Nancy, the aesthetically conservative comic strip created by Ernie Bushmiller in 1938, isn’t especially liked among the cartoons on the funny pages, but it has a curiously devoted following among some artists. Fans have included Andy Warhol, Joe Brainard and avant-garde comics artist Mark Newgarden, each of whom has reproduced altered versions of the mischievous young girl who is the strip’s protagonist. Quasi-Dada cartoonist Bill Griffith remarked, with some praise, “Everybody that loves Nancy loves it in a slightly condescending way. Nancy is comics reduced to their most elemental level.” In his current show at Salon 94’s Bowery location, Jayson Musson joins Nancy’s fan club, declaring his devotion in sculptures and paintings, with mixed success.

Whereas older artists sought to expose the bizarre and seductive nature of Nancy’s banality, Musson intends to affirm the comic’s beauty. He ignores Nancy herself to focus on paintings and sculptures that sometimes appeared as set pieces in her forays to museums or galleries to grok and mock the art on display. In a chiding and indignant tone, Bushmiller used his character to snub much of contemporary art as a sham and no better or more valuable than the finger paintings of children, occasionally having Nancy create her own messy abstract paintings. Musson has appropriated the objects of ridicule, rather than the finger-pointing avatar.

His attitude about the appropriations is ambivalent. Quoted in the press release, Musson claims, “[Bushmiller] drafted some perfect paintings. … In his pejorative depictions of abstraction lay a symmetry, balance, and economy of form that is simply exceptional.” Later, however, he continues, “To recreate some of these works … and set them into the context of exhibiting them as verifiable works of art is perverse in a way, and perhaps confirms Bushmiller?s point of view about the whole operation of art.” His attitude is not quite cynical, but Musson might possibly profit from the perversity, humoring both Bushmillerites and aesthetes.

Musson’s paintings and sculptures are not without merit. His reproductions are made with colorful Flashe acrylics rather than black-and-white ink, or as powder-coated fiberglass sculptures in three dimensions rather than two. Musson has invented the palette, and his use of color is smart — not quite reminiscent of the bold, slightly muddy tones of traditional comic strips and comic books. He’s shown himself capable of making handsome choices in his previous show at Salon 94, which featured paintings made of Coogi sweaters. But the Nancy paintings feel disappointingly like a punchline without a clearly articulated joke. As with Bushmiller’s comics, all the action is dead in the middle and a bit corny; the images are constricted, pushed toward the center of the canvas. Add to this the strangeness of Salon 94’s premises, with its small upper gallery and its cavernous, high-ceilinged lower space, and the whole thing feels overbearing and crowded — big without being ambitious.

Works that succeed are also the ones that are most attractive. Fritzi’s Painting I (all 2014), named after Nancy’s caretaker aunt, is a lusciously matte azure with a jumbled set of graphic marks: spirals, triangles and a brushstroke-like flourish running to the left. The symbols are rendered in a tastefully complementary set of mauve, green and pale yellow, whereas most of the other paintings are drawn in only two or three hues.

The identification with comics is made only sparingly explicit. Figurative imagery, such as a bulbous pink man with a hole in his middle called Sculptural Allegory for a Specific Cultural Sphere, points to the derivation. And the inclusion of text in signs painted on panel, reading “ART EXHIBIT” or “ART MUSEUM ?,” root the show in what Art Spiegelman called “comix,” a portmanteau he developed to note the power of co-mixing text with imagery. Comics can be a really powerful medium, a fact that Musson showed in his cartoonish 2009 drawings series, Barack Obama Battles the Pink Robots, but doesn’t exploit so much here.

Musson is probably best known for his web series Art Thoughtz (2010-2012), published under the alter ego Hennessy Youngman, a Henny Youngman-like art critic who dresses and speaks with caricatured mannerisms based on stereotypes of hip-hop culture. Youngman (more deftly than Musson does here) satirizes the mechanics of art making and artspeak, explaining, among other issues, the significance of the sublime and post-structuralism, the monopolistic careers of Bruce Nauman and Damien Hirst, and how to get a curator’s attention (bring her roses). Youngman’s lampoon of art fully becomes art itself. The deployment of visual and verbal rhetoric, of sequential imagery, shares more with comics and is far more thoughtful than Musson’s current series. One imagines that Musson didn’t want to be pigeonholed or stuck in a project he’s grown bored with, but still, one wishes he would retire the comics and bring back his comedian.

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Elisabeth Kley, Hearne Pardee, Martha Schwendener joined moderator David Cohen to discuss Matt Bollinger at Zürcher Studio, Nayland Blake at Matthew Marks Gallery, Sergei Tcherepnin at Murray Guy, and Sylvie Fleury at Salon 94 Bowery

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Robert Storr, Sarah Valdez, and Joan Waltemath joined David Cohen to discuss Lois Dodd at Alexandre Gallery, Ellen Phelan at Gasser Grunert Gallery, Laurie Simmons at Salon 94, and Krzysztof Wodiczko at Galerie Lelong.

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Lush Life is an exhibition curated by Franklin Evans and Omar Lopez-Chahoud which takes place at nine Lower East Side (LES) galleries: Collette Blanchard Gallery, Eleven Rivington, Invisible-Exports, Lehmann Maupin, On Stellar Rays, Salon 94, Scaramouche, Sue Scott Gallery, and Y Gallery.  Lush Life adopts Richard Price’s 2008 novel to title and organize the exhibition.  The novel is set in the contemporary LES and through a murder investigation exposes the dynamically changing community of the neighborhood, which despite its evolution retains a ghostly and vital link to its layered past.  The deep and varied history of the LES now includes the LES galleries as new community members, and the premise of community is reflected in the cooperative nature of the galleries’ and artists’ participation in the exhibition which uses Price’s novel to critically consider concepts of neighborhood and change.  Each gallery will be a sub-exhibition reflecting the idea of one of the nine chapters in the book.

Sue Scott Gallery – Chapter One: Whistle.  June 19 to July 31
On Stellar Rays – Chapter Two: Liar. June 23 to August 3
Invisible-Exports – Chapter Three: First Bird (A Few Butterflies). June 25 to July 31
Lehmann Maupin – Chapter Four: Let It Die. July 8 to August 13
Y Gallery – Chapter Five: Want Cards. July 8 to July 25
Collette Blanchard Gallery – Chapter Six: The Devil You Know
Salon 94 – Chapter Seven: Wolf Tickets. June 29 to July 30
Scaramouche – Chapter Eight: 17 Plus 25 Is 32. July 8 to August 7
Eleven Rivington – Chapter Nine: She’ll Be Apples

Artists: Christopher Drager, Claudia Weber, Coco Fusco, Dana Frankfort, Dana Levy, Dani Leventhal, David Shapiro, Derrick Adams, Elisabeth Subrin, Erik Benson, Ezra Johnson, Ishmael Randall Weeks, Jackie Gendel, Jackie Saccoccio, Jayson Keeling, Jessica Dickinson, Joanne Greenbaum, Jose Lerma, Judi Werthein, Justen Ladda, Kai Schiemenz/ Iris Fluegel, Karina Skvirsky, La Toya Fraizer, Leslie Hewitt, Manuel Acevedo, Mario Ybarra Jr, Matthew Weinstein, Melissa Gordon, Nana Debois Buhl, Nicolas Di Genova, Nina Lola Bachhuber, Oliver Babin, Patrick Lee, Paul Gabrielli, Paul Pagk, Robert Beck, Robert Melee, Rudy Shepherd, Scott Hug, Tim Davis, Tommy Hartung, Xaviera Simmons, among others.

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January 29 to March 9, 2009
1 Freeman Alley, off Rivington Street, Lower East Side
New York City, 212 529 7400

Francesca DiMattio’s solo exhibit of paintings on view at Salon 94 and Salon 94 Freemans is a double bird strike for the young New York painter. Both uptown and downtown gallery spaces are exhibiting a selection of paintings from 2008 to 2009 that communicate the physical drama of momentous chaos and miraculous recovery.

This is DiMattio’s second solo show at Salon 94.  The paintings are a confluence of geometric spaces, loose and fast brushwork, and recognizable figurative elements (ladders, lace, showers, chairs) soldered together as teetering structures within stark black, white and grey tiled spaces. The mythical storytelling of German Expressionism and the playful heaviness of 1980’s Neo-Expressionism are visible forbearers for DiMattio’s paintings. There is also a direct connection to Francis Bacon in her depiction of human and inanimate forms in motion against a stage-like space. Bacon’s acute sense of ecstasy and tragedy are also a little on display as well, but to less extreme effect. Instead, it is a dreamy, personally-conceived Surrealism that is most at play here.  Unlike other young painters who combine abstraction and figuration in explosion-like arrangements, DiMattio forgoes obvious reference to our age of accelerating communication and technology. This is partly due to the painting craft being a visible component. Thickly rendered wedges and lines of paint take on sculptural qualities, literally becoming the glue and grout that holds the tile surface together and keeps the ladder from collapsing.

Blackout (2008) and Whiteout (2008) are complimentary paintings, on view respectively at Salon 94 Freemans and Salon 94.  Amid a room of maximal energy and violent action, both paintings offer an oasis of relatively minimal calm. In Blackout an angular space is created with fields of black and grey, two buttressing tree trunks, and a lemon yellow umbrella-like form floating above. The central focus rests on a thin white lawn chair, a moment of light carved into the darkness of the “blackout.”  The black is thickened by a density of lines and patterns that hint at a rigorous history behind the arrived at composition. Whiteout has the same central motif of a furniture object floated in a thick space of all-over white.  Labor and time is a felt presence in the painting, a pulsing energy that radiates off DiMattio’s most successful compositions.

On view at Salon 94, Figure 2 (2008) describes an illusionist space with loosely drawn tiles as the sides, floor and back wall. The action in the middle is a pile-up that stretches from floor to ceiling.  The central characters are a Greek column, lacquered wood chair, table, and ladder. In the receding background is the silhouette of an old-fashioned sailing vessel and a water tower. Entangled in the middle of the rubble is a human figure, a burst of flesh tone amid the popping graphics and splashing debris. A black chair stationed at the lower right corner of the canvas appears as an invitation to have a seat on stage to watch the action. In this sealed vision we are allowed to breathe through the freshness of paint itself, an ingredient that is always visible as pure material.

In all of DiMattio’s paintings there is slippage between interior and exterior space, a preoccupation that can be traced through the history of modern painting.  In a way that is similar to Matisse’s The Piano Lesson (1916) where figures, furniture and statues are spatially transformed into fragments, there is a spell cast on the quotidian in DiMattio that endows every object with newfound meaning. However closely she references classical,  renaissance and modernist genres, her paintings never lapse into nostalgia, but instead give off an arch contemporary emotion. The use of pitch black, white and grid tiles has the effect of a printed graphic against a sharp color palette of reds and pinks.

The quiet showstoppers are to be found uptown where three large-scale canvases are complimented by four small paintings of classical Greek statue heads with colorful face paint “masks.” The metaphysical melancholy of de Chirico is channeled through DiMattio’s heads, yet her painterly touch is more pronounced. The mask-like visages of Bay area painter David Park come to mind, as does Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon.  Head and Mask 3 (2009) packs the greatest visual impact of the group—candy-colored, irregular shapes, applied with palette knife perfection to an expressionless face from antiquity. There is nothing ironic in the gesture. Like the epic paintings, the heads are a self-contained vision unto themselves, simply conceived and endowed with the emotional weight of an artifact from a lost culture.

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1 Freeman Alley, off Rivington Street
Lower East Side
New York City, 212 529 7400

Lorna Simpson’s two-part exhibition at Salon 94 and Salon 94 Freeman has a quiet tone. The content of her art is somber. She deals with such issues as gender, identity, war, and torture. All of these subjects are explored by Simpson with a formal sophistication that generates provocative yet ambiguous works.

In the uptown space, two bodies of work are exhibited, Photo Booth (2008) and Heads (2008). Simpson’s drawings of the backs and sides of women’s heads put a special emphasis on hairstyles. Simpson transforms hair into abstract forms. These are not simply representations of specific “heads”. They are multiplicities containing poetic signifiers that go beyond the visible world. They are reminiscent of Rorschach tests and yet they never become non-descript inkblots that are open to any interpretation. The drawings are based on photographic imagery and by interpreting these found images through the drawing process, Simpson discovers new forms and ideas that are not contained in the original material

The hand of the artist plays a very different role in Photo Booth (2008). These images are of black males from the 1940s. The intimate images are reminiscent of Carrie Mae Weems’ work, but instead of creating narratives, Simpson juxtaposes these images to form a cloud-like shape on the wall. This shape takes on a life of its own and an element of abstraction and ambiguity is introduced within a context that in and of itself only has historical value. The overall form created by the accumulation of individual photographs appears to be more important than the individual images and Simpson reiterates this notion by interweaving inkblots among the photographs. The inkblots become weird surrogates for the photographs, filling gaps to complete a “big” picture. The artist becomes a mediator of found images and the marks she makes. The viewer is responsible for interpreting this tapestry consisting of personal images of men who are self consciously posing for snapshots.

The tensions between intimate and public, between information and interpretation, found in the uptown space, take on a different meaning in what Simpson calls the “orchestrated theatrical disaster” of war. At the Freeman Alley venue, a piece called Long, Slow, War (2008) are juxtaposed with a set of drawings of interior spaces from the same year; these latter took their titles from the motif depicted in each drawing. The graphite drawings, on sheets of graphing paper, reminiscent of interior design sketches, are based on published images of war (either disseminated by the government or the soldiers themselves). The drawings emphasize the ubiquitous quality of war imagery in our culture, but when viewed all together, there is something uncanny about their barrenness. The mental spaces created by these drawings could be defined as a heterotopia; the viewer is not completely detached from the reality of the images from which these drawings are reproduced and yet the drawings do not make the reality of the events taking place pertinent.

The disorientation caused by the drawings urges the viewer to take them in in conjunction with the two video projections presented in the same gallery. The video projections are footage from Thomas Edison’s Railroad Smash-up (1904) and Fourth of July fireworks along with the aural element of slowed down sounds of train crashes and fireworks. Simpson’s criticism of the “spectacle of war” is more direct in the video works, whereas the drawings give the viewer more room for private deliberation and free-association.

The subversive beauty that has been present in Lorna Simpson’s work since Waterbearer (1986) has reached a new level of refinement in the private world of her new drawings and “collected” imagery. These new drawings address critical issues that are important to the artist while giving the viewer just enough mental space to experience precious moments of deliberation. It is the melding of formal sophistication with the artist’s honest yet poignant perspective on critical issues that makes Simpson’s work transcend boundaries and definitions and any and all expectations.

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“In Search of a Purple Heart” a site-specific performance, written and directed by photographer Noritoshi Hirakawa, was presented twice on Sunday, February 27. The performances took place at Salon 94, a satellite of Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery on East 94th Street just off Fifth Avenue.

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn provided brunch and later gathered the 40 or so attendees into the exhibition space for the event. Curved white walls exhibited the artist’s photographs of the University of Toronto’s Graduate House, a project recently completed by Thom Mayne of the Morphosis architectural firm. Hirakawa’s documentation of the architecture includes groups of figures in sexually ambiguous poses, such as a woman draped over a banister with her skirt up and a man in a woman’s dress walking as if asleep.

Across the room, a semi-circle of floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto a garden. A large bed covered in apricot-colored silks rested in the center of the room. The audience stood along the walls, looking toward the bed as light gray curtains were pulled across the windows. A musician sat to the side and delicately tapped his fingers across the surface of a goatskin-framed drum.

The performance began as a Latino man approached the center of the room with a bouquet of roses. Soon, a blond woman settled onto the bed and looked at video images of herself on a monitor and spoke into a cell phone. The performers next began repeating snatches of sentences, redacted from interviews with American Vietnam War veterans, as they moved among choreographed positions. The woman partially disrobed and mimed masturbation, writhing on the bed.

An African-American man in a white bathrobe entered the space through the glass garden door. The woman approached him. They embraced in stylized movements. After more bits of appropriated dialogue—such as “Do you know what you are asking? Do you have any idea of the nature of your question?”—the performers left the space in spider-like movement, crawling hand and foot, one over the other.

The performance lasted 20 minutes. The intense compilation of atmospheres that Hirakawa assembled within the stylish environment of a Museum Mile townhouse gallery began to sort themselves out in the audience’s memory after the performance. Hirakawa is intent on infecting the seductive surfaces that dominate our culture, as typified by the gallery, with the rot of our culture’s collective guilt. The affective allure of cosmetic and spa environments, high-end pornographic films and fashion imagery dominate Hirakawa’s work, as symbols for America’s affluent life. His appropriation of memories from veterans hint at the general malaise he believes to be hidden in our culture.

The question that Hirakawa cannot answer—and is no clearer after this performance—is, “Does America really have a conscience?” The value of Hirakawa’s work lies in our consideration of this question. The glossy reality of current American life may have left such consideration far behind.

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Jules Olitski: Spray Paintings of the 1960s, at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art, 20 W 57, 2nd fl, between Fifth and Sixth, New York, NY 10019, phone: 212-445-0051, mon-fri 10-6, sat 10-5, thru Aug 1

Art Production Fund, brainchild of curator/improsario Yvonne Force, administers a scheme to place upcoming American artists in studios at the Fondation Claude Monet in Giverny. Protected from the tourist hordes, residents enjoy privileged access to the Impressionist master’s legendary gardens. Key fixtures like the Japanese bridge and the lily pad pop up frequently in this sprightly celebration of the program at Salon 94.

For the most part, Ms. Force has sent Giverny way 15 hot button emerging artists, including painters Augusto Arbizo, Ann Craven, Steve DiBennedetto and Rochelle Feinstein. Rumor has it that the Fondation has vetoed future photographers, which on the evidence of the alumni on view here is a shame: Miranda Lichtenstein and Susan Jennings both responded to Monet’s horticultural inspirations in ways that pay homage to his vision across the divide of medium.

Ms. Jennings, with her high-chroma, zestfully cropped, chirpy photographs of the inner workings of flowers exploits the the painterliness of photography in a masterful, one might say impressionistic fashion. Like Monet, she fuses visual intensity with high style in a way that defies any hint of their incompatability. Her photographs are artfully sealed behind extra thick plexi adding a layer of sculptural otherness to their presence. They hang nicely besides dinky plastic waist-high flowers by Rachel Urkowitz; these nursery-colored fleurs du mal are the only sculptural work in the show.

It is particularly instructive to see Alexander Ross’s not especially Monet-influenced painting in the company of the almost mocking homage to the master by Will Cotton. These two painters, though respectively abstract and realist, have close affinities with one another in terms of modus operandi (apparently there are complex arrangements involving set-ups and photography) and heightened awareness of artifice.

Mr. Cotton makes big still lifes of melting ice-creams and soft-focus puddings. His 2003 piece here is entitled “Giverny Flan Pond”. He creates abstract fields (shimmering haystacks indeed) from absurdly hyperreal observation. Mr. Ross travels in the opposite mimetic direction, but the rich dialogue between these two painters only goes to prove that the journey not the destination is what counts in art. His ambiguous forms defy pictorial interpretation, but the brushstrokes are organized with tight depictive purposiveness. In Mr. Ross, abstraction achieves the condition of representation, whereas in Mr. Cotton it is the opposite that seems attempted.

From the paradise where they were made to the Upper East Side the pictures in this exhibition continue to enjoy a pampered setting. The exquisite Salon 94 is actually the ground floor of the home of financier Nicholas Rohatyn and his wife, the dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn of Artemis Greenberg van Doren. The gallery space looks out onto a garden through a magnificent floor to ceiling bay window that directly recalls in shape and scale if not content the late murals of Monet.

Yeardley Leonard offers a painterly bridge between the cool minimalism of this classy interior and the sumptuous naturalism of Giverny. The touchstones of her dense but serene constructivism are Bridget Riley, Jesus Rafael Soto, and Theo van Doesburg, but in her painting “When the Sun Shines Through” (2003) a compositionally-centered burst of light softens her usually rigorously determined flatness almost, within her own strictly geometric terms, impressionistically.

***

Apropos Monet, there is a timely chance to view classic 1960s spray paintings by Jules Olitski at Ameringer Yohe. Like late Monet, these breakthrough works by the leading color field painter are at once solid and ethereal: color is embodied by paint and yet seemingly seen through it, as if – contrary to the formalist rhetoric that accompanied these pictures into the world – color constitutes an image autonomous of the means of its conveyance.

Mr. Olitski is hard to see. It is not that he isn’t visible – there are fairly frequent shows of his work, though more in commercial than public forums – so much as that he comes with baggage. Mention his name and the critic Clement Greenberg comes to mind as surely as Baudelaire’s does with that of his protégé Constantin Guys’. But the experience to be had at Ameringer Yohe may prove a revelation to a generation better acquainted with the theory and hype surrounding Mr. Olitski than the work itself.

The artist has recounted elsewhere how, in the mid 1960s, these paintings came to be. The British sculptor Anthony Caro was talking about how he used color to emphasize the density of steel. “Without thinking I said I want the opposite for my painting. If I could just have a spray of paint in the air that would just stay there, not lose its shape.” The next day he drove into town and bought a spray gun. Olitski and his peers had been striving for a “post painterly”, that’s to say anti-gestural color presence. Hitherto staining and pouring had been a preferred mean to take the hand out of painting. Spraying upped the ante; paint moved beyond saturation to become a breathy, whispering presence.

Later, in complete and studied contrast, Olitski would re-embrace impasto with aplomb, experimenting with gels and mediums to create bizzare bas reliefs out of paint (anticipated by “17th Hope” [1969], from the end of the period represented in this show). In either extreme – flatness or thickness – Mr. Olitski is a master of unexpected color, risking saccherine sweetness in his pursuit of feeling. Despite their radically reduced means, these works are miles away from the minimalism and conceptualism beginning to take hold of the artworld of the day. They are romantic and naturalistic, almost to the point of embarrassing the viewer with illusions of cloud formations or morning mist. If abstraction is implicit in the atmospheric impressionism of Monet, the opposite holds for Mr. Olitski.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 17, 2003

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