February 13 to May 26, 2013
235 Bowery, between Rivington and Stanton streets
New York City, (212) 343-0460

NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, currently on view at the New Museum, examines the art scene in New York over the course of one year and attempts to chart a lineage connecting the city’s artists working today with the major players of twenty years ago.  Of course, many of the featured artists are still active in the New York scene, and it’s a falsehood to suggest that this group of artists was the first to engage in robustly political art.  The insinuation that these artists were the first to tackle such historically broad issues as race, gender, economic concerns and sexuality is one of the many frustrations of the exhibition, and while the works on display are some of the most visible of the period, one senses a missed political opportunity on the part of the curators.

The show is certainly prolific in scale, the first in the New Museum’s history to span all five floors and take up every gallery space.  The wall text and catalog essays (much of it written by curator Massimiliano Gioni and the New Museum’s director Lisa Phillips) stress the notion of “capturing a particular moment.”  This moment, according to Gioni, saw the rise of relational aesthetics—in his view a product of a global recession—as well as a critique of consumerism, and an emphasis on art as a basis for community building.  But why turn to 1993 as a time capsule for these problems?  On the same day as the press preview, the brilliant critic and theorist Amelia Jones was featured on a panel at the College Art Association Annual Conference titled “Art Criticism: Taking a Pulse.” In her talk Jones brought to light the enormous debt that Rirkrit Tiravanija and others working directly within Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of relational art owed to the feminist artists of the 1960s and ‘70s.  I bring this up to illustrate that what Gioni terms a “new conceptual climate” seems much more influenced by the art of twenty years prior than is made public in the text for the show. The missing historical link is the broad adoption in the 1970s of postmodern theory in academia and MFA programs across the country, and the guidance of artist-teachers who were deeply invested in feminist and relational politics.

While much of the work in NYC 1993 is rooted in institutional critique and questions of gender and race, the wall labels and curators’ comments in the catalog are no match for the intellectual rigour of the art on display.  Furthermore, many of these works would be greatly enriched by a reading that steps outside of their historical contingency. David Hammons’s quietly shocking In the Hood consists of the hood cut from a green sweatshirt, hung on the wall.  The work recalls decapitation, the suspicious image of the hooded black man so often seen on facial composite sketches, and even evokes the Ku Klux Klan.  If the curators were to initiate a conversation that relates the art practices of 1993 with the political landscape of today, the shooting of the black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 would have been an obvious parallel to draw with this piece.  Hammons’s simple work is imbued with suspicion, fear, and the simultaneous concealing and exposure of identity: issues that are far more nuanced than the translation of “hood” as black lexicon for “neighborhood,” which the wall text offers.

With that being said, many of the works on display are incredibly powerful, and, for me, aesthetically representative of the time period the show examines.  Two understated pieces by the Mexican-born artist Gabriel Orozco on display in the second floor gallery fell under this category. Yielding Stone is a clay ball of the artist’s weight, which he rolled from his studio on Broadway to the New Museum in 1993.  The sculpture resembles a boulder, and though its surface is constituted by the grit and grime of lower Manhattan, the art object more closely resembles an organic form found outside the city.  Isla en la Isla (Island within an Island) is a small photograph taken next to the West Side Highway of a miniature Manhattan skyline made from garbage and wood debris facing the real skyline.  This “gritty” work, in which the city plays a lead role, is characteristic of the overall aesthetic of the exhibition. The rough simplicity of Orozco’s work shares an urban poignancy with the enormous, yet equally subtle, Félix González-Torres billboard Untitled, on the fourth floor. In marked contrast, the filmmaker Larry Clark’s multimedia installation revels in the same “downtown” aesthetic without the conceptual or emotional weight.

An arresting work to see in person was Janine Antoni’s installation Lick and Lather consisting of fourteen self-portrait busts deformed either through Antoni bathing herself, as she did with the busts carved from soap, or gnawing and licking away at those made of chocolate. The work was originally displayed at the ’93 Venice Biennale, and this show along with the ’93 Whitney Biennial were touched upon numerous times within the exhibition.  Glenn Ligon’s contribution to the 1993 Biennial catapulted him to art superstardom, and while his Notes on the Margin of the Black Book was absent from NYC 1993 (perhaps because he started working on the piece in 1991) his Red Portfolio was an ingenious addition to the exhibition.  The work exists as a series of framed descriptions, white text on black background, of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs as penned by the Reverend Pat Robertson in a 1989 letter for his constituents in an effort to describe government-funded works.  “A photo of a man in a suit exposing himself” refers to Mapplethorpe’s Man in a Polyester Suit (1980), an image that is a subtle and tender a commentary on the fear of black masculinity this is possible in the presence of an enormous black penis.  The culture wars of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was certainly burned into the public consciousness of the time, and Ligon’s work brilliantly displays the attitudes of the religious right without judgment or commentary, allowing the slippery relationship between art images and language to be laid bare.

My experience of NYC 1993 was one of equal parts frustration and fascination.  It would have been impossible to include every revered work from that year in the exhibition, but the selection of art chosen by the curators was extraordinary. It must be noted, however, that a majority of the work was rooted in the political or institutional critique of its time.  The frustration thus lies in a reticence on the part of the New Museum to examine more closely the historical and social contingencies of the art on display, and the ways in which it differentiates itself from art being produced in 2013. Instead of taking up these thorny issues, the curators have presented a neat time-capsule exhibition that seemingly functions no differently today than it would have in 1993.

The post It Was Twenty Years Ago Today: NYC 1993 at the New Museum appeared first on artcritical.

Jack Whitten at Alexander Gray Associates
526 West 26th Street #215. 212 399 2636. www.alexandergray.com

Greg Drasler: On the Lam at Betty Cuningham
541 West 25th Street. 212 242 2772. www.bettycuninghamgallery.com
reviewed by David Cohen (capsule reviews)

William Anastasi/N. Dash at Nicole Klagsbrun
526 West 26th Street. 212 243 3335 www.nicoleklagsbrun.com

Ronnie Landfield: New Paintings  at Stephen Haller Gallery
542 West 26th Street. 212 741 7777 www.stephenhallergallery.com
reviewed by David Cohen (exhibitions)

Will Barnet: Small Works on Paper from the 1950s at Alexandre Gallery
41 East 57th Street. 212 755 2828 www.alexandregallery.com

Anthony Goicolea: Pathetic Fallacy at Postmasters
459 West 19th Street. 212 727 3323 www.postmastersart.com
Was discussed at The Review Panel, September 30

Gabriel Orozco at Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th Street. 212 977 7160. www.mariangoodman.com
reviewed by Jonathan Goodman (exhibitions)

Tine Lundsfryd: Recent Paintings at Lori Bookstein Fine Art
138 10th Avenue. 212 750 0949. www.loribooksteinfineart.com

Vincent Desiderio: Recent Paintings at Marlborough
545 West 25th Street. 212 463 8634. www.marlboroughgallery.com

Ad Reinhardt: Works from 1935-1945 at Pace Gallery
32 East 57th Street. 212 421 3292, www.thepacegallery.com

Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World at Whitney Museum
945 Madison Avenue. 212 570 3600 www.whitney.org

Loren Munk: Location  Location  Location at Lesley Heller Workspace
54 Orchard Street. 212 410 6120 www.lesleyheller.com
reviewed by Greg Lindquist (exhibitions)

The post Last Chance Saloon: A Dozen Shows Closing This Weekend appeared first on artcritical.

September 14 to October 15, 2011
24 West 57th Street, between 5th and 6th avenues
New York City, 212 977 7160

Gabriel Orozco’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, presented nearly three years ago in December 2009, gave supporters and detractors alike cause for talk. Some of his work, such as the famous—or notorious—top of a Dannon yoghurt carton exhibited in a room by itself, seemed staged deliberately for conflict. A provocation of the mostly middle class audience who dutifully filled the large exhibition, the yoghurt cap posits nothing but its own reality, more than likely discardable at that. The current show consists of Corplegados, or folded bodies, in the front room of the gallery; clay sculptures in the middle room; and Particles, or paintings made by the repetition of small geometric shapes such as circles, in the back. Together, the three bodies of work represent a less alienated—and alienating—artist, whose refusal to stay put in one place makes him one of the first, and one of the best, post-studio artists working today.

The Corplegados, life-size in their dimensions, consist of paper folded four times in half so that they would be portable for the artist as he traveled. Orozco considers these works a kind of notebook, and worked on them, as the press materials explain, in several ways: hung on a wall, put directly on the floor, or folded to a manageable size on the desk. As his sessions of work passed (done while Orozco prepared for his retrospective), the compositions became a kind of palimpsest, replete with marks of ink, gouache, and pasted photographs layered over each other. Reflecting Orozco’s extensive travels, the drawings change from the pastoral to the more urban—from organic to geometric forms. At the same time, the drawings demonstrate the wide range of moods available to the artist, whose insistence on human proportions and on a “conscious” side (which is consciously worked) and an “unconscious” side (left to chance) for each piece suggest that, in addition to renderings of the visible world, the drawings represent states of Orozco’s psyche.

Blackbirds in the Trees, Lac du Bourdon (2010), consists of abstracted black wings in the midst of white blossoms and green leaves; it is a highly lyrical image, which, on its opposite, unworked side is also beautiful if harder to read. Continental Chess Game, New York (2009) offers rows of white and black squares, as occur on a chessboard. In the center, some of the edges of the squares are round, forming a shape suspiciously like a manhole cover—an urban icon if there ever was one. Here Orozco’s sensitivity to his environment becomes more understandable. Conservatory Plan, Roca Bianca (2009), New York (2010) is a marvelous mix of grids, curved lines, and bars and rectangles—an amalgam of architectural effects that has unusual beauty in its own right.

Orozco’s Particle Paintings are very new—less than a year old. They are large figurative images made up of tiny geometric ones: small circular forms that are arranged in grids and deliver to the viewer a broad range of images, including the artist’s own photos, postcards, news images taken from the Internet, favored paintings from art history. The audience can clearly see the small circles from which the big image is composed; colors approximate shadow and create the form of Uncle Ho (2011), a benignly official image of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, or Mondrian’s Composition Grid Red (2011), presumably a favorite choice of Orozco, who comes close to a BenDay dot version in his treatment of a great abstract painting.

In contrast, the installation of clay works seems less high-minded, yet highly original. Anonymous but also familiar — they are vaguely human in form — the pieces look like feet or organs and nicely hold the viewer’s attention. They are interesting alone and in relation to each other, and remind us that Orozco is a highly skilled sculptor. This show, which demonstrates Orozco working in commercially accessible, in facthighly attractive, traditional genres makes the case of mastery in most everything he lays hands to.

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June 10 – September 2, 2010
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

New York City endured a near-death experience during the 1960s, and the steep decline of lower Manhattan precipitated the rise of a vibrant underground culture. The City began to acknowledge the pioneering efforts of artists to create live-work spaces or lofts within this wasteland of residential and commercial buildings in the 1970s by rezoning them as “mixed use”, albeit in piecemeal fashion and with much rancor. Within a decade, the empty lots and ruined real estate property that had incubated a wealth of sinewy conceptual art were transmuted into Soho gold.

If “mixed use” as a real estate term inspires this show’s outward theme, it implicitly applies to “artistic practices and strategies” in transition over a four decade period, as well. Curators Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp present a considerable array of films, photographs, texts, and sound installations by 40 artists spanning several generations. The city as performance space or experiential sphere of creativity becomes the unifying frame around projects of wildly differing intention, and the show often suggests links between specific works by artists who might otherwise appear to have little in common.

For example, several of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills from 1978 (#25, #60, #83, #63), hang near Barbara Probst’s Exposure #9, New York City, Grand Central Station, 12.18.01, 1:21 pm from 2001. Probst’s six-part work features a female model, photographed simultaneously from six distinct points of view. Clearly, Sherman’s and Probst’s concerns, conveyed through distinct conceptual and technical approaches to picture-taking and picture-making, are strikingly different and decades apart. Yet the juxtaposition of these selected works highlights a common interest in the instability of photographic verity, set right in the midst of some of New York’s most familiar public spaces.

By contrast, photography as a straightforward accomplice to performance pertains in Babette Mangolte’s Woman Walking Down a Ladder from 1973. The ladder in question is that of a rooftop water tower. Contact sheets reveal a figure descending perpendicular to the ladder with no visible sign of a harness or guide wire. At close range, we see that she wears a nondescript blouse and skirt, while her face is obscured by her hair. At medium distance in profile, her descent appears even more precarious against the void of sky; and she is a mere speck when the photographer pulls back to reveal the full height and might of the building on which the water tower is delicately perched.

New York City’s rooftop water towers are also featured in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s 15-part array of fine black and white photographs from 1988. Echoing a 19th century trend to assemble photographic archives of like things for civic records, the Bechers adopted a similar methodology in the 1960s to make comparative studies of decaying industrial architecture in Europe and the US. Their systematic approach dovetailed with strategies of conceptual art being forged in that era, and the Bechers’ typological studies of water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and other industrial relics have been highly influential.

Typologies abound in Mixed Use, Manhattan. From John Miller’s enigmantic series Clubs for America (1993) to Moyra Davey’s Newstands (1994), the streets of New York are teeming with similar things made unique by happenstance and style as much as wear and tear. The windows of urban buildings are the common denominator for Jennifer Bolande’s Globe series, which features blue metallic orbs with maps that are forever out of date. In a different key, Gordon Matta-Clark’s deadpan, black and white Window Blow-Out from 1973 depicts an abandoned building whose grid of broken windows is animated by a lone dog’s vigil.

The line between typology and series is porous. They synchronize neatly in William Gedney’s 1960s views from his apartment window. Entertaining a play between the static camera and everyday movement in the world beyond, his window is the theme for a set of variations. James Welling employs much the same strategy in Eastern Window #1-24 (1997-2000) except #8, 11, 12, 23. A chair on the neighboring rooftop changes position; light alters the buildings’ forms; the moon changes phase and disappears. Welling’s introduction of occasional color in this black and white world of ideas is mildly startling.

If still photography lends itself easily to urban typologies, photography on the move offers other possibilities. Sound and physical movement predominate in David Hammons’s video Phat Free (1995), in which a hand-held camera follows a performer kicking a can down the street. In David Wojnarowicz’s well-known series, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), a figure wearing a crude paper mask of the poet’s face traverses Coney Island, Chinatown, and the deserted streets of the West Side, enacting the artist’s taste for romantic irony and despair. With less drama, the painter Christopher Wool would photograph streets at night while walking home from his studio, studying incidental marks.

Images of the bygone West Side Piers stir piquant nostalgia for many New Yorkers of a certain age. In all their decrepit glory, the Piers were a magnet for aesthetic prowess as well as sexual trysts. From 1975-1986, Alvin Baltrop photographed their interiors and exteriors, observing cruisers, lovers, and yawning empty space in exquisite detail. When Gordon Matta-Clark cut an enormous, half-moon aperture at the far end of one pier, Baltrop noted its impact on the huge space as sublime cathedral or camera obscura. Peter Hujar’s haunting nocturnes of the Canal St. Piers, from 1983, submerge their secrets in velvet hues of photographic black. What’s left of them in 2010 amounts to jagged rows of decaying piles, as shown in Emily Roysdon’s gray-hued photographs, The Piers, Untitled (#2-5).

In 1971, the Piers were the site of an ambitious series of conceptual art pieces by 27 artists (all male, as it happened). Curated by Willoughby Sharp, photographed by Harry Shrunk and Janos Kender, the consistent format and high quality of the small, gelatin silver photographs establishes a collaborative framework within which each artist had his own word-and-image solo. Because the works were installed in a long corridor of the museum, viewers walking past the sequential imagery might experience it like stills from short silent movies. Vito Acconci, for example, spars with a reputed stranger who threatens to push him off the pier. Besides Acconci, the list of illustrious participants included John Baldessari, Keith Sonnier, Michael Snow, Daniel Buren, George Trakas, and others.

In quite another register, Charles Simonds, Gabriel Orozco, and Bernard Guillot found in the city places for reverie and magical thinking. Simonds, a sculptor, made a 16mm film called Dwellings in 1972. With children as his witnesses in blighted neighborhoods on the Lower East Side, Simonds uses tweezers to move tiny clay bricks into wall crevices. He explains that he’s creating miniature cities for “Little People” who will be moving in soon. (Simonds’s ephemeral archaeology eventually found its way into permanent niches, such as the stairwell of the Whitney Museum). Orozco’s color photograph, Isla en la isla (1993), also plays with changes in the cityscape’s scale. Wooden planks and other debris lean against a traffic barrier in a parking lot beside the Hudson River, mimicking the World Trade Center buildings and piers along the skyline due south. Guillot, in a series of photographs titled Orpheus and Eurydice from 1977, reinvents a mythic tale of tragic love, death, and descent into the underworld as photographic views of forlorn territory on the West Side.

The richness and variety of these projects is daunting. They attest to the elasticity of photographic and cinematic media as co-conspirator to artistic vision, be it performance, conceptual art, architectural intervention, socio-aesthetic political commentary, memento mori, extreme ballet, found object, available view, topographic documentation, lyrical serial existentialist anarchy, rough play. Cumulatively, the show exudes an inviting sense of spontaneity and hard-won freedom. I was particularly moved by Glenn Ligon’s harrowing, 20 wall-panel narrative of his residences, from his youth in the Bronx through a series of legal and illegal sublets early in his career, to, more recently, a stable situation in a condominium. Ligon’s true story is a bracing reminder of the anarchic forces of city real estate and the crucial, double role of the home-studio environment in an artist’s life.

It should be remembered that many of the works in Mixed Use, Manhattan were not seen publicly at the time of their creation. Some of the work on view came to light only through the efforts of dedicated curators and/or the survivors of loved ones. With equanimity and to fascinating effect, the curators have conjoined informal, private, and underknown works with widely known icons. Despite the real estate theme, as I see it this exhibition primarily draws inspiration from artists of the 1960s and 1970s who intentionally kept their work out of mainstream systems, creating alternative avenues for reception and distribution. A long perspective on the sensibility they set in motion can be found here, in disparate works that embrace plurality and resist categorization, revealing quixotic and tantalizing whispers of desire.

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February 12th to August 1, 2010
1852 West 19th Street
Chicago, 312-738-1503

Modernism was so underdeveloped in the United States in the early 1930s that the impact that the Mexican Muralists – Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera – was all the more decisive.  The employment of artists to paint WPA-funded murals in public spaces created a burst of activity that lead to the emergence of art communities and groups, including amongst them many future Abstract Expressionists.  Translating Revolution gives ample opportunity to review the course of this progression, and to see how it flowed from the Mexicans’ emphasis on themes of the common man engaged in political and social struggle.  It is not hard to see how the expressionist fury and Futurist intensity in the murals of Orozco and Siqueiros were suggestive to American artists during the Great Depression – a time of considerable social and political upheaval.  Diego Rivera’s tamer version of Social Realism also had significant impact.  He absorbed important lessons from Cubism which became part of his rhythmic compositions using flattened planar figures in densely populated mural scenes, a style that proved to be a very popular with WPA artists.

Edward Millman’s Detail Fresco, St Louis, MO Post Office (1942) observes many aspects of Orozco’s work.  Three counterpoised men stand and kneel in a wasteland of ruptured planks, a design clearly inspired by Orozco’s Zapata 1930 (not in the exhibition). Millman’s men have large knuckled hands that convey both supplication and anger.  This same symbolic device is apparent in the lithograph by Leopoldo Mendez, Murdered Teacher (1938), which presents a bound teacher being burned along with his books.   His struggling hands and the flames of fire surrounding him directly and simply convey the emotional impact of the scene.

One highpoint of the exhibition is a boldly sketched charcoal head study from Orozco’s  Man on Fire mural 1938 – 39 (in Guadalajara, Mexico) in which the brusquely rendered bald head of a furious prophet stares intently with piercing eyes.  His painting The Martyrdom of Saint Steven I (1943) shows the violent stoning of the saint by a bloodthirsty crowd: muscular sinews in the limbs and backs of his figures heighten the tension in the mob and add to the tone of existential violence and death so common in his art. In contrast to this particular work, much WPA art is infused with a populist sympathy for suffering.  The painting A Man to Remember (1939) by Charles Wilbert White presents a seated ragged amputee begging for alms.  The creased folds in his worn out face and clothes magnify the sense of pathos.  His approach seems inspired by Siquerios’ energetic use of abstract space around his figures, resembling a vortex of fire that is used to highlight the presence of intense feeling.

Two important early examples of Jackson Pollock’s work show his direct connection to the Mexicans. In Untitled (Bald Woman with Skeleton) (1938-41) a nightmare scene presents a faceless bald female nude bending over a disjointed animal skeleton.  She is surrounded by an hallucinatory mob with starving faces claustrophobically crammed on either side of her.  The intense gestures in Pollock’s brushstrokes and the bilious mix of yellow, green, blue and red makes this one of his darkest Orozco- inspired works.  In another equally turbulent painting, Untitled (Composition with Ritual Scene) (1938 – 41), the primitive theme of animal sacrifice is repeated.  By outlining his figures in heavy black angles and curves he abstractly suggests figures marching or intertwining in a tangle of movement. Pollock had participated in a political art workshop lead by Siqueiros in 1936, and though he never met Orozco he was deeply moved by his 1930 mural, Prometheus, which he had seen at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Futurist-based circular and geometric divisions of space are visible in Philip Stein’s Battered (1983) where almost the entire vertical surface is filled with the curved torso of a nude woman rendered in heavy outline.   Her hands and arms are protectively raised as if to fend off an attack while her foreshortened face, pressed into the upper right corner, is reduced to an expressive oval.  Her pained and contorted expression rhythmically repeats in a series of curved brushstrokes. In a smaller work of Stein’s, The Cursed (1951), the metallic sheen of a phalanx of Conquistador helmets defensively glow with the cold hostility of machines used in warfare – a prevalent theme in Mexican Muralist art.

There are noteworthy works in the exhibition by Ben Shahn, Tina Modotti, Pablo O’Higgens, Elizabeth Catlett, and Eleanor Cohen and others.  The last room, however, has many contemporary, more conceptual works that are distant from the compositional and expressionist urgencies of the Mexican Muralists. Gone is the vitality with which “Los Tres Grandes” challenged American painters to connect with the social realities, emotions and conflicts of their time.

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, Illinois. The recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2002, she will be exhibiting at the Kouros Gallery in New York City in 2011 and is represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago.

The post Los Tres Grandes: US Artists Interpret the Mexican Muralists appeared first on artcritical.

This first major museum retrospective of Mexican Gabriel Orozco has been viewed as controversial, and not entirely for reasons of taste.  Few Latin American artists have had such an honor bestowed on them  by The Museum of Modern Art, particularly with such fanfare.  Curator Ann Temkin exclaimed during remarks at the press debut: “I’m getting a bit annoyed with people asking me the question – Why Orozco?”  The curator went on to explain that she endorsed the artist not only as one who “resists categorization” through his heterogeneous body of objects, but as a global trend-setter who has moved his practice outside the proverbial isolation of the studio into direct interaction, on a communal level, with everyday life.

Her point is well-taken, but a gnawing problem of how to contextualize Orozco, who was born in 1962, remains,  given that he is certainly not the first artist – let alone, the first Latin American– to produce works in different mediums, such as photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, readymades, printmaking and installation.  An argument made in favor of Orozco is that he does not fit the traditional romantic stereotype of the Latin American artist.  Rather his career has moved in the direction of conceptual art where the idea foregrounds the object. Yet one can point to an array of Latin American conceptual artists who have preceded him, including Luis Camnitzer, Liliana Porter, Cildo Moreiles, and Regina Silveira. On the other hand, a younger generation of specifically Mexican artists appears to hold Orozco in great esteem, largely for having established an international reputation that goes in opposition to this perceived cultural stereotype. This still leaves his work strangely exempt from critical considerations.  While the spatiality of Empty Shoe Box (1993) and Yogurt Caps (1994) may hold a philosophical discourse, what takes that discourse further than Marcel Duchamp or Yves Klein took it?

It would appear that Orozco’s rhetoric lies somewhere outside the form, whereas the non-objects of Duchamp and Klein assiduously internalize the concept. The same could be said of Orozco’s half-circle paintings, collectively titled Samurai Tree Invariants, painted by hired hands in other parts of the world who are in touch through the air waves at any given time.  While such methods were intriguing in the early enamel plaques by László Moholy-Nagy (1928), or Tony Smith’s Cube (1961), they fall flat with Orozco.  Again, the problem appears to be one of locating the conceptual support.  For Orozco, the textural referent is too cynically removed and therefore out of place, detached in ways that remove the Invariant permutations from having any core of elasticity. As a result they are suspended within the infinite universe of a hypothetical game of chance where no resolution is foreseen, and where variations appear arbitrarily chosen.  In contrast, his early chromogenic photographs function visually in a way that the recent paintings do not. In works like Sleeping Dog (1990), My Hands Are My Heart(1991), and Sand on Table (1992), the poetry is never in doubt. The text is foreseen within the reality of what we empirically observe.

Mobile Matrix (2006), installed in the 2nd floor atrium, carries the subtitle “A Monumental Sculpture of Reassembled Whale Bones”.  According to the accompanying description, Orozco discovered the bones at the Isla Arena beach in Baja California Sur and had them exhumed and cleaned by a team of experts, then sent to Mexico City where they were reassembled using metal armatures. In the meantime, the artist employed assistants to apply a drawing to the skeleton consisting of a series of optically equidistant concentric rings.  Finally the mammoth skeleton was suspended overhead in the Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City. This work bears a distinct relationship to two earlier works by Orozco: a series of gouache and graphite circular drawings called Twelve Korean Notebook Pages (1995) and a chessboard graphite drawing over a human skull, Black Kites (1997). In fact, there is a third response that does not belong directly to Orozco.  The more I examined Mobile Matrix, I saw a more elegantly refined response to the aesthetic of deceased whales, certainly more satisfying than Damien Hirst’s macabre shrunken shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1992).  With the Hirst now at the Met, it is ironic that at major museums in New York, at the same time, two noted postmodernists are both represented by relics of large sea creatures.

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