May 2 saw the season finale of The Review Panel at the Nationa Academy Museum. Stephanie Buhmann, Mario Naves and newcomer to the series Saul Ostrow joined moderator David Cohen to discuss shows dotted around Manhattan, taking us from the Lower East Side, via Soho and Chelsea to 57th Street.  The shows under review: David Maisel: History’s Shadow at Yancey Richardson, John Newman: Fit at Tibor de Nagy, Jackie Saccoccio at Eleven Rivington’s two spaces and Allan Wexler: Breaking Ground at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.  The panel will be back for its tenth season at the National Academy in September.  Sign up to our bulletin to be the first to know the details.

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January 6 – February 19, 2011
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 646-230-9610

Kahn & Selesnick fabulize at the intersection of historical fact, apocalyptic future, nerdy museology and steam-punk.  Melding childlike playfulness with adult obsessiveness they create faux-historical narratives realized as photography, sculpture, and installation.

Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea, currently on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery, depicts the adventures of two unitard-attired women as they explore an unwelcoming landscape studded with the defunct remains of ambiguous circuitry, abandoned dish-structures, and enigmatic monoliths.  Most of the works are photographs, including a few of the detailed panoramic scenes that the team is known for.  Five mid-size dry-looking hematite and concrete sculptures are positioned on the gallery floor, as though the exploring team had managed to send back a few heavy artifacts from the crumbled civilization they investigate.

The environment was digitally constructed from actual photo-mosaics of Martian landscapes taken by NASA, combined with deserts in Nevada and Utah.  The female protagonist’s clothing is compellingly impractical- many outfits lack arms or eye-holes, though concessions to the necessity of breathing are plentiful – every bodysuit comes equipped with a facemask, and snakelike tubes coil around an “Abandoned Oxygen Farm” and lie tangled in shallow lakes.  This Mars has water, and hence, the ability to sustain life- though judging by the occasional space-suited corpse, not forever.

With Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea, Kahn & Selesnick have departed from previous more “academic” displays – where labeled artifacts were carefully presented in display cases and copious documentation of the expedition was presented in the form of a diary or log, or elaborately forged newspaper articles.  Their new deliberate ambiguity liberates the earthbound preoccupations of artist and viewer alike, allowing suspension of disbelief.   Oddly this suspension both strengthens the impact of the show, and allows it to be perceived more intuitively.  When rules of space and time are too obviously suspended, as in Oracle, 2010, where a blue-clad figure regards a half-sphere upon which stands a blue-clad figure regarding a half-sphere, and so on like self-consciously meta- Russian nesting dolls it’s hard not to be jolted by the impossibility – a sign of prior credence.

Kahn & Selesnick’s ongoing interest in inefficient transportation extends beyond the recurring motifs of balloons and dirigibles to gliders and “sandboats.”  Humankind has made it to Mars, but with technology from the turn of the 20^th century.  This is the second series where the team has combined science fiction and space travel with archaic means – in The Apollo Prophesies, man lands on the moon, only to discover that it has already been colonized by an expedition from the Edwardian era.

If, as the artists presuppose, humankind has truly come unstuck in time and place, as the hourglass of the title is endlessly flipped end to end, we must address the unsettling question: Is Mars’s past our present?  If so, is Mars’s present, Earth’s future?

One might conjecture that the team’s recurring choice of explorers as protagonists reveals something of their psyches – the artist as intrepid traveler in a strange land – but Kahn & Selesnick do separate reality from art in “real” life (unlike say, McDermott & McGough.)  It is only in their art that there is no division between fact and fabrication.  The distinction is irrelevant – to belabor it would be missing the point. In art, unlike life, there is no physical or temporal limitation.

Two concurrent exhibitions of Kahn & Selesnick:

The Apollo Prophesies and Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago
600 S. Michigan Ave, Chicago, through April 3. 312.663.5554

Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea
Carl Hammer Gallery
740 North Wells Street, Chicago, through February 19. 312.266.8512

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Detroit contains a barely believable 80,000 abandoned buildings and lots.  Andrew Moore’s current exhibition, named for the auto city in crisis, consists of ten large-scale photographs reflecting this urban blight. Although the majority of this imagery is indeed based on Detroit (Palace Theatre, the exception, was taken in Gary, Indiana), the specificity of the photographs is not located in geographical location so much as in transformative relationship of abandoned architecture to the natural elements and, through time, its reclamation by the same.

Moore tends to work in series, pace his previous bodies of work documenting Governor’s Island, Havana, Sarajevo and Russia. His photographs are, characteristically, highly saturated, recalling advertising while also suggesting a painterly sensibility. In Model T Headquarters, Detroit, Michigan (2009), a humidity-soaked and mold-encrusted shag carpet appears verdant in both the forms its decomposition has naturally taken and the digital heightening of its chromatic intensity. These concerns he shares with such contemporary photographers as Anthony Goicolea and Edward Burtynsky while having in common with Thomas Struth an interest in the theatricality of space and scale. In Palace Theatre, Gary, Indiana (2008), the stage and backdrop smartly puns on antiquity, as if a Piero della Francesca fresco has been digitally transported into a contemporary ruin’s interior.

But Moore’s work can feel commercially slick, as in his rainbows of light drenching the interior of The Rouge, Detroit, Michigan (2008). Although subtly and beautifully executed, this over-embellishment of a rough, gritty space is problematic in its heavy-handed aestheticization of decay. Moore has said that in his work, “The great wonder of Detroit’s transformation is the Janus-faced role that Nature evinces through its devouring decay as well as its power of renewal.” These works do indeed speak volumes about a relationship between nature and the decay of the humanmade, yet as a whole, these photographs lack a cumulative force and have little specific formal, conceptual or thematic relationships to one another. That a photograph depicting rusting colossal factory gears such as Marine Terminal, Detroit, Michigan (2009) is in Detroit seems unimportant—it could be just as easily be Germany or the former Soviet Union.

In Detroit, urban artist interventions verging on Duchampian pranksterism has reclaimed much of its industrial and residential blight. Such actions as “Detroit. Demolition. Disneyland.” in which a group of artists has covered abandoned buildings with a construction orange-colored paint, visually and conceptually unify decay. Calling attention to these specific issues, these buildings are also politically and economically charged. With his interest in what he describes as “a city whose actual decomposition extends to surreal proportions,” documenting the results of such a site-specific artistic intervention is an ideal future project for Andrew Moore.

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