February 13 to May 26, 2019
235 Bowery, at Rivington Street
New York City, newmuseum.org

This exhibition offers a unique window onto the black experience. Nari Ward is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose career spans twenty-five years. His work is composed primarily of found objects from the street in New York, Harlem in particular, that critiques and subverts conversations around capitalism, poverty, and race. His New Museum retrospective fills three floors with assemblage, sculpture, painting, video, and installation in an exhibition that, in generously embracing and provocative ways explores how crime, justice, care, violence, and economics all have a stake in what it means to be a responsible citizen. Found, humble, everyday objects are shown to contain a web of epistemological and linguistic meanings and connections that can twist and propel the past and the present.  With Ward, nothing is exactly as it seems, as his objects are stripped of original meanings and given new ones. And however much his semiotic disobedience stems from intuitions of questioning and refusal, his creativity nevertheless connects us to his life in Harlem, to social sculpture, and to a variety of folk traditions in Jamaica, where he was born.

I vividly remember my first encounter with Nari Ward. It was at a show of his from 2015 at Lehmann Maupin in the Lower East Side that incorporated a whole series of performances by guest artists that took place on top of his Ground (In Progress), a large square floor piece composed of copper bricks. There were many stunning performances there and the artists involved have gone on to other great things. Sticking in my memory were performances by Niv Acosta and by several of Ward’s former students from Hunter College, Zachary Fabri and Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow amongst them.

At the New Museum, Ground (In Progress) lay inert in the middle of a room, surrounded by stoic guards and grip tape. The walls of this room are filled with a number of large paintings done on copper panels through a process of patina, etching, drilling, and hammering nails. Each work is slightly different, but with a recurring symbol in them all: the cosmogram. The Bakongo cosmogram, to which Nari refers, is an ideographic religious Congolese symbol for the cosmos and the continuity of life that can comprise a cross, a quartered circle or diamond, or a seashell spiral. Describing its importance, Robert Farris Thompson has written that  “a person stands upon it to take an oath, or to signify that he or she understands the meaning of life as a process shared with the dead below the river or the sea…[in Kongolese ritual] the real sources of earthly power and prestige”. These cosmological symbols exist in many other instances around the world such as the Catholic Church, The Klu Klux Klan, the Confederate flag, the Jamaican flag, alchemical treatises, mandalas, etc., and artists such as Adrian Piper and Jean-Michel Basquiat have also been known to also employ cosmograms in their own work. In this exhibition, the cosmogram refers to the transatlantic transfer of this African spiritual symbol preserved in black churches throughout America. In Savannah, Georgia, the First African Baptist Church was a stopping post in the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves. The former slaves would hide under the floorboards in the basement of the church and a breathing hole was drilled for them in the shape of a quartered cross. Imagine hiding below floor decks, pitch black, situating yourself between life and death, and this is the only light you can see. This symbol beams out of each of these paintings as a point of intersection between the ancestors and the living.

During his residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1992-93, the young Ward filled his studio with old ragged baby strollers collected from neighborhood streets, culminating in the installation Amazing Grace, where a large room was filled with hundreds of them.  There is a middle cluster where about a third of all the strollers are tied with fire hoses in the shape of an oval, Virgin mandala, or a ship. The rest of the strollers circle around the center shape in attention while a gospel recording of “Amazing Grace” plays soulfully from the strollers in the middle. The fire hoses on the ground and on the strollers trigger, for me, Civil Rights era riots from the 1960s where black protesters were sprayed down by police with pressurized water from fire hydrants, literally soaking their dignity. I was personally very moved by this room because for me it symbolizes the intimate, existential struggle between black youth, white supremacy, and religion. A journey made from the void of absent young bodies, and for each missing, a fiery potential extinguished. Adjacent rooms evoke similar conceptual and metaphorical themes through a range of assemblage-based street sculpture, such as a wounded lion, shopping cart monuments, and the abject caramelized remains of the drink “Tropical Fantasy”, a beverage widely marketed to black communities in the ‘90s that contained ingredients, believed then and now, to affect male fertility.

If an idea is not sensitive to the poor it can neither be radical nor revolutionary. Several things are known. The planet can no longer sustain capitalism. African-Americans literally planted the seeds of imperial wealth in this country. As an artist creating a body of work that actively works around capitalism instead of with it, Ward creates a voice for those neglected by the system, those forsaken by legislation, history, politics, and justice. We the People offers a walk in another citizen’s shoes. Ward’s evocative readymade conjuring of the human condition teaches us profound lessons about ourselves.

The post Between the Ancestors and the Living: Nari Ward at the New Museum appeared first on artcritical.

June 20 to September 2, 2018
235 Bowery, between Stanton and Rivington streets
New York City, newmuseum.org

Thomas Bayrle is a systems man. This five-decade survey at the New Museum, whose 115 works include paintings, moving sculptures, prints, textiles, wallpaper, video, and more, delves into systems of culture, politics, economics, infrastructure. “Playtime,” is the German artist’s first major museum show in New York. Although hardly a household name in this country, Bayrle is something of a national treasure in his native land.

A preoccupation with repetition and dissemination predated Bayrle’s becoming an artist. Born in Berlin in 1937, he had worked already in advertising and publishing, and was first exposed to mechanization as an apprentice at a weaving company. But don’t picture young Bayrle as a cog in anyone’s machine: He threw himself into the student protest movement of the 1960s. “Playtime” reflects the tension between these dynamic experiences.  

The two floors of this show present such different visitor experiences that it might color your ultimate takeaway. Starting on the fourth floor, I found myself in the company of Bayrle’s signature idioms, the “super forms” and “praying machines,” along with a selection of small portrait prints, and a hanging textile. The “super forms” are images that comprise a large object tessellated from myriad tiny versions of the same. For example, Flugzeug [Airplane] (1982-3), Bayrle’s biggest work in this series at approximately 26 by 44 feet, is a photo collage of more than one million airplanes. At first, these look like small exact replicas of the macro image, but upon closer inspection it is revealed that Bayrle has taken a Warholian approach. Despite the mass, each digit is unique, juxtaposing ideas of mass production with a distinct artist’s hand. These slight alterations mark the difference between a consumer ad and a more interesting art object. As Bayrle says in his catalog interview, “Even in billions, everything is singular and unique. Every cell, every atom, they are singular. I think that’s the richness of art, to define this singularity in the mass.”  

These mammoth collages are set to an odd audio accompaniment at the New Museum, emanating from a selection of four of Bayrle’s “praying machines” in the middle of the gallery. Comprised of car, plane, or motorcycle engines with exposed moving gears, belts, and pulleys, these objects each have their own built-in soundtrack. The robotic sculptures, individualized but inhuman, splice together human voices and mechanical growls. As most feature Catholic prayers, the high-ceilinged gallery takes on a cathedral-like atmosphere, inspiring reverence in visitors. The heavy use of Catholic iconography and symbolism in both this series and other works might incorrectly make one think that Bayrle is Catholic. He is actually Protestant, but from a young age was drawn to Catholicism by the structure and rhythm of its traditions and imagery. In the praying machines, Bayrle unsteadies that rhythm, making the soulless robots recite the rosary (another mechanical process), taking on a human effort to save themselves.

The repetition within the objects is echoed in the space – the neutral colors, the aural buzz from the machines and visual buzz from the repeated super forms. However, this is oddly broken by the inclusion of the only hanging textile: iPhone Pietà (2017). An instance, perhaps, of curatorial tongue-in-cheek anticipating visitors capturing their visit with a photo or video (which, during my visit, was a popular trend with the praying machines), ultimately I thought the piece felt out of place. It’s blue fabric and lack of the traditional super form patterning didn’t fit among the monotone paper and metal. True, it did connect thematically with its interesting contemporary meditation on technology as religion and the worship of the smartphone, but ultimately this break in the organized system of the gallery went too far.

The sparseness of this floor is all but thrown out the window in the near-clutter of the almost 100 objects downstairs. And yet, this part too – with its proliferation of neon-colored wallpapers, prints, videos, and paintings (either still or his “painted machines,” whose small parts move to reveal a new image) – cleverly reinforces Bayrle’s central themes. Going through the space, shocked in my transition from the upper floor, I thought: Where do I fit in amidst this overwhelming repetition?

With his investigation of individualism and early adoption of innovative, pre-digital technologies, Bayrle made his mark. This legacy was explored at a July 19th panel at the museum, “Social Fabric: Thomas Bayrle’s Expanded Network,” which featured artists Jordan Wolfson, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Lena Henke. Moderated by art historian Alex Kitnick, each artist addressed how their work deals with various of Bayrle’s themes, including digital technologies, systems, production, and – most prominently – the relationship between pop aesthetics and politics. This younger generation meditated on how subversion and any definition of “radical” isn’t just about materiality and process – as in Bayrle’s inventive copy techniques, or in contemporary digital video art – but has to include a sense of the artist as witness to change, of art as intervention. For Jordan Wolfson, the contemporary artist has to “make pop and politics subvert each other.”

Bayrle’s “painted machine” Mao (1966) is an early example of just this process of intervention. In this piece, small moving wooden pieces slowly morph the paramount leader’s portrait into the communist star. Bayrle would later witness communism first hand in visits to China in the late 1970s. (Fun fact: His Mao actually predates Warhol’s by about five years.)

Among the plethora of objects on this floor, there was one piece that I kept going back to, placed in an alcove at the back of the gallery, almost shrine-like in its forced intimacy. In Himmelfahrt [Ascension] (1988), crucified Jesus is made of fractured, repeated images of the autobahn, which also constitutes the work’s background. Looking at this piece I was reminded of the voices in the sculptures upstairs – the prayers on repeat in a gallery-cum-cathedral – reset for the road: I could imagine someone praying for traffic to ease up among a chorus of car horns. Standing in front of Jesus on his cross, I kept trying to pick apart the comedy and the tragedy of this contemporary purgatory. I tried to reconcile the image of a monumental religious icon slipping into the scene like a commercial break in the middle of regularly scheduled programming. The geometric energy of the repeated autobahn making up the vulnerable Christ forced me to stop and look and think about the disruption taking place. This experience captured the show as a whole: at once an overwhelming fun house questioning the structures by which we live, and a wake up call to shift my perspective within the routines of daily life. Despite all of the stimuli of the gallery, I felt asked to focus and notice the quirks throughout – the distortions of the tiny airplanes, the not-quite-aligned edges of the autobahn-Jesus shards, the slight shudder of the painted machines’ movements. I left wondering if looking closely at the kinks in the system would become a trend of its own.

The post Disrupting the System: Thomas Bayrle at the New Museum appeared first on artcritical.

April 26 to September 10, 2017
235 Bowery (between Rivington and Stanton streets)
New York, newmuseum.org

The exhibition’s opening room evokes her work’s recusancy to the notions of corporeal perfection or wholesomeness. A plump, naked woman (except for her dress shoes) sticks out her tongue while taking a big shit; a girl crowned with a laurel wreath blows the viewer a raspberry while grasping a snake rearing up from her vagina; a woman with exposed breasts kneels insouciantly as two men wag an improbable number of penises in her face. The images’ brazenness is belied by their delicate format, watercolors of relatively small dimensions. The sheer difference of Rama’s bodies is striking – a great number of them women in wheelchairs, or strapped to asylum beds. In this imagery lurks the shadow of her parents’ mental illness, source of an anguish that informs her entire oeuvre. Yet the women in Rama’s wheelchairs wear elegant high heels; they return the viewer’s gaze. Particularly for a time when differently abled bodies (and minds) – to say nothing of women at large – were hardly celebrated as active agents, Rama’s work is truly striking, and resonates with a decided contemporary relevance. As much as gallows humor, it is often an exuberant joy in the face of anguish which her work bears out.

Rama’s production proved consistently inventive over more than six decades – a period which saw her explore geometric abstraction, expressionist etchings, bronze sculpture, collage, and assemblage in a range of materials and formats. Interspersed alongside wall texts (often frustratingly huddled at the New Museum to one side of the wall), quotes by Rama lend context – and irreverent levity – to many of the works. Anchored by the opening room of early paintings and drawings, the exhibition wraps around flanking galleries in a continuous flow, beginning with work completed not long before her death in 2006, back along the stretch of various decades. Some of her most recent paintings feature anonymous, nude male bodies with sexual members in full spate. One of Rama’s quotes discusses how irrelevant to her such sex organs are compared to the mouth – “the mouth, that’s real desire.” We find, in fact, disembodied mouths in several instances (her watercolors, for example), along with other free-floating body parts. Over the drawing of a foot (from some treatise on classical statuary) (2005), Rama painted the toenails black, adding a hand-written note about the under-appreciated eroticism of the male foot: “with its toenails painted black and gold I’d want to lick it.”

The body also undergoes various levels of abstraction, as in a series from 2001 (Heroic I and II) which render crouching, cut-out forms almost as hieroglyphs. Rama’s figurative facility is matched by a keen penchant for abstraction, whether of urinals rendered as floating forms, or large-scale collages incorporating patches of leather and other materials, composed as recently as 1999. The formal equilibrium and sophistication of these works – still redolent of the shallow, post-Cubist space which was the domain of so much mid-century modernism – testify to Rama’s role in Italy’s Arte Concreta movement in the 1950s, one of her only associations with an organized movement or school. A few hard-edged, geometric canvases from the early 1970s reveal the lasting influence of this geometricizing tendency upon her work. Yet one would look in vain for some neat chronological or teleological progression. Just as Rama shrugged off Arte Concreta for Informalist-style works since the 1960s (themselves an anachronism by then), she returned to neatly composed abstract composition in the 1970s, wrought from sliced bicycle tires. One such work from 1970 (Even More Space Than Time) sets a bulging (but flat) black form and solid line against a white expanse of canvas, reminiscent of Motherwell’s Elegies, and revealing an astute feeling for the power of empty space.

In Rama’s paintings of the 1980s we find further echoes of Surrealist figuration, though here they find expression once again on paper, in a series of works centering upon exotic-looking bodies in reverie or some sort of ecstasy (Teletta, 1983; Venezie, 1983). Many of them are painted over maps or architectural elevations, creating layered fields of imagery and out of scale spaces. Edmo (1983) suggests an Etruscan painting (perhaps a funerary image) of two men, suggesting – to a modern audience –erotic impropriety. One wonders what she thought of the Italian Transavanguardia and its revival of figuration and its postmodernist citation during these same years. Indeed, something of Francesco Clemente’s work resonates with Rama’s whimsical figures and appeals to eastern tropes. Yet Rama remained her own individual to the end. Reprising assemblage and abstraction in her final years, she also painted large-scale male nudes on canvas and pursued other collages on paper. Rama once commented that she had once considered becoming a nun, but instead began to paint “coarse pictures.” There remains something of the prayer in her work – votive offerings to vitality in the face of death, and pleasure in spite of great pain.

The post Differently-Abled in High Heels: Carol Rama at the New Museum appeared first on artcritical.

May 4 to June 26, 2016
235 Bowery (between Rivington and Stanton streets)
New York, 212 219 1222

Exiting the east stairwell onto the New Museum’s third floor, I am greeted immediately by Hanging Man (2016), a sculpture of wood and wax mounted on a wheeled, metal table. The wooden structure’s arms end in clumps of clay from which organic sticks awkwardly protrude. Just below this armature, a figure rests vertically but upside down, legs kicking in the air atop a torso-less giant head. Clumps of dark brown wax are strewn about the worktable. Below, a stream of burnt sienna paint issues from a tube to form a spiraling pile beneath the table’s final shelf. Crudely, playfully, this tableau evokes linguistic and experiential allusions that, much as we try to avoid it, are undeniably part of human life; these rough, “piece-of-shit” objects suggest the different shapes and smells that our bodies are capable of producing. However, equally present in the sculpture is its titular relationship to hang-man — formally established in the hooking arrangement of the wooden arms — and the history of violence so carelessly invoked in this children’s game. This olfactory experience and the following tide of associations seems a fitting introduction to “Al-ugh-ories,” a survey exhibition that attempts to address the humor, complexity, and satire of Nicole Eisenman’s varied and probing works.

After the fashion of the old masters that she alludes to, Eisenman creates compositions so rich in their references that they are painted not only in pigment but also in words and relationships. In Night Studio (2009), the names of artists and movements listed on the spines of painted books color my reading of the painting, pressing it into a history of imperialism and cultural appropriation, even while objects such as a bottle of Vitamin Water and an orange extension cord return the scene to the present moment.

In literal and contemporary interpretations, Eisenman demonstrates the ridiculousness and crudity of the ideas that construct our intellectual canon. Eisenman visualizes Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus complex in Dysfunctional Family (2009), mocks the fleshy dynamism of Michelangelo’s renditions of the human form in Spring Fling (1996), and teasingly exaggerates the tawdry romance implicit in traditional renditions of Death and the Maiden (2009). The Triumph of Poverty (2009) gestures explicitly to Hans Holbein the Younger’s drawing of the same name, even while imposing a group of miniature figures copied directly from Pieter Bruegel’s The Parable of the Blind Men (1568). In spite of the richness of this iconography, there is a fundamental humanity in Eisenman’s paintings that make them legible to a varied audience. Her portraits render our lives in startling relief, bringing the awkwardnesses and banalities of life to the painted canvas. This leveling does not discriminate between an alluring nude, an individual performing oral sex on his or her partner, and boy looking onto his own body with confusion.

In a society that mortifies the flesh for the beacon of intellectual democratization, Eisenman’s sculptures and canvases confront us with visions of human corporeality, capturing the body in all of its base carnality and abjection. Captured in gaudy hues and caricatured parts, these figures are aliases for human bodies that allow us to enter a surreal space of symbolism and alterity. In the startling revelation of the human form rendered grotesque and confusing, Eisenman refuses to adhere to expectations of class, age, or gender. In Coping (2008), a mummy, a bundled form, and a female nude pass each other in anonymity on a provincial street. A reclining yellow figure in the forefront of Night Studio, although explicitly female, remains uncertainly coded in a challenge to a sexual binary that is fully realized by the child who castrates himself in Dysfunctional Family. Many of Eisenman’s characters exhibit a curiosity and physical self-inspection that both question and potentially affirm difference. The cartoonish cyclops of Selfie (2014), a boyish figure in I’m with Stupid (2001), and child in the Dysfunctional Family all seem to wonder “Am I normal?” These disruptions ask us, in turn, to dispute the idea of normal and other cultural expectations laden with judgmental biases.

Eisenman reveals modern allegories in even the most banal of gestures. The stack of books and cheap beer depicted in Night Studio do as much to communicate time and narrative as iconographic and allegorical details do in classical paintings. The individuals who live out the minutiae of the everyday in these colorful canvases unselfconsciously wear their unusual identities on their sleeves. As layered as they are in emblematic markers of character, these badges point to an “ordinary” that is not necessarily common. By comparing the flawed models of aesthetic tradition to the normative power of contemporary conventionality, Eisenman demonstrates the stifling impossibility of conforming to the idealized archetype. In the lovingly mocking tone of Breugel’s paintings of peasants, the artist brings our daily discomforts and failures into sharp (or occasionally stylized) relief. These unapologetic portraits of unexceptional life are characterized not only my mistakes, foolishness, and crudity, but also by the joys of affection and laughter. Eisenman’s forgiving gaze tells us that it is alright to have a nonconventional face, body, or sexuality. Because nothing follows the prescribed model, particularly not our allegories.

The post Crudely, Playfully: Nicole Eisenman at the New Museum appeared first on artcritical.

May 19 to June 25, 2016
532 West 20th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 367 9663

The sudden embrace of Nicole Eisenman as culture hero should come as no surprise. She’s a prolific painter whose unleashed imagination and hungry heart have produced memorable and disturbing works of art. She also happens to hit the diversity buttons of underappreciated woman, queer, and gender fluidity that animate current cultural discourse. And of course the trifecta of MacArthur Fellowship grant, survey exhibition at the New Museum, and concurrent first solo show at Anton Kern gallery, has obviously made her the focus of attention. But what makes Eisenman important, rather than merely au courant, is her approach to ambiguity.

Something significant has happened to Eisenman’s paintings since the work shown in “Al-ugh-gories” at the New Museum. Much of “Al-ugh-gories,” though compelling, is fairly easily parsed, and critical interpretations seem remarkably consistent.

At Anton Kern, the truly subversive nature of Eisenman’s vision flowers when she focuses on “normal” everyday life. Her new focus recalls a passage from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts:

It reminds us that any bodily experience can be made new and strange; that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it; that no one set of practices or relations has a monopoly on the so-called radical or the so called normative. 

The more one gazes into the mechanisms of these paintings, the more it is apparent that ambiguity has become the medium with which she now paints. In so many different ways, ambiguity animates every new Eisenman painting. If it isn’t the uncertain gender of her figures, it’s a subway train’s direction of travel in a station, the era in which a party occurs, whether a shooter is gangster or cop, or the nature of the figure/ground relationship.

The tour de force Grand Guignol here is Another Green World (2015), which is also the title of the Brian Eno album the central character is examining. A huge 128-by-106-inch party scene that is inhabited by 28 figures (by my count, if you don’t include Grace Jones on an album cover) of indeterminate gender and sexuality who are making out, doing drugs, listening to music, eating, drinking, dancing, conversing, smoking, moon-gazing, or passed out under the coats on the bed. Oh yeah, and despite the ‘70s disco ball, vintage turntable with vinyl LPs, and lines of coke, there is a figure raptly gazing at a cell phone, which throws the whole era of the party into question. The binaries of male/female and gay/straight and past/present quickly break down, as we try to assign gender to all but a few obviously female figures. It is interesting how reflexively we desire to do this in order to navigate our social world. But here it doesn’t matter; it’s a party, everyone’s welcome.

In Another Green World Eisenman also successfully confronts the figure/ground problem that has increasingly challenged her as a painter. Eisenman has great skill as a draughtsman, but her talent lies in expressively depicting people. Against the blank paper, there is no problem, but in her paintings she has to invent the environment in which they occur. The details of background have evidently always been less compelling to her, and might have seemed like tiresome labor. With scaled up canvases, the figure/ground dilemma has become more urgent: how to animate every inch of the canvas while preserving the hierarchies of attention needed to construct emotional legibility. It has been interesting to watch Eisenman tackle this as an idea she seems to have realized that she needed to address.

Part of her solution has been to increase the number of figures so that sometimes much of the background is now other figures. But more interestingly is the way she now considers paintings as a jigsaw puzzle of shapes. And whether they are the positive shapes of feet, hands, faces, clothing, and objects, or instances of negative space revealing surfaces of carpet, furniture, table, or landscape, Eisenman treats each shape as an arena of painterly invention of differing facture, not letting big expanses of emptiness dominate. What keeps it together is her masterful drawing, creating space through exaggerated changes in scale, juxtaposing oblique surfaces coexisting in impossible perspective, and establishing different points of focus using her sharp tonal color sense.

Despite the cacophony of Another Green World, Eisenman gets the whole drama to revolve around the brightly lit woman at the center raptly studying the eponymous album, and rubbing her nose in reaction to the bump of coke she has probably just snorted. Our attention rotates to the lower left to the kissing couple, a topless woman sprawled upside down on the couch in the embrace of an impossibly blue figure of indeterminate gender, though perhaps the stubble on her legs indicates female–but that’s how closely you have to look.

There are many compelling paintings in this show, which also invite rigorous analysis particularly Weeks on the Train (2015). Despite focusing on a central young person slouched in a window seat working a laptop, whose cat in carrier occupies the aisle seat, Eisenman pulls off the neat trick of rotating the windows 90º to fit parallel with the side of the vertical canvas. This pushes the viewer’s perspective high above the painting. From this point of view, our focus is pulled to the cartoonish Guston-like head ensconced by big red headphones, with a single, large bulging eye in the bottom foreground staring out the window. At the level of this eye, the view out of the window becomes thick with impastoed booger-like flowers.

Though more emotionally subtle, another focal point of this show is the tenderly haunting Morning Studio (2016). Here Eisenman eschews the butch/femme brazenness of her two pre- or post-coital chapeau’d women in Night Studio (2009) at the New Museum and replaced them with two embracing figures whose erotics are more maternally consoling than flatly conversational. In Morning Studio, the faces are painted with different levels of specificity but it is the boyish person with ochre skin who fixes the viewer with a wary stare, and who is comforted by a more generically represented topless woman who is also simultaneously reaching a hand beneath her jeans. Eisenman then explodes this intensely personal moment with references to the world out a window and the universe via a large spiraling galaxy computer screen, which watches impassively over the scene. This is where we see Eisenman striving for an emotional complexity that she achieves specifically in her recent paintings.

The measured construction of her paintings provides a pointed contrast with the still wonderful drawings in the second, back room of the show. They demonstrate how Eisenman’s work has previously been driven by her drawings, which are fairly direct depictions of any idea that crosses her mind, no matter how silly, heretical, or gross. Her drawings are pure id, she doesn’t seem to judge or censor, and they have a spontaneity and freshness that has always been thrilling and noteworthy.

But this show seems to indicate that Eisenman’s present ambition, her desire for significance, now lies in her paintings. Earlier paintings seemed often like large elaborations of various ideas originating in drawings and fleshed out with details in paint. Now the paintings seem to develop on their own terms, with the ambiguities and complexities that the act of painting promulgates seizing control over the content. Drawings are direct and fast and in the present, while paintings are slower, much more calculated, and connected to a history that is mostly white and male. In her new paintings, we see Eisenman sublimating the immediacy of her drawing talent and examining historically established protocols that she either honors, flouts, or fucks with. It is now in these mature paintings, that Nicole Eisenman is finally confronting her artistic superego.

The post Paint Queer, Gender Fluid, Meaning Ambiguous: Nicole Eisenman at Anton Kern appeared first on artcritical.

“Texts were invented in the second millennium BC in order to take the magic out of images, even if their inventor may not have been aware of this; the photograph, the first technical image, was invented in the nineteenth century in order to put texts back under a magic spell, even if its inventors may not have been aware of this. The invention of the photograph is a historical event as equally decisive as the invention of writing.” –Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983)

An impression: of the young woman staring with watchful eyes, lips pursed and short, tousled hair, a viewer is inclined to read circumspection and doubt, maybe distrust. This image of a young Diane Arbus, taken by her husband Allan around 1949, was projected onto an onstage screen through nearly the entire reading by Hilton Als of his new, unpublished essay “Diane Arbus in Manhattan” at the New Museum on September 15, as part of the annual Stuart Regen Visionaries Series. But as he read, his words constructed an alternative estimation of the legendary 20th century photographer, one that depicted her as open, inquisitive, skittish and all-embracing; in short, the consummate New Yorker. She lived her entire life in Manhattan, moving from apartment to apartment, sometimes uptown and sometimes downtown, on both the Eastside and the West. “You devoured the island of your birth and gave it back to itself,” Als read from the epistolary essay, “re-imagined but not reconfigured.”

Arbus did not fear what was different from herself, he argued, because New York was her small town, and the “freaks” (as her subjects were commonly referred to in mid-20th century parlance) that she photographed — drag queens, dwarves, the mentally disabled, interracial couples — were her neighbors, the people she lived among and with whom she not only empathized, but felt compassion for. “No artist worth their salt, pain, humor, steeliness, selfishness, generosity, love, ruthlessness, or plain interest in other people and things can turn away,” said Als, in what sounded like a direct rejoinder to Susan Sontag’s classic but truculent “Freak Show” (1973), an analysis of Arbus’s work in which she accused the photographer of giving nothing of herself in return for the portraits of vulnerability she regularly captured on film. But Als had a different tack. “You were in conversation with your sitters, a social exchange resulting in a kind of emotional documentary that became metaphysical as that terrible and beautiful alchemy took place; which is to say the sitter, you looking at the sitter, the cameras click, and sometimes flash.”

In many ways Arbus is a natural fit as a subject for Als’s writing. A longtime contributor to the New Yorker — he began publishing in the magazine in 1989, was made a staff writer in 1992, and has been the Chief Theater Critic for the past 13 years — Als has also published two ruminative books of essays, The Women (1996) and White Girls (2013) that are an audacious master class on the transcendence of race, gender, and physical difference. In both books, the classic profile narrative of one subject is most often turned on its head, becoming a mash-up of portrait, autobiography, gossip, and journalism. The writing is difficult: frequently opaque, occasionally navel-gazing, and once in a while outright caustic. But Als, like Arbus, tackles subjects that have either been marginalized, or else quite publicly “othered.” (Michael Jackson; Dorothy Dean, the doyenne of gay New York social life in the 1950s and 1960s; and Malcolm X’s mother have all been subjects of his scrutiny.)

A photograph is always subjective. Though the viewer might want for it to speak the truth, for it to be objective and documentary evidence, no photograph is ever absolutely honest. Decisions are always made by the one who presses the shutter button — what remains in the frame and what is omitted, what is brought into crisp focus, what is left to the shadows. “You weren’t treating the image as a kind of journalism but the record of a fantasy of magic ground through the glass of the real,” he said.  And so it goes with writing. “Diane Arbus in Manhattan” is Als’s textual photograph of the artist, an image of her that may not be empirical truth, but is perhaps even more genuine than the black-and-white photograph he addressed directly that evening. As he said, “Shaping metaphors out of the real is the work of an artist, or those artists who know there is something better on the other side of daydreaming.”

For those who missed Als’s talk, complete video of it can be seen here: http://livestream.com/newmuseum/events/4338723

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At his Facebook page, the moderator of The Review Panel (and editor of artcritical.com) David Cohen recounted an amusing episode  last weekend when he took a class of students from the New York Studio School students to the American Academy. “I had the students play the game the panel will play next week – awarding three imaginary purchase prizes. Awarded to artists not works, no consideration of factors like ” so and so deserves a break, so and so is well known already”, purely on merit. five students, two laissez faire males and three strong willed women. From the short list of twelve after a round of general advocacy and votes taken, Harry Roseman was the clear front runner. After some debate, Brenda Goodman emerges for second place. But then there is fierce battle for the last spot. Two of the women are adamant John Walker fans, an impassioned third, an Irishwoman, argues as if her life depends upon it for Kyle Staver. The other two admire the strength of her argument, and do indeed like Staver, but won’t budge in their votes for Walker and carry the men with them.

The two shows are a contrast of medium proclivity: while new technologies predominate at the Triennial, an international survey of early-career artists filling all floors of the New Museum’s Bowery headquarters, the Invitational has a bias towards painting and artists of all career stages. The Triennial has been curated by Lauren Cornell of the New Museum and artist Ryan Trecartin while the Invitational is selected by a committee of academicians.

John Yau, the eminent poet and respected critic, has been a regular guest of The Review Panel. Our other two speakers are newcomers: Sharon Butler is the veteran blogger at Two Coats of Paint, while Noah Dillon has been Associate Editor at artcritical.com since last summer.

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October 29, 2014 to January 25, 2015
235 Bowery (between Stanton and Rivington streets)
New York City, 212 219 1222

“Chris Ofili: Night and Day,” the first major solo museum exhibition in this country devoted to the artist, is staged on four floors of the New Museum. At the lobby façade is his vinyl on glass Afro Waves (2002-03). On the second floor, there are 17 paintings from the 1990s, 26 small watercolors and pencil drawings, and a couple of sculptures. On the third floor, the pencil on paper Afro Margin drawings and an enormous room full of dark blue paintings. And, on the fourth floor, seven large pictures made in the past decade. Because these galleries are very large and extremely high, and so best not subdivided, they can be a difficult painters. But Ofili’s tall works really command the setting. This generous installation provides a really good understanding of his career.

In the 1990s, he favored single figures in a vertical format: the Madonna, some other women, and the phallus of Pimpin’ ain’t easy (1997). In the first decade of the next millennium, when Ofili moved from London to Trinidad in 2006, came the dark narrative scenes such as Blue Night Watcher (2006). And then more recently, inspired in part by a commission from the National Gallery, London, he began his compositions after Ovid — Ovid-Actaeon (2011-12), for example — in response to the Titians recently accessioned by that museum and National Galleries of Scotland, the former Bridgewater loan of Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto (1556-59). A large number of contemporary artists were been invited to respond to old master art in the National Gallery. Ofili responded empathetically and most successfully to this commission by enlarging the narratives of his earlier painting. In place of his icon-like frontal scenes from the 1990s, and the political ‘blue night’ pictures, he began to develop more complex narratives, some based upon Ovid, others presenting sacred texts.

As this masterful exhibition demonstrates, Ofili has a rare capacity for decorative, room-filling ensembles of paintings. Because his sources, in both old master and contemporary art, are so very varied, his ability to create an effective synthesis of the two, which cannot have been uncomplicated to achieve, is all the more impressive. If it is not easy, sometimes,to read his retelling of these stories, that is because this ability to generate decorative schemes doesn’t support focus on individual works:without knowing the titles The Raising of Lazarus (2007) and Ovid-Actaeon (2011-12), it wouldn’t be easy to identify these (very different) narratives. Because these pictures are gathered together by the high-pitched pastel colors of the recent narratives on the fourth floor and the very dark blues on the third, the net effect of his installations on both floors is much great than the sum of the individual pictures.

In Reflections on the Nude (1967), the British art writer Adrian Stokes speculatively described Paul Cézanne’s The Bather (1894-1905), recently acquired by the National Gallery as “among the first and perhaps the greatest works of a deeply founded cosmopolitan art which . . . (is) to pre-figure the eventual evolution of a multi-racial society.” He was thinking of its anticipation of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon “and upon all those works that were so soon to forge the easiest of links with Negro sculpture.” I see Ofili’s recent painting, which makes excursions into such diverse sources as hip-hop music, Zimbabwean cave paintings and Blaxploitation films as an answer to this hopeful prophecy.

No service is done to the present reputation of this ambitious, wonderfully successful mid-career artist, however, by replaying the story of the reception of his The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) in “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” at the Brooklyn Museum, as it is at length by several writers in the New Museum catalogue. Since, in that unhappy political controversy, the true merits of his art were not really at stake, why look back to 1999 when right now he is a heroic artist to reckon with? Having provided a magnificent installation, in its catalogue the museum has let him down. But that is a minor problem.

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September 10 to October 25, 2014
519 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 727 2070

Asymmetry, illusion and odd numbers all add up in this, Tomma Abts’s second exhibition at David Zwirner.  She was last seen in New York in solo exhibitions six years ago at Zwirner and at the New Museum. There are eight oil and acrylic paintings ranged across three walls and five pencil drawings on paper grouped on the remaining wall. All the paintings are hung at what might be considered a lower height than usual, one that invites contemplation from close quarters.

Fenke (2014) is positioned singly over toward the right end of the wall. It is the standard size of 18-7/8 x 15 inches that Abts has been using for some time now. Surface as a subject and its contradiction through an irresistible illusionism propels a counterpoint that succeeds in engaging vision, touch and thinking equally.  Fenke even has a slice cut in from its edge, inviting real space to participate and contrast the illusions of depth created elsewhere in the composition

On the adjacent wall, Wybe (2014)  – one of four this time, three equally spaced, and one distanced further away, again to the right – is divided into two parts by a diagonal space of half an inch or so.  This startling incursion does not masquerade as part of the composition as in Fenke. Wybe evinces a sense of over-painting: there are fine gradations across the canvas tooth and opaque skins marked with ridges formed by edges of now submerged shapes.  We sense an image repeatedly reconfigured or lost, a result of many hours in the studio.

Abts’s approach is intuitive – the geometric planar compositions emerge without a prior plan and so refute along the way the need for a fixed rationale.  Her space is a shallow and completely convincing one, always askew and splintered. Her use of shading and muted color that evokes unnatural light and obscured passages of space recall the sculpture of Vincent Fecteau.

When installing the exhibition Abts looks for a precise relation for her works to the gallery.  The position and height of the works and the lighting are, in a way, the continuation of the idea of composition, this time applied to the gallery itself. Once installed Abts then titles the paintings, sourcing from a dictionary of first names. This way of titling and the size of painting naturally bring portraiture to mind.  and abstraction of this order can indeed portray an emotion or atmosphere, complex feelings and states of mind. Certainly there is openness in how the viewer may choose to identify the characteristics seen, both formally and psychologically. The paintings are a physical and visual language that discovers rather than seeks equivalences to experience. They do, of course, provoke new experience using a vocabulary of traditional means and forms sometimes considered exhausted.

The five drawings made with pencil and colored pencil read as permutations – there seem to be rules or a set of principles that they extend from, in a musical sense. Contained within each linear element is a striped pattern of yellow, red, green, blue and graphite carefully filled in against the white of the paper. The lines pass over and under each other their color joining intermittently and in so doing imply a movement that flickers restlessly suggesting at turns that the lines incise the paper or are slivers of planes seen through slits. The space and diagonal dynamics are close to the paintings – the white paper is substantial and pressing rather than acting as a void. Both the paintings and drawings, whether planar and opaque in the former or skeletal and rhythmic in the latter, somehow remain fragmentary whilst lacking nothing.

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“In the beginning everything was dead,” chanted a voice from Camille Henrot’s mesmerizing video Grosse Fatigue (2013) as it leaps off to 13 minutes of throbbing inquiry. There is something slightly contradictory about this statement: death is the cessation of life, so how could death precede the existence of living things? An attempt to trace the history of the Universe usually leads to a brutal confrontation with the limits of one’s perception and ability to comprehend infinity, and describing the endpoints of a creation story seems essential and grounding. Or perhaps this doesn’t matter so much.

Henrot’s exhibition at the New Museum, “Restless Earth,” is one of the most energetic and rejuvenating installations to visit New York this season. It expands upon her explorations of culture, history and informational systems in her earlier works, deliberately toying with the artificially established boundaries between disciplines of study, research and perception as Henrot masquerades as anthropologist, scientist, librarian, sociologist and artist. She explores how the material world and culture is formulated, acknowledged, recorded, organized and standardized, but more prominently, it demonstrates all the chaos and energy these processes exhale.

A large section of the exhibition is filled with sculptures inspired by various works of literature, guided by Ikebana, the Japanese practice of flower arrangement. In these engrossing displays, Henrot attempts to visualize literature through slightly absurd compositions of flowers, grocery vegetables, other seemingly arbitrary ingredients, such as USB cables, Japanese newspapers, sheet moss — all exposing their physical and socio-economic connotations, their roles as food, decoration or mechanical devices, the stories of their discovery or their taxonomy. Each work is labeled with a quote from a work of literature, as well as detailed, hilariously scientific lists of its components — this interest in cataloguing and factual archiving is noticeable throughout her exhibition. These terse, contemplative canopies sprout from countertops, drape from the ceiling and crawl past the walls (Melville’s epic Moby Dick, 1851, is reduced to a few scattered crescent-shaped palm leaves), to form a little jungle ecosystem of their own, a buzzing room of dialogue. There is something strange and attractive about nature jolted into unnatural juxtapositions, considering these fragrant, vivacious arrangements are of amputated flowers and leaves nearing the end of their lives — “at death’s door” would be melodramatic, but their drying edges and fading color carry a hint of ephemerality and urgency.

Her fascination with appropriation and biological material is extended to another room of the show, containing a long table of neatly arranged pages from a 1995 Christie’s catalogue, Jewels from the Personal Collection of Princess Salimah Aga Khan. Henrot illustrates the descriptions on each page with dried bookmark-like flowers and leaves stolen from residences on the Upper East Side. The magnificent gems and luxury uptown urban herbarium are both deliberate demonstrations of excess, but also, to their owners, decidedly necessary measures that define their social status. The catalogue pages only note estimated prices, rendering the values of the jewelry — and whatever they signify — speculative until juried by the auction attendees. This small sense of instability is perhaps furthered by spare, conspicuous slices of opaque tape affixing immobile and dried leaves to the pages, as if to restrain their plot to escape.

Then there are Henrot’s videos. The exhibition features several earlier videos that study the role of various symbols, practices and material objects across different cultures: Coupé/Décalé (2011) documents the origin of bungee jumping; Le Songe de Poliphile (2011), of the semiotics of the snake; and Million Dollars Point (2011), on World War II materials abandoned in Polynesia and the “cargo cults” that subsequently formed. Grosse Fatigue is the most conceptually ambitious (and probably low-budget) of them all, a series of desktop windows appearing on a computer screen, propelled by a groovy rap song that stitches together various origin myths, scientific presentations and annals of anthropology with the coherence of a surging music video. The deluge of imagery in today’s Internet age is a popular topic for artists, but few successfully conjure much beyond some purposefully collaged frenzy. Henrot’s selection of images (animals of from various phyla, different cultural practices, shots of mundane activity such as a manicured hand rubbing an orange) is not unpredictable, but they provide more than a simple sensation of distress and visual saturation. She consciously demonstrates the gaps and limits that still (and might forever) exist in our already overwhelming knowledge of history, a vault of information that could be more reasonably experienced through the momentum and innate disorder that weaves it all together.

Grosse Fatigue was made at Henrot’s 2013 Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian, during which she collected footage of animal and plant specimens, obscure digital archives, blank hallways and anonymous office workers. She paired that imagery with the unending reach of the digital realm, which, in many ways, is an archive and simulation of the immense universe beyond the monitor, but also feels oddly tangible as it is fully manmade and portable (one shot features an iPhone with a green croaking frog parked on top, held by a hand). This strategy allows her narrative to swell with felt urgency and inscrutable complexity, and also the leisurely nimbleness of aimless web surfing. Queues of browser windows at times pile up like flashing torrents of spam advertisements, but they can be readily clicked shut like full drawers of ghastly, vibrantly preserved tropical bird specimen. In the beginning and end there were both uncluttered Mac desktops.

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