Since “Pacific Standard Time,” the comprehensive survey of art in Southern California from 1945 to 1980, organized in 2011 at multiple venues, documentation of artists from that innovative and experimental period has been on reset. The early 1970s, in particular, were a watershed, as young artists emerging in the wake of the game-changing 1963 Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, turned to conceptual and performative practices the boundaries between them blurred. Some, like Ed Ruscha, extended the notion of object making into specific sites of investigation, the surreal nature of Southern California itself chief among them.

Raul Guerrero was born in 1945 in Brawley, California, and is currently living and working in San Diego. He was an active part of the groundbreaking scene of the early 1970s, and has continued in the decades since to contextualize the hybrid culture of Southern California.

In his second solo show in New York City, and his first at Ortuzar Projects, we’re introduced to over 20 years of Guerrero’s ongoing trajectory, from 1971 through 1993. That he began his career at a unique moment in Southern California isn’t lost on Guerrero—this is the time of Chris Burden’s most notorious performances, the 1972 Womanhouse of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, and the work of David Hammons, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari (his first teacher) and Doug Wheeler. Al Ruppersberg, Jack Goldstein, Vija Celmins, William Leavitt, and James Welling were all Guerrero’s peers.

In conversation, Guerrero often uses the phrase, “by coincidence,” usually in appreciation of the fortuitous events that marked his journey and aesthetic.

“Since I was a child, every summer my family and I would travel north and work as migrant workers,” he says. “All the accoutrements we’d need for the summer, the pots and pans, everything, were loaded into the back of my father’s flatbed truck. As we’d go over the 101 Freeway, from the back of the truck I’d gaze out at the Capitol Building, and think, ‘Wow, this is Hollywood.’  We’d stop and cook our meals right by the side of the road, and join the encampments by the Merced River, and suddenly there’d be so many other people, Anglos, Oakies, African Americans, gypsies, Mexicans, and Mexicans from Texas. My aspiring family eventually became middle class, and at 16, I’m lying under a vineyard, wondering, what I’m going to do with my life? I hitchhike down to Mexico City and 4 years later I’m in Chouinard Art Institute. On the first day of class, I found myself sitting next to Jack Goldstein. Can you imagine? He looked just like Paul McCartney, and we became close friends.”

At the Chouinard, which later became part of CalArts, Guerrero understood Duchamp’s work instantly and found it liberating, the essential foundation of his aesthetic philosophy. Not only was he drawn to the concept of the assisted readymade, but also to the subliminal power of a single, iconic object or image. This, for Guerrero, resonated with another influence—Carl Jung’s theories of archetype and the collective unconscious.       

Among the 46 pieces in the exhibition, the earliest are Guerrero’s Moroccan watercolors from 1971, shown here for the first time. These come with the intriguing backstory that sparked their creation. At the suggestion of his friend and mentor Ed Kienholz, Guerrero sold all his belongings and headed to Europe. “By coincidence” (again) he managed to meet everyone right away: sitting next to Francis Bacon at dinner in London, he meets Lee Miller, (Man Ray’s model and muse), and meets his idol, Richard Hamilton, and this is just the first week. He ventures down to Morocco, and soon was living on a few dollars a day in El Ksar Seghir, a small village outside of Tangier. The series of watercolors are intimately sized, as they were created to be postcards for his girlfriend. He shares the dazzling ambiance in beautifully patterned, detailed, and hallucinogenic pieces in which teapots, tiles and other domestic objects with their exotic symbols and arabesques vibrate in talismanic bands of energy—reverberations from the local hashish.

After that summer, Guerrero returned to LA blazing. In just a few years he made significant bodies of work in photography, sculpture, performance, installation, and video. Each of these directions could have fuelled a lifetime of work. Guerrero is a gifted and emotional photographer, as evidenced by his California Sur Photographs from 1972. (He cites the Mexican movies of Luis Bunuel as a childhood passion.) These photos were his personal documentation of a two week road trip through Baja with artist friends. The compositions are effortless. Throughout his photographs, Guerrero’s utilization of light is mysterious, otherworldly, and exquisitely tender, as in the ethereal portrait, for example, of his elderly grandmother, who seems to hover between the tangible and spiritual realms.

Another standout in his multifaceted career is the assisted readymade: Rotating Yaqui Mask(1974) is a seminal, declarative work. Guerrero describes this piece as a formal exploration of, and direct response to, Duchamp’s “Rotating Glass Disc,” but the personal choice of the Yaqui mask can be unsettling. For me, the psychic energy released from the mechanized spinning of this ritual object multiplies seismically in a fearsome way, the context feeling both taboo and dangerously displaced. Similarly, in his movie “Primitive Act” of 1974, Guerrero is squatting and naked among rocks and shrubs, reenacting the primitive discovery of fire.

Seeking a more subjective, and pliable medium, since the 1980s Guerrero has focused on oil painting. Among those on view are four selections from his Oaxaca series from 1984 plus La Mujer of the Puerto from 1993. The Oaxaca series was done on location and, like the Moroccan watercolors, he entrenches himself in the history and culture of this particular place. Guerrero treats stylistic representation like a local language and adapts a flat colonialist style relevant to his theme. Like many of the painters he admires —Walter Robinson, Neil Jenney, Lisa Yuskavage and Alida Cervantes — Guerrero opens the door to Kitsch and pulp desire. As if he is writing a detective novel, heembeds layers and clues in his post-conceptual approach.

Much of Guerrero’s process involves honing his attention and allowing his emotional responses to connect him not only to his own history but to that of the culture at large.He interprets his painting Vista de Bonampak (1984) for me:  “I want to capture not only what represents the place for me, but also a critique of the culture, so after visiting the archeological ruins of  Bonampak, once a Mayan city near Chiapas, Mexico, I imagined a jaguar, coveted within Mayan culture for ferocity and strength, stumbling on the scene of the murals, depicting men dressed as jaguar knights, in jaguar skins, capturing enemies for sacrificial purposes who are also dressed in jaguar skins.  Although I might question who is the most vicious creature in the jungle, I also want to make paintings that are interesting and beautiful.

“There’s a lot that can be said about the brutality of the system, especially with our current president, but I prefer images that don’t delve into it overtly.”

After 40 years of structured study of North America, Guerrero has a new theory:  “Because we’re living on a continent that was occupied by indigenous people through millennia, and their voice has been suppressed, their culture, especially in the artworld, is changing things subliminally by gaining a voice though artists, one way or another. It’s a philosophical and cultural virus that’s spreading. For example, John Baldessari grew up in National City, like I did, ten miles from the border. Now, here’s a major artist, he goes to Mexico and is exposed to all this stuff that you see coming out of Mexico that’s really interesting, but in fact it’s all indigenous culture.

“If you dig tacos, you’re being affected by an indigenous culture. You’re consuming part of that philosophical virus. It’s full of indigenous material: tortilla, beans, corn, the way it’s prepared—it changes the way you see your reality. What that reality is I’m not sure, but somehow that essence, that philosophy, is expressing itself nonetheless into the culture unbeknownst to us.

“In this encounter between culture and things,” he says, “your sense of reality is shifted. Artists like Baldessari, who’s making art about culture on a large scale, has had his view shifted, and then he turned all these other guys on at CalArts. Bizarre, right?”

Guerrera is planning a trip to the Amazon sometime later this year.

The post A Multifaceted Career: Raul Guerrero talks with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

Okwui Enwezor’s two main presentations of the present and future of visual culture, at the Arsenale and at the Giardini’s Central Pavilion, are difficult, provocative and unwieldy, as intended. The work shown at the Arsenale is like a full course meal from soup to coffee, the Central Pavilion at the Giardini is more like a cafeteria style serving of a range of dishes you can choose yourself. They each have their advantages. One starts, in Room 1, with the American artist Bruce Nauman’s well-known neon antinomies such as Human Nature/Life Death/Knows Doesn’t Know (1983), which annoyingly and persistently flash their contradictory assertions at you from the darkened walls. They share this space with the 2015 work of Algerian/Parisian artist Adel Abdessemed, whose swords and machetes are clustered, sticking up from the floor, and titled Nympheas or water lilies. The works of these two artists, in their darkened room, as a prologue to what follows, don’t so much re-enforce each other or dialogue, as present two contrasting manners of plugging into the culture around them, Nauman as signage of pop-culture aphorisms, and Abdessemed as a relevant yet straining op-ed page metaphor. The viewer is put in a mode of plugging in, connecting to the work, extracting fragmented meanings and pleasures, and moving on. The implied point is not so much to seek unified understanding or unifying judgments of value and resonance, but to seek rhapsodic impressions, maybe snatches of fact and opinion, and continue to the next.

Toward the end of the Arsenale, in Room 11, at another terminus of this cultural multiplicity, is a room containing among other works, Rikrit Tiravanija’s Untitled 2015 of 14,086 unfired clay bricks with the Chinese characters which one can take for a donation of 10 Euros. The money goes to an organization supporting Chinese worker’s rights. Also in this room is Maria Eichhorn’s presentation of works created on site by volunteers on blank canvases painted with a single color (Toile/Pinceau/Peinture, 2015. So here audience and viewer are invited to participation and engagement, undermining and subverting passivity and viewing. One enters the workshop and can assume a living role in relation to works in the states of production and distribution. In this room is also a continuous performance by two people of Dora Garcia’s The Sinthome Score (2014 – 2015). One performer reads and one assumes assigned choreographed postures related to the text based on a Jacques Lacan seminar, and they alternate roles periodically. The viewers are left to interact as they wish with the performers. Works like these that once seemed to grate more strongly against prevailing norms, now seem largely unmoored and single-minded. While the future always holds the possibility of forging more connections to these works, the connections offered seem weak in the present.  The actual final room of the Arsenal, Room 12, extends these ideas in the works of Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera.

Enwezor proposes three filters for the exhibit, and possibly for a view on contemporary culture and the art world at large: the filters of liveness and epic duration, the garden of disorder, and reading capital. And presumably Enwezor’s filters should be seen in relation to culture and art in states of permanent transition with unfixed goals and concepts, as he has previously described the art world. Enwezor’s title for the whole mass of works is “All the World’s Futures.” The ambition Enwezor presumably sees in the works and their being brought together is admirable for embracing both the anxieties and hopefulness implied. In the end, in my opinion, its value is supported not only by the Marxian evaluations of value, work and effort ­but also by a Kantian critique of experiential engagement, implied in numerous echoes in Enwezor’s essay on the shows filters.

Between Rooms 1 and 11 are the works of roughly 90 to 100 artists and collaborative groups that cover a range of contemporary visual art, performances, videos, sculptures, films, installations, objects, images, and paintings.   They follow a range of concepts and impressions that resist unification, fixation and rigidity of thought and experience, and they serve to extend in various manners the ideas of 19th, 20th, and 21st-century observers ranging from Marx, to Kristeva, and Jacques LaPlanche to Enwezor himself. Likewise they extend the ideas and works of various artists extending from Romare Bearden and Gerhard Richter to Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson and Joan Jonas – the last two represented in the Arsenale and the US Pavilion respectively.

One further focus or group of ideas to access these works is provided by the judgments of the jury in awarding Adrian Piper, Massinissa Selmani and Harun Farocki, respectively, the Golden Lion, Silver Lion and Honorable Mention. While Piper moves closer to the concerns of Room 11 and Garica and Tiravanija than perhaps Nauman and Abdessemed, it is important to notice that her work offers multiple connections to contemporary culture, if mainly through social and artworld institutions and their critique. Her primary work in Room 5 is The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game # 1-3 (2013). Three performers/recorders sit at three circular desks with three aphorisms – or brandings – in gold on the wall behind them. Viewers are invited to register into a system where contact information is eventually shared with other registrants and contact is made, which is recorded and kept as part of an ongoing archive of contacts. Even viewers not registering are made aware of a system of which they are not part, going on around them, paralleling everyday experience of social, political and commercial exchange. Piper continues to highlight the inclusions and exclusions that go on around us and provoke our knowledge of them. While clearly conceptual in its premises, Piper’s work offers several parallels to the culture of the art world and the culture of everyday life that locates it and gives it more than a single focus.

The Czech German filmmaker of a mixed German and Indian family, Farocki who died last summer at the age of 70, is presented through a section of Room 8 which shows an atlas of his films on small screens in a matrix around the walls. I am not sure if this is the best way to either be introduced to his works or to sum up his works. But the films themselves are careful observations of everyday life through short, often found, footage. Again, like Piper’s works, his offer multiple intersections to the world of art and the world of every day life, including his re-working of ideas of, among others, Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard.

Farocki’s inclusion, like that of Terry Adkin and Chris Marker, remind us of recently deceased artists whose works continue to make their impact on ideas of other artists; Farocki and Marker in the mode of film and photography and Adkin in the installation of sculptures with African American and musical references and sources.

Massinissa Selmani was born in Algeria and studied in France. His works, such as the drawing series A-t-on besoin des ombres pour se souvenir? [Do we need shadows to remember?] (2013-2014), are sparse, almost illustrational, drawings of news events and photos, which document both the quotidian nature and the bizarreness of reported news. Selmani has also worked in short projected animations and photo collages to report on actual events and planned utopian social structures. Like other artists showing at this Biennale, his works record and diagram present moments and idealized plans. Like Selmani, the artists Joachim Schonfeldt and Madhusudhanan, use drawing as an end in image making in order to portray and report on how the world is simplified and reimagined through our observations and experiences of it. In the works of these artists which serve to represent both deadpan and dreamlike image making, recording the present moment is more prevalent than presenting structures and images that break down or pull apart our sense of the world to move us into the future. Rather than rebellion of the present moment as a precondition for future development, the respect for present moments becomes a prerequisite for modeling future thoughts. Selmani and Schonfeldt use drawing as just one of their media, exploring similar connections to political and social events through photography, and film. They both are using fixed image media in ways that parallel Farocki’s use of short films, which is to say as a media for creating essays on current events and for reflecting opinions about these events.

The stated curatorial premises of the Biennale, in dialogue with the works themselves, yield an interesting emphasis on works that stress the present as a model for engaging the future. These works are strongest when they offer more than one connection to the current art world and the culture at large.

But not all the works fit neatly inside the narrowest confines of the promise of the curatorial concepts. The widest readings of liveness, disorder and value lead in some other directions. Some works stretch across a wide range of cultural concerns including those from recent, if not contemporary, art history. As Amanda Sarroff discuses in her comments on Gedi Sibony’s paintings in the Short Guide to the Biennale. His works touch on concerns of Arte Povera, Minimalism, and Rauschenberg’s combines. Sibony paints on and over aluminum sheets often printed with other images from their previous uses as sides of trucks. In works such as The Shake (2015) and One Foot to Shoe On (2015), he manages to engage, almost as collaged elements, shapes and partial images from commercial messages as abstract elements in large abstract images of three or four colors and a similar number of shapes. In a way that seems to move back and forth from a magnification of small scales to a shrinking of immense scales, Sibony creates a virtual world of image and light that seems recognizable from both the physical and the digital worlds of structure and space, and from art works of the past and the present.

Some of the most moving works in Venice, among a host of notable works that there is not room to mention here, go beyond the curatorial issues of the exhibitions. And yet they carry out the promise of Enwezor’s curatorial premises. Jenny Holzer’s installation from her “War Paintings” Series at the Correr Musuem make moving visual statements. Holzer’s works are large printed canvases of the redacted statements of the United States military and intelligence reports concerning interrogation of those held in the Iraq War. They are shown among the paintings and artifacts at the Correr Museum of Venice’s past glories and accomplishments. They run the risk of exploitation of the topic and people involved, and yet they can be defended both as acts of journalism and art. They quote the words of those interviewed as represented in the documents released by the freedom of information act. They stand as un-easy records of words and acts classified as “interrogation,” but clearly of actual inhumane and cruel treatment of the interrogated.

Many of the works at the Biennale embody the Enwezor’s focuses of a Garden of Disorder and Reading Capitol in relation to the world at large. Good examples are Helen Sear’s “. . . the rest is smoke,” and the Invisible Borders: Trans-African Project, a collaboration initiated by the Nigerian artist Emeka Okereke. Sear and the Trans-African Project both show a series of projections and photographs, which address the place of humanity in relation to the natural world, our use of the natural world as a source of economic value and desired goods, and our reliance on our environment and political structures. At this point we could call this a presentation of imaginative reporting and engaged looking, which is maybe the same thing. They offer us a vision not of a road map for the future, but of a cautionary tale of future choices. If our use of images and art is to bring to life shared stories about our world that both report on its condition, and also allow further considerations in our own thought, then Sear’s and the Trans_African Project’s series of projection and photographs stand as one clear example of how to accomplish this.

“Slip of the Tongue” at the Punta della Dogana curated by Danh Vo provides a contrast to the Biennale that tells a different related curatorial story of contemporary works. If the Biennale provides an example of the strengths of curating contemporary works in an attempt to place them so they both tell their own stories and offer interesting dialogues with each other, this show – also huge in its scope with 50 artists or more spanning eight or so centuries – shows some strengths and some weaknesses of curating works from a single and more impassioned point of view. The sharpness of Vo’s viewpoint is evident in both how he separates the works, and how he brings them together. In short, some of the works exude a passion and breadth of thought that allows them to play brilliantly and at times subtly off each other, and sometimes they become shallow and more desultory. At times one feels Vo wants us desperately to relate to the works as he does, but we can’t locate our history and connection to them.

In both “All the World’s Futures” and “Slip of the Tongue” there are examples of curatorial intelligence in allowing works separate spaces to speak for themselves: for example in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, the three works of Wangechi Mutu, and at the Punta della Dogana the Cri du Coeur (2005) and “Codex Artaud” series (1971 – 1972) of Nancy Spero. But also there are places in each when the works are placed to allow the voices of the artists to be heard in concert or in contrast to each other, such as Nauman and Abdessemed mentioned above, and at the Giardini, the works of Huma Bhabha and Ellen Gallagher. At Punta della Dogana there are several examples of dialogues attempted and provoked. The oddly at once subtle and jarring sculptural juxtapositions of Jean-Luc Moulene’s La Toupie (2015) yields a set of difficult but interesting comparisons with the awkward but material directness of Sadamasa Montonaga’s Work 1961. Likewise, Moulene’s work contrasts but enriches aspects of Vo’s pieces, also close by. Both curatorial objectivity, like Enwezor, and curatorial passion and conceptual pointedness, like Vo’s, can have advantages and disadvantages.

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Manifesta, the European biennial of contemporary art, is held in Western European cities — most recently in Genk, Belgium. This tenth edition, hosted by St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, was housed in the Winter Palace and New Hermitage, the two main buildings of that institution and, across the enormous Palace Square, the city’s main plaza, in the newly renovated General Staff Building. The Hermitage, an encyclopedic museum celebrating its 250^th anniversary, is devoted to world art, going up to Post-Impressionism and the paintings by Henri Matisse; another collection of Russian art is in the State Russia Museum. Because visas are expensive, Russia is not readily accessible to many Americans and West Europeans, so the primary intended audience was Russian. There were a great many foreign tourists in St. Petersburg when I visited in late July, but relatively few of them focused on Manifesta.

Some of the artists responded to specifically to contemporary issues in Russian society. Alexandra Sukhareva, who is Russian, presented photographs from World War II archives. There is a video of a Russian dance class by Klara Lidén and a video of young dancers by Rineke Dijkstra. Boris Mikhailov presented photographs of a protesters’ camp in Kiev. The late Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, a gay artist who had been beaten up in the streets, was represented with Tragic Love (1993), a series of photographs of the artist dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Some foreign artists also offered Russian themes. Yasumasa Morimura made photographs based on drawings of the Hermitage when its art was removed during World War II. Marlene Dumas showed portraits of famous gay men including three Russians — Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Diaghilev and Rudolf Nureyev. Thomas Hirschhorn, whose Abschlag (2014) was designed for “Manifesta 10,” showed a gigantic collapsed building in which works by the revolutionary Russian Constructivists are installed. Erik van Lieshout presented the story of the Hermitage cats, longtime residents of the museum; they perished during the siege, but today are back in the museum basement, controlling invading rodents. And Francis Alÿs, whose boyhood dream was to travel from his native Belgium to the other side of the Iron Curtain, crashed a Russian Lada, a now-obsolete model of car into a tree inside the courtyard of the Winter Palace.

Facing controversy about Russian anti-LGBT laws and, also, about the country’s action in the Crimea, in interviews Manifesta’s curator Kasper König, who described Russia as “a repressive and authoritarian country,” articulated frankly the difficulties he faced. So far as I could see (I was not able to attend the performances or public performances, which were held outside the central exhibition site), much of the art, including most of the art by non-Russians was the kind displayed at such exhibitions in America. Certainly this is true of Olivier Mosset’s large, handsome monochromes; Ann Veronica Janssens’s very beautiful installations of floating liquids; and Vladim Fishkin’s A Speedy Day (2003), which compresses the twenty-four-hour light cycle into two-and-a-half hours, an effect especially evocative in far-North St. Petersburg, where the summer days are so long. The same can be said of Joseph Beuys’s Wirtschaftswerte (“Economic Values,” 1980), a commentary on food shortages in East German stores; Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage, 2001); Susan Philipsz’s piano recording inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which was played on the main staircase of the New Hermitage. Lara Favaretto’s installation of concrete blocks in the gallery for ancient Greek sculpture; Tatzu Nishi’s temporary wooden living room built around a chandelier in the Winter Palace, creating a home with the museum; and a painting from 1966 by Gerhard Richter made similarly affecting use of the site.

As the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, rightly notes in the catalogue, “Displaying contemporary art alongside the classics is a common occurrence.” The logic of this procedure deserves discussion. In the gallery of the Hermitage devoted to Nicolas Poussin you can see the relationship between his early Joshua’s Victory Over the Amalekites (1625-26); Moses Striking Water from the Rock (1649), painted more than 20 years later; and his Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1655-57), a marvelous example of his late style. Normally we thus find visually connected works in one gallery. When, however, the physically contiguous works are historically distant, imagination is then called upon to identify connections. This is true when Louise Bourgeois’s silver sculpture The Institute (2002) is installed alongside an etching by Piranesi and when Katharina Fritsch’s sculpture Frau mit Hund (“Woman with Dog,” 2004), which alludes to the life of Russia’s historical high society, is displayed in the former emperor’s private quarters. In a challenging variation on this familiar procedure, Maria Lassnig, Dumas and Nicole Eisenman occupied the two rooms of the Winter Palace usually dedicated to Matisse. (His paintings were removed to the General Staff Building.) They too deal with the female body and its sexuality, and so temporarily giving them his privileged place in the Hermitage counted as a political gesture.

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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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Yes Bruce Nauman

Of all the avantgarde artists to emerge in the 1960s, Bruce Nauman is the most deserving of the epithet “counter-cultural.”  Be it high or popular culture you are talking about, Mr. Nauman’s emotionally difficult, intellectually forbidding, visually ungenerous art has a masterful ability to alienate.  Sometimes dull, sometimes pretentious, his art is remorseless.

He has not merely been consistently disdainful of traditional, expressive mediums and of conventional expectations. He has also been relentlessly dismissive of anything that smacks of aeshetic experience, whether capturing beauty or intimating the sublime.  As bewildering to this critic as is Mr. Nauman’s status with museum professionals (he is widely considered a genius), even more strange is that so anti-art an artist is also, one has to concede, an artist’s artist.

This point is proved in a sprawling, menacingly dull show of Mr. Nauman in the company of nineteen acolytes and imitators. “Yes Bruce Nauman” is titled after a 1989 painting by Jessica Diamond consisting of these three words, written placard style in black acrylic on a ground of metallic silver paint.  There is added irony in so affirmative an expression for an artist of unremitting nihilism.

The first work to greet the visitor is a car sticker-type slogan in letters cut in holographic vinyl applied to the gallery window.  Mungo Thomson’s “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths” takes this high falutin quote from one of Mr. Nauman’s first neon works, from 1967, which presented this phrase in blue letters along a red spiral in emulation of a beer logo, and which was displayed in the window of his former grocery store studio in San Francisco.  The stated aim of the original work was to communicate an esoteric notion to a broad public while not initially looking like art.

If Mr. Thomson shies away from neon because Mr. Nauman has made this non-art medium ubiquitous in the artworld, choosing instead a tacky, downmarket communication product in emulation of the spirit of the 1967 work, then plenty of others in the show pay homage to Mr. Nauman in his trademark neon.  Glenn Ligon, whose most familiar and accomplished work uses text in black and white to explore racial and linguistic issues, acknowledges Mr. Nauman in “Warm Broad Glow,” one of a series of neon pieces that quotes a pregnant, enigmatic phrase from Gertrude Stein: “negro sunshine.”

Peter Coffin’s “Untitled (Line after B. Nauman’s The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths)” (2004) posits a sprawling mangle of neon in an illegible line that—until you discover the title, and with it the conceptualist credentials of the work—looks like a dutiful, uneventful abstract sculpture.  Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “Untitled (Paul writing my name, No. 3)” is also a scrawl, this time wall-bound, based, we are told, on the artist’s young nephew’s mimicry of language.  Stefan Bruggeman’s “No No No No” (2005) presents it eponymous line in neon capitals, the first three words in white, the fourth in red.  This is a quote from the soundtrack of Mr. Nauman’s performance video, “No, No, New Museum (Clown torture series)” (1987) a continuous loop of the artist dressed as a medieval knave, with red leggings and cap, and green bodice, jumping up and down furiously, stamping both feet at once, and screaming—you guessed it—“No, no, no, no,” with the emphasis, as in Mr. Bruggeman’s color coding, on the last negative.  All these “no”s put Ms. Diamond’s “yes” in context.

The neo-neon imitators keep company with two Nauman neon pieces, “Eat/Death” (1972) and “Suite/Substitute” (1968).  In these, the shorter word alternates with the longer, from which it takes its letters, flashing in different colors. Mr. Nauman’s preoccupations—the mystic truth he reveals—will, by now, be clear: life is a bore, art is no different from life, look at me.

Besides neon, Mr. Nauman’s favored processes include filmed performance, entailing banal repetitions of activities centered on the artist’s body, and deliberately uneventful, unexpressive castings in wax of body parts, often his own.  Mr. Nauman was of the same generation as the minimalists, and while his own art is often reductive, he eschews any of the spiritual or aesthetic connotations of minimal art, often actively mocking such pretentions.  This iconoclasm in taken up, in turn, by Charles Ray in “Plank Piece I-II” in which the artist has himself pinioned against a wall by a plank, a performance documented in dingy black and white photos to give it a period look.

“Bouncing Balls” (1969) a 9 minute, 16 mm film (since transferred to DVD) of Mr. Nauman fiddling with his private parts is the inspiration for Francesco Vezzoli’s video of the same title which, true to neo-conceptual form, adds new meaning to a vintage conceptual gesture through slicker production values: the artist commissioned a porn-star, with well toned muscles and shaved legs, to swing his genitals back and forth with balletic grace.

Mr. Nauman’s penchant for buffoonery clearly marked him as a precedent for the Californian artists and sometime collaborators Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, whose works explore abjection and abasement.  Mr. McCarthy is represented by a selection of short black and white films from the early 1970s, including “Face Painting—Floor, White Line” (1972) in which he paints a line with his own face, crawling through the paint; “Ma Bell” (1971) in which he vehemently feather-and-tars each page of the phone book, creating a mucky, visceral accumulation in the process; and various schatalogical and genital titles that revel viscerally in futile, absurdist actions.  Mr. Kelley has a relatively tame though no less forlorn installation of stuffed animals on a blanket.

Futility, negation and self-regard, the Nauman standbys, are the order of the day in the remaining exhibits: Jan Mancuska has a stencil of negative words like “no,” “nowhere,” “nobody,” “never,” register on his self-portrait face via light shining through a stencil; Aaron Young circles black and white reproductions of a Goya firing squad painting in marker pen, identifying one prisoner awaiting execution as Bruce Nauman; the late Jason Rhoades’ “Black Hole, Poontain” (2005) constructs a figure out of detritus and neon; Martin Creed’s “Work No. 312: A lamp going on and off” is and does what its title proclaims.

The evidence suggests that Mr. Nauman has spawned a veritable academy of denigratory pranksters whose antics consist in repeating his own enervating gestures.  It is ironic how close they are to the master not just in spirit, but formally—despite the anti-formal premise of Mr. Nauman’s enterprise.  The counter-culture has actually produced a system of emulation that recalls Byzantium or ancient Egypt in its formal strictness.  Do positive repetetions of negative gestures amount to something affirmative?  No Bruce Nauman.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, August 24, 2006

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