May 16 to August 3, 2015
2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy (at North 20th Street)
Philadelphia, PA, 215 278 7200

The Barnes Foundation’s recent exhibit, “The Order of Things,” in their contemporary gallery, is at once dynamic and problematic. Intended to relate to Barnes’s enigmatic approach to exhibition design, fantasy and appropriation abound. Installations by three renowned artists — Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff and Fred Wilson — mine varying aspects of Barnes’s approach to installing artifacts and paintings. His system for exhibiting work was intended to be carried into in perpetuity and is mimicked in the work of the artists selected for this project.

Pfaff created a sprawling installation in the main space of the gallery. Center stage, this work honors Laura Barnes’s arboretum, which she cultivated alongside Albert Barnes and a cluster of specialists. The arboretum is an extensive garden of hundreds of rare trees and flora from around the world, still flourishing at the Foundation’s original museum in Lower Merion. Pfaff’s Scene I: The Garden, Enter Mrs. Barnes (2015) is a dazzling psychedelic display of photos of the arboretum and Henri Rousseau’s paintings gone awry. Perhaps an abject backdrop to Alice in Wonderland, the installation is replete with digital prints on plastic and vinyl, poured pigmented foam, natural wood and steel. Swirling renditions of a simulated pond’s edge and bank are constructed using wood and liquid foam. Repeated in several key locations within the installation, these frothy sea-green islands create a sense of boundaries and depth. Punctuating this expansive landscape are leafy steel structures, painted white.

Incongruent elements abound, with white steel chandeliers overhead and neon lights that are, disappointingly, never illuminated. An installation of plastic wallpaper with distorted floral patterns is strategically placed on the gallery’s southern wall. Plastic floor panels extend across the space and were based on Henri Rousseau’s paintings; they serve as a conceptual bridge between Pfaff’s installation and the collection. Other connections include an area over the eastern wall of the gallery that alludes to the framed lunettes of Henri Matisse’s The Dance (1910).

Laura Barnes was integrally involved in the development of the arboretum at the original Barnes Foundation. She cultivated an expansive array of flora from areas within the states and other countries. Laura Barnes selected blooming plants that were considered difficult to grow in the Pennsylvania’s blistery winters of Pennsylvania such as southern magnolias, etc. Her approach to constructing the Foundation’s gardens paralleled the landscapes found in the work of Calude Monet, Paul Cezanne and other landscape paintings in the collection. Pfaff’s title channels the contribution of Laura Barnes to the development of the Foundation’s botanical gardens.

Fred Wilson’s rooms, located to the right of the entrance, are conglomerates of staged tableaux, some more successful than others. At the entrance three scenes are created in a sparse, modernist fashion, using furniture borrowed from the Merion offices, desks chairs and even an early Dell computer. The interior rooms hold greater intrigue; these spaces represent a sculptural approach to furniture, art objects and glass works from the collection. While visitors walk through these spaces, African drums and chanting waft through the air. Wilson inserts the African presence through sound rather than including it materially in his installation. Perhaps using African art directly would have been too obvious a move for Wilson, based on his past installations at museums throughout America. The soundscape is a compilation tape. Wilson has chosen not to disclose its origin or name the people recorded. Nameless voices surround the viewer — the ubiquitous presence of Africa is in our midst.

In his 1983 book Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson uses the metaphor that if aliens descended on earth and sampled the music produced around the world, overridingly the music from Africa and the African Diaspora would be the most prevalent. Wilson has reconstructed this reality for us in Trace. However, it is interesting that he has chosen not to name the African cultural groups represented in his compilation tape. Is this again an example of a Western intervention that includes the artistry of Africa and deciding to render it anonymous?

Mark Dion’s installation is delightful, yet foreboding, in its inclusion of guns, knives and the like; however, would these be included in the collection of a naturalist? These emblems are contrasted with butterfly nets, fishnets, satchels and garden tools. Dion’s The Incomplete Naturalist is a tour de force in symmetry. According to the curator, Dion’s use of symmetry is mimetic of Barnes’s aesthetic. Like an archeologist, he puts everything in order and builds relationships to construct a narrative.

Overall, the Order of Things was a fascinating array of dissonant styles of installation art brought together. Therein lies its intrigue. Each artist serves as an individual conduit into the mind of Albert and Laura Barnes.

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October 18 to November 15, 2014 (Zoubok) and to December 20 (Howard)
531 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, Zoubok: 212 675 7490; Howard: 212 695 0164

Billed as a collaborative exhibition, this Judy Pfaff double-whammy at 531 West 26 Street reveals an understated bifurcation in Pfaff’s studio production: extroverted and introverted. It also leaves the viewer convinced that, given the opportunity, the artist could have hung new work on every wall in the entire building, and the neighboring addresses as well. She is unstoppable, having devised a working method that is capable of absorbing an enormous range of materials, processes and moods.

At Loretta Howard, Pfaff delivers her familiar but always engaging blend of elegance and ebullience in 14 works of widely varying size, all dated 2014. In smallish works dedicated to Larry Poons, Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley and Jules Olitski, Pfaff tips her hat to movers in mid-20^th-century abstraction. In these pieces, shards of colored plastic, deformed by being melted, tangle with acrylic, resin, and pigmented expanded foam, and evoke the formal means of each honoree. The biggest of the tributes is Blue Note (for Al), in which Pfaff’s former teacher, Al Held, is celebrated — a 9-by-14-foot wall work featuring concentric circles of blue and orange Plexiglas, fluorescent lights and a meandering, steel-rod musical staff.

Even more convincing is the gallery’s second space, in which the visitor encounters the two largest works in the show. Pfaff’s use of foam in the (mostly) free-standing, three-part There is a Field, I Will Meet You There (Rumi) recalls Lynda Benglis’s innovative use of similar materials, but whereas Benglis’s roiling mounds of polyurethane feel volcanic, Pfaff’s oozing pools are more like quicksand — once you start to get sucked in, it’s difficult to extricate yourself.

In Alberta, another dimensions-variable work, there are echoes of Frank Stella’s late-1980s and early-90s wall works — those with the relatively restrained palette and the rippling, swirling, organic shapes between which you can see through to the wall. In this company, an untitled work dominated by green plastic is both compact and explosive. To achieve such balance of intimacy and theatricality requires that Pfaff nail the scale of the works relative to the room — and that she does.

The mood is darker at Pavel Zoubok, the work there less immediately ingratiating. Their materials feel clotted rather than clustered — not just layered, but laminated. The checklist runs to 73 items (nearly all from 2014 or 2013), of which many are small, individually framed works, many riffing on botanical and decorative motifs, in encaustic and collage on repurposed ledger paper from India and antique bills of lading from a New York paint company. Across tiled expanses of snapshots and postcards of flora, fauna and her own studio activity, these framed works are arrayed, underscoring the idea of inventory or archive. Wrapping around three walls in the gallery’s back space is one such environment, which includes 21 paper works and an untitled, tendrilly sculpture; the viewer might feel a bit lost in the underbrush. Even more than usual for Pfaff, this installation device risks inelegance for the sake of sheer abundance, as if to assert that the irreducible essence of her practice is proliferation itself.

Among the many sculptural works at Pavel Zoubok, of particular interest is Hydroza, nearly eight feet high and dated 1994-2014. A rough bundle of tar, resin and steel wire, enclosing a big bulb of greenish blown glass, dangles by steel-rod vines from a sort of boom mounted at a perpendicular to the wall. It looks like a nest. The gallery’s overgrown, jungly feeling owes much to the preponderance of materials that have been scavenged from the natural world: Hanging Judge, a walk-through sculpture just inside the entrance, makes effective use of several charred chunks of driftwood; in other works one finds tree branches, dried leaves, deer antlers and sections of honeycomb.

These are combined with repurposed manufactured objects such as paper Chinese lanterns, welded steel furniture, plastic flowers and (naturally) more expanded foam. Twenty-four feet long, Let Sixteen Cowboys Sing Me a Song is anchored by a stringy, undulating frieze of what appears to be seaweed encased in clear resin, an element that plays nicely against the other flotsam washed up in this piece: photographs of giant crustaceans; a translucent pool of pigmented resin, mounted to the wall at looking-glass height; roots, branches, leaves; pinwheeling globs of some unidentified polymer product; photographs of old color engravings of deep-sea fish. A rigid, right-angled, polished steel armature lends visual as much as structural cohesion to this sprawling work.

In the best sense of the term, Pfaff is an artist of the old school. She puts the stamp of her personality on whatever theme she takes up. She thoroughly reinvigorates a tired trope — the natural vs. the man-made — and in the process suggests that just about anything is open to being revisited, reinvented, rediscovered. Embracing a familiar idea and completely recasting it in her own idiom, she demonstrates an awe-inspiring tenacity. To rework an old joke: How do you get to have a two-gallery show in Chelsea? Practice, practice, practice.

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Patricia Tobacco Forrester: New Paintings
A.V.C. Contemporary Arts Gallery until October 11 (41 E. 57th Street, fifth floor, at Madison Avenue, 212-888-1122).

“Mario Naves, Collages,”
Elizabeth Harris until October 4 (529 W. 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-463-9666)

That installation art had its origins in a set of values which were essentially anti-aesthetic makes Judy Pfaff a doubly remarkable figure. Not only was she one of the pioneers of the new medium; as a consumate aesthete, she also represents, a dissenting strand within it. Whereas the impulse behind installation for her countercultural, iconoclastic contemporaries was militantly antagonistic towards the object, in Pfaff’s hands, as Clausewitz might have put it, installation is painting and sculpture pursued by other means.

This is not to portray her as a counter-revolutionary or to deny her personal connection with the avant-garde of the 1970s. That she brings formal concerns to installation doesn’t make her a formalist. But, at the same time, she takes an abstract delight in readymade materials (she is the crucial forerunner to Jessica Stockholder and Sarah Sze in this respect.) In Ms. Pfaff’s work, there is an ambiguous back and forth between indulgence in the sheer shape, color, and texture of her appropriated bric-à-brac and poetic awareness of actual, redolent things in the world.

Her latest installation, at Ameringer Yohe, is her first exhibition in New York City since 1997, when she showed at Andre Emmerich, which has since closed. It is also the first opportunity for New Yorkers to see a significant change in direction, first signaled at the 1998 São Paolo Bienal, where she represented the United States. If her work in the 1990s had tended towards sculptural unity, her new approach revives the radical informality of her earlier forays into environment.

“Neither Here Nor There” falls roughly into four interconnected zones. , though the installation is far from visually unified. From scaffold, architectural ornaments, and found objects, Ms. Pfaff and her assistants have created structures that are at once dense and sprawling, and they have painted, stenciled, and collaged the walls with a panoply of decorative detail. While one room is dominated by grids built out of tape on the floor and a floating frame of plywood, the style in another room is determined by circuitry, with vaguely Islamic motifs zig-zagging around the room in welded metal strips and plaster vase-forms. But despite a density of spatial and referential layers, despite a cornucopia of materials and a corresponding abundance of style and touch, from delicate intricacy to studied nonchalance, , there isn’t the overwhelming sensuousness one might imagine.

In fact, the work shows remarkable expressive restraint. Forms are built up or broken down with disarming poise. Even where architectural trimming is deconstructed to expose its underlayers, this incident forms an isolated phrase on the wall. If a room is an installation artist’s blank canvas, Ms. Pfaff leaves much of the canvas bare, despite the seeming alloverness of her approach. This is where the new work contrasts with her 1990s sculptures, with their Frank Stella-like exuberance and deliberate over-stimulation. Environment has become her support again, but without a corresponding ambition to envelop the gaze. Instead, the eye is left to roam around on its own, to find scattered effects rather than lose itself in the visual forest.

It is bizarre that such a “material girl” as Judy Pfaff should remain so cerebral in this way. The sense of deliberation, of isolated phrases and interventions, brings to mind Katharine Hepburn’s reported criticism of Glenn Close and Meryl Streep: you can hear them thinking. But in Ms. Pfaff’s case, that may not be a criticism. At Yale her mentor was the problematizing abstractionist, Al Held.If her subsequent tastes and preoccupations took her into the company of the “pattern and decoration” artists of the late 1970s, and if her use of materials is poetic as much as it is formal, at the end of the day her vision still remains heady and hard-won.

***

Down 57th Street at AVC Gallery in the Fuller Building, Patricia Tobacco Forrester does equally remarkable and inventive things within a chosen medium at the opposite end of the trendiness spectrum, watercolor. Ms. Forrester was a few years ahead of Ms. Pfaff at Yale, where classmates included Richard Serra, Rackstraw Downes, and Janet Fish. She has not only made watercolor her exclusive medium, but made the exotic landscape her chosen motif. In a way, it was as brave to join a genre that attracts so many illustrators and amateurs as it would have been to pioneer a new medium such as installation.

What makes Ms. Forrester’s work so compelling is its unpredictability. Technically speaking, these paintings achieve their intensity through outsize scale, strong inner light, formal complexity, dramatic cropping, and high-octane color – abetted by the artist’s fearless decision to expose her paper unglazed. But what makes them so demanding and satisfying has to do with obsessive attention. And it’s attention not so much to detail as to nuance.

“Beech/Birch” (2003), a 10-foot-wide triptych, has both alloverness and depth. The painting depicts a violent competition between the tree species, in which growth entails strangulation in a way that mirrors the precarious vitality of watercolor itself. A painting like this bathes the retina in chromatic luxuriance, but Ms. Forrester holds back from a sentimental view of nature. She collides passages of precision and ambiguity managing at once to summon the immediate presence of wood and to evoke the ethereal movements of water. In her paintings, such strange bedfellows as vibrancy and mystery are encouraged to cohabit.

***

Artist Mario Naves is a critic for the New York Observer, so perhaps it’s fitting that his chosen expressive medium, papier collé, should entail a degree of cutting and tearing. Joking aside, he is a collagist of great charm and sophistication, whose fresh, intriguing works at Elizabeth Harris are at once delicate and pack a punch. Although he prepares his own stock of painted and impressed papers rather than finding materials out in the world, the fiddly intricacy of his touch recalls Kurt Schwitters, the Dadaist who appropriated bus tickets, matchboxes, commercial labels and the like in his quirky constructions.

The more obvious source of inspiration, of course, are the late cutouts of Matisse. Other modernist strategies come to mind, particularly those pioneered by the Surrealists, such as frottage (rubbing) and decalcomania (a form mirror imaging itself through folding and impressing.) While Mr. Naves remains an abstractionist, his affinity with Surrealist collage encourages a sense of narrative in his lively compositions. Anything but polite essays in spatial dynamics, these teasing, voluptuous objects of desire might just be subjects of it, too.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 25, 2003

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