Jason Farago, Seph Rodney and Karen Wilkin joined DAVID COHEN to discuss:

Susan Philipsz: A Single Voice
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21 Street, New York tanyabonakdargallery.com

Aneta Grzeszykowska: Mama
Lyles & King, 106 Forsyth Street, New York lylesandking.com

Sangram Majumdar: Offspring
Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth Street, New York shfap.com

Adam Liam Rose: Threshold
Ortega y Gasset Projects: The Skirt, 363 Third Avenue, Brooklyn oygprojects.com

James Hyde: Western Painting-Magnasco
Cathouse Proper @ 524 Projects, 524 Court Street (enter on Huntington St.) Brooklyn cathouseproper.com

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

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

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

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

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August 10 to November 3, 2013

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York City, 212-708-9400

As a rule, sound infiltrates space, and the nearby listener can’t help but inhabit what is heard. Sound can grate upon or delight one’s immediate, internal presence in a way that visual information cannot. The implementation of its unique influence for investigatory aesthetic aims has been a concern of the sound art genre since its emergence via Dada and Surrealist movements early in the 20th century. Soundings—MoMA’s first show to present sound art exclusively—clings to the museum’s typical foregrounding of the image, exhibiting work that demands visual appraisal as much as it demands close listening.  This fidelity to visual media impedes the expressive capabilities of the works as sound. In this way, the show fails to make clear the unique influence that sound wields as a reservoir of meaning left largely untapped in our image-laden culture.

To the show’s credit, the reason why its shortcomings are so glaring is that it does indeed provide rare moments of pure, sonic eloquence, which set the bar high. Jana Winderen’s Ultrafield (2013), a sixteen-channel ambisonic sound piece installed in a darkened gallery, is, along with Susan Philipsz’s Study for Strings (2012), among the mere two works in the show that offer nothing but sonic information. Winderen’s piece is comprised of ultrasound field recordings culled from around the world—we hear bats, fish and underwater insects—which the artist has pitched down low enough to be detectable by humans.  The piece has an incongruous beauty to it. Unmistakable creaturely rhythms sound like rising clusters of synth bleeps and within this striking simultaneity of the familiar and unfamiliar, one is reminded that technology still butts up against an incredible wildness.

Philipsz’s Study for Strings is taken from a 1943 orchestra written by the Czech composer Pavel Haas during his imprisonment in a concentration camp. A performance of the piece was staged there as part of a Nazi propaganda film, and Haas, along with most of the musicians, was executed shortly thereafter. Study for Strings, drawing from a reconstruction of the score assembled by the surviving conductor, reduces the orchestration to only the viola and cello parts. The piece is unique in Soundings in that it not only uses conventional instruments, but is concerned with traditional musical criteria—such as harmony and counterpoint—if only in its divergence from them. While hints of melody in the piece are enough to conjure a warm, emotional identification on the part of the listener, long, abrupt silences provide the meditative space from which to question why and how. Is it in the music itself or the painful history of its composition? Conceptual projects rarely produce work so immanently expressive.

Ravaged lives, ruined buildings, and cast-aside technologies provide content for a good portion of the works presented, though the subtle devastation of Philipsz’s sonic mood stands alone in its precision. Jacob Kirkegaard’s Aion (2006), though not devoid of sensory appeal, is overly burdened by concept.  The film is a succession of fixed, long shots taken in four different derelict buildings in and around Chernobyl. Video and audio have both been subjected to a layering process, resulting in a dark image that is gradually peeled away to reveal details of the room depicted. The sound consists of low, atmospheric noise swelling to a heavy, machinic drone. The project reportedly pays tribute to Alvin Lucier’s vocal piece I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), which employed a similar layering technique. Aion‘s waves of mounting tension are sensorially absorbing, but its immediate audiovisual impact fails to anchor the artist’s references.

Overall, the curation tends toward a science-fair enthusiasm for mechanics, which encourages a manner of viewing that is more investigative than affective.  Carsten Nicolai’s wellenwanne lfo (2012)—a box-like apparatus of mirrors, water, and light which visually translates sounds inaudible to the human ear—looks like a sleek lab project, whereas a different curatorial context might present it as an elegant minimalist sculpture a la Donald Judd. Richard Garet’s Before Me is a clunkier iteration of the show’s gadget-art theme, piecing together dated sound equipment into a cheeky assemblage topped with an amplified marble rolling on a revolving turntable. The dull sound of the marble and the cobbled-together look of the sculpture implicate technological obsolescence in an ironic statement no less crude than its presentation.

Tristan Perich’s Microtonal Wall (2011) is the only tech-heavy piece in the exhibition that is refined enough in both concept and effect to offer a simple, unencumbered experience of sound. Perich’s sprawling grid of tiny speakers broadcasts a series of minute pitch changes which hum together in a white noise drone when approached from afar. In walking back and forth along the variously pitched rows, one can manipulate what is heard, generating, in a sense, one’s own improvised sound composition. Here, the piece’s stated motive is detectable within the encounter, such that the experience and its mechanics are elegantly unified.

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Life on Mars is the title of a David Bowie song and now, too, the 2008 Carnegie International.  The oldest exhibition of international contemporary art in North America, it has taken 55 incarnations for the show to bear a title.  “Is there life on Mars?” is a question curator Douglas Fogle asks as a way to explore “what it means to be human today,” “investigate the nature of humanness,” and “demonstrate hope for humankind.”  Uh-oh.  It doesn’t take an extraterrestrial perspective to realize that stating an artwork is an exploration of human nature is just a touch more specific than claiming it is about life.  Fogle’s big questions, however, guided a selection of works that share material concerns recently associated with less unwieldy notions.

I am thinking in particular of two other survey shows of the past year: the much-discussed inaugural exhibition of the Lower East Side’s New Museum, Unmonumental, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.  Unmonumental offered up the informality of assemblage and collage as the proper antihero for our times.  Shortly thereafter the Biennial made much the same proposition, with one of the show’s curators, Henriette Huldisch, adding the catchphrase “lessness” to the New Museum’s “unmonumental”. And so a style was born, or rather, codified.  Life on Mars shares a number of artists with Unmonumental, including Mark Bradford, Cao Fei, Thomas Hirschhorn, Matthew Monahan, Manfred Pernice, and Susan Philipsz.  For a show of only 39 artists, that makes nearly a sixth.  This is perhaps unsurprising considering the New Museum’s Eungie Joo served on the advisory committee for the 2008 International, but is rather suspect for a show that purports to be global in its representation.  Suspect as well is that all but seven of the artists are from the US or Europe and only twelve are women.

Fogle furthered aligns himself with Unmonumental by stating “these artists are inheritors of an artistic legacy that seeks to produce not the monumental but the momentary, the ephemeral, and the modest”.  The problem with speaking in terms of inheritors and legacies   is that it can make for rather reductive relationships between works.  Paul Thek’s Untitled (Earth Drawing I), an acrylic on newspaper painting of Earth as seen from space, has become the signature image for Life on Mars.  Besides this work’s obvious play with the show’s title, Thek’s inclusion among the others artists in the exhibition presents his use of ephemeral materials as a precursor for a younger generation.  But pairing Thek with an artist with a similar materials list, like Mark Bradford, flatters neither.  At his best, Bradford’s mixed media collages seduce with a dense, dark physicality.  When he uses quotidian materials it feels simply as if the work pulled them in with a gravitational force.  Attaching any meaningful metaphor to the fact that Bradford assembles map-like images out of scraps of paper that you would commonly find on the street leaves one with a lot of overly obvious and not so useful metaphors.  Thek, on the other hand, hardly used materials in a way that could be described as seductive, but the information those materials bring to the work is always pointed.  At the time of its making -1974, just five years after the first human contact with the moon- his painting of Earth featured an image that had recently and frequently graced the pages of many newspapers.  Thek’s rendering of this icon with his characteristic light and fast touch leaves much of the newspaper underneath exposed.  What could be a poetic image, Earth seen from a distance so great that all its features become abstract, is interrupted by information about the US Army building a golf course or an oil company’s profits.  The pleasure of such wry humor isn’t transferable to Bradford.  His work’s sexiness starts to feel like so much art school posturing in comparison, while Thek uselessly becomes the enigmatic outsider.

The prevalence of what was being termed “scatter art” in the 90’s also renewed interest in Thek.  Ironically, the very person to have written extensively about the problematics of such resurrection jobs, Mike Kelley, is included in the Life on Mars as well.  His contribution, seven architecturally-based works from his Kandor series, cleverly capitalize on their incongruous relationship to the doric columns and marble austerity of the Hall of Sculpture in which they are housed.  Noticing that Kandor, a fictional city in the Superman comics, is represented differently in one issue of the comic to the next, Kelley presents the conflicting depictions of this fictional locale as a series of miniature cityscapes covered in glass domes and basked in glowing synthetic lights.  Each dome is connected via respiratory tubing to an oxygen tank of candy-colored hue and displayed amongst sleek platforms, pedestals, and partitions, with the occasional random decorative element, like a throw pillow, tastefully placed in their midst and video projections of similar set-ups on walls nearby.  In other words, the life of a pop-cultural fiction, Kandor, is being sustained by a parody of contemporary reworkings of modernist forms.  Perhaps Kelley is suggesting Modernism is a sort of Superman: a constantly evolving fiction rendered invincible through endless resuscitation and regurgitation.  In any case, Kandor 1, 4, 6, 13, 15, 17, and 20 are ephemeral only in the jokey sense that they are connected to respiratory tubes.  The work seems to critique rather than support the claims made on its behalf by our curator Fogle.

Other works in the 2008 International are also well worth seeing, but gain little from their placement in the show.  Fischli and Weiss please as always with a scene built of fabricated items that would be common to any workshop, everything from a plate of peanut shells to workman’s boots, and please as well with a dizzying video of double-exposed and constantly moving images that is as mesmerizing to stare at as a gasoline spill or a rave. Bruce Conner more than pleases with Angel, a series of stark and beautiful photograms made using the artist’s body and a slide projector, appropriate photographic portraits of someone who always played with ideas of artistic authorship.  However, thinking of Vija Celmins star-filled skies as evoking life on Mars is the least interesting context I can possibly imagine for works that otherwise play with the very limits of representation.

And yet, Fogle is not without my sympathies.  The job of curating a survey show of the magnitude of the Carnegie International is a thankless one; such exhibitions make it structurally impossible to appease all or even most expectations.  The history of the International is a complicated one, with the exhibition first beginning as a convenient way for Andrew Carnegie to build the museum’s collection.  Rather than traveling to find work for the museum, the International brought work to Pittsburgh that then could either be added to the permanent collection or shipped back home.  In its current position, the International serves as one of Pittsburgh’s only points of exposure to a larger art world.  A rather big job, but not one at which it has been wholly unsuccessful.  I grew up in Pittsburgh.  When I was fifteen the International was the cause of my first seeing Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close, and Tony Oursler, artists with whom I can no longer imagine a lack of familiarity.  I’m sure to many seeing the 2008 Carnegie International this exhibition is similarly revelatory.  However, in order to avoid appearing to be guided primarily by an unimaginative ploy to escape provinciality, the next curator of the International would do well to take less cues from New York, show a less predictable group of artists, and contextualize their work in a less uselessly broad way.

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