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Among images in American civic and cultural life, the subject of the human face remains dominant, though not always used for upright purposes. Certain police departments, for instance, are reported to employ super powerful surveillance cameras in the vain hope to track and match blurry s­­treet close-ups of faces with mug shots in criminal suspect files. Or take the recent fuss about the ease with which commercial and political operatives can hack into media, thereby injecting their clandestine interests into TV reportage of talking heads.  Consider also the growing animus of fake news and disinformation, which have elevated public mistrust—a sense that we’re not getting things right because they could be compromised in their transmission or history. During the coronavirus pandemic, employers found ways to monitor lapses in employee productivity with the workforce confined to their homes. The integrity of privacy became an equivocal phenomenon, subject to infiltration and real snooping, as self-interest encourages, and as certain apps provide.

At least selfies offer transparency of performance, within their context. Their playfulness is diary-like, nominally composed for or from a social occasion and conveniently transmitted to an audience, warmed or not by their personal content. In their modes of address, selfies act as tokens or reminders of connection, sometimes soliciting reply. Except, that is, when people were actually seen outdoors, as they were during the time I was writing this review, wearing surgical masks. As we know, this spectacle was sponsored by a protective state agency during an epoch of plague. But though a genuine response to a public health crisis, it evokes an atmosphere suggestive of widespread repression, forced isolation, and a social leveling hostile to individualism.

Artists are, of course, known as avatars of individualism and subjectivity. It is a stance that disavows any requirement that they verify something.  This imaginative condition applies even to appropriated material, in collage as well as installation art. Within such modes, a mundane object—say a humble tube of lipstick—may attain emblematic status by virtue of its contribution to the fictive assumption of the whole.

Judith Henry is a contemporary artist who is aware of the invasive disturbances of our situation and chooses to engage poetically with some of them and contends with others., Based in Brooklyn, Henry has roughly a —40-year career of multimedia work to her credit. It developed along themes that embrace theatrical metaphors illuminating social artifice. On her website these are given titles such as “Makeover,” “Casting call,” “Masquerade,” “Me as her,” “Rebirth,” and “Archive.”  They refer to phases of her practice that reveal a fascination with identity shifts, questionable environments, and metamorphoses of human life forms. In one of her photo projects, notable women like Emma Goldman and Virginia Woolf are shown at ease in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a place they probably never visited. This apparent testament to earlier heroines is titled ”Me as Her,” 2014. An indifference to their whereabouts runs through this artist’s world of characters –in the act of posing. They seem detached from any social milieu without knowing that they have been repositioned in one, other than the photo to which they originally consented. In Henry’s images, the standard protocols of portrait genres are at an enigmatic loss.

I’ve picked up these impressions from glimpses of her art over the past six or seven years (I have known her for much more of that time). My attention is now intriguingly drawn and focused on her latest project, an artist’s book titled “Beauty Masks Portraits.” It features scores of close-up color photographs of young, glamorous women’s faces, cut from fashion magazines into pages continuously suspended by the artist’s hands to cover her own face, the two of them acting as a pair of heads that almost reaches the nearby frame. Viewers are therefore asked to engage with a self-portrait matrix that conspicuously declares its intention to conceal its subject. (Though not completely, as Henry’s eyes are sometimes made visible through holes that resemble glasses.) This aspect of her theatre raises the question of how to regard a real, though very reticent human presence in these images, capable of staring back at you. In any case, the results are not beautiful, but they are certainly haunting.

When masquerades do their work, proposing alternate faces for the ones we know or might expect, their impersonations are not subtle. Rather, they actively reach out to signal that a charade is in order, and a role is being played. They can’t help but pull appraisal toward their own contrivance, as such. A viewer may then realize that the women’s faces of “Me as Her” were not “there” in Henry’s photos, but only their appearance, in someone else’s photos. And the artist’s hands, tremulous as they might be, are holding it up. This is not homage to women’s creative achievements so much as a statement skeptical of career status itself. Great care has been taken to conceal the actual masquerade, and this fact fosters the effect of seamless illusion that was originally intended. Underneath this iconography, the artist makes her debut but is nowhere to be found, except in the title of this project.

The new book with the word “beauty” in its title plays havoc with a notion of beauty by intermingling faces, such that they exist primarily as awkward physical components of each other—cheeks as dismembered chunks fitted in the wrong place. On one level, they take on the look of modernist grotesquery, familiar in museums. At the same time, I get another and more emotional input from the plenitude of media one offs, who display their improbable coiffures and toothy smiles. They consist of glamour pusses, cutie pies, high school seniors, and haute couture models—of different races. Henry’s elegant fingers everywhere get into the act with a stateliness that induces mirth or wonder, or sometimes both.  She seems to cooperate with the paper illustrations, as if she was of the same material existence as theirs. The spectacle of it inspires me to think of how Picasso would deal with photos of Audrey Hepburn.

More seriously, a survey of these faces generates a mood of longing, enacted by their maker, who functions simultaneously as partial subject and object. I’m thinking of multiple personality disorder, a condition in which individuals have lost their sense of self, and compensate by their pretension to be others. The thought of such ego transfers may infuse the beauty book, but mostly as a reckoning with a metaphor of a social thesis, rather than as a documentary on a psychic malaise. For my part, whether people are smiling or scowling under their half masks on the streets, this issue of public life contrasts with Henry’s delving into her private concerns.

Criticism has a habit of refining itself at short notice for purposes of isolating distinctions. We often use a device called the ‘’yes, but’’, as in: Are her young subjects coquettish?—Yes, but some are baffled or just vacant.  Is their moodiness a contribution to the narrative aspects of the project? Yes, but they are more pluralistic in psychic shading than you think.

I suggest that color has its own role to play in Judith  Henry’s outlook. The choreography of her palette includes movements into black and white, which contrast with flesh tones that dramatize her artifice. As  for the chromatic environment itself, how could it not reflect disparate sources from the cosmetic routines that fascinate her?

One may well ask: where did all these maneuvers come from; is there a pictorial tradition from which they stemmed? Though the answer is apparently negative, there does exist a scatter of previous self-portraitists who ventured into theatrical modes. Among them are Cindy Sherman, Lucas Samaras, Claude Cahun, and Hannah Höch. Judith Henry’s works are as disconcerting as theirs, as complicated psychologically, and of equally high artistic stature.

Beauty Masks, portraits, Judith Henry. Published by Small Editions (Brooklyn, 2020). All photographs were taken by Howard Saunders with an iPhone 8 Plus, indoors, with natural light. Introduction by Grace Graupe-Pillard. ISBN 978-0-578-64727-2. $40

Due to the pandemic, the book is not widely distributed. To order a copy, please visit the artist’s Paypal and be sure to include your mailing address with payment: http://paypal.me/beautymasks

The post “Charade is in Order”: Judith Henry’s Beauty Masks appeared first on artcritical.

February 12 to March 12, 2015
24 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212-977-7160

The opening photograph of this exhibition of around 30 vintage prints, some of them previously unseen, sees the show’s title, ‘I’m trying my hand at fashion photography’, scrawled in red ink in Woodman’s spidery handwriting. The inscription falls below an image so wonderful in its off kilter poignant economy that it takes a while to take in the nuanced details. Within it, Woodman stands facing us, hands over her eyes, wearing a white dress textured as if quilted, its slight thickness imparting a creamy softness to its folds. Behind her is pinned a skewed quilt, dirty white and slightly torn, against a wall with joins like a giant graph, a large circle peeking down from the top of the frame. It is a minor symphony of textures and composition.

The show focuses on Woodman’s New York years between 1978 and 1980, a difficult period for the young artist: no longer supported by study or residency programs, she was battling to find resolve to continue her practice, gain acknowledgement from the art establishment and pay the rent. Although much is made of the tragedy of her early suicide, the year after this period of her work at the age of 22 what really comes across is that making successful photographs was an act connected to joy and satisfaction, fueled by her indomitable, restless energy.

An image in a completely different mood has Woodman sitting on the floor, the sweep of her hair in a loose top bun caught in frames of falling sunlight, echoed by the casual satin cascade of her dress. Her eyes are thoughtful, looking to the side, a small gothic chair in a corner adding the final compositional touch. The astonishing depth of Woodman’s understanding of spatial and geometric relationships of the body and other objects within the pictorial frame elevated her work, no matter how deceptively simple an individual image might be, to the highest level.

An example of this sensitive arranging is shown in a monochrome photograph where Woodman stands sideways to the viewer, arms above her head so that she forms a black line against the wall. Parallel to her is a hanging skinned fox, its head, legs and tail dark, vulpine and dramatic against the surrounding white. On the floor is a carefully placed decorative plate, positioned on an invisible diagonal to the bottom corner of a painting in the top left of the image. The unobtrusive alignment of painting to Woodman, to stole, to plate, is an example of the precise visual harmonies that lent Woodman’s work its subtle dynamics and formal rigor.

One of the highlights of this sometimes-uneven selection was a rare series done in color that showed a more polished, mature Woodman. These are shot in empty rooms with pastel green walls and pale pink molding, her body sheathed in a green knit dress. The new element of color is added to her compositional mix as she throws shapes through a mirror climbs a door post – all Titian hair and bare legs – or peeks through the camera at us, sensual yet coy in peep-toed shoes.

Woodman is less convincing when she emulates other photographers. A series shot at night outside the New York Public Library in a style halfheartedly reminiscent of Helmut Newton sees a model drape her limbs alongside the giant stone lions. Elsewhere, we have a girl all lipstick and glamour in a bathing suit reclining, in the mode of Guy Bourdin, alongside stuffed, running wolves. Both sets have elements of Woodman but those seem hesitant mixed with the slicker, hard-edged styles of photographers that were so much about the male gaze.

In Woodman’s imagery, she was often both subject and photographer. Just as a dancer uses her body as an instrument, Woodman used hers, alongside many props and clothes as a tool for the camera. Like Cindy Sherman, she controlled the gaze, which with Woodman was unambiguously female.

It was only days after seeing this exhibition, while thinking about how intrinsic and poetic to my understanding of Woodman’s oeuvre her nude self-portraits were, that I suddenly realized that most of the subjects in the show had been clothed. That I hadn’t noticed is as it should be— her work transcended all of that.

The post Gaze Control: Francesca Woodman at Marian Goodman  appeared first on artcritical.

Good exhibitions are designed to create a visual program of content and experiences that communicate affect most effectively. Curators and designers consider a number of factors to ensure that the visual experience — the look and feel — of the space accurately conveys the story they want to tell about the work: What if the art is lighted from below or above? How might the object look hanging from the rafters or on the floor? What if the walls aren’t white? What if the physical environment is not rectinlinear?

In March 1947, renowned dealer Alexander Iolas — then director of Hugo Gallery — sought to push the boundaries of curatorial license through a breathtaking environment for modern art in the exhibition “Bloodflames.” The show featured art curated by Nicolas Calas installed in the unconventional Fredrick Kiesler-designed environment filled with bright, bold colors and sloping walls. Works by Gorky, Noguchi, Lam, and Matta among others lay propped against walls, hanging from the ceiling, and jutting out at odd angles. Paul Kasmin, in collaboration with Rail Curatorial Projects, revisited this seminal exhibition through “Bloodflames Revisited,” curated by artist, writer, and Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui.

Filling the expanse of both Kasmin galleries, “Bloodflames Revisited” features work from more than 20 artists, including Will Ryman, Cindy Sherman, Chris Martin, and Roxy Paine. While certainly not as radical and disruptive to the senses as the original — you’ll find no sloping exhibition walls or amorphous blobs interspersed between works of art at Kasmin — this contemporary response to “Bloodflames” presents an effective and thoughtful alternative to the traditional white-cube exhibition as we know it. Upon entering the galleries, viewers are jarred by Crayola-colored walls that stretch from the hay-covered floor to the ceiling. “Bloodflames Revisited” is filled with artwork, although the orange-yellow of the walls and the earthy smell of hay trigger the senses to conclude the opposite. Walking into the exhibit spaces takes a bit of re-orientation that immediately calls into question the visual cues we associate with the display of cultural objects. Is it the color on the walls the risers or the hay beneath our feet that suggests everything we experience and see in this space can be questioned?

I walked through the 27^th Street gallery as if down a pirate’s gangplank and felt a relationship to the artworks that unsettled me. When we go the gallery or the museum, we stand apart from the art and typically view it from eye level. Standing on the riser, I looked down on Tunga’s sculptural assemblages, and my eyes rested on the top third of Deborah Kass’s and Alex Katz’s paintings. I decided to surrender to the moment, realizing that the exhibition was successful in its premise: it had indeed forced me to interrogate ideas I had internalized about what my relationship to the art should be as a viewer.

Glenn Ligon’s electric blue and neon green Niggers Ain’t Scared (1996), from the Richard Pryor joke paintings series is still jarring, even when viewed from above. “Alot of niggers ain’t scared, youknowwhatImean?” the text begins in Ligon’s signature stenciling style of imperfection. “I mean like when the Martians landed and shit white folks got all scared.” In an additional act of visual violence, the stenciled words smear down the canvas drawing more attention to the textual dissonance. “Nothing can scare a nigger after 400 years of this shit,” the joke concludes.

Nearby, Lynda Benglis’s giant half sphere of red-orange tinted polyurethane protrudes off of the wall as if floating in space.Benglis developed the brain matter-like forms of her metal and polyurethane half-spheres after combining elements from her work with knotted metal in the 1970s and glass in the 1980s. After discovering she could make knots of glass with her hands using technology, she gained a greater understanding of the material’s properties and began casting concave and convex forms. D’Arrest (2009) is mesmerizing, due in part to its relationship to light. The pigmented polyurethane seems to absorb light while reflecting it, causing it to act like a proprioceptor. The form appears to change as its jelly-like squiggles catch the light from various angles.

On Tenth Avenue, my viewing experience was altered still. The exhibition continued to use bold colors and elevated platforms, but the limitations of the physical space were brought into view more sharply. The snaking riser connecting the two viewing spaces here felt especially distracting, which encouraged me to step down and freely traipse around through the hay. As I examined Do Ho Suh’s stove from the Specimens series, I was reminded of the relationship between belonging and assimilation. In the series, the artist explores his own relationship to cultural displacement and belonging by making scale replicas of items from his New York apartment using only polyester fitted over wire armatures. The translucent material reveals while it conceals, showing some of the internal structure of the object yet protecting the vulnerable insides.

Much of our visual viewing experience is guided by subtle contextual clues: the height of the walls, the lighting, the props on which art objects reside, etc. What other stories do cultural objects reveal through the environment in which they are presented? How can altering the visual context of an artwork allow us to see it fully? The ideas presented in “Bloodflames” and its modern-day re-imagining emphasize the possibilities in disrupting how we relate to art through the physical space where it is presented. Bui fiddles with some of the contemporary conventions of exhibition design by swapping out sterile white walls and employing our other five senses in the viewing experience. It is a welcomed disturbance. Though Kasmin’s gallery spaces will return to their familiar spotless white and polished concrete in a few weeks, “Bloodflames Revisited” serves as a reminder that the relationship between viewer and art object can — and should be — personal and visceral.

The post Burning Inside: Passion, Politics, and Disruption at Paul Kasmin appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post The Flow of the Pulse: Gretchen Bender at The Kitchen appeared first on artcritical.

June 10 – September 2, 2010
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

New York City endured a near-death experience during the 1960s, and the steep decline of lower Manhattan precipitated the rise of a vibrant underground culture. The City began to acknowledge the pioneering efforts of artists to create live-work spaces or lofts within this wasteland of residential and commercial buildings in the 1970s by rezoning them as “mixed use”, albeit in piecemeal fashion and with much rancor. Within a decade, the empty lots and ruined real estate property that had incubated a wealth of sinewy conceptual art were transmuted into Soho gold.

If “mixed use” as a real estate term inspires this show’s outward theme, it implicitly applies to “artistic practices and strategies” in transition over a four decade period, as well. Curators Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp present a considerable array of films, photographs, texts, and sound installations by 40 artists spanning several generations. The city as performance space or experiential sphere of creativity becomes the unifying frame around projects of wildly differing intention, and the show often suggests links between specific works by artists who might otherwise appear to have little in common.

For example, several of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills from 1978 (#25, #60, #83, #63), hang near Barbara Probst’s Exposure #9, New York City, Grand Central Station, 12.18.01, 1:21 pm from 2001. Probst’s six-part work features a female model, photographed simultaneously from six distinct points of view. Clearly, Sherman’s and Probst’s concerns, conveyed through distinct conceptual and technical approaches to picture-taking and picture-making, are strikingly different and decades apart. Yet the juxtaposition of these selected works highlights a common interest in the instability of photographic verity, set right in the midst of some of New York’s most familiar public spaces.

By contrast, photography as a straightforward accomplice to performance pertains in Babette Mangolte’s Woman Walking Down a Ladder from 1973. The ladder in question is that of a rooftop water tower. Contact sheets reveal a figure descending perpendicular to the ladder with no visible sign of a harness or guide wire. At close range, we see that she wears a nondescript blouse and skirt, while her face is obscured by her hair. At medium distance in profile, her descent appears even more precarious against the void of sky; and she is a mere speck when the photographer pulls back to reveal the full height and might of the building on which the water tower is delicately perched.

New York City’s rooftop water towers are also featured in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s 15-part array of fine black and white photographs from 1988. Echoing a 19th century trend to assemble photographic archives of like things for civic records, the Bechers adopted a similar methodology in the 1960s to make comparative studies of decaying industrial architecture in Europe and the US. Their systematic approach dovetailed with strategies of conceptual art being forged in that era, and the Bechers’ typological studies of water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and other industrial relics have been highly influential.

Typologies abound in Mixed Use, Manhattan. From John Miller’s enigmantic series Clubs for America (1993) to Moyra Davey’s Newstands (1994), the streets of New York are teeming with similar things made unique by happenstance and style as much as wear and tear. The windows of urban buildings are the common denominator for Jennifer Bolande’s Globe series, which features blue metallic orbs with maps that are forever out of date. In a different key, Gordon Matta-Clark’s deadpan, black and white Window Blow-Out from 1973 depicts an abandoned building whose grid of broken windows is animated by a lone dog’s vigil.

The line between typology and series is porous. They synchronize neatly in William Gedney’s 1960s views from his apartment window. Entertaining a play between the static camera and everyday movement in the world beyond, his window is the theme for a set of variations. James Welling employs much the same strategy in Eastern Window #1-24 (1997-2000) except #8, 11, 12, 23. A chair on the neighboring rooftop changes position; light alters the buildings’ forms; the moon changes phase and disappears. Welling’s introduction of occasional color in this black and white world of ideas is mildly startling.

If still photography lends itself easily to urban typologies, photography on the move offers other possibilities. Sound and physical movement predominate in David Hammons’s video Phat Free (1995), in which a hand-held camera follows a performer kicking a can down the street. In David Wojnarowicz’s well-known series, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), a figure wearing a crude paper mask of the poet’s face traverses Coney Island, Chinatown, and the deserted streets of the West Side, enacting the artist’s taste for romantic irony and despair. With less drama, the painter Christopher Wool would photograph streets at night while walking home from his studio, studying incidental marks.

Images of the bygone West Side Piers stir piquant nostalgia for many New Yorkers of a certain age. In all their decrepit glory, the Piers were a magnet for aesthetic prowess as well as sexual trysts. From 1975-1986, Alvin Baltrop photographed their interiors and exteriors, observing cruisers, lovers, and yawning empty space in exquisite detail. When Gordon Matta-Clark cut an enormous, half-moon aperture at the far end of one pier, Baltrop noted its impact on the huge space as sublime cathedral or camera obscura. Peter Hujar’s haunting nocturnes of the Canal St. Piers, from 1983, submerge their secrets in velvet hues of photographic black. What’s left of them in 2010 amounts to jagged rows of decaying piles, as shown in Emily Roysdon’s gray-hued photographs, The Piers, Untitled (#2-5).

In 1971, the Piers were the site of an ambitious series of conceptual art pieces by 27 artists (all male, as it happened). Curated by Willoughby Sharp, photographed by Harry Shrunk and Janos Kender, the consistent format and high quality of the small, gelatin silver photographs establishes a collaborative framework within which each artist had his own word-and-image solo. Because the works were installed in a long corridor of the museum, viewers walking past the sequential imagery might experience it like stills from short silent movies. Vito Acconci, for example, spars with a reputed stranger who threatens to push him off the pier. Besides Acconci, the list of illustrious participants included John Baldessari, Keith Sonnier, Michael Snow, Daniel Buren, George Trakas, and others.

In quite another register, Charles Simonds, Gabriel Orozco, and Bernard Guillot found in the city places for reverie and magical thinking. Simonds, a sculptor, made a 16mm film called Dwellings in 1972. With children as his witnesses in blighted neighborhoods on the Lower East Side, Simonds uses tweezers to move tiny clay bricks into wall crevices. He explains that he’s creating miniature cities for “Little People” who will be moving in soon. (Simonds’s ephemeral archaeology eventually found its way into permanent niches, such as the stairwell of the Whitney Museum). Orozco’s color photograph, Isla en la isla (1993), also plays with changes in the cityscape’s scale. Wooden planks and other debris lean against a traffic barrier in a parking lot beside the Hudson River, mimicking the World Trade Center buildings and piers along the skyline due south. Guillot, in a series of photographs titled Orpheus and Eurydice from 1977, reinvents a mythic tale of tragic love, death, and descent into the underworld as photographic views of forlorn territory on the West Side.

The richness and variety of these projects is daunting. They attest to the elasticity of photographic and cinematic media as co-conspirator to artistic vision, be it performance, conceptual art, architectural intervention, socio-aesthetic political commentary, memento mori, extreme ballet, found object, available view, topographic documentation, lyrical serial existentialist anarchy, rough play. Cumulatively, the show exudes an inviting sense of spontaneity and hard-won freedom. I was particularly moved by Glenn Ligon’s harrowing, 20 wall-panel narrative of his residences, from his youth in the Bronx through a series of legal and illegal sublets early in his career, to, more recently, a stable situation in a condominium. Ligon’s true story is a bracing reminder of the anarchic forces of city real estate and the crucial, double role of the home-studio environment in an artist’s life.

It should be remembered that many of the works in Mixed Use, Manhattan were not seen publicly at the time of their creation. Some of the work on view came to light only through the efforts of dedicated curators and/or the survivors of loved ones. With equanimity and to fascinating effect, the curators have conjoined informal, private, and underknown works with widely known icons. Despite the real estate theme, as I see it this exhibition primarily draws inspiration from artists of the 1960s and 1970s who intentionally kept their work out of mainstream systems, creating alternative avenues for reception and distribution. A long perspective on the sensibility they set in motion can be found here, in disparate works that embrace plurality and resist categorization, revealing quixotic and tantalizing whispers of desire.

The post Vitality Amidst the Ruins: Lower Manhattan’s gritty golden age appeared first on artcritical.

elles@centrepompidou: Women Artists in the Collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne

May 27, 2010 to February 21, 2011
Place Georges Pompidou
75004 Paris, +33 (0)1 44 78 12 33

France has a long history of women artists and of organizations supporting their work.  Partly as a result of that tradition, the National Museum of Modern Art owns works by more than 800 mostly European women artists.  Approximately twenty-five percent of these are represented in elles@centrepompidou, an exhibition that runs through February of next year with occasional substitutions of additional works.  Occupying the extensive fourth floor of the Pompidou Center, elles is divided into nine categories: “Pioneering Women,” “Fire at Will,” “The Body Slogan,” “Eccentric Abstraction,” “A Room of One’s Own,” “Words at Work,” “Immaterials,” “elles@design,” and “Architecture and Feminism?”  This thematic approach enabled curator Camille Moreau to organize some 500 works in provocative groupings.  Her purpose was “to present the public with a hanging that appears to offer a good history of twentieth-century art.  The goal is to show that representation of women versus men is, ultimately, no longer important.”  But she goes on to say, “Proving it is another matter.”

“Pioneering Women” encompasses the late 19th to the mid-20th century period.  Often described as pre-feminist, these women nevertheless engaged the male-dominated art world with wit and determination.  Lack of representation of these artists in galleries and museum collections was one of the issues prompting demonstrations and other actions by feminists during the 1960s and 1970s.  Because of their longevity, several pioneering women were still working during those decades, notably Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delaunay, Joan Mitchell, Maria-Elena Vieira da Silva, and Dorothea Tanning.  In general, however, they did not identity themselves as feminists or participate in exhibitions open only to women artists.

Confrontational and deconstructionist approaches produced the dynamic pieces in “Fire at Will,” which includes print and video documentation of performance art by Valerie Export (exposed crotch and machine gun), Sigalit Landau (barded-wire hula hoop), and Charlotte Moorman (cello and camouflage uniform), along with Wendy Jacob’s eerie installation of inflated, animated blankets.  In materials as well as subject matter, artists in this section attacked assumptions pertaining to art production. The violence of war, viewed as a male domain, prompted this theme. From Zineb Sedira’s nostalgic photograph of an Algerian ruin to Annette Messager’s skewered protest, these artists dealt with war-scarred landscapes and psyches.  The female body as both canvas and subject in “The Body Slogan” addresses concepts of gender and identity, creating the most unified section of the exhibition. Jana Sterbak’s flesh dress of thinly sliced raw beef (completely dried by the time I saw it in June of 2010) resonates with the bloody visions of a nude Ana Mendieta holding a flapping, decapitated chicken.  Marina Abramovic, Sonia Khurana, and Carolee Schneemann dance to their different drummers, while Tania Brugera, Louise Bourgeois, and Cindy Sherman consider the self-portrait as an exploratory genre.

“Eccentric Abstraction,” with its unmistakable reference to the 1966 New York gallery exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard using the same title, functions as the lynchpin of elles.  If we consider that the final two sections of the show focus more on design than art per se, then “Eccentric Abstraction” can be seen as positioned near the center of the exhibition.  Our opinion of everything that we see before these pieces and after them becomes enhanced or reduced by the “craft” materials and offbeat treatment of shape and space in this section.  Besides the classically deviant sculpture of Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse, works here emphasize the power of repetition, both inside and outside the grid.  The rhythm of marking, stacking, and stitching is claimed and perpetuated as essentially female within the context of this exhibition.

In “Immaterials,” eccentric abstraction morphs into post-minimalist dialectics, with light and white as recurring motifs. “A Room of One’s Own” strays from the rigorous curatorial focus in the rest of the show, with several works seemingly shoehorned into this category.  While Louise Nevelson’s sculptural installation, for example, may look like a wall unit for storage and display, its title Reflections of a Waterfall I suggests that the artist’s thoughts were elsewhere.  Although Mona Hatoum’s circular structure resembles a tiny room, the video seen on the floor invades and exposes the universal physicality of the human body.  The most ironic “room” is experienced in the 1975 video of Martha Rosler’s kitchen. “Words at Work,” while conflating text and visual narrative, nevertheless emphasizes the crucial component of language and storytelling within feminist art.  From the literal messages of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger to Eleanor Antin’s liberated black boots, we are reminded not only that women have stories to tell, but also that women tell them best.

On seeing an exhibition of this magnitude focusing exclusively on women’s art, it is very hard to imagine how its curator could suggest that the “representation of women versus men is, ultimately, no longer important.”  Moreau’s show underscores the fact that museums have only just begun to demonstrate the advances in post-1960 women’s art, let alone to explore work  by early women modernists that explores their differences from male pioneers.

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The recently-converted 5thfloor galleries at Gagosian uptown have mostly been given over to sprawling group shows of market-driven talent. The space, a low-ceilinged fluorescent-lit warren of former offices, verily hums with chilly attitude. Curator Tom Duncan, a gallery registrar, now brings art history into the mix with this adventurous photography survey, pairing historical and contemporary examples of sculptural construction and assemblage as subject matter.

The show’s timeline begins with experimental modernist works by two noted sculptors, American David Smith and Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy. Smith’s four exquisite miniature black-and-white gelatin silver prints, Untitled (Tableau) (1931-1933), first appear as Max Ernst-like surrealist painted landscapes, but on prolonged viewing reveal themselves to be arrangements of real organic forms, coral and twigs found on a trip to the Virgin Islands. Moholy-Nagy, in his little-seen early vanguard color work from 1936-1946, exploits his then-new medium’s theatrical qualities, capturing prismatic light as it reflects off plastic armatures hung in black space. Both artists move photography away from its traditional reportorial definition—toward more open formal abstract readings.

Jumping ahead to the 1980s, works by the Swiss collaborative team of Peter Fischli & David Weiss and also by American James Welling seem intentionally “academic” and “arch” by comparison. Fischli & Weiss’s Blossoming Branch (1986), a tabletop arrangement of stacked metal clamps, a plastic bottle, an aluminum cooking pan and a dust broom, has all the “traditional” compositional elements of a Picasso bronze. Welling, in his studio studies of drapery, exploits the chiaroscuro qualities of black-and-white printing to willfully static effect, more like Dutch still-life painting.

Cindy Sherman’s two large works from 1992 are brazen and provocative by comparison.Untitled (1992) is a horrific portrayal of a figure made up of prosthetic limbs and disattached body parts, its face in agony, seemingly in the midst of a sexual assault from an equally distended aggressor. Sherman exploits photography for all its visceral immediacy; she constructs “fictional” self-identities only in order to make them “real” all over again.

Gregory Crewdson follows the radicalism of Sherman’s “set-up” strategy to its logical ends in Untitled (butterflies with braids) (1997). Yet his results are staid by comparison. The medium-scale glossy color print shows human hair blond braids hanging amidst a dark grove of trees, covered with blue taxidermy butterflies in the foreground. The lighting, saturated palette and cinematic “staging” provide for an overall mood of ersatz surrealist horror.

The younger practitioners follow Crewdson’s self-conscious lead, especially Anne Hardy, who makes mock-ups of windowless rooms and loads them with signifying objects: a makeshift lab with beakers, pipettes and notational charts, for example. For her, a lot of effort is exerted creating narrative-looking content that doesn’t lead anywhere.

Roger Ballen, working in black-and-white at a modest scale, also feels quite stilted, with his diorama arrangements of cardboard boxes, animal skulls, a live kitten, child-like scrawled drawings on the walls behind. His work has the psychological flavor of Joel-Peter Witkin’s earlier genre-defining efforts (he’s not in the exhibit), but without the hardcore goods.

In the end, it is Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) who is the star of the show. His works are interspersed among the first three rooms, and they all come across relaxed and intelligent without ever working too hard. At the entrance, Beerenstilleben (2007), a modestly-scaled color print, shows empty plastic food containers sitting on a windowsill bathed in light: it is an absolutely considered and casual moment. Beauty is returned once again to the realm of a photographer’s “eye” as opposed to surrounding conceit. For Tillmans, meaningful abstraction exists all around us in the realm of the everyday. He doesn’t need polemical purpose.

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“Spencer Tunick: Public Works 2001-2004” through June 19 at I-20 Gallery, 529 W 20th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-645-1100).

“Hilary Harkness” though June 26 at Mary Boone (541 W 24 Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-752-2929).

Now that the doyen of feminist performance photography has taken to masquerading as tacky, pathetic circus performers it seems a good time to come clean with a double confession: I have never found clowns or Cindy Sherman remotely entertaining.

Make no mistake about the gravity of these failings: Within polite art-world company not to “get” Ms. Sherman is tantamount to not having a brain, rather as despising the grinning goons who interrupt the jugglers and the lion tamers is to admit to not having a soul.

Clowns are a natural synthesis of Ms. Sherman’s familiar preoccuptions. Her meteoric ascent in the early 1980s came with fictional “film stills” in which she posed in artfully contrived stereotypical scenarios as the ubiquitous dumb blonds of B-movies. Rather ingeniously, this established intentional vacuity as her emotional affect of choice, a less is more aesthetic that allowed nonchalence to be classed as “subtle” and clichéd gestures as “subversive.”

In the 1990s, Ms. Sherman absented herself from the picture to pursue still-lifes that tested the taste endurance of viewers with lurid assemblages of detritus and vomit. Sex toys and sexually-posed prosthetic limbs became a favored motif to complement her pukey palette, and then gender warfare broke out between battered and besmirched Ken and Barbie dolls.

More recently, the performance artist returned lense-side to star in a series of stereotype-castings, as assorted middle-aged losers, personifying Hollywood wannabees and sexually past-it housewives. In her latest, clown incarnation, sick color, sad gesture, slick technique, nonchalance, and nihilism are brought together in a pantheon of the pathetic. Her large format tableaux fill two floors at Metro Pictures, where the artist has shown from the outset of her career: elaborately costumed, affectless behind grimly determined smiley masks, with artful, computer-manipulated backdrops, she is truly the sagging bore she seems to want to be.

The impression I had, trying my utmost to be moved or intrigued by these images, is of meeting the wealthy aunt of Ronald McDonald. Each is as corporate and ubiquitous as the other, and the product they push about as nourishing.

Spencer Tunick is an action painter in the tradition of Jackson Pollock, only instead of dribbling paint on canvas with bravura speed and in all-over configurations, he uses naked people as his medium and city streets as his support.

The photographer puts out the word for volunteers who in burgeoning force agree to strip and arrange themselves in ways that vary from random gestalts to serial patterns. Sometimes his naked collaborators are an inchoate crowd, other times a disciplined regiment.

Mr. Tunick, who has been persuing this line for several years, has become something of an institution. Like Christo, whose career also proceeded from, essentially, a single antic (wrapping up edifices in his case), he has seen his motif progress from a spontaneous, somewhat anarchic gesture into something officially sanctioned across the globe. Once, speed was of the essence: participants had to get into their birthday suits, adopt the requested pose, and dress again before the bemused cops arrived. Now, artist and models can take their time; the events, carefully scheduled by contemporary art centers from Melbourne to Basel to Sao Paolo, are increasingly a focus of civic pride.

In art-historical terms, it is as if Mr Tunick is passing from an art informel phase to hard-edge abstraction. The earlier poses had an existential angst and tragi-comic urgency to them; nowadays, precision and formality are of the essence, the ever-dirigible mass arranged in artfully slick, tidy swathes of skin. The effect of the new orderliness ranges from absurdist humor, as in “London 5 (Selfridges),” (2003), where massed ranks ascend department store escalators, to touching, almost poetic decoration, as in “Melbourne 3,” (2001), where the figures on a river bank are like swaying reeds.

Some works in this new show at I-20, his first in New York since 1998, recall the earlier scatter pieces, like the melodramatic interior group portrait of HIV-positive New Yorkers in a diner. In “Finland 2 (Helsinki Art Museum),” (2002), the affectless, nonchalent expression of the sprawling, crouching figures is powerfully ambiguous, recalling his earlier work. The effect is precariously poised between humor and horror, with conflicting associations of free love and catastrophe, bacchanal and Buchenwald.

Hilary Harkness is a deliciously perverse absurdist in paint who brings together the unemotional nastiness of Ms. Sherman and the crowd addiction of Mr. Tunick. The somewhat precious display of just three smallish pictures at Mary Boone’s Chelsea barn, Ms. Harkness’s first show with this dealer, is a perfect complement to the masquerades and mass actions explored in these other exhibitions.

Ms. Harkness’s all-female S/M orgies and girl’s own adventures at sea are a chilly marriage of medievalism and the comic strip. In “Matterhorn,” (2003-04) for instance, Hieronymous Bosch and Lucas Cranach team up with Quentin Tarantino, Henry Darger, Balthus and his oddball occultist brother Pierre Klossowski, gay illustrator Tom of Finland, and vintage bandes-dessinées pornographer Eric Stanton. In what reads like a sliced-open doll’s house, she offers cross-sectional, compartmentalized views of an army of skinny young women kitted out in black with sexy boots, hotpants, bikinis, and military caps who in each room torture, abuse, molest, and mortally dispatch sartorially and anatomically similar fellows. In fact, as no discerible emotion is displayed on the perfunctory faces or standarized bodies of any of the participants, it is not too easy to say what criterion, fate, or preference determines whether you are a perpetrator or a victim, although the majority of the latter are wearing white socks, which might signify something. No one registers much by way of pleasure or pain on their cute, dumb faces.

In painterly terms, Ms. Harkness favors a flat, nerdish, swiftly dispatched naïvete, in harmony, some might argue, with her moral maturity. What does actually make these sick, silly pictures interesting beyond the shlock-horror inventiveness of her abuse fantasies, and her nostalgic eye for period charm, is a compellingly crafted ratio of detail to whole, a weird sense of decorative balance and all-overness. Mind you, once you allow so formalist a take of scenes of rape and pillage, the artist’s warped values are obviously working.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 10, 2004

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