RE:LOCATION
Alexander & Bonin through July 28
132 Tenth Avenue at 19 Street, 212 367 7474

A BRIGHTER DAY
James Cohan Gallery through July 14
533 West 26 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 714 9500

Summer is for group shows in art galleries and innocent family fun on the beach. Right? Not on the second count, if you believe what a slew of group shows in New York have to say.

Marvelli even title their seasonal grouping “Nightmares of Summer.”  It is co-curated by Marcello Marvelli and his collector friend George Robertson.  An earlier summer presentation at the gallery in 2004, “Black Milk, Theories on Suicide” curated by Monica Espinel, suggests that a sombre, if not sinister worldview might reflect the gallery’s sensibility as much as a war and terror-torn zeitgeist.  Mr. Marvelli and Mr.  Robertson have gathered images that reflect “the darkness inherent in all paradigms of light, the dark cloud contained by every silver lining.”  Rather than a gothic horror fest, however, this strange gathering is characterized by a perverse good cheer.

Barnaby Furnas sets the tone with “Holiday” (2005), an angel of the apocalypse masquerading as a kid on the beach.  Mr. Furnas has made the terrifying exhilerations of battle his distinctive theme in images, often in watercolor, that at first read as joyous explosions of beauty, and only yield their awesome portents on closer examination.  Here a young, fleshly beauty with golden wings wears a gormless, demented expression on her face and splatters what could be blood in all directions.  A second image by him in the show is a red glowing composition that looks a bit like a close-up of a molten oil rig: the image itself isn’t as sinister as the title and the medium: “Dead Red” (2005), dispersed pigment in urethane and ink on bald calf skin.

This keeps company with a pair of nautical drawings by Francesca DiMattio of Nineteenth Century battleships caught in distress.  These crackle with a sense of danger in the way that recalls David Fertig’s neo-romantic Napoleonic battlescenes.  The DiMattios in turn flank a dense, brooding charcoal drawing, “Untitled (Situation with Octopus)” (1998-2004),  As with the second Furnas, context is all: the octopus looks like he is having a whale of a time.

Several collages by Nils Karsten have a maccabre humor: he gives spiky body hairs to the smooth legs of the appropriated little Victorian girls who populate his ghoulish compositions.  A theme running through this show is the ickiness and unappeal of sweating limbs, parched throats, and exposed body parts.  Several historic photographers induce degrees of alienation at the thought of nakedness: Diane Arbus with her loadedly, unconvincingly non-judgemental view of “A Family One Evening at a Nudist Camp, PA” (1965) with ill-at-ease looking corpulent couple and their child under an ominous sky; an André Kertesz distortion; a Hans Bellmer puppet.  Bellmer’s awkwardly thrust together mannequin parts and prothetic limbs find echo in a pair of poignant collages by Robert Beck that focus on press photos of the naked corpse of a murder victim at a gay pickup beach.

Michael St. John brings an “In Cold Blood” meets the Mansons sensibility to his nighmarish evocations of murder.  One canvas, “Dead Body Inside” (2006) scrawls the words of the title in a demented scrawl next to photograph of a forlorn cabin.  Marilyn Minter (of Whitney Biennial poster fame) takes body squalor to Dantean depths in her blown up C-Print deconstructions of the beauty myth: “Soiled” (2000) has copious dirt between a cropped image of lurid, green-painted toe nails, while “Drool” (2004) focuses on a menacing, saliva-filled mouth animated by a vampire-like grin.

Then there is guilt by association for some of the remaining images: Ann Craven’s saccherine Hallmark Card-like portrait of two pink birds in a tree and Stuart Elster’s dense, sickly monochromatic seascape at dawn become convincingly nightmarish for keeping natural company with overt horrors.

The miserablism of “Re:Location” is neither fantastic nor seasonal—it derives from the alienations and privations of exile and war.  Some are overt in their politics, others more oblique, but all are pervaded by a sense of frustration and fear.

Willie Doherty shows three sets of five c-prints laminated on aluminum from the larger “Apparatus” (2005) series which dwell on scenes of grim decay in Northern Ireland: boarded up houses, tattered flags, graffitied projects.  “The Troubles” has been Mr. Doherty’s career theme.  Previously he has dwelt on such issues as surveillance, or riot control; these images concern the banal, day-to-day squalors of a divided society.  Somehow he finds hidden poetry in his hideous landscapes, creating constructivist patterns, for instance, in the way he crops a bird’s eye view of hemmed-in, barricaded walkways.

Cages and barrier are often Mona Hatoum’s metaphor of choice for oppression, alienation and exile.  In superficially lighter mode, her work here is a curtain on which a newspaper article has been printed.  The title, however, hints at political portend: “Every door a wall” (2003).

The visitor passes through this curtain/door/wall to the back gallery where an intriguing object by another artist of Palestinian extraction, Emily Jacir, takes on added meaning from its placement and company.  “Embrace” (2005) is a pointlessly mini-luggage carousel, around six foot in diameter, motion sensor activated by the viewer—a complex metaphor perhaps for exile and the frustrations of reconcilliation.

I preferred the poignant little paintings after emails from Gaza residents that she last showed at this gallery, but the cool meanness of this object sits well with other exhibitors: Diango Hernández’s “The underdevelopment is a long game, do you want to play” (2005) which has the words of the title in shiny little letters along a rusty pipe that is placed within an oval toy train track; and an inscrutable 1970s-style hexagonal brass architectural fixtures of unspecified usage by Rita McBride installed at ceiling level.  Relief from such pretense and tedium comes in the form of an untitled Doris Salcedo sculpture, as ever poetic and enigmatic in its melancholy description of the human condition.

No one would accuse “Re:Location” of being laugh a minute.  If you prefer your nihilism with a smile James Cohan has a group show titled “A Brighter Day,” a hint of Monty Python sarcasm in the title.

It’s a sprawling show of eighteen artist united in their chirpy interpretations of apocalypse, oppression and decay.  Several artists bombard the viewer with despondent or desparate verbal messages delivered with beguiling visual upbeat: Jenny Holtzer inscribed “What urge will save us now that sex won’t” onto a white marble footstall; McDermott & McGough emblazon the sadomasochistic song lyric, “Violate me/ in violent times/ The vilest way/ that you know/ Ruin me ravage me/ Utterly savage me/ On me no mercy/ Bestow” in multicolored letterpress fonts on a torquoise ground; Alejandro Cesarco prints “When I am happy I won’t have time to make these anymore” in pretty colors on a page; Trenton Doyle Hancock compulsively scrawls “You deserve less” like schoolboy lines to fill a whole wall with designer intensity.

Other exhibits render the macabre in saccherine colors and delectible surfaces.  Folkert de Jong’s Polyurethane, silicone rubber and styrofoam sculpture “Dust” (2004) has a survivalist sitting astride oil barrels and supplies with guns, megaphones and a kerosene lamp to hand in nursery pink and blue.  David Altmejd renders a cadavre in an advanced state of decay amidst cracked mirrors and neon lights in “The Settler” (2005), a work of weird beauty.  The marquetry compositions of Alison Elizabeth Taylor of survivalist girls in a bombed out wilderness, and Eric Swenson’s meticulous rendering of the hideous decapitated head of hybrid animal similarly collide luxurious craft and dark message.

There are pleasurable surprises in this studiedly strange show: The tight, anachronistic realism of Michaël Borremans enigmatic miniature “Flattening of a Hellhound” (2000), the collage of a cellphone transmogrifying into a ghoul in the lotus position on William Morris wallpaper of Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, “Dread Medley (Sapphire version)” (2004), and above all, the exquisite 11 minute video installation, “Bellona (after Samuel R. Delany)” (2005) which quotes a passage from the cult sci-fi writer on an imaginary city where subterranean motors rearrange the streets after visitors have passed through them and then segues into gorgeous video animation of rooms melting into color-coded reconfigurations.  Emerging from the subdued mystery of Ms. Lislegaard’s installation, it really is a brighter day.

A version of this article first appeared in The New York Sun, June 8, 2006

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 8, 2006.

The post Nightmares of Summer at Marvelli, Re:Location at Alexander & Bonin, A Brighter Day at James Cohan Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

A shortened version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 4, 2004.

This might be a classic “gringo” blunder, but isn’t the distinctiveness of Latin American and Carribean art amazing? The Columbian Doris Salcedo’s sculpture “Untitled,” (1995) consisting of a found chest of drawers ominously filled with concrete and the Uruguayan Joaquin Torres-Garcia’s painting, “Composition,” (1932), a grid of pictorgrams that seems carved in black upon a rough, earthy painterly ground, are bonded to each other and a common sensibility that leaps across boundaries of time and nation state.

Other examples could be drawn from “Latin American & Caribbean Art: MoMA at El Museo,” the landmark exhibition that opened this week, ranging even further across a continent and a half and the several different languages.

This observation of unity is not for a moment meant as a charge of homogeneity. The range and quality of work on display, including seminal examples by major modern artists, puts paid to it straight away. And yet, the visual language of the Latino half century is far more unified in terms of texture, attitude, and sensibility than a comparable period in, say, German art, to take a unified country with a common language.

And if this common currency is a feel not a look, it can still be quantified. It comes down to a robust synthesis of the earthy and the poetic where gutsy handling meets whimsicality, where the primitive meets the vulnerable. No doubt Hispanic eyeballs will roll at the mere mention of the clichèd phrase, but there really is something to it after all: Magic realism.

The Museo del Barrio, located on the northern reach of Upper Fifth Avenue’s “Museum Mile,” celebrates 35 as a significant cultural institution with this exhibition. It also takes happy and mutual advantage of MoMA’s rebuilding program, with the closure of its midtown Manhattan premises and its temporary tight squeeze in Queens.

The Modern has been collecting Latin American art in depth almost from its outset, always, at least until recently, concentrating its efforts on contemporary work. This is a remarkable fact. The museum formed around a conviction that modernism was a European, and for the most part a French phenomenon. As its unrivalled holdings demonstrate, along with the theorizing of its founder, Alfred H. Barr, Cézanne and the School of Paris that followed in his wake, formed its initial, central focus.

The Americans it collected were of a very different stripe, for the founders had a curious bifocal view of modernity. Abstraction, cubism, surrealism- all the funny stuff- was something that Frenchmen were good at, but Americans, it was thought, excelled at something different: pictorially naïve, socially conscious realism. It was a source of chagrin for the New York avantgarde for years that MoMA wouldn’t take serious contemporary American art of a truly modernist bent.

And this is where South and Central America came into the picture. The Modern, founded in 1929, began collecting art from the rest of the Americas in 1935. It didn’t turn its attention to other continents til much later, its allegiance being to its own notions of modernism, rather than to world culture on the world’s terms.

To the founder patrons of the Modern, sympathetic to American primitivism, the art of the Mexican muralists ranked very high in their esteem. And rightly so, as Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco galvanized American art at the time. Politically conservative critics took to them, despite their revolutionary sympathies.

Everyone knows, thanks to the movies “Cradle will Rock” (1999) and “Frida” (2002) that Nelson Rockafeller had Diego Rivera’s mural for the Rockafeller Center destroyed when the Mexican painted in Lenin. The point, however, is that the tycoon, who was a leading light at the Modern, wanted so avowedly realist a painter in the first place.

The muralists fill the first room of El Barrio’s exhibition. Frida Kahlo is represented by “Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair” (1940). Rivera himself (her husband) comes across somewhat tame, with a set of watercolor studies of a May Day parade in Moscow and a large encaustic of a Mexican flower festival, whereas Siqueiros packs a punch with two phenemenal paintings. One of them, “Collective Suicide,” (1936) brings to mind the wacky Victorian apocalype painter, John Martin: Warring armies, minute Breughel or Ucello-like figures meet at the base of a seething cauldron of abstracted painterliness. Siqueiros is using the device of abstraction to figurative ends. Just a few years later, his experimental workshop in New York would prove a critical influence upon Jackson Pollock.

It is a short step from such fantasy realism to the Surrealism of the Cuban Wilfredo Lam and the Chilean Matta (Roberto Sebastián Antonoio Matta Echaurren). Lam’s majorly influential “The Jungle,” (1943) deserves to be seen more often. Although heavily Picassoid in its primitive masks and sexualized anatomical distortions it is a striking painting. Its touchingl execution proves a counterpoint to the dense structure of its composition.

The problem, in a way, with Latin American Surrealism is that all Latin American art has a touch of the Surreal about it, anyway, marvelling in unlikely cultural collisions which are, to some extent, the cultural norm. Moving on to the 1950s, it emerges that even when it embraced abstraction, Latin American art retained the key characteristics of gutsiness and viscerality. The Brazilian Hélio Oiticica and the Venezuelan Jesús Rafael Soto always maintain a degree of edginess and animation in their cool abstraction, recalling the robust modernism of the expatriate Brazilian architect, Oscar Niemayer. It was as if they were temperamentally incapable of purism, as such.

Similar things happen when Latinos go conceptual. The Mexican Gabriel Orozco erases all the type on a random page of the phone book, save for a column of “Maria”s, all belonging to a sequence of “Munoz”s- an antic worthy of conceptualism anywhere, yet by creating this surreal litany he gives his work an edge of Borgesian Surrealism.

As MoMA’s collecting moved into the 1960s, artists influenced by Pop Art (and in the case of Venezuelan Marisol [Marisol Escobar], who worked in New York from the 1950s, exerting an influence on that movement themselves) retained a distinctive Latino sensibility, recalling local traditions in their personal brands of primitivism. Ms. Marisol is represented by her canonical face mask downing a coke bottle, and her sculptural portrait of LBJ which couples nicely with Mr. Botero’s “The Presidential Family,” (1967), a painting whose freshness and purpose belies the ubiquity this absurdly prolific artist has since achieved.

The premise of the exhibition might seem to faulter when artists who worked for their entire careers in America are incluced thanks to their passport, but could Haitian Jean Michel Basquiat possibly have been excluded? In fact, a work in color by this dynamo artist would have cheered up the later rooms, although it is fascinating to see a drawing by so collage-minded an artist which is literally a collage.

A room ominously entitled “Between the Sixties and Recent Acquisitions” begs the question about yawning gaps in MoMA’s Latin American collecting chronology: did the museum lose interest, or did the art? Still, things definitely pick up in the contemporary rooms, with Ms. Salcedo’s previously mentioned, de Chirico-like furniture keeping company with a sinisterly metamorphozing suite of theatre seating plans from the Argenitine Guillermo Kuitca (again, something bigger and in color would have been welcome from this major artist) and “Succulent Eggplants,” (1996) from the young Brazilian, Beatriz Milhazes. This decorative-erotic had me wishing there was something here from the Mexican-American Roberto Juarez, if Americans are to be admitted after all, but that and the exclusion of Raquel Forner (Argentina’s Frida) are my only gripes about this fun, fine exhibition.

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