbery. Plush, plump, porous.

Part cactus, part snowman-shaped Peep candy, a bulbous form stands a shy distance from the front doors. Shaded a dusty aquamarine, slightly blanched like the surface of freshly cut silicone, three cylindrical volumes perch one atop the other. In tumid contours, this shape vaguely gestures to that the class of object that contains canine chew toys, children’s building blocks, and paraphernalia for the sexually adventurous. Jayson Musson infuses Pedestrian (2014) with unexpected life, bringing the object to the physical scale of the human form. In the placement of this work, curator Feelings (whose book on soft art was published last year by Rizzoli) prepares us for the wealth of sensations to come, abstracted in objects that become bodily in their engagement of ours.

Temptingly tactile, Justin Adian’s works echo gestures that feel intimately human; in Yabba Dabba Doo (2016) a mitted hand crunches closed, while 2^nd Cousins (2016) gives a sidling sway that closes the awkward distance between a baby-boy-blue rectangle and a girlishly pink wave. Spongy, enamel-coated forms cling to gallery walls, creating pastel pop-out patterns detailed by crinkled material and real-life shadow. John Chamberlain’s Untitled (1967) seems to complete these flirtatious motions on the second floor of the gallery, comprised of two partial spheres that kiss, tenderly embracing to become whole.

Guy Goodwin’s cardboard cushions resemble the dotted patterning and depressions of upholstery, an allusion borne out in titles such as Springtime for Henry Grimes (2016). However, we are made sharply aware of the distinction between content and form as Goodwin’s cardboard amoebas stiffly sail through stippled seas. Weirdly plush in volume, these rigid surfaces model structures that they cannot possibly match, distorting internal integrity to achieve the uncanny quality of plastic food or fake hair.

The humble moving blankets that compose Sam Moyer’s series of Night Moves (2009) are impeccably folded, the original patterning of gray and neutral-toned expanses are divided by neat seams, joining one region to another. Regular, orderly ripples traverse each square plane. As with Goodwin’s unyielding bubbles, Moyer’s compositions fall eerily flat, less interested as they are in tactile pleasure, than in clean aestheticism.

Retaliating against hard lines and geometry, Lynda Benglis’s Untitled (1970) makes the fluid discrete in a colorful spill that fails to mar the floor of the gallery. Uneven blocks of color seep stickily in this flow frozen in diffusion, movement caught in permanence. By contrast, Erwin Wurm’s Internal (2016) dissolves that which should have integrity, warping the sturdy exoskeleton of a toaster.

Samara Golden’s pillowy figurative sculptures are tattooed with patterns that feel distinctly, embarrassingly American. Here is the body politic, striated by squiggly bacon strips, foreheads emblazoned with law books and hammering gavels. If we sit too hard and long on the couch — watching conventions, of course — will we too soak up its dull, grandmotherly floral ornamentation? The American flag flourishes across arms upraised in the pose of one of Picasso’s demoiselles. Eyes, painted over these designs and illuminated by a track of fierce gallery lights, look at us coyly sideways. Walk around to other side, and these same limp forms are illuminated by a blacklight that causes a very different relief to manifest: glowing skeletons, skulls, and bones fluoresce. Yet, for these two fronts, there is no substance, no interior.

Airy, insubstantial, empty, hollow, these various works find life in the inanimate and the object in the human. There may not be a whole lot in the way of content here, but that is proudly proclaimed by the exhibition title. This is about substance, but not the intellectual kind; texture is the name of the game and we are awarded with a crunchy, crinkly, plushy show that gives to our gaze as easily and as generously as it would under the weight of a hand. Touch with your eyes. I dare you to feel something.

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Nancy, the aesthetically conservative comic strip created by Ernie Bushmiller in 1938, isn’t especially liked among the cartoons on the funny pages, but it has a curiously devoted following among some artists. Fans have included Andy Warhol, Joe Brainard and avant-garde comics artist Mark Newgarden, each of whom has reproduced altered versions of the mischievous young girl who is the strip’s protagonist. Quasi-Dada cartoonist Bill Griffith remarked, with some praise, “Everybody that loves Nancy loves it in a slightly condescending way. Nancy is comics reduced to their most elemental level.” In his current show at Salon 94’s Bowery location, Jayson Musson joins Nancy’s fan club, declaring his devotion in sculptures and paintings, with mixed success.

Whereas older artists sought to expose the bizarre and seductive nature of Nancy’s banality, Musson intends to affirm the comic’s beauty. He ignores Nancy herself to focus on paintings and sculptures that sometimes appeared as set pieces in her forays to museums or galleries to grok and mock the art on display. In a chiding and indignant tone, Bushmiller used his character to snub much of contemporary art as a sham and no better or more valuable than the finger paintings of children, occasionally having Nancy create her own messy abstract paintings. Musson has appropriated the objects of ridicule, rather than the finger-pointing avatar.

His attitude about the appropriations is ambivalent. Quoted in the press release, Musson claims, “[Bushmiller] drafted some perfect paintings. … In his pejorative depictions of abstraction lay a symmetry, balance, and economy of form that is simply exceptional.” Later, however, he continues, “To recreate some of these works … and set them into the context of exhibiting them as verifiable works of art is perverse in a way, and perhaps confirms Bushmiller?s point of view about the whole operation of art.” His attitude is not quite cynical, but Musson might possibly profit from the perversity, humoring both Bushmillerites and aesthetes.

Musson’s paintings and sculptures are not without merit. His reproductions are made with colorful Flashe acrylics rather than black-and-white ink, or as powder-coated fiberglass sculptures in three dimensions rather than two. Musson has invented the palette, and his use of color is smart — not quite reminiscent of the bold, slightly muddy tones of traditional comic strips and comic books. He’s shown himself capable of making handsome choices in his previous show at Salon 94, which featured paintings made of Coogi sweaters. But the Nancy paintings feel disappointingly like a punchline without a clearly articulated joke. As with Bushmiller’s comics, all the action is dead in the middle and a bit corny; the images are constricted, pushed toward the center of the canvas. Add to this the strangeness of Salon 94’s premises, with its small upper gallery and its cavernous, high-ceilinged lower space, and the whole thing feels overbearing and crowded — big without being ambitious.

Works that succeed are also the ones that are most attractive. Fritzi’s Painting I (all 2014), named after Nancy’s caretaker aunt, is a lusciously matte azure with a jumbled set of graphic marks: spirals, triangles and a brushstroke-like flourish running to the left. The symbols are rendered in a tastefully complementary set of mauve, green and pale yellow, whereas most of the other paintings are drawn in only two or three hues.

The identification with comics is made only sparingly explicit. Figurative imagery, such as a bulbous pink man with a hole in his middle called Sculptural Allegory for a Specific Cultural Sphere, points to the derivation. And the inclusion of text in signs painted on panel, reading “ART EXHIBIT” or “ART MUSEUM ?,” root the show in what Art Spiegelman called “comix,” a portmanteau he developed to note the power of co-mixing text with imagery. Comics can be a really powerful medium, a fact that Musson showed in his cartoonish 2009 drawings series, Barack Obama Battles the Pink Robots, but doesn’t exploit so much here.

Musson is probably best known for his web series Art Thoughtz (2010-2012), published under the alter ego Hennessy Youngman, a Henny Youngman-like art critic who dresses and speaks with caricatured mannerisms based on stereotypes of hip-hop culture. Youngman (more deftly than Musson does here) satirizes the mechanics of art making and artspeak, explaining, among other issues, the significance of the sublime and post-structuralism, the monopolistic careers of Bruce Nauman and Damien Hirst, and how to get a curator’s attention (bring her roses). Youngman’s lampoon of art fully becomes art itself. The deployment of visual and verbal rhetoric, of sequential imagery, shares more with comics and is far more thoughtful than Musson’s current series. One imagines that Musson didn’t want to be pigeonholed or stuck in a project he’s grown bored with, but still, one wishes he would retire the comics and bring back his comedian.

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