It can be curious to find digital images in video: Jurassic Park (1993) still looks pretty sharp, while pixelated objects in more recent monster or action movies can stick out like a sore thumb. David Claerbout’s current show at Sean Kelly, his first at the gallery and his first in New York in eight years, plays both. His 2015–16 video, KING (after Alfred Wertheimer’s 1956 picture of a young man named Elvis Presley), digitally reconstructs, in the round, a 1956 photo of Elvis at home. The detail, while startling, in many places comes off as rubbery, like a video game. Nonetheless, it’s a wonder to have long-gone artifacts revivified, to walk through a still image. Even more striking is Oil Workers (from the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain (2013), another digital reconstruction, which inhabits the other end of the spectrum: of completely convincing virtual detail. As the camera pans through a picture of laborers sheltering under a flooded overpass, one is challenged to distinguish between Bill Viola-like slow motion and uncanny, still reproduction. Claerbout’s careful vision allows us to revel in still images precisely because he makes them almost live.

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Carly Berwick, Ellie Bronson, and Ken Johnson join David Cohen to discuss Anthony Goicolea at Postmasters, Leandro Erlich at Sean Kelly, Alex Katz at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, and Haim Steinbach at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.

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March 30 – April 30, 2011
528 West 29th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 239-1181

In his essay Art After Philosophy, Part One (1969), Joseph Kosuth argued that when art is reduced to ideas, the function of art displaces the necessity of making a conventional art object, and therefore the context in which the idea is placed becomes all-important.  For much of the work designated as “conceptual art” over the years, this has become standard practice.  For Kosuth (among others), who valued the earlier ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, the context of the idea was ultimately more important than its material form.  At the outset of his career in the late 1960s, when still in his twenties, Kosuth fabricated neon word installations, leaning plates of glass, and dictionary definitions printed as negative Photostats as a means to emphasize ideas. The transmission of these ideas is largely dependent on language — as revealed in a recent exhibition at Sean Kelly — and relies heavily on the manner in which language is appropriated and integrated into work.  Ironically, the quality of design and craft — often discounted in conceptual art — in Kosuth’s work appears aesthetically seamless as shown in a recent installation of texts by Samuel Beckett, and in another earlier series of time-based phrases taken from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1998).  In both works, neon light effectively transmits the language embedded within each installation.  Also included in the exhibition were a series of the artist’s iconic dictionary definitions, titled Nothing (1968), which hung in a conventional side-by-side display directly on the wall.  Whereas the original Los Angeles exhibition used inexpensive Photostats of the various definitions of the word “nothing,” the work was later refabricated on canvas to ensure preservation.  And, as it was later discovered, a motivating factor for doing this work related to his reading of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, which was published by Grove Press in English in 1967.

While, in recent years, some of Kosuth’s installations have tended toward repetition through systematic overdetermination, occasionally something exceptional will appear on the Heideggerian horizon that reaches beyond the predictable. The current work, titled “Texts (Waiting for–) for Nothing,” Samuel Becket in play, is one of these occasions.  In this unusually reflective conceptual opus, the artist has formulated a strategic core that pulls together relevant aspects from two earlier works.  Typically dense in its literary, philosophical, and semiotic references, Kosuth’s tripartite installation manages to make all the elements appear as simple as pie (or as dense as pi).  In his dialectically reductive black and white installation — a quality willfully apparent from the beginning — Kosuth reaches a kind of apotheosis in this homage to Beckett.  This suggests a subtle turnabout in artist’s thinking.  Traditionally adverse to hermeneutic or metaphysical concerns in art, it would appear that he has extended his purely linguistic connection ascribed to his modus operandi of the 1980s into a poignantly dark and light theatrical presentation.

Here Kosuth appropriates texts from two early works by Samuel Beckett, titled Texts for Nothing (1950-52) and Waiting for Godot (1948-49).  The first is a group of abstract narratives or ruminations, while the second is a well-known play first performed in Paris, 1953.  In combining the two works by Beckett, Kosuth offered a trace of potential meaning – a  quality often exempt or eliminated in his work.  Given the slow, steady, dramatic incantation of the words traveling laterally across the upper reaches of the four walls close to the ceiling — using a technology known as “cancelled warm neon light”—I found the work illuminating from a phenomenological point of view as it moved to the core of  “meaning” in Beckett’s work without jargon.  The intensity of this kinetic operation was further augmented by a small black and white framed reproduction of a painting by German Romantic painter, Casper David Friedrich, in which two figures are poised by a tree, thus echoing an affinity with the original stage set designed by Sergio Gerstein in Paris. As Beckett’s word fragments merged – appearing and then slowly dissolving into the dark void – I felt the sensation of entering a simulation of descending twilight along with Beckett’s two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who – in the play – speak to one another using a hesitant metaphysical phraseology while stranded in a barren landscape.  (I once performed the cameo role of Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, while a student in Boston, during my rather short-lived theatrical career.)

However, the metaphysical words of the Beckettian characters perpetually end without any perceptible resolution, that is to say, they perpetually end in/with nothing.  Somehow this nothingness is emotionally moving in the context of Kosuth’s opus – and not merely because it happens to coincide with the concluding proposition in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, for which the artist was formatively aligned.  Nevertheless, the intersection between Beckett and Wittgenstein — not to mention the obsession with relativist time in James Joyce, for whom Beckett served as a personal secretary during his apprenticeship years – intuits on some level the commitment of Kosuth in maintaining his focus on the foregrounding language in art. While he may ignore the potential significance of a critical contextualization coming from the outside as he continues to function within the context of language, he remains at his best when he allows “nothing” to stand in the way. This work is amazing without reprieve, a masterwork that carries the original intent of how conceptual art functions at its best and therefore achieves validity. It is the intersection between art and language, a topic that engaged me over thirty years ago as a doctoral student, nearly as much as it does today – particularly when confronted with works of this caliber.

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Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, Stephanie Buhmann, and Peter Plagens joined David Cohen to discuss James Casebere at Sean Kelly Gallery, Sherrie Levine at Paula Cooper Gallery, Wangechi Mutu at Gladstone Gallery, and Roxy Paine at James Cohan Gallery.

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It has been 23 years since New York has last experienced the luminous yellow of one of Wolfgang Laib’s marvelous pollen installations. Laib’s environments are the rarified product of hard work—the current piece, Pollen from Hazelnut (2002-05) represents several years of gathering the precious material by hand. As ethereally beautiful as this piece may be, it also possesses a ritual or social dimension in which the process of gathering takes on a sacramental element, fulfilling a rite whose spiritual dimensions echo in the installation itself. One has the sense that Laib works out of a Beuysian precedent, in which the action of gathering the hazelnut pollen belongs to a process of sharing—not only the exquisite beauty of the material but also the daily work, even the drudgery of collecting it. In any case, the pollen functions as an example of raw pigment, except that its implications remain interactive and participatory. It is rare to find art whose aura is both public and absolute, and as happens so often with Laib’s art, the idea of the piece lingers just as long as our memory of the ethereal hue.

Laib’s show is titled “Frieze of Life,” after the installation of the same name that occurs in the second gallery. This latter work is the artist’s most recent piece; it is composed of 400 hand-thrown clay pots, which hold ashes collected from temples in India, close to Laib’s studio there. The pots are supported on a wooden frame placed high up in the gallery—hence the title Frieze of Life. As an installation, Laib’s work suggests the ash of the cremated dead, which may in turn participate in the Hindu cycle of death and reincarnation. The pots are exhibited at a height that forces viewers to look up at them from below, but the ash can just be seen rising to a point an inch or two above the clay containers.  Laib, an artist with a penchant for common materials such as rice, milk, stone, and wax, finds meaningfulness in the ash coming from the burned incense of Indian temples. To understand the subdued synergy of the pots and ash, we must know where the ash comes from, as well as its ritualized meaning.

The pollen work emphasizes the startling beauty of nature, which speaks to the beginning of life and a collection of ashes whose mythic associations are primarily those of death. Rice Meals(1988) perhaps forms a bridge between the beginnings suggested by Pollen from Hazelnut and the closure intimated by Frieze of Life. A work more than twenty years old, Rice Meals consists of 12 brass cones, casually placed in a group on the floor, that hold rice, which spills out from within each cone. If the pollen field orients the viewer toward the start of life and the ash-containing clay pots are linked to death rituals, the rice might well substantiate the process of life as it is lived. One hesitates to read heavy symbolism into the relations of the three works—Laib himself suggests that his art brings up rituals and emblems only by way of indirectness and intuition. At the same time, however, he has a strong interest in Indian religions and Christian mysticism, encouraging us to make spiritual connections between his processes and the art produced by them. Additionally, and strikingly, Laib sees his art as having a political dimension, in the sense that the production of cultural artifacts change people and institutions over the long run, effectively competing with the  harsher dynamics of contemporary social change. The three pieces in this show correspond to the origins, process, and mortality of a life lived across time. Their subtlety underlines Laib’s visionary creativity.  He is that rarity, an artist with religious feeling in a predominantly secular art world.

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Arthur Danto, Vincent Katz, and Linda Yablonsky joined David Cohen to discuss Kara Walker at the Whitney and Sikkema Jenkins, Karen Yasinsky at Mireille Mosler, Isaac Julien at Metro Pictures, Kate Shepherd at Galerie Lelong, and Antony Gormley at Sean Kelly.

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Donald Kuspit, Joan Waltemath, and Karen Wilkin joined David Cohen to review Bill Jensen at Cheim and Read, June Leaf at Edward Thorp, Odd Nerdrum at Forum, Anthony McCall at Sean Kelly and David Hammons at L&M Arts.

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CALLUM INNES
Sean Kelly until December 8
528 West 29 Street between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 239 1181

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 9, 2006 under the title “Making Art out of a Mess “

What’s not to like about the paintings of Fiona Rae?  Once you resign yourself to the logic of postmodernism in which cacophony is just a complex way of describing harmony, and entropy is a sophisticated spin on order, then you are in the right mindset to sink your gaze into the baker’s dozen of boisterous, busy canvases at PaceWildenstein’s cavernous W22nd Street gallery.  You are at the mercy of what Dave Hickey, in his catalogue essay, terms “benign hysteria.”

Ms. Rae has sustained a high-wire act in quality “Bad” painting since her precocious launch at London’s Waddington Galleries in 1991.  Born in Hong Kong in 1963, she trained at London’s Goldsmiths’ College where her peers included Damien Hirst who selected her for “Freeze,” the landmark 1988 group exhibition that launched the YBAs, as Britain’s neo-conceptualist new wave were known.  Her riffs on High Modernism, splicing together banal imagery from animation and pop culture with virtuoisic painterly effects culled from the history of abstraction, sat well with the disparate strategies of cool affront that characterized that movement.  She was shown at the Saatchi Collection with Gary Hume, and in the notorious “Sensation” exhibition at the Royal Academy and Brooklyn Museum.

What set her apart from many among her iconoclastic generation, however, was an earnest commitment to easel painting, to the joyful conundrum of making art out of mess, design out of disorder, and of exacting purposiveness out of doodles, squiggles, and balletic brushstrokes.  Her stylishly cool deconstruction of painting over the last fifteen years has sustained exuberant energy and panache.  Each new series is spritely and fresh: she perpetuates the “Y” in YBA.

But she never breaks ground—even within the “end game” painting culture of postmodernism, in which the notion of new ground is suspect and fraught anyway.  The essential ingredients of her chemistry lesson experiments with style have been in the textbooks for decades: a collision of high and low, an extraction of abstract patterns out of accumulated pop culture references, decorative order out of ornamental overload.  Her aesthetics don’t differ substantially from those of Sigmar Polke, or of the German pop abstractionist’s disciple Albert Oehlen, who was seen recently in New York and reviewed on these pages.  I would argue that Ms. Rae does it “better,” by which I mean that her canvases are spunky, sumptuous, and unabashedly hedonistic in ways that are alien to those artists, who are somewhat severe and po-faced in their assaults on aesthetic quality.

In her latest body of work Ms. Rae revisits the kind of overt pop source material that characterized her early work but began to absent itself in the interim.  Where Disney characters found favor in the early 1990s, Japanese “decal” is now her kitsch resource of choice.  These are the transfer images collected by Oriental schoolgirls with an avidity familiar in the west from the old cult of baseball cards.  These are copied by the artist with formidable precision and take their place amidst contrastively painterly strokes, drips and splurges, making her surfaces dense lexicons of markmaking possibilities.

A little deer in various colors, a cross between Bambi and the Babysham logo, is a recurrent motif.  So too are stylized, friendly little skulls, stars, flowers, computerized lettering.

“I’m learning to fly!!” (2006) has eleven of these deer, in synthetic colors, scaling or projecting themselves from various painterly shapes and arabesques that consequently read as an abstracted playground scaffold.  As is typical of her compositions, there is a pronounced ground, in this case a contoured “sky” of pale blues, against which the various marks and motifs float in a flattened, shallow foreground space.  Brushstrokes vary radically in terms of perceived speed, temperature, and body: There are smooth, slick curles of single stroke black; squiggy back and forth strokes of green accumulating into a bulbuous form; cartoon-like outlines; Abstract Expressionist-redolent drips; an hazy, atmospheric candyfloss-like area of pulsating complementary blues, mauves and purples.

All of the paintings have at once a totally saturated “all-overness” and a relentless unwillingness to submit to an organizing principle.  This is what gives the show its unity—or, if you don’t buy her aesthetic, its repetitiveness.  She proves that anarchy is ultimately as compelling a design dictum as order.  There is, in other words, abundant method in her decalcomania.

On first impression, the severe streamlined abstraction of the celebrated Scots painter Callum Innes (born 1962) represents a marked contrast to Ms. Rae’s busy eclecticism.  He is reportedly the Hollywood minimalist of choice, collected by Jennifer Lopez among others: To Ms. Rae’s high-low, his appeal is to J-Lo.  But the reductive Mr. Innes and the all-inclusive Ms. Rae actually tap similar tastes for cool décor and formal precision.

His fulsome exhibition at Sean Kelly includes large works on paper from 1990 and from 1996, one canvas from 1992, and several rooms of his new series of “Exposed Paintings”.  The progression seems to be from serial arrangements of atmospheric, dripped or applied marks to more schematic, hard-edged grids that contrast dense and opaque areas of paint.

Closer examination of the new series soon confounds any idea that the works are as simply made as they initially look.  They appear to be neat arrangements of a dense black rectangle, a smaller rectangle in washy gray, and a block of semi-opaque color, a different color in each canvas.  But edges intriguingly recall colors or tones from other, non-contiguous areas.  It transpires that the artist’s process involves what he calls “unpainting,” a painstaking removal of areas that leaves faint vestiges in unexpected places.

It would be a flight of poetic fancy, however, to imagine a sense of absence and loss corresponding to Mr. Innes’s precious process of removal.  The slight ambiguities he generates are of a formal rather than emotional character.  The work is a handsome handsome, unthreathening fusion of the rugged and refined.

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Daniel Kunitz, Barbara Pollack, and Irving Sandler joined David Cohen to review Laurie Anderson at Sean Kelly, Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner, Bruce Pearson at Ronald Feldman, and Sue Williams at 303.

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