November 8 – December 21, 2013
20 East 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues
New York City, 212.737.2060

Walking into Salle’s Ghost Painting show late last year, one might have expected to see Salle’s multi-layered, lateral dislocations of image and subject played out across the surface.  Instead, one was transfixed by beautiful color, translucence and internal depth. There is also directness, singularity, and an emphasis on centrality in this series from the early 1990s. The tough simplicity of the Ghost Paintings is a clear pivot from Salle’s better-known work.

I immediately thought of a comment the painter and critic Sidney Tillim had made to me twenty years ago. Tillim had stated with certitude that David Salle is an exceptionally fine colorist.  I hadn’t thought of Salle in these terms before, but Sidney’s comment stuck with me.  I have always considered Salle’s main achievement to be his inventive use of inserts and filigrees in energetic compositions.  Initially informed by John Baldessari at Cal Arts in the early seventies, Salle’s probing imagination eventually found common cause with the flurried compositions of Francis Picabia, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist toward the end of that decade. But Salle’s longstanding, unwavering ability to communicate how much he loves the act of painting was a thorny proposition for an artist who ascended with “Pictures Generation.” Salle’s signature trajectory, an imagistic slot-machine surrealism, barrels on, as recently evidenced in New York solo exhibitions at Lever House and Mary Boone gallery in 2012 and 2011 respectively.

So much is captivating here.  Bold simplicity reigns as big fields of color dominate these large paintings. The color schemes range from melancholic to a brightness that is reminiscent of Warhol’s swan song Daimler-Benz car series.  And if you’ve ever wondered what single representation Salle would settle on if he had to downshift from his effusive progression of racing representations, here it is – a photo image staged by Salle himself, of a mysterious shrouded figure, drapery cascading that is timeless and elegiac.  Anonymous yet theatrical, the figure’s absence of identity actually increases its presence. It’s as if Salle is asking, if I cover it over, does it really have less impact? It is an act of negation that begets pictorial possibilities.

The presence of a shrouded figure, eerie and beautiful, carries centuries of history.   When Salle elects not to use color, as in Ghost 12, associations of grisaille painting, haunting fragments of classical sculpture, and the gloomy tonalities of early photography spill forth.  Salle’s drapery configurations bear resemblance to the backdrops in Victorian photos of children, a portrait style in which mothers actually hid under fabric drapery while supporting their toddlers for the camera.  That Salle has titled his series Ghost Paintings underscores the images’ spectral, shape-shifting quality, which also echoes turn-of-the-century interest in spiritualism and supernal apparitions.  And Salle’s softly contoured drapery can also suggest feminine interiority. The florals of Ghost 9 and Ghost 11 recall Fragonard’s young women swathed in pinks, yellows and blues.

Salle’s rolling concavities of cloth and color also recall the paintings of Andrea Del Sarto, as in Ghost 10, for instance, where architectonic drapery reinforces compositional centrality, leading us deeper into the psychic space of the scene.   When Salle amplifies the color, in half of the works on display, his neon combinations revisit the fully mannered color displays of Del Sarto’s younger colleagues, Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino.  Both Salle’s Ghost 6 and his Ghost 14, which reveals the tilted face of his female model, have characteristics of the swooning madonnas in Pontormo’s Deposition and Fiorentino’s Lamentation.  When the suggestive folds of drapery are plied to enhance mourning or passion, the sacred and profane often spring from the same source.

Salle’s solitary shrouded figures conjure a compendium of associations.  Ghost 1 seems like a mountain, while Ghost 5 looks like one of Zubaran’s monks or Guston’s Klansmen.  The photo image in Ghost 3, (shrunk and recycled by Salle in Picture Builder one year later), now seems prescient.  With a discernibly forlorn posture and outstretched arms, the figure is now disturbingly familiar in the form of the infamous, harrowing image of a shrouded Iraqi prisoner under torture.

Focusing on one large-scale image per work, Salle taxed the image with successive acts of negation and dissociation.  He cut it, visibly re-stitched it, and inked it.  The image was horizontally trisected on photosensitive linen, and rejoined with two visibly sewn seams.  Here, Salle looked past the variations of the modernist grid relied upon by fellow postmodernists. Instead, he proportioned his images classically, into approximate thirds.  The narrative-driven formats used by Salle’s Picture Generation peers promoted sequential arrangements that mimicked authoritarian modes of instruction and control.  Ideally suited to enshrine critique, ideology, and promote a return to the aesthetics of puritan severity, such formats lacked the flexibility to accommodate Salle’s less orthodox visual interests.  In contrast, Salle’s single image doesn’t settle into a read. However, in a tacit nod to Minimalist iconoclasm, each horizontal section in the Ghost Paintings is identified with a distinct color, giving each painting the look of a tri-colored flag.  But Salle adroitly inks the surfaces with intense hues that increase depth of field, light, and illusion. The effect is not dissimilar to David Reed’s drapery-inspired abstractions of the period.  Employing a breezy imperfect haste, Salle’s occasional traces of wide brushstrokes reveal how the thin translucent veils of color were pushed around. Both the color applications and the photo images have been treated nonchalantly.  Spots, scratches and other photo imperfections appear like eye floaters, baring all against the draped figure. Absorbing these stresses, the shrouded figure gains poetic strength while the Rothko-esque proportions and emphasis on color field allow the viewer to hang back and bask in sensation.

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The Kitchen

August 27 to October 5, 2013
512 West 19th Street
New York City, 212-255-5793

Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) was a pioneering video artist whose work was under appreciated in her own lifetime. Although Bender was connected to the group of artists known as the “Pictures Generation,” she never received the recognition and institutional legitimization that many of these artists now enjoy. A new exhibition at The Kitchen, Tracking the Thrill, suggests that Bender’s videos and her prophetic views on the media’s relationship to art and perception was ahead of its time, and that perhaps it is only now that the radical dissonance of her work can be fully appreciated.

The top floor of The Kitchen presents the video installation Wild Dead (1984), a video documentation of the lost performance piece Dumping Core (1984), and a sampling of her commercial work. Her flashy, high-speed intro for the television show “America’s Most Wanted” is shown alongside music videos she edited or directed for bands such as Megadeth and New Order. The slippage between these commercial works and her artwork is fascinating. As an artist who also worked in commercial television, Bender was something of a double agent: she played an active role in both developing and appropriating the system of commercial advertising to expose the viewer to the manipulative language of the industry. Bender was aware of an artwork’s half-life, and by controlling the high-speed intoxicating language of commercials she worked to stay one step ahead of art’s absorption back into advertising. She speaks with poetic urgency in a 1987 Bomb Magazine interview with Cindy Sherman about the power and effect of the media, describing it as “a cannibalistic river whose flow absorbs everything” and flattens out content. It is her recognition and intervention into this incessant movement that feels the most shockingly relevant today.

Total Recall occupies the entire bottom floor theater and takes its name from the 1990 film by Paul Verhoeven, which was still in production at the time. First exhibited at the Kitchen in 1987, the 18-minute video installation is an operatic tour de force, and curator Philip Vanderhyden does an excellent job in re-staging it. A stack of 24 television monitors and three projection screens pulsate with images woven together in a way that is both absorbing and frightening. As the viewer is confronted with bits of movies, news, personal graphics, and film, very rarely do all the monitors and screens show the same image simultaneously. The eight channel analog piece has a rhythm all its own and the work demands that the audience sync to its rapid pace. Bender’s long time collaborator Stuart Argabright’s soundtrack flutters between assault and surrender that perfectly compliments the visual speed of Total Recall. This unsettling pace will not allow a passive viewing; as soon as one begins to feel comfortable, the tempo of sound and image change radically. It is this fast-paced rate of change that is paramount to understanding this work and indeed Bender’s overarching vision. Because one is never fully able to grasp the entire work and although one might recognize commercial logos and fragmented images from popular culture, the edits destabilize a complete and “true” read of the symbols. We are left simply with their particle form, an aesthetic empty shell. As the hollowed scenes and symbols are sequenced, their speed and movement simultaneously become context and content.

Despite its chaotic abstraction Total Recall, like much of Bender’s work, evokes the political climate of the time. Regan-era conservatism and the monolithic aspect of consumer culture was pervasive, and Bender worked furiously to expose how advertising reflects our society’s obsession with entertainment. One merely needs to turn on a television (or stream digital news) to see just how prescient she was in anticipating the way we now consume information, and how our appetite for such rapid consumption is never satiated. Today, when so many artists are passively using the language of advertising, Gretchen Bender is a bold reminder that they should be “active agents.”  Although the current of information may be strong, we can jump in and change the flow of the pulse.

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The Jewish Museum

May 10 to Sept 29, 2013
1109 5th Avenue
New York City, (212) 423-3200

JACK GOLDSTEIN x 10,000 speaks to the high voltage intensity that one artist can generate over the course of a lifetime. The exhibition at The Jewish Museum arrives by way of the Orange County Museum of Art in California where the show opened last year as the first American retrospective for the Canadian-born Jack Goldstein (1945-2003). Works featured include Goldstein’s infamous short 16mm films from the 1970s, experimental soundscapes on vinyl, epic 1980s paintings of dynamic weather, and his final philosophical writings exhibited in seventeen bound volumes.

In Goldstein’s performance-based 16mm films, such as A Glass of Milk (1972) and Some Plates (1972), we witness the artist first coming to terms with the kinetic dynamism of still life objects. These early films, along with four others, are projected onto a wall for forty minutes on a continuous loop. With the help of a charismatic projector, Goldstein’s films are bewitchingly charming, resembling a middle school reenactment of Isaac Newton’s first Law: an object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. In A Glass of Milk, for over four minutes, a fisted hand rhythmically pounds against a table upon which there sits a vulnerable glass of milk. Similarly, in Some Plates, a precarious stack of plates is as motionless as a still life on a table, until an outside force (the artist) enters. In the background behind the plates, a pair of legs begins to stubbornly stomp and jump. After about three minutes of stomping, the stack of plates, like the glass of milk, crashes, as we expected it to. Although these films are, to put it bluntly, experiments, Goldstein successfully captures the integrity of his objects as they act alongside and against the artist as force, or outside agent.

In A Spotlight, another film made the same year, Goldstein takes his place among his objects, challenging his own endurance over the course of eight minutes, running back and forth trying to escape the spotlight that pursues him. In one sense, Goldstein’s stomping, pounding, and fleeing can be understood as the common, eccentric gestures of a frustrated artist. As early experiments, these films exhibit one of Goldstein’s life-long, humbling preoccupations: How to breathe life into the still life?  It is Goldstein’s sensibility, his way of regarding the stack of plates, the glass of milk, or himself, that comes across as the main subject of the film work. At times, this sensibility carries with it Baldessari-like inflections of Cal Arts humor, but ultimately, what sets Goldstein apart is his sense of profound disappointment as he perpetually discovers objects, like characters, will and do endure, with, or without us—like Samuel Beckett’s characters, they go on.

The experience of the silent films is complimented by the overlay of Goldstein’s sound effects records compiled from Hollywood audio archives. In Two Cats Wrestling (1976) the distinct and disorienting sounds of cats fighting can be heard throughout the exhibition via overhead speakers. Among Goldstein’s Suite of 9 Records with Sound Effects (1976) the purple 45rpm, The Tornado, is simultaneously the least intrusive as well as the most haunting. As a soundscape, The Tornado’s howling winds successfully foregrounds the foreboding, moods one might experience alongside the artist’s later paintings made in New York during the 1980s, visible in an adjacent room.

Goldstein’s depictions of lightening storms, meteor showers, and volcanic eruptions, airbrushed to perfection by his assistants may strike a viewer initially as out of place. In their celestial aspirations, they appear overtly ambitious, especially in comparison to the memorable Mickey Mouse simplicity of a film like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975), a three minute portrait of the company’s famous roaring lion head logo. Given the heavily emphasized LA art context of the show (pop red and yellow painted gallery walls), these New York paintings appear especially strange, and saturnine with their high-contrast explosions, stormy weather, and apocalyptic undertones. The scale and High Definition-like quality of Goldstein’s appropriated nature scenes boasts in his untitled works a commercial presence in so far as they appear pristine, as well as pricey. What is fascinating to me is that they complicate, and contextualize how the commercially vibrant art world of the 1980s existed alongside the intellectual ambitions of the so-called Pictures Generation of the late 1970s. Within Goldstein’s oeuvre, the later paintings share in common with the earlier films the urge to add energy, momentum, and a sense of kineticism to the still life. Not unlike the final philosophical texts Goldstein was composing toward the end of his life, these darker works depict the torpor of being alongside the drama of exile.

Consistently across mediums, Goldstein uses found images, sounds, pets, and texts in order to interrogate the cosmic fact that our fragility, like the stack of plates, is our livelihood, our vitality. Perhaps that is what the 10,000 of the retrospective’s title speaks to. Ten thousand is a quantitative measure of Goldstein’s capacity, his wattage, so to speak. Or, perhaps 10,000 suggests the number of times, turns, and transformations it took for Goldstein to make the final artistic leap–as he did in his last film, The Jump (1978) moving from incandescence to something else. For the artist who seldom signed his paintings, that, it seems, would be Goldstein’s signature: trademarked transubstantiation, the movement from light into pictures and then from pictures into ether.

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