March 3 to April 23, 2016
293 Tenth Avenue (at 27th Street)
New York, 212 563 4474

“James Nares: Portraits,” currently at Paul Kasmin, offers one of the more intriguing efforts by a contemporary artist to affect the portrait genre, currently enjoying a popular revival. Though appearing at first glance to be still photos, these portraits are actually shot with a special video camera that can record in excess of 300 frames per second, many more times a camera’s normal rate. Each portrait in the exhibition amounts to an extremely slow-motion video displayed on HD screens with their respective subjects posed mostly in conventional head-and-shoulders format. The result is that a viewer can track a subject’s movements as methodically as one can follow a snail on a branch. In acquiescing to this weirdly protracted form of observation, the effect is mesmerizing — just as mesmerizing as it was in Bill Viola’s “Quintet” videos 15 years ago.

The glacially slow movement of each subject certainly holds one’s attention, and to put this to use, Nares had each sitter accentuate a specific movement. Titled with the subject’s first name only, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, Jim (2015) offers a turn of the head, while film critic Amy Taubin, in Amy (2015), augments a similar gesture with a smile that replaces a grave stare. These examples are mere fragments, as some of the videos last up to 20 minutes. Art critic and curator Douglas Crimp, posing for Douglas (2015), clasps his hands together just under his chin, sometimes interlacing his long fingers in a series of gestures that resembles the sort of unconscious movement a portrait subject is likely to indulge in when an appropriate gesture escapes them.

Others display more calculated gestures, like Jahanara (2016), in which a young woman in South Asian dress performs dance-like motions with her arms gently ascending and descending. More than the other pieces in the show, her gestures seem calculated to complement the camera’s artifice. And this is where the work’s more contradictory aspect becomes apparent. Though charming, her attempt to cooperate with the artist’s intentions manages to put even greater emphasis on the camera’s unusual interpretive bias, coldly thwarting her effort to create something personal.

Jahanara is a portrait of one of Nares’s three daughters participating in the series. The remaining subjects are all well-known art world figures and friends of the artist, suggesting Nares wished to lend his project the standing of celebrity along with a note of personal and emotional involvement. Visual aspects are ordinary. The lighting of many is stark but not exaggeratedly so — softly diffused and aimed generally toward the front. Whatever contrast it creates naturally changes as the subject turns from left to right, or right to left. Backgrounds tend to be dark. A deep charcoal blue for instance does the job of offsetting the platinum shock of Jim Jarmusch’s hair.

A temporal medium like video applied to a still-image genre like portraiture brings the viewer into an unsettling space where neither a feeling for cinema nor any sensitivity toward still images are much help in coming to terms with what they are experiencing, mostly because as a hybrid their individual characteristics cancel each other out. To watch Amy morph from a frown to a smile holds our attention to the tiny muscle changes that create her expression. But in doing so, the expression itself becomes secondary — it feels bypassed. What can be appreciated of her humanity is undercut by the camera’s mechanism.

As social animals we are super sensitive to, yet almost entirely unaware of, how we read facial nuance. I challenge any parent to actually describe the physical subtleties that reveal their child is telling a fib, though their ability to read them is usually unquestionable. In watching Amy’s face dissected into many small moments, one is witness to the mundane mechanics of what makes a smile, the muscle contractions splayed out in laboratory fashion. It’s worth noting that the camera — a Fastec Troubleshooter — was designed as a scientific instrument.

There is a mildly absorbing yet ultimately alienating strangeness in these videos. The ambiguity Nares produces — hardly an unwanted aspect of an art work — is reflective of how he places the viewer in a conceptual no-man’s-land between the time the subject expended posing and the duration of the video one sees in the gallery. One ends up hovering between methods of seeing, alternating between intimacy and voyeurism.

Voyeurism has deep roots in Western art, extending from Johannes Vermeer to Andy Warhol; the latter’s screen tests of the late 1960s are characterized as influential by the artist in an essay by Max Lakin in last month’s Vanity Fair, which coincided with the show’s opening. The Warhol reference seems an odd choice, since Nares’s ostensible approach to his subjects is the opposite of Warhol’s cold-blooded gawking. Nares clearly seems interested in creating genuine engagement with his subjects. And yet this clichéd use of slow motion actually pushes a viewer away from the subject and repositions them behind the artist, who is behind the camera, which functions according to the methodically relentless purpose for which it was designed.

If I were to seek the missing link to the connection Nares claims between himself and Warhol, I’d look to Richard Avedon’s deer-in-the-headlights celebrity portrait work of the last century. Though Avedon is a still photographer, he makes for a better precursor to an artist working in the portrait mode. In Avedon, as in Nares and Warhol, the blending of celebrity (real or imagined) confrontation and the supremacy of the lens renders the camera’s intrusion inevitable. If I am to accept the context of portraiture that Nares insists upon, I cannot ignore the fact that the only real video content is the plain evidence, in each portrait, of time passing, the banality of which is overcome by the fantastic properties of the super slow aspect — not what I can grasp of the subject’s humanity. For all their close-up beauty and dream-like dawdling, as portraits they are more weighed down than lifted by the camera’s obstinate scan.

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July 4 to August 2, 2015
4 Fulling Lane
Kent, CT, 917 270 8044

Everyone loves an art movement, and many may feel the lack of any major recent one. But the next best thing is a group of disparate artists all working in the same place — ideally bucolic or exotic. And just in time to quench our thirst for such geographical groupings, and to welcome the upstate summer, comes the exhibition “Cornwall Bohemia,” at James Barron in Kent, Connecticut. This is the first group show at the gleaming new space belonging to Mr. Barron, an infamously modish figure who shuttles between here and Rome, his international profile matching the storied elegance of many of these local artists.

This is a crew, a scene, of truly heady social stuff, whether the ultra-cosmopolitan Philip Taaffe; the reigning royalty of TriBeCa, Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham; not to mention leading glossy magazine photographer Todd Eberle; Downtown superstar James Nares; and Duncan Hannah, dandy draughtsman supreme. But quite aside from any such cosmopolitan grandeur these are all artists of true importance, of global caliber, who also happen to have houses and studios in Cornwall, a group of quaint unspoiled villages in Litchfield County, where they spend some of their creative time and energy. No, of course there is no thematic coherence or identifiable shared method,but yes they all make for a damn rich group show, artists of world renown here operating on a smaller, more communal scale. The perfectly proportioned main gallery is not only ideally light and airy, but also deliciously cool — blasting AC always being an accurate socio-demographic clue to a dealer’s status. And the whole space is simply ablaze with local color, from Greg Goldberg’s zingy modernist motifs to Eberle’s outrageously bold mirrored flowers from his Cosmos series, or Speed of Heat (2012) a smooth trademark bright swoosh from Nares. The show seems to move across from a joyously breezy abstraction, including the kick-ass, mica-rich Portrait (Regal) (2015) by Jackie Saccoccio. There’s a sort of refined outlined figuration in Dunham’s comic biomorphic blobs and Brendan O’Connell’s tasty, melting supermarket products, juxtaposed with ideogrammatic Canal Zone cityscapes of Judith Belzer. As if coming into focus, the image itself then solidifies into the recognizable contours of Simmons’s perfect, solitary and spotlit photograph Brothers/Aerial View (1979) and Hannah’s two highly stylized and desirable untitled paintings of cars and buildings brimming with Brutalist chic.

In all this, Taaffe provides a sort of central fulcrum to the movement from abstraction to realism, with his Strata Nephrodium (2014), a thicket of primal pattern, whose fern shapes and bold brightness could be read as an homage to Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”: “And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves/ Trail with daisies and barley/ Down the rivers of the windfall light.”

Kent is known for its widespread public sculpture – not least thanks to the notorious neighboring Morrison Gallery. But Barron has wisely included only one example, Nozedone (2013) — a sinister yet sensual work by Carl D’Alvia, a sort of Maltese Falcon built from cast resin licorice curlicues, looming in a back perch.

The Cornwall area has a long tradition of artist residents, including Alexander Calder, James Thurber, Marc Simont and Alexander Lieberman; and this exhibition is a welcome addition to such proud regional history and, ideally, perhaps an annual tradition. As Barron notes, “Cornwall has always enjoyed a rich intellectual and artistic heritage, which is especially remarkable given the town’s tiny population.” In fact, so creatively rich is this county that one could easily pitch a Litchfield Biennale, though this is no place to play the “why not so-and-so” game.

If there do seem some obvious omissions from this exhibition — such as watercolorist Adam Van Doren or sculptor Tim Prentice — clearly not everyone could be included without losing that generous, big, calm hanging that so distinguishes this show. The only two Cornwall artists one might have liked to seen together here are Seth Price and Emily Buchanan, a perfect pairing, ideal demonstration, of the town’s wide artistic diversity: a celebrated conceptualist and a renowned traditional landscape painter who recently created the White House Christmas card.

For any British critic, or indeed follower of European Modernism, there is the added irony that the original Cornwall, in England, was site of one of the St. Ives School, one of best known of the 20th century. This was a genuine movement. more than causal geographic coincidence, bringing together Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth as well as several subsequent generations of artists, such as Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton, who all shared a distinct aesthetic approach to depicting their common landscape. Likewise, one does suspect that some of these artists in the “other” Cornwall up in Connecticut, should get together to work in a similar aesthetic vein, sharing studios, ideas and materials. Then at last we could have an actual new, live art movement. It only takes three to make one, as well as a welcome weekend country set. Perhaps they just need a name: the “Cornwall Oddballs” or the “Litchfield Color Field Crowd.” Something suitably snazzy can surely be found.

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March 7 to April 20, 2013
514 West 25 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-941-0012

In “The Painter of Modern Life”, Baudelaire envisions a painter of “the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity that it contains.” He also condemns photography, which for him too easily gratifies the popular desire for images. But Baudelaire’s words about the painter could well apply to video artist Mary Lucier, whose latest piece, Wisconsin Arc, combines constructions of light and contrapuntal movement with a sympathetic documentation of everyday life. In this highly formalized record of bourgeois recreation, comparable to Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on the Grande Jatte, Lucier engages both popular culture and high artistic ideals.

These new videos were made during two years of teaching in Milwaukee. The works unfold progressively in the gallery, beginning with a three-minute flat screen video at the entrance. Like the predella to an altarpiece, this loop, visible from the street, entices viewers with narrative scenes, leading into “Wisconsin Arc”, the more ambitious projection in the inner gallery. There’s indeed some sense of a chapel in that chamber, with benches before large images of Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum, whose monumental window onto Lake Michigan creates a cathedral-like space, with networks of reflected light.

Shot on a beach near the museum, the more documentary and informal “predella” video, entitled Beauty and the Beast, follows a Hmong family group filming one another on the shore, seemingly aware of Lucier’s camera on them: observing and being observed. Lucier implicitly acknowledges this fundamental condition of our public life, while the obvious fact of the family’s ethnicity leaves open the question of what social divisions underlie the popular democracy of the beach.  As viewers pass into the inner gallery and the more sophisticated recreational context of the art museum, the passage is hung with video stills printed on silk, suspended like prayer flags along the gallery wall. These exemplify the multiple potentials of digital images, including their commercial value. The passage might reference the museum shop with its omnipresent commodification of culture. Like the question of ethnic diversity, the issue of art’s complicity in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” is acknowledged but left open.

These undertones of contemporary media ethnography give way to a starkly formal image in the opening section of Wisconsin Arc, a close-up of a glass with ice cubes. Centered hugely in the frame, it creates a lens through which we view the distorted figures of passers-by on a distant walkway. The message implicit in this surrogate eye is the camera’s authority, as it imposes itself on the visual process. Its active intervention is only extended in the editing of the next two sections.

If we think in musical terms, the middle section would be the scherzo, with its hyperactive pace, as amateur performers move through the space in front of Calatrava’s giant window. Along with this intricately choreographed sequence come layered images of the beach and the lake, dissolving the architectural frame while introducing footage of the family from the “predella” video.

The final section is the longest, set to the leisurely pace of a group of walkers. Now down on the beach itself, the camera tracks a panoramic vista as it picks up and follows a man and two women who are  carrying their own cameras. The man acknowledges Lucier with a glance before strolling on into what becomes a fugue of layered tracking shots. Sequences of the group overlap with one another and combine with other shots until the initial group re-emerges, approaching us again, and the procession repeats itself. By varying the opacity of the layers, and manipulating the speed of the projection, Lucier treats the people and landscape as visual elements in a larger composition.

Indeed, the sixteen-minute duration of this loop prolongs the simple pleasure of viewing and being viewed into a timeless, meditative continuity. Given our conditioned expectation of quick editing and punchy messages, it comes as a mild surprise each time the group reappears for yet another swing along the beach. For those who recognize the musical accompaniment – the intro to Jerry Butler’s “For Your Precious Love” – the continuity extends into the past, into a primeval ‘fifties realm, before the invention of video art.

This attitude towards time distinguishes Wisconsin Arc from Street, a video by James Nares currently featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nares has recorded passersby in New York in slowed motion and heightened detail, like Lucier, but where Nares emphasizes a sequential movement through space and time, Lucier layers her sequences to create a less linear, more forgiving temporal structure. Like the Soviet experimental filmmaker Dziga Vertov in “Man with a Movie Camera”, which concludes on a human eye merged with a camera lens, she integrates time, space, people and technology.

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