October 2, 2019 – April 5, 2020
Bankside, London SE1 9TG
tate.org.uk

American exceptionalism is a very real phenomenon, but it far too often obscures a British exceptionalism and a very British obliviousness to history. Whereas America is notorious around the world for its geography skills, that antagonism of history – crystallised through the struggles for civil rights – has long been in the public consciousness, however unwelcome it might be. Few people in Britain are so keenly aware of their own country’s actions, of Oliver Cromwell’s massacres in Ireland (in Britain he’s instead remembered for banning mince pies), of the East India Company, of the Opium Wars, of dividing and redividing the world according to its designs. 

Entering Tate Modern and being greeted, in the distance, by Walker’s Fons Americanus (2019) – the 2019 Hyundai Commission for the Hall – is almost overwhelming. In the Turbine Hall you’re first met with Shell Grotto (2019), a large, water-borne shell, reminiscent of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1486), standing at the front of the Hall. But the goddess herself is absent, and instead a young boy’s head is overcome by waves at the shell’s bottom as he gazes into the sky; instead of the contained swirl of water that circles the shell and the feet of Venus in Botticelli’s painting, there is a boy drowning with tears running down his face.

Venus, absent from her stage, is at the head of Fons Americanus itself, at the back of the Turbine Hall. Whereas on top of the Victoria Memorial, which informed Walker’s piece, is a gilded personification of victory, wings and all, above a seated statue of Victoria herself flanked by truth and justice, here Venus is throwing back her arms and baring her breasts as water flows from them as easily as from her neck – downward past a caricature of Victoria flanked by a hanging tree, a ship’s captain, and a slaver. As a gift “to the heart of an Empire that redirected the fates of the world,” the didactic accompanying the 42-foot-tall statue reads, it not only “redirected the fates of the world” but also sharks’ migratory patterns to follow the British slave ships of the Middle Passage. 

“This is a piece about the oceans and seas, traversed fatally,” says Walker in her profile for the Tate, as an allegory of the Black Atlantic. And so, in the first of the two pools at the bottom of the fountain beneath Victoria and the slavers, instead of the proud bows of ships at the base of the Victoria Memorial we see sharks encircling slaves as they struggle to stay afloat. 

The lowest level of the fountain is sparser, with fewer figures. Here the sculptures are more expressionistic, with one figure resembling a Kathe Kollwitz woodcutting through its distress and mournfulness; another has a face that mirrors the anguish of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), as it’s hounded and harassed by a figure with a haircut suspiciously similar to Donald Trump’s. But Trump is only a small part of the fountain, as much as he is a small part of US and British imperialism.

Rianna Jade Parker, writing in ARTnews, is right in asking whether British artists would be commissioned on such a project, and be given the same resources and international stage that is granted to an American artist here – recalling that Boris Johnson’s promise in 2008 for a bronze statue memorializing the victims of British slavery went unfulfilled. Would another work by a British artist be more nuanced than Walker’s Fons Americanus, she asks, highlighting Walker’s misunderstanding of British history when Walker says slavery never happened on British soil – even failing to recognize the Tate’s own foundations that were built on slavery, and so failing to meet the criteria of the Hyundai commission that is to create a site-specific work for the Tate’s Turbine Hall. Had a British artist been commissioned to undertake this project, Parker writes, it would have been an opportunity to build and publicize a British discourse around race and slavery that is distinct from the American experience. But Walker herself deserves more credit.

Rather than an “an unnuanced portrayal of a subject Walker doesn’t know enough about,” as Parker claims, Walker recognizes the function of monuments and memorials beyond their official purpose. In discussing the forgettability of monuments, Walker describes first seeing the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace on her way to the airport, taking photographs in passing, and then promptly forgetting about it. “There’s this very peculiar quality that they have of being completely invisible,” she tells the Tate in a promotional video. “The larger they are, in fact, the more they sink into the background.”

And so Walker’s monument, contrary to Parker’s claim, does “what any good statue should – deal with its site and the context surrounding it.” Rather than adding another monument into the public that sits beside those like the Victoria Memorial, Nelson’s Column, or the Diana Memorial Fountain, any monument sanctioned by a British government that is headed by a notorious racist and which still fails to address basic inequality would have rung hollow. And so this is not a “counter” memorial but a negative memorial, a memorial to that failure and unfulfilled promise. When Parker “wonders whether a more introspective version of the monument was possible – and whether Walker was the right person for the job at all,” this refusal to have another memorial sit alongside them is this introspection. 

Walker’s monument then isn’t one that demands that it’s understood, but recognizes – however unjustly – its place in the British psyche. Slavery is thought as a purely American phenomenon that sullies that nation’s history, and which the US must still contend with. Britain instead celebrates its having ended slavery sooner than the US, without, of course, acknowledging its pivotal role in the American slave trade in the first place – and not to mention that its ships were still transporting slaves even after slavery itself was made illegal. It’s seen as an exclusively American problem; a novelty import from America that sits beside all its other cultural artefacts that gives us films about slavery as readily as Mad Men (2007–2015).  

Fons Americanus is a monument against this novelty of the British attitude towards slavery, that recognizes the intransigence of many of its viewers and the history of the country it exists in, presenting, as the didactic reads, “the Citizens of the Old World” and “The Monumental Misrememberings Of Colonial Exploits” in a way that putting a traditional monument a mile down the road from the Victoria Memorial could never achieve.

The post Fons Americanus: Kara Walker at the Tate appeared first on artcritical.

February 2015: Vincent Katz, Martha Schwendener and Christopher Stackhouse

Joining Moderator David Cohen February 13, 2015, at the National Academy Museum, the panelists reviewed exhibitions of Mamma Andersson at David Zwirner, Merlin James at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Titus Kaphar at Jack Shainman Gallery, and Heidi Howard at Nancy Margolis Gallery.

We regret to inform listeners that due to equipment failure the last segment of the event was not recorded; Heidi Howard’s review ends part way through and the audience response to the second half of the program (Kaphar and Howard) was lost. Special thanks to recording engineer Isaac Derfel for defying the odds and saving the bulk of this month’s recording.

The post February 2015: Vincent Katz, Martha Schwendener, and Christopher Stackhouse with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

January 31 to March 2, 2013
530 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-929-2262

Portuguese painter Jorge Queiroz is hot in the pursuit of something new in abstraction.  His show is founded on an original idiom of for the most part organic forms that are captivating and challenging, stimulating the viewer to investigate a seemingly informal but actually highly structured series of paintings. Working in the gray area between realism and abstraction, veering closer to the latter, the artist mixes shapes and colors into rough configurations that contain all manner of formal interest. Faces are laid sideways on the canvas; colors are chosen with something close to abandon. While there is a deliberate choice of freedom bordering on anarchic abandon—and at this point we feel obliged to comment that the tactic is close to cliché—Queiroz nonetheless establishes a niche where he can paint in a process-oriented, unsystematic manner while retrieving what he wants from the past. The implications are clear: we are in need of an idiom which would do justice to the history of painting but which would also show us a way out of excessive reverence for what proceeds us in art.

In the painting Waiting on the Sand (2012), we can see Queroz buld up a figurative tableau on the lower half of the picture: a person in red, holding his hand to his head, while sitting on the sand. Above him, large boulder-like forms in different colors threaten to fall all around him. What is the painting about? Is it a constrained allegory, in which an individual exists at war with nature? Or is it a mere conflation, without extraordinary narrative meaning, of forms and style? It is truly hard to say what is happening in Queiroz’s specialty as a creator of conundrums enigmas past words. His resistance to pure formalism feels contemporary in its implications, just as his attraction to abstract shapes makes the work not only more complicated stylistically, but also less involved with storytelling. H Is for Heads (2012) is an even more complicated abstraction, underscored by various forms that look like they should be legible in a figurative sense, but in fact they never quite are. This amounts to a strategic rule in Queiroz, in which abstraction struggles to move into the realm of a meaningful figuration. The two idioms are never completely at home with each other.

In H Is for Head, we see a painting done with oil stick and vinyl ink on canvas; several inchoate heads can be found on the top of the composition; others are scattered throughout the painting field. A dark-brown blotch holds the center, while a lyric blue occurs on either side of the work. The rest of the canvas contains a complicated mix of forms and colors, accommodating each other none too gracefully. Perhaps the awkwardness in Queiroz’s style shows us that, for the painter, the elucidation of a particular style is a messy affair. It certainly complicates the paintings we see, which are, in the final analysis, rich with intricacies and conundrums that a simple reading of the art won’t solve. Queiroz strives for complexity by mixing formats and roughing up the edges between forms on the canvas—we can see this in The Alphabet (2011), which has a tan-colored, roughly human form on the left. Behind this man-mummy is a broad expanse of an orange background, complete with a dark circle or hole toward the middle of the painting. The orange form curves down on the right, suggesting perhaps a human soldier, but we really can’t ascertain the content of much of what is rendered. With a lot of artists, this might become a tic to worry about, but with Queiroz, real mystery takes place.

The post At War With Nature? Jorge Queiroz at Sikkema Jenkins appeared first on artcritical.

December 9, 2011 – January 25, 2012
530 West 22 Street at 10^th avenue
New York, (212) 929 2262

Trisha Brown’s long, illustrious career as a choreographer and dancer has won her many awards and much recognition. Now age 75, her early work was colored by friendships with Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Rauschenberg, the later artist with whom she collaborated. Her choreography, featured in a video in the gallery shot by Brown herself, is athletic and gently humorous, gaining her an international reputation as an artist of supreme skill and subtlety. She is perhaps not so well known for her performative drawings—works on paper, placed on the floor, that are accomplished while Brown dances with pastels or charcoal in hands or feet, recording her movements on stage. The exhibition consists of these large sheets of paper, shown vertically on the gallery walls, recording Brown’s motions and appearing, rather oddly, like the traces of atomic movement. Relating to the abstract expressionist movement, the works on paper, part of the “It’s a Draw” series, are easily compared to the abstract, richly evocative spectrum of marks and scribbles achieved by Cy Twombly.

It is important to remember, however, that Brown’s drawings reflect a physical activity: the dance performance. While there is a direct correlation between Brown’s dances and the marks she makes on paper, the relations between the two are resolutely abstract—we cannot reconstruct the dance from the marks alone. This uncertainty actually becomes an advantage in Brown’s hands, in large part because the drawings belong to the idiom of the New York School, which gives the artist a context in addition to the defining but invisible circumstances to which the marks refer. The result is a marvelous tension between the drawings’ origins and the way they are actually seen: the works quite literally mark actions occurring over time, so that there is a fourth dimension to what Brown is doing. Like many successful ideas in art, the concept of registering motion is simple but generates an esthetic of considerable complexity. The drawings therefore may be said to possess two lives—one as a record of dancing, a different artistic activity; and another as a sequence of independent drawings belonging to the tradition of the New York School.

Most of the drawings in the show are remarkably large, with their squiggles, smudges, and blotches pinning down the memory of actual movement occurring in real time. Oddly, but beautifully, there is a moment when the memory of the dance performance and the performance of the drawing merge in an action-based insight of which the visionary John Cage would have entirely approved. Viewers must remember that Brown’s career as a dancer spans more than just one generation and argues for a tradition of alternative art; this small but genuine history gives Brown the context she needs, while the drawings themselves build whimsical structures that actually refer to the dancer’s body and its expressiveness. In the first work of the suite Untitled (London), 2003, most of the linear activity is occurring in the lower half of the composition, with the scrawls building some sort of structure.

The intelligence of the work is not to be denied and can even suggest a certain curiousness, in the sense that Brown was not thinking at all when she made her marks. But even so, it can be acknowledged that the body has its own perceptions, sometimes of acute insight. Untitled (Montpellier), 2002 consists of a suite of the large drawings and there is little stylistic difference between the two groups of works. Despite the visual muttering evident in Brown’s art, the drawings’ integrity wins out because their origins belong to another field. Brown is thus triumphant not in one but in two modes of expression, leading us toward the understanding that complexity can be both personal and publicly compelling when handled intelligently.

The post The Memory of the Dance: Trisha Brown at Sikkema Jenkins appeared first on artcritical.

While the work of the two African American artists Mark Bradford and Kara Walker might not have much in common at first sight – the former being a figurative artist and the latter more of an abstractionist – this show makes a case for it.

The most obvious common denominator is that both artists favor paper as an expressive material. Walker became famous for transforming the 18th and 19th Century practice of cutting paper silhouettes into a contemporary medium.   Bradford, after years of installation work, has turned his focus increasingly towards collage. They both occasionally use text as a compositional element and also their choice of palette – Walker preferring stark black and white contrasts and Bradford large areas of white with occasional color accents- complement each other effectively.

What is more important, however, is that both artists share the ambition to create works that examine cultural and social issues, albeit in very different ways.

Walker draws from history. Exploring hereditary societal and cultural conflicts, her work is one of the most daring and acerbic comments on persisting racial problems. Her most prominent works are complex tableaux which address identity and gender issues, in particular those experienced by African-American women. Her visual vocabulary is rooted in stereotypical Black Americana, mined in part from objects she found in flea markets. In contrast, Mark Bradford studies his more immediate, contemporary surroundings. He collects everyday urban trivia.  His latest works involve billboards, posters, and magazines, for example, which he gathers in his neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. Like Walker, Bradford has an affinity for dense information.  His compositions are made of multiple layers, which he often distresses and abstracts through the act of sanding and scraping. Under this treatment, the posters and signs become abstracted layers of color. He literally aims to peel away the layers of information to see what is hiding underneath. To Walker and Bradford alike, density of visual information is an aesthetic choice that mirrors the mutliple layers of reality and complexity retrieved from subject matter.

In this restrained, elegant exhibition, works by the two artists are interspersed, allowing the audience to repeatedly compare the artists side by side. It is Walker, however, whose selection of works comes as a bit of a surprise. Rather than mounting another of her signature wall installations, Walker has selected panels in which her cutout figures are mounted on painted backgrounds, as well as paper sculptures and two videos featuring silhouette puppets for this show. While her oeuvre by nature is much more provocative and controversial than Bradford’s, who strives for compositional harmony and a sense of ethereality, this exhibition shows a subdued version of her bite.  It almost seems as if the usual tone and physicality of her work was adjusted in order to bridge the gap between the two artists. Though her efforts on panel are far from disenchanting, they lack the immediate impact of her black and white tableaux. Rather than being enveloped by a whirlwind of gruesome images of rape and lynching scenes, the viewers will find themselves studying more harmless depictions of ghosts and figures.

While the pairing of two of this gallery’s most prominent artists makes for an interesting comparison, it is hard to overlook that it is the artists’ careers that have just as much in common. Both rose fast in the art world. They both have already exhibited extensively in the museum circuit, including solo shows for each at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY in 2007 (Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love and Neither New Nor Correct: New Work by Mark Bradford). They are both in their forties, (Walker was born in 1969 and Bradford in 1961) and they both have received a so-called “genius” awards from the MacArthur Foundation, Walker in 1997 and Bradford this year.

Though Walker enthusiasts will appreciate the opportunity to see some of her works in the gallery, they will find themselves craving more. Ultimately, the exhibition is a showcase for Bradford, who as the lesser known of the pair, succeeds in holding his own and leaving a solid impression.

The post Mark Bradford and Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post Shahzia Sikander at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. appeared first on artcritical.

on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co, 530 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212 929 2262, until January 10, 2009

Josephine Halvorson’s small oil paintings are diminutive delights. Their breezy infatuatedness would bring Karen Kilimnik to mind were it not that Halverson’s love affair is with the actual rather than the nostalgic, sparking a true painterly tension between real-life things and their pigment-and-oil existence. In Memento Mori cropped tombstone text fills the canvas, and Crumbs presents just that – lovingly painted remnants of a meal. Within the boundaries of a canvas, eclectic details of our surroundings come to constitute a world unto itself.

This was an artcritical PIC in November 2008.

The post Josephine Halvorson at Sikkema Jenkins & Co appeared first on artcritical.

MERLIN JAMES: Paintings of Buildings
Sikkema Jenkins & Co until January 12
530 West 22nd, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212-929-2262

Merlin James and Thomas Demand – whose current solo shows face each other on West 22nd Street – might seem as different as two contemporary artists can be: One a poetic charmer, the other an austere, highly cerebral photo-conceptualist.

But a coincidence of means begs a comparison between shows of overtly contrastive mood and artworld temper.  For both artists make their final images  — small-scale easel paintings in acrylic in the case of Mr. James, a photographic installation in the case of Mr. Demand – from models of their own making.  And both use buildings, though neither is concerned with architecture per se. The way models play a role in the precarious interchange of perceived reality and encouraged artifice constitute a specifically contemporary attitude towards subject matter.

Mr. Demand’s installation is titled “Yellowcake” after the colloquial term for the enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons. His subject is the “Nigergate” affair that undermined a casus belli for the invasion of Iraq, when the authenticity of paperwork that was considered proof of Sadaam Hussein’s attempts to procure the minerals from Niger was brought into question and related to a robbery of stationery and seals from the embassy of Niger in Rome.

Mr. Demand’s modus operandi entails recreating physical places with paper models with considerable exactitude – though not disguising that they are indeed models. He then photographs in large format images with willfully bland, neutral, lighting. His procedure, in a way, is a pun on “documentary” as the models are made of paper, from which documents are often made. In this case, the politics of the situation adds a further spin to the artist’s habitual concern with the exchange between fact and artifice.

For Mr. Demand’s show, the 303 gallery has been painted an institutional gray, and the photographic tableau printed so that the depicted spaces are effectively life-sized. The Niger embassy is situated in a Fascist-era office building located between the Vatican and the 1930s Olympic Village. As befits a Thomas Demand project, it exudes non-descript generic modernism. The photographs, like the models and the source of inspiration, are at once elegant and austere.  Mr. Demand is clearly influenced by Bernd and Hilla Becher, the serial photographers of typologies of building structure, who taught at the Dusseldorf Academy where Mr. Demand studied sculpture. The C-print “Embassy II” (2007), for instance, mixes conceptual art’s matter-of-factness with consummate artistry in the way it crops the composition of a banister, the glimpse of hallway, and the entrance to the embassy premises. The image both services a sense of place, and, at the same time, creates a near-abstract arrangement of planes.

Other images depict the depopulated offices as they might have appeared on the day of the historically momentous robbery, with shots of the national flag hanging on the exterior balcony or in the lobby, and the disheveled desk from which the stationery was stolen. The images, however, only really start to become sinister when you know the backstory. Left to their own devices, they would simply be bland, in a cute, dinky way.

Unlike the central, causal relationship between final image and constructed model in Mr. Demand’s work, the relationship of model to painting in Merlin James is incidental and occluded. In fact, the viewer might only know that some of his paintings of buildings are modeled on the artist’s own dollhouse-like constructions from the gallery poster that shows the artist alongside a table of them in his studio. But what the viewer does pick up is a marked sense of artifice within the painted image, if not the source or the artist’s perception of it.

Mr. James’s exhibition is his third in New York in the last two years: He was the subject of a retrospective overview at Sikkema Jenkins in 2005, and earlier this year the New York Studio School presented his transcriptions of old master paintings, a show (organized by this critic) which also included work dating from the outset of his career. Even the present, thematically-focused show includes old work. An evident aversion to a concentration on new work is of a piece with the artist’s refined sense of slow deliberation, and of art that feeds on different pasts – the artist’s own, the medium’s, and, in this case, the lived-in weather-worn buildings themselves.

Mr. James’s paintings are loveable in their quirkiness, but nonetheless willfully difficult: he wants to paint in bright, cheery colors, but insists on working unwieldy acrylic paint and various textured materials to get there. His palette is often muted to the point of muddiness; forms are obscured; the handwriting perfunctory. He is the kind of artist who lives his oxymorons — surfaces are painstakingly spontaneous, images are tortuously slight.

Rather like Mr. Demand, Mr. James pays attraction to generic modernism as a loaded motif. Mr. James prefers vernacular buildings over landmarks, but with a poignant attachment to them as specific places — one painting, indeed, is titled “A House in my Mother’s Hometown.” In some works, “House” (2008), for instance, a simple box-like structure denoting a modern house is filled in with childlike primary colors as if the motif is demanding a more modernist solution to the construction of the painting than in, say, the more romantic or impressionist approaches to older buildings and landscapes. It is as if Modernism itself is a subject of nostalgia.

A difference between Mr. Demand and Mr. James might come down to their individual mix of intention and temperament, but neither is a caricature of the hot romantic or the cool conceptualist.  Mr. Demand’s precise, calculated coldness has political pertinence and its own kind of poetry, while Mr. James’s warm expressivity is no less cerebral, deliberated, or concerned with what it signifies.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 13, 2007 under the heading “Model Agencies”

The post Thomas Demand at 303 Gallery and Merlin James at Sikkema Jenkins & Co appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201583464″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

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.

The post November 2007: Arthur Danto, Vincent Katz, and Linda Yablonsky with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, January 11, 2007under the title “A Nostalgia for Radical Inquiry”

Two of the three artists in this exhibition share the distinction that, as often as not, their solo efforts are mistaken for group shows, anyway. James Hyde works simultaneously in a variety of directions; whether taking the form of wall relief, free-standing sculptural object, furniture, or treated photographs, however, he insists on describing himself as a painter.  And though disparate in medium and look, his bodies of work do test the boundaries of painting—color adhering to structure is always a feature.  His art is often compared to the French 1960s Support-Surface group of minimal abstractionists for its formalist antics, its play with language.

By contrast, the neo-romantic Saint Clair Cemin is unlikely to be accused of formalism: His output often strays along such contradictory paths as elegaic classicism, a primitivism invested with sympathetic magic, and a hi-tech aesthetic.  The critic Donald Kuspit has named him an artist of bisociation.

On this occasion, however, the works by which these artists are represented remains relatively focused.  The appropriation art of the third member of the troika, Mr. Cemin’s fellow Brazillian Jac Leirner, revels in a tongue-in-cheek semiotics  that bridges Mr. Cemin’s hermeticism and Mr. Hyde’s language games.  Ironically, therefore, the three-person show can be mistaken for one man’s retrospective.

Thus, three conceptually consonant categories of object come to cohabit the main, central gallery at Sikkema, Jenkins: vitrine-contained painting construtions by Mr. Hyde, vaguely science fair-like sculptural balls by Mr. Cemin, and a wall-hanging of museum store bags by Ms. Leirner.

“Weights and Heats” (2006) by Mr. Hyde has a glass box tilted at a diagonal to the wall at 8 foot by just over five foot, and 17-1/2 inches deep; this pristine, meticulously fabricated vitrine accommodates an artfully messy arrangement of papers, stretches of fabric, and paint.  The paint is applied in varying thicknesses to the glass support and also adheres to, or reaches across, the appropriated materials.  The vitrine does theatrically emphasized double-duty as surface and support, container and contained.

The sense of wayward energy compacted can put the viewer in mind of John Chamberlain’s crushed car-parts, while the controlled anarchy recalls Robert Rauschenberg’s early Combines.  But the color and movement both have a chirpiness that keeps them free of existentialist connotations. But somehow, miraculously, such critical self-consciousness doesn’t cramp their sly exuberance.

In a way, his vitrined painting format (also adopted in two other 2006 works here, “Catalytic” and “Rotational”) relates to the almost ubiquitous use of vitrines in conceptual and neo-conceptual work, whether of Joseph Beuys, Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst.  By tipping his vitrines and having the paint adhere to the glass as support, Mr. Hyde both plays on this cool, distancing convention of  the vitrine, and subverts it, insisting that the glass box, like exposed canvas, has a life of its own.

Mr. Cemin has five identically shaped sculptures in different colors—four in polyester resin, colored blue, green, white, and yellow, the fifth in stainless steel—each titled “Supercuia” (2006). A monumental version of the same sculptural form is installed permanently in a park in Brasillia. In the gallery versions, these enigmatic balls are each around 46 inches diameter.  With breast-like forms protruding at equal points, they come across as oversized models of some molecular structure—thus their collided mix of the hi-tech, in their finish and symmetry, and the biological, in their organic point of inspiration (the breast-form, it transpires, though perfectly neat and regular like a laboratory vessel, is actually based on a gourd).

Just as Mr. Cemin’s somewhat romantic synthesis of the organic and the mechanical begins to relate to Mr. Hyde’s collision of the wayward and the contained, along comes Ms. Leirner, to remind the company that it is just art that’s being talked about.  Her “144 Museum Bags” (2006) arranges its titular content in a neat grid, suspending the flat, empty, but slightly crumpled, and thus obviously used bags along plastic coated steel cable.  She is evidently well-traveled—a sophisticated bag lady—with souvenirs of galleries across the UK (lots of Tate purple, for instance), the US, and as far afield as Denmark and Israel.  These are freely arranged with chroma not geography as the guiding principle, creating wave patterns of color from these unlikely digits.  Her aesthetic offers, like her male counterparts, both a collision of cultures: The bags have a jocular, personal element, but the order to which they are subjected recalls the Constructivism prevalent in Brazil in the 1950s, with its love of grids and systems. Like Mr. Hyde, with his throwback to French structuralist abstraction of the 1960s, and Mr. Cemin, whose syntheses and bipolarities are redolent of 1940s artists who fused Surrealism and abstraction, Ms. Leirner presents a nostalgia for the radical inquiry of yesteryear.

The post Saint Clair Cemin, James Hyde, Jac Leirner at Sikkema Jenkins & Co appeared first on artcritical.