This summer the axis of art in San Francisco runs between two museums: the De Young, which temporarily houses one hundred Picassos from the Musee Picasso; and the Museum of Modern art, currently exhibiting dozens of works by Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse collected by Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo [both exhibition reviewed at artcritical by Bill Berkson]. With the current staging of Wagner’s Ring at San Francisco Opera, art-hungry masses are getting a full meal from the matrix of modernism. In the galleries, meanwhile, older living masters are showing some of the most notable work.

Paul Kos is among the most accomplished of Bay Area conceptualists. His varied body of work spans over forty years and self-consciously filters Sol LeWitt’s programmatic statements of conceptualism through a concern with recovering the poetry of natural processes. In his most characteristic works, some non-semantic but evocative dimension of nature is revealed—recalling Adorno as he heard the rustling beneath meaning in the language of Borchardt’s poetry. Kos’s extensive oeuvre allows him to stage his newer works within the context of his long career. Upon entering the gallery, one encounters a series of drawings from 1969 depicting an unrealized project to set lines and semi-circles of red salt pillars in the salt flats of Utah. These images would not be out of place in an archeological reconstruction of henges and causeways. The pillars are set up in the order that they might dissolve, leaving only slightly less impermanent red stains.

This concern with the poetry of undoing and erosion frames the central element of the show: a visual and aural tunnel created by two formidable newer works, Aspen, 2009 and Beethoven Piano Sonata #13, 2009.  Aspen shows a dense thicket without background, while Beethoven depicts a piano’s hammers striking the strings in performance. Both project an image onto canvas, which is then loosely painted using the image as a template. The painted surface seems to disappear where the projected image is still, but where the wind rises or the hammers move the surface becomes just visible, as if the image were dissonant with itself –the material surface a ghost of the virtual reality. In this installation, the sounds of nature and the sonata alternate in sections of a few minutes. The effect, perhaps intended, is the decrescence of the sonata to a mechanical gurgling, then a natural rustling. Kos thereby renews something of the Romantic project of overcoming the one-sidedness of rationality, in the service of attracting to his work otherwise inaccessible resonances—quasi una fantasia, as Beethoven characterized the sonata.” [Paul Kos at Gallery Paule Anglim, May 4-June 11, 2011]

Jim Melchert is a revered figure in the Bay Area, as much for his personal generosity as for his unusual attempt to bring the tradition-bound skills of a ceramicist to the project of Bay Area Conceptualism. His poetics are rooted in a moment half a generation before Kos’s, when in the late 1950’s Peter Voulkos challenged West Coast ceramics as Pollock did for New York painting. For Kos, the conceptualist moment is the point of orientation, whereas for Melchert it’s a moment, but only a moment, in a synthetic practice. Melchert’s current show offers nearly two dozen square tiles, 3/8ths of an inch thick with sides measuring 1-1/2 or 2 feet. The course of treatment is easily recoverable: the tiles are shattered, then reassembled and mounted on plywood. The larger shards are treated as pictorial backgrounds upon which Melchert outlines forms in dark glazes that hover between the organic and the inorganic, between potatoes and river stones. Finally, he inks in a background grid of evenly spaced circles, which, in each case, end at the irregular forms—ostensibly occluding the grid. The results are reminiscent of John Cage’s later graphic works, wherein nature in its lawless guise appears somehow both beneficent and accessible, its violence overcome by visual alertness and acceptance.

A couple of the tiles result from a slightly different procedure, and their great difference in expressiveness speaks to the delicate balance of the heterogeneous elements in the main body of work. In one, Melchert allows the glazes to run to the edges of the shards, as well as to fill the interiors of the irregular shapes. This small change, together with the dark glazes set against the whitest of backgrounds, seems to raise its voice to a shriek. In the other (perhaps a piece of leave-taking), Melchert replaces the grid with a mysterious numbering of the individual shards, as if each were catalogued archaeological finds, or sections of the sky on a star-chart. This piece is the sole one given an evocative title: How It Is, the allusion to the inaugural work of Samuel Beckett’s late phase perhaps intended to darken the sense of sublimity. This is as deeply satisfying a show, both in the individual pieces and the over-all conception, as any in recent memory. [Jim Melchert at Gallery Paule Anglim, June 15-July 16, 2011]

Shahzia Sikander’s show at the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter McBean gallery recalls an overly familiar scenario: an artist of substantial gifts and great intelligence, searching for a theme, confronted with a curator who’s installation of the show would make Procrustes blush. How does the work fare? Worse than one might have hoped. Besides the perverse arrangement and the supposed one-size-fits-all theme of being an individual under post-colonial conditions, the works are accompanied by the curator Hou Hanru’s texts, the philistine literal-mindedness of which is not their greatest fault.  One is alarmed to learn that “China and the U. S.” are continents; that the motif of transformation “has preoccupied artists and writers since classical (?) times” (fairy tales? Kwaikutl masks?); and that China was once dominated by “Anglo-Saxons” (perhaps a hitherto unrecorded conquest of East Asia by King Ethelred?).  In the past decade Sikander has produced a number of digital animations, and most recently video works, while continuing to make her well-known works on paper, two small series of which are exhibited. Here, Sikander characteristically submits both figurative and abstract motifs to fantastic calligraphic elaborations, interweaving the burgeoning arabesques, filigrees, and cells to the point of fissure.  The elements flow together into a whirlpool wherein the distinctions among old compositional opposites of figure and ground, abstraction and representation, and positive and negative space become moot. The problem for Sikander for the past decade has been a certain sameness of effect in the results, along with the increasing pressure for a more direct way of addressing contemporary issues—a problematic close to that of Philip Guston in the mid-1960’s. The urgencies of elaboration and intertwining repeatedly result in a rough circle against a blank background, like a ball of twine set in the center of a small, unfurnished room.

Sikander has said that she turned to animation in order to present the temporal unfolding and transformation of her elements, and that in doing so, the problem of the intelligibility of the dissolving figures might be overcome. In Hou’s selection and arrangement, the animations crowd out the works on paper while offering little compensation. The animated elements are subjected—over and over—to a process of whirling, multiplication, dispersion, and dissipation, with no gain, as far as I can see, in intelligibility or thematic density. Of the videos, Gossamer, which shows the composer, Du Yun, allegedly dancing both in a ‘classical’ style and gyrating under a fright wig, is unspeakable. But a recent work mostly documenting South Asian military bands does contain a promising sequence of paragliders, each in a different bright color, one after another slowly twisting downward, against the cropped head of a soldier.  Behind them is billowing reddish smoke, presumably marks the landing target. Here might be a theme, and a new expressiveness, that could charge Sikander’s drawings. [“Shahzia Sikander: The exploding company man and other abstractions”, Walter and McBean Galleries, 800 Chestnut St., San Francisco, April 23-June 25, 2011]

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The School of Visual Arts launches its Fall 2010 season of lectures with painter and critic Alexi Worth in a talk organized by the School’s BFA Visual and Critical Studies Department.  Worth, who shows his visually witty art-historically referential hybrids of Mannerist painting and cartoonery at DC Moore Gallery. speaks at the School’s 133/141 West 21st Street building, Rooom 101C at 6.30pm Tuesday September 14.  Also up this week at the same venue is a panel titled “Not Nature Poems” with Rackstraw Downes, Brenda Iijima, Joan Richardson and Jonathan Skinner, moderated by Vincent Katz and Tim Peterson, in the first in what is billed as a “quips and cranks” series on poetics in the arts. The panel takes place Thursday, September 16, same time and room as Worth.  Both events are free and open to all.

The National Academy Museum, host with artcritical magazine of The Review Panel, has announced the line-up for this popular series for 2010-11 which takes place despite the overhaul of their premises this season, where most else of their programming in on hold.  The season includes newcomers to the panel Barbara MacAdam, John Perreault, Alexandra Anderson Spivy, Elisabeth Kley, Hilarie Sheets, Eva Diaz, Marjorie Welish, Ariela Budick and Jeffrey Kastner along with returning favorites Stephanie Buhmann, Peter Plagens, Blake Gopnik, Robert Storr, Sarah Valdez, Joan Waltemath, David Carrier and Colleen Asper.  As ever, the series is moderated by articritical’s Publisher/Editor David Cohen.  The season launches September 24 when Lance Esplund, Faye Hirsch and Andrea K. Scott, all “repeat offenders” on the Review Panel, join Cohen to review Adam Fuss at Cheim & Read, Roman Signer at the Swiss Institute, Arlene Shechet at Jack Shainman and Joan Synder at Betty Cuningham.  At 1083 Fifth Avenue at 6.45pm.

The New York Studio School lecture series launches October 5 with painter Suzan Frecon, currently exhibiting at David Zwirner Gallery, talking about her work, and sculptor William Tucker addressing thoughts to Matisse Sculpture the next day.  Both talks at 6.30pm and free, but patrons will need to get there early to secure seats for some of the speakers this season who include Michael Taylor on Gorky, David Cohen on Sickert, Hayden Herrera on Frida Kahlo, Renaissance scholar Alexander Nagel on “Two Prophecies of Modern Art,” and of course artists on their own work, including Phong Bui, Karlis Rekevics, Shahzia Sikander, and, on Thursday, November 4, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans.

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Three years ago, Banners of Persuasion, a London-based arts organization, commissioned thirteen artists to design tapestries.  Artwork was then sent to a workshop in China to be woven by a team of experts.  The results, on display at the James Cohan Gallery, could not be more diverse.  Indeed, without the consistent medium, almost nothing seems to hold these works together visually.

While many prominent artists have used tapestry to their advantage (William Kentridge and Chuck Close come to mind) some pieces in this show are less suited than others to this particular translation of this medium.  That the artist never touched the object seems out of sync with the hand-heavy quality of these kinds of weavings.

The most interesting works were those in which tapestry added a level of meaning to the image.  Kara Walker’s A Warm Summer Evening in 1863 (2008) depicts a large black silhouette of a hanged female figure against a background of rioting masses and burning buildings.  Although it is a black and white image, it calls to mind the richness of Renaissance weavings in its composition and story-telling ability.  It is completely stunning in a way that a charcoal drawing or a photograph cannot match.

Fred Tomaselli’s After Migrant Fruit Thugs (2008) and Shahzia Sikander’s Pathology of Suspension (2008) are both enriched by making reference to the history of Middle Eastern weaving.  In Tomaselli’s work, two large birds, depicted with every feather colorfully articulated, sit in a tree amidst a starry nighttime sky.  The use of flat space and the decorative, stylized depiction of the birds, branches and stars harkens back to Middle Eastern pictorial rugs.  Sikander, whose work references Moghul craft traditions, uses a border motif, floral patterns and a strong, if off-centered, red rectangle typically seen in traditional Persian or Oriental rugs.

Grayson Perry’s Vote Alan Measles for God (2008) stands out as the only work that makes reference to war rugs.  These highly collected weavings started to appear in Afghanistan in the 1980’s and included images of bombs, tanks and guns.  Perry’s piece has a decidedly folk-art feel—the crooked writing along the border, the crowed cacophony of images, religious references.  Central to the image is a giant red Gumby-like character standing atop the twin towers waving an M16.  His body is strapped with a bomb, filled with grenades, and he’s surrounded by coffins, Osama Bin Laden, car bombs, fighter planes, crosses, dollar signs, images from Abu Ghraib and more.  It manages to be at once marvelously wacky and terrifying.

In Francesca Lowe’s Trump (2008), a mushroom cloud is a swirl of exploding body parts, thrusting feet and fists.  Clouds and smoke erupt from the central figure in an apocalyptic, almost religious ecstasy. The deep space, the rich color palate and the otherworldliness make the image compelling.  However, one has to imagine that the experience of looking at the tapestry and the original painting would not be much different.  As with other works in this show, one is left to wonder what the sheer amount of labor that went into its creation was ultimately for.

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When Shahzia Sikander’s viewers first walk into the gallery, they find themselves facing a brief but powerful video entitled Observation Post (2009). The filmed narrative, lasting only a minute and a half, consists of an older black man playing “The Star Spangled Banner” on the harmonica, against a backdrop of a decrepit, rusting building. America’s bitter racial legacy is reprised in this telling incident, made all the stronger by the black man’s seeming patriotism, which moves past irony into an unspoken accusation that the state of the nation is not well. Music thus becomes a weapon against social entropy. Sikander’s show, whose name is “Stalemate,” describes a political distress that is not so much geographically specific as it is universally experienced—much as the artist herself has moved into a place and time that are larger than the specifics of her biography. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1969, Sikander has now lived for quite some time in New York City, noted of course as a center of mixed nationalities and ethnicities. The internationalism here is in fact a place she calls home, yet she remains wary of the paradox to which her status concedes.

The drawings and paintings in “Stalemate” consist of images that draw upon mislaid existences, and describe psychic loss. Identifying with the powerless, she brings forth into awareness the raw wounds of neglect—as she comments in press materials, “I am interested in recorded histories and their paths of evolution in terms of what gets culled and elaborated.” Her series of drawings and paintings, called “Mapping the End of Something,” pays homage to the dispossessed, in particular those whose identity has been lost in the fray of an uprooted existence: “Drawing upon literature, political and national histories, art history, media and language, and lived experience, I find shifting geographical locations compelling.”

It is hard to be a patriot if one’s affiliations are divided between a homeland no longer truly one’s own and a current address in which a utopian universalism covers up a much harsher set of circumstances. In the graphite, ink, and gouache drawing Power of Silence, we see a figure almost hidden by what look like instruments; two large cones—megaphones of some sort?—occupy the drawing’s upper registers, with a background of what seems to be overlapping feathers. Perhaps here the artist is making the case for a silence that rejects and rebels against the noise of our epoch; perhaps, as happens in Blood Lines (2009), music becomes a way of supporting the self: the red tuba in the composition becomes a weapon, while the abstract, intertwining lines may be seen as representing the complexities, personal and political, so many of us bear.

In Garden for an Interpretation Center (2009), another small painting, a portly figure stands surround by abstract effects: a white decorative pattern envelops him, while above other abstract images—a spiral maze, a red ribbon—take up the rest of the painting. Sikander has always been a bit of a magpie, eclectically picking up what is useful to her. Cheerfully ignoring unities of place and culture, she delivers a complex image in which her training as a miniaturist in Pakistan evolves alongside her appreciation of Western abstract and decorative imageries. This intricacy, usually a strength, can also obscure her art’s ability to communicate—it is sometimes hard to know what she means. But if we, like the artist herself, hold true to her theme of equal worthiness, and forsake historical reference for an all-encompassing present, perhaps we can see her transparent, layered imagery as rendering an utterly apt metaphor for the spirit of the time. In the very large work entitled Template for Stalemate (2009), Sikander proves herself as adept at work of outsize dimensions as she is of smaller sizes. Brilliantly colored, covered with decorative motifs and gestural abstractions, the work suggests a gorgeous manuscript, a place where the politics of place and the pain of indifference no longer exist.

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Robert Storr, Gregory Volk, and Karen Wilkin joined David Cohen to review Shahzia Sikander at Brent Sikkema, Robert Gober at Matthew Marks, Harriet Shorr at Pelavin, Magnus von Plessen at Barbara Gladstone.

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