GABRIELE EVERTZ: EXALTATION
Minus Space, 16 Main Street, Suite A, DUMBO, minusspace.com

SUSAN ROTHENBERG
Sperone Westwater, 257 Bowery, Lower East Side, speronewestwater.com

MICHAEL ST. JOHN: DEMOCRACY PORTRAITS
team (gallery, inc.), 83 Grand Street, Soho, teamgal.com
ASHES/ASHES 56 Eldridge Street, Lower East Side, ashesonashes.com

DAN WALSH
Paula Cooper Gallery, 524 West 26th Street, Chelsea, paulacoopergallery.com

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In an upstairs gallery at Paula Cooper, Charles Gaines has 12 identically-sized, clear acrylic boxes march around the perimeter in an orderly parade. Each box is about six feet high by five feet wide and six inches deep. Both the front and back surfaces are gridded in black with a neat handwritten number and letter system running down the left vertical edge. The front panel of each box has a highly generalized drawing in a particular color of the face of a famous philosopher or writer starting with Aristotle and proceeding in rough historical order to bell hooks. Each filled-in square has a number, counting out from the midline, carefully written on top in a contrasting color. The colored “pixels” are painted on front and back of the clear acrylic giving them a slight visual shiver. Despite the imposing scale  of these frontal “headshots”, the generous track size of the grid (about one half an inch) gives these pixelated drawings an extremely abstracted, lo-rez feeling. They immediately call to mind the facial landmarks extracted with widely used facial recognition algorithms.

As the series proceeds, each drawing drops to the opaque panel on the back of the next  box as a new one occupies the front. So, as you proceed, the most recent portrait stands out in front of an increasingly dense tangle of all the preceding ones in the series. Whenever a spot in two or more drawings occupies the same “pixel” on the back panel, the colors are carefully mixed to form a new tone. There is some variation in the intensity of the color from pixel to pixel and the unoccupied pixels on the back panel are given a variegated scrubby gray. These minor variations in hue reminded me of old mosaics in the New York subway. The whole thing accumulates in a logical fashion like some big board game, while all the time getting more and more challenging to read. Clarity and confusion are set at war with each other. The snarl of color in back becomes increasingly entrancing as each new outline in front struggles to take its place. Despite their obviously systematic method of manufacture and the corresponding suppression of any personal gesture or expression these pieces nevertheless have a distinctly hand made quality, the product of a considerable amount of time and attention. The aura of the mechanically rendered or the computerized graphic hovers in the background more as metaphor than as method.

The faces are hard to identify without the title sheet, but once you have them in mind, certain individuals do seem to stand out, particularly W. E. B. Dubois in red and Edward Said in a deep aqua blue.  They all run toward the history of leftist, liberationist thought with important inclusions of African American thinkers like Malcolm X. The theme is the politics of identity. The second wall with Dubois, Malcolm and Jacques Lacan and the fourth wall with Said, Molefi Kete Asante and hooks are particularly powerful. As the color in the back panel increases in density the areas around the eyes and mouth tend toward rich tonal browns giving the later portraits a slightly scary backdrop. The multiple outlines of hair and beards turn into slightly wild, vibrating auras.  Any sense of dry, methodical production in the series is belied by this chromatic crescendo . This points to the possibility that within the world of rational procedure there is still a chance for affective engagement. A person can be moved by the impersonal. And despite the chaos of context there may be some access to another’s identity. To give an analogy: While it’s certain that reading Das Kapital in 2018 is a very different experience from reading it in 1917, nevertheless the text itself retains traces of a living consciousness and to some extent reading that text lets us enter into that individual’s reality. Gaines’s portraits seem to project this somewhat tenuous access to identity onto the accumulating entanglement of history. It literally gets harder to read the individual as the context gets thicker and yet the relief of the individual against that context gets more striking. Identity emerges not as a goal but as a process. Whereas initially Gaines’s piece seems almost didactic, I think, in fact, he is interested in these paradoxes. Somewhere in the space between logic and emotion, system and chance, language and image, simultaneity and history, Gaines sees a void that opens up and that is where he wants to stand. At each moment of history there is the possibility of constructing a workable identity with which to negotiate the paradoxes of the changing environment.

In a second room Gaines shows the preparatory drawings for Faces 1: Identity Politics and two musical scores from a series called Manifestos 3, created by assigning musical notes to the letters of the alphabet in two speeches by Martin Luther King and James Baldwin. The scores play as a video monitor scrolls by the words of the speeches. I do not have the musical knowledge to assess what I heard, but I was struck by the gentle, almost mournful quality of the music lending a quiet counterpoint to the contained fury of two of the most brilliant figures of the 20th Century.

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October 22 to December 2, 2017
534 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, paulacoopergallery.com

Instagram must, in part, be credited with the popularity craze for Yayoi Kusama in New York right now. In her whimsical multi-venue exhibition, “Festival of Light” the Japanese artist has cultivated the quintessential environment for the age of the selfie. Beyond the perfect selfie backdrop, these rooms foment a phenomenological encounter between participant and environment. The primary physical encounter with Kusama’s spaces induce mental stimulation, be it destabilization, escapism, or even simple enjoyment. And while there continue to be numerous painting shows this season, with the preponderance of Kusama-like immersive environments, contemporary painters are steeped in an art world that anticipates a certain kind of spectator immersion.

Perhaps this is why Cecily Brown’s new paintings, presented at Paula Cooper in her first solo show with the gallery, is such a revelation. Brown produces an absorptive mental and physical experience that rivals interactive art. Owing to the dictates of her elaborative painterly process, works in this exhibition ensnare the viewer in a state of sustained looking. This activity is not unidirectional as Brown’s undulating canvases simultaneously reveal and withhold visual data.

The centerpiece of the sold-out show is also its title piece: “A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!” (2016), a triptych, is the largest work to date in Brown’s oeuvre. While critics have pointed to the art historical references at play in this canvas, including a stated homage to the shipwreck scenes of Géricault and Delacroix, the philosophic underpinnings of Brown’s process are what unlock potential for sustained looking.

An heir of Francis Bacon, Brown is, as it were, an intellectual relation to Bacon’s great interpreter, Gilles Deleuze: her work echoes the French philosopher in the translation of sensation onto canvas. Brown’s most recent works seem especially in dialogue with Deleuze’s conception of the fold—an unrelenting maneuvering of existing material, inter alia the folding and refolding—which allows preexisting matter to transform into a form of expression. Brown’s processional practice, in which she continually remediates her strokes, covers her previous marks, and often returns to her works after months-long hiatuses, is an artistic translation of this philosophical concept. The artist’s additive process is an accumulation of luscious gestures and abrupt strokes, ultimately rendering an assemblage of fractured forms that produce a rhythmically pulsating whole.

Sifting through the canonical imagery of Géricault’s’ The Raft of the Medusa, Brown’s immersive method allows her to splice her art historical allusion with swaths of paint and encoded gesture which complicate the discrete categorization of her work as figurative or abstract. Relishing in the instability of her own mark-making, her phantom-like forms emerge from the depths of the painting, only to recede into the cyclonic mass of abstract forms. As the viewer walks from edge to edge of her painting (which is the only way to fully absorb the behemoth masterpiece) both body and eye activate as the ambulatory motion reveals recognizable traces of flesh, wreckage, and the elements. The single reading of the painting proves insufficient. Iterative looking is continuously rewarded in Brown’s canvases: each additional viewing unearths new discoveries and destabilizes old observations. Mirroring the artist’s own additive painterly method, the absorbed viewer returns to the same zones of the canvas only to see it anew. Whereas Brown is most frequently understood to be in dialogue with Willem de Kooning, another New York School name comes to mind at Paula Cooper: Barnett Newman, who avowed that the most salient aspect of his paintings was not their monumental measure but their relationship to human scale. These works were successful if they produced reverberations of the human figure and prompted an introspective consideration of one’s own bodily presence. Rendered to human scale, Brown’s A Day! Help! Help! Another Day! (2016), brings the physical body of the spectator into the mass of forms and flesh, implicating the viewer in the chaos of the shipwreck.

Beyond the physical absorption of the viewer, Brown’s content subsumes the visual field. In much the way that Newman’s iconic “zips” serve to orient the viewer at the center of the visual field, so too does Brown’s most clearly rendered human form near the center of her composition. Acting as an anchor, the figure both centers and envelops the viewer in the visual content. The distinction between painted figure and viewer is collapsed, a sensation heightened evermore by the orientation of the figure with back turned to the audience. Indeed, Brown’s most prominent figure seems to survey the damage of the shipwreck with the gallery-goer. This back-turned figure repeats in another painting in the exhibition, the equally enigmatic Madrepora (Shipwreck), (2016).

While Brown deals in plastic media, her mesmerizing canvases elicit the immersive environments and absorptive states which characterize the most successful installation art around today. Even more than these Instagram-friendly environments, Brown asks the viewer to slow down and participate in the unfolding of her canvases. A true interlocutor with artists and philosophers past, Brown’s subject matter nevertheless expresses an engagement with the demands of contemporary art. Where Kusama gives you infinity in a room, Brown paints you into her shipwreck: You are a material form in the process of becoming, alongside the flesh, wreckage, and masterfully applied brushstrokes.

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April 27 to June 30, 2017
534 W 21st Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York City, paulacoopergallery.com

Since 1965, David Novros has been exploring mural-scale and often site-specific painting—including paintings made in traditional buon fresco, directly on a wall. The artist has described multi-panel paintings like those in this selection of works from the 1970s as “portable murals”; like his fresco works, they actively relate to the surrounding architecture. Untitled (1970–71) is the earliest painting here and is closest in composition to Novros’s first commissioned fresco painting, which he made in Donald Judd’s SoHo building in 1970. In a limited palette of browns, grays, and a single pale blue “L” form, the surfaces of his rectangular shapes vary in both close and contrast of tone, and changes of hue. As simple as it may sound, this is stunning. No dramatic effects, only a musically metered variation of the parts—which, at 120 by 90 inches, occupy the viewer’s field of vision when close, and operate on a wall-like scale with more distance.

In 1963, Novros took a formative trip to Europe, visiting Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, the Paleolithic cave paintings of Northern Spain, and the Alhambra in Granada—which, he has said, “taught me that a painting could be something other than a rectangle hanging on a wall in a museum or gallery.” (All quotes from the artist come from the catalogue of his 2014 exhibition at Museum Wiesbaden, Germany.) Another important encounter took place at Henri Matisse’s villa in Nice, where he was particularly impressed by the “Apollo” series of cut-outs, later explaining: “you could use the wall and end up with a mural of some kind. […] That is why I started making shaped canvases in separate pieces that could be hung together.”

Novros was a key artist of 1960s, actively participating in the discussions of the time, though never identifying with the idea of a group or with an art historical movement. In this respect, it is important to dismiss categorization of Novros’s work as Minimalist. A modular system is used in these works—as in those of Donald Judd and Carl Andre—but with no intention of reducing subjectivity or compositional complexity. But, like Judd, Novros is also committed to the possibility of permanent installation of site-specific works, rejecting an assumed circulation of artworks as traded and exchanged commodities.

In its stead is an art that will endure, what Novros calls “a painted place.” Like Mel Bochner and Sol LeWitt, there is often a desire to work directly on the wall, but also for this to be lasting, rather than ephemeral. Other artists of the ’60s, sculptors foremost, included gallery space as a part of the work—for example, Robert Morris’s gray plywood pieces and Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tubes at the Green Gallery in 1964. Though Novros is not a sculptor, but a colorist concerned with the object nature and spatial illusion of painting, he looks beyond the single rectangular form. His interest in color and painted surface is integral. At first, on seeing the current exhibition I also thought of Barnett Newman, but Mark Rothko’s more emotional style soon came to mind, especially the panels of Houston’s Rothko Chapel.

Untitled (1964) is a work on paper in charcoal and red oil paint that recalls the structure and intervals of post and lintel architectural, and both Italian Renaissance interiors and the much earlier Roman interior wall painting of Pompeii. It instills an intensely contemplative feeling, recalling Renaissance alter pieces that the large-scale triptych paintings also evoke. Mounted on Shoji panel, the paper surface is exposed without the containing and distancing effect of being placed under glass. The gray and black rectangular forms repeat and shift subtly. Around the edges, previous workings on the sheet contribute to this sense of movement.

Large Drawing for Lent (1974) and Lent Painting (1975) consist of three parts. Both works are very complete, the surprise being the central part of Lent Painting. The negative space, where the wall intrudes and is incorporated as part of the composition in this central panel echoes the white section in the drawing; otherwise, the color departs from blacks and whites to earth colors. as if to emphasize more gradual transitions between night and day

Untitled (1975), and Untitled (Frog Altar) (1975) use right angles as pivotal compositional elements. Novros’s interest in the “expressiveness”—as he described it—of right angles was well-established, first exhibiting the forms in works at Galerie Müller, Stuttgart in 1966. The two inverted “L” shapes of Untitled (1975) again refer to post and lintel architectural forms, rather than modular forms for the anti-compositional ends of artists like Judd and Andre. The changes in color and proportion are poetic: the result, one presumes, of long deliberation and meditation.

Both the viewer and the painting are animated, provoking an experience like that of passing through a chapel or a cave, rather than analytically viewing small-scale rectangles from a fixed perspective. A desire for the viewer to experience passage is evident in the current exhibition: in the way the light responds to surfaces worked to varying degrees, as in the sequencing of panels and the placement of shapes. Novros has not participated in the typical one- or two-year interval of exhibitions for some time, preferring to more thoroughly consider the relation of his paintings to a specific space. This is a rare chance to see significant works from a decade when Novros innovated his practice, regularly connecting with ancient manifestations and traditions of painting—something the artist continues today.

The post “A Painted Place”: David Novros at Paula Cooper appeared first on artcritical.

January 5 to February 4, 2017
521 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, paulacoopergallery.com

Can technical doggedness produce compelling art? In his current show of new work, Dan Walsh has found a way to do just that.

The paintings, especially, feel like they have arrived, achieving equilibrium of plan and craft. The visual image is the hook for all this, as Walsh has relaxed his previously familiar pictorial strictures to allow for a variety of approaches to a basic scheme: vertically oriented, broad bands diminishing in width as they increase in number. A unit so generic, the band does not illustrate anything but itself.

The warrant for Walsh’s artistic approach goes back sixty years to when representation of the already seen world veered away from abstraction evocative of symbolic ideas, to flaunted signage. For this purpose, the artist’s hand—synecdoche to expressive individuality—became instrumentally neutral. Materials and techniques of a derivative nature rose to take charge of received ideas, the vernacular, and the domain of transmitted information. Flash forward to early canvases done by Walsh in the 1990s. These were derived from graphic reductions of fireplaces or boxed archives, motifs no longer endowed with tectonic structure and practical function of workable things in the world but functioning instead as deliberately affectless demarcations of the surface of the picture plane. Thus transcribed, the graphical lines were a curious amalgam of the literal and the arbitrary, for which imagination was entirely beside the point, effecting a metamorphosis and synthesis of processes that abstract painters of the New York School had presupposed went unnoticed. From this inflection of formulaic transposed mark-making came something other than the well composed, finely attuned image but lifted from the already seen—although overlooked—everyday idiom. This is the opposite of the truth urged by Hans Hofmann, when, as a modernist, he said that as soon as a mark is made on a canvas, a composition is in force.

The current exhibition does execute diminishing series often enough to raise expectations of pattern making; but otherwise, also at odds with itself, it shows eccentricities not so predictable. Color schemes in some works are of good-taste favorites—taffy beige or baby blue—but do not read as decoratively pleasant either owing to an amusing reverb effect or to a brightly plangent counterpoint in the interstices. Seen up close, variables in brushy paint handling that integrate formal and optical matter are done well–this, without bending the rule of consistency so as to interrupt the surface as a whole.  So at the least, Walsh is calibrating his neutrality.  And at the most, he is attaining to the mastery in technique that allows for a kind of elasticity of moves within the methodical technique he swears by. To this end his Klimt Book has its own kind of perfection worth noting. To this end the exhibited copy of his Klimt Book has its own kind of perfection worth noting. Open to a double-page spread the book renders a succession of ellipses waxing and waning as though through the passing day into night—suspending a fanatic’s dream of micro-optical gradation in sequence through the digitally printed mica-inflected inkjet and silkscreen.

What’s curious is the contrast between the hermetic and everyday ingredients comprising the image: each set of four ellipses-within-squares is placed within a kind of rustic crate more in the style of Richard Artschwager than anything that might be found in an ebonized dining environment of the Secession architect Josef Hoffmann, whose Palais Stoclet, in Brussels, houses the Klimt Frieze that inspired Walsh’s book project in the first place.

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Locations:
534 West 21st Street
521 West 21st Street
197 Tenth Avenue

192 Books:
190 Tenth Avenue

David Cohen on Christian Marclay, 2011
The Review Panel, November 2010
David Cohen on Mark di Suvero, 2010
Deven Golden on Robert Grosvenor, 2010
The Review Panel, March 2008
Jonathan Goodman on Jackie Winsor, 2008
The Review Panel, February 2006
David Cohen on Carl Andre, 2004
David Cohen on Mark di Suvero, 2003

More information can be found at Paula Cooper.

Full index entry for “Paula Cooper” at artcritical

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Comedian Louis CK points out, with his characteristic ethical generosity and pragmatism, “A lot of people wonder what happens after you die. Lots of things happen after you die — just none of them include you.” The recent death of On Kawara ends the brief but significant line of a life and of an exceptionally powerful artistic contribution. Human life is a rarer accomplishment than most of us, living day-to-day, sometimes remember. Most of the world is uninhabitable. Probably far greater than 99% of the entire Universe is completely inhospitable to life. Figuring out how to organize the mind and the body into some kind of harmonious, eudaimonic state is an ongoing struggle. Just getting up each day can feel like a victory. And, after any life extends for its short span, it ends. Thereafter everything else continues in its absence. That someone lives and is known at all, is momentous.

Kawara was 81 years old. Born in Japan in the midst of the 20th Century’s great upheavals, he moved to New York in 1965 where he remained until his death last month. Early in his career he showed figurative paintings, but moved toward conceptual art by the early 1960s. He exhibited his work regularly at Paula Cooper in New York, Yvon Lambert in Paris, and other galleries from the late 1960s onward and was included in one of the first large surveys of conceptual art, “Information,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. There’s a permanent installation of his work at Dia:Beacon and a large retrospective to be exhibited at the Guggenheim early next year. His New York gallery, David Zwirner, announced his death on Thursday.

Kawara had a group of friends and colleagues, but he was known for being retiring. He emerged alongside conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth, a close friend. Kawara shared their interest in language and its ability to frame or shape human perception, to describe and to conceal. Only bits and pieces of his life are available, recounted by those who knew him and as documented in works such as his postcards and telegrams. It is likely that he was influenced by American and Japanese fluxus artists who helped develop and formalize (if that’s the right word) mail art in the 1950s and ‘60s. Correspondence evinces his familiarity with John Baldessari, John Evans, Sol LeWitt, Michael Sesteer, numerous curators and dealers in Minimalist and conceptual art of his era, and collectors. But such connections connote only a very hazy portrait of Kawara.

In his best-known series, Today, he documented every day of his life from January 4, 1966 (two days after his 33^rd birthday) until, perhaps, very recently. This project highlights the impossibility of notating one’s life adequately. Even as recording technology has improved and expanded the personal and professional archives of those living in the developed world, when a person dies that’s essentially it. Kawara never published any statements about his work, didn’t grant interviews, never gave speeches, never sat on public panel discussions, wasn’t photographed. And yet with the Today series he recorded his existence by making one painting for every day, consisting solely of a complete date, rendered in white on a monochromatic background. It’s a simple act that gets straight to the heart of a lot of complicated stuff about our existence, experience and finitude. The sum of his archive is paltry in comparison to any person’s life, to Kawara’s life indeed, with a minimum of context provided for each date: a newspaper clipping stored with the painting and a record in a diaristic calendar. But it’s a rich testimony. It was as fleetingly temporal as anything, though it remains.

A parallel to the Today series, Kawara’s One Million Years (1969) is comprised of a 20-volume book that lists the million years that preceded the work’s inception, as well as the million years that are in the process of succeeding 1996 A.D. The subtitle for the first set of volumes reads “For all those who have lived and died.” This is a small addition to the annals of billions of people, long lines of humanity stretching over horizons of space and time, the known and the unknown. And barely overlapping those two dates lays an infinitesimally small span of time — the life of Kawara himself. It was carefully cordoned off and diligently recorded, until it’s not there anymore.

In another series, Kawara sent telegrams to friends and acquaintances, simply proclaiming, “I AM STILL ALIVE.” That affirmation, in the face of the difficulty of being a person, both ontologically and just physically, is deeply affecting. They are messages filled with love and tenderness, a recognition that something mundane and approaching the miraculous has happened, again. Finitude, and our resistance to it at each moment, is something that Kawara noted with exceptional concision and dignity. That is now finished. His death marks both the succinctness of his work, and serves as its ultimate frame. It was the only trajectory the work could have ever taken, but that doesn’t make its sting any less acute. He was alive. That’s important. The world preceded him and time continues. We (other people) continue — an equally valuable recognition. But he will be missed.

The post On Kawara: January 2, 1933 – June 27, 2014 appeared first on artcritical.

January 21 to February 19, 2011
534 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 255-1105

The proverbial sign of a good movie is that you don’t notice time going by.  In the sublimely bizarre cinematic experience that is Christian Marclay’s The Clock such obliviousness is, literally, impossible.  Time is omnipresent. The entire conceit of this 24-hour video sampling is that the passage of time, recorded in myriad timepieces, constitutes the narrative thrust in every filmic moment. And in the 24-hour screenings that take place weekends through the video’s run at Paula Cooper Gallery, the time on screen is the actual time.

The gallery has been transformed to an approximation of a classic movie theater, sans smoke and cigarette girls (though Paula Cooper herself served as usherette during my visit), with plush sofas for the stalls and pleated drapes insulating the sound and isolating the big screen.  It was the first time in quite a while that this viewer stood in line for 40 minutes to see a film, free or otherwise.  I arrived at 11.15 last night in the company of fellow Review Panelists Blake Gopnik, Elisabeth Kley, and Carol Diehl, making our way from the National Academy where Diehl had mentioned Marclay in connection with the sampling piece in Tracey Moffatt’s show at Tyler Rollins, unflatteringly contrasting Moffatt’s skill, complexity, and profundity to Marclay’s

A platoon of interns culled potential clock face moments from their allotted viewing materials (not a bad way to spend a summer) allowing the director/editor, Marclay, to splice together thousands of film clips that occur in specific minutes of a day or night.   Every genre is represented, different historic periods depicted, footage of contrastive vintages (color, black & white, silents) rendered seamless.  Although the films are mostly Hollywood, other languages are spoken, too.  Movie buffs will recognize many a star and scene (I yearned for a playlist that would magically feed into my Netflix account) but there was little anxious sucking-in of air to be heard in the gallery/auditorium as spectators tried to remember the what or who of each cinematic remembrance. Instead, the montage established its own rhythm, and acceptance set in.  And yet, as with any good collage, each element retained the integrity of its appropriated source while learning to operate within its new constituent body.

The reason we had such a wait to get in probably had to do with the fact that, once in at 11.15 pm, few would tear themselves away before midnight, as if waiting for an eclipse.  That, however, imposes the logic of a narrative arc, of a climax, on what is, instead, an epic of irresolution.  The whole movie has you at the edge of your seat in expectation of what you soon realize is not going to happen, the completion of a phrase.  Another thought as to what kept the crowd, keeping us out, in, is that up to midnight the genres would likely entail much eschatological sci-fi, albeit it melded with Cinderella romances; we did get in at 12.05 am in time for pumpkin hour, as lovers begin to wilt, serial killers strike, and late-night heists get underway.  I sat it out until 2.05 am, by which time insomnia and conjugality were beginning to take over (on screen only alas), although genre eclecticism was still the order of the day (night.)

There were plenty of moments of humor, some pristine and others contrived via juxtaposition.  Woody Allen made hourly wisecracks, telling a countess in Love and Death who congratulates him on his lovemaking skills that he gets to practice a lot on his own, and later, in Manhattan Murder Mystery, complaining to an anti-social telephone caller that not everyone is up at 1am watching the porn channel. But the mood is more often somber or sinister, with stirring music, sometimes dialog too, carrying from one clip to its muted successor.

Telephones, incidentally, are the second subject of The Clock, constantly ringing, at least in my two nocturnal hours, understandably as characters would be trying to sleep, and would need to be rudely awoken lest viewers do the same, as one might in Warhol’s Sleep for instance.  Telephones were also, however, the motif in his similarly sampled 2007 video of that title, so maybe he had some left over footage on his digital equivalent of the cutting room floor.

It is weird to stick around wondering what is going to happen next when you know what will happen next—it will be a minute later.  That happens in all movies, you might say, only in two senses it doesn’t.  Firstly, your mind is on better things than time.  Secondly, in “real” movies time jumps all over the place, lurching forward, flashing back, ever subservient to narrative.  This Frankenstein monster of a movie (and two versions of Frankenstein clipped their ways into my two hours) is fanatically scrupulous in its minute-by-minute progression, a paean to pace.   Correction: not pace, beat.  And Marclay doesn’t miss a beat.  In instants where it seems he has gone back a minute it is in fact to show the passage on a given clock to the next (we can allow a clock to be seconds late in a movie which isn’t).  As a character in a vintage British labor-relations comedy tells his already despondent apprentice, “You can’t beat the clock.”

Marclay’s marathon is a merciless object lesson in Henri Bergson’s distinction of real time and duration.  In non-Marclay circumstances, there is an acute difference between time as experienced by moviegoers and time as depicted (compressed, manipulated) by moviemakers.  Narrative and mood and investment in the fate of characters and the desire to stay with the stars you love keep you in a place and state where time stands still.  Or rather, to avoid clichés as one ought when philosophizing, where time has its own logic – reel time, let’s call it.  In Marclay, you lose the actual narratives from which his wrested clips are bleeding chunks.  Although unexpected delights of surrogate narrative do offer themselves in fractional compensation, the conceptual purpose of challenging unexamined expectations of time seems the primary purpose of Marclay’s project.

Adopting Bergson, the great if forbidding philosopher of cinema Gilles Deleuze drew a distinction between two temporal conceptions of movement in time, what he calls privileged instants and any-instants-whatever.  The bizarre thing in Marclay is that the epitome of the latter, arbitrary but relentless markers of time, become exemplars of the former, moments of poise, drama, accent and focus. The Clock is a minute-by-minute speedball of enervating expectation. Despite its relentlessly cruel denial of narrative satisfaction, the fact that you can only endure it, you get hooked in the moment, as you watch, craving to know, if not what will happen next then at least what will be used next, and how it might relate or contrast with what has happened just before. A door is opened.  Which other building will it lead into, and which other character will walk through?

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Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, Stephanie Buhmann, and Peter Plagens joined David Cohen to discuss James Casebere at Sean Kelly Gallery, Sherrie Levine at Paula Cooper Gallery, Wangechi Mutu at Gladstone Gallery, and Roxy Paine at James Cohan Gallery.

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By the time Stalin coined the phrase “engineer of the soul” to describe the ideal Soviet artist his regime had already crushed the visionary Russian art movement to which the term would actually have been applicable: Constructivism.

The suppressed impulse of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International enjoyed an unlikely afterlife, however, in the career of a Shanghai-born, California-raised Italian-American abstractionist. Mark di Suvero has populated sculpture parks, coporate plazas and university campuses across the world with fiesty, gravity-defying, bright red-painted or artfully rusted exclamations in steel.  Thrusting their limblike elements into the air in a spirit of defiant optimism, his structures operate like emblems of some long lost ideology.

An early masterpiece from his hand has been reconstructed at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, whose premises include an appropriately hangar-like structure to accommodate this 24 foot high steel and wood construction.  Di Suvero put together Nova Albion in 1964-5 on the beach in northern California using sawn logs and entire trunks.  The original wood has since rotted, but the steel elements bracing them together were kept in storage for decades.

Somewhat uncharacteristic in this more poetic than workerist early piece is the delicacy with which shaped and welded metal locks into warm wood.  Pure and perennial di Suvero, however, is the fearless sense of conquest the soaring forms engender.

Three works by di Suvero, meanwhile , are also on view in Renzo Piano’s atrium of the Morgan Library and Museum, through September 12, in what is billed as that institution’s first exhibition of contemporary sculpture.

A version of this article first appeared at nysun.com (the New York Sun) on June 14, 2010

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