LAILA PEDRO, BARRY SCHWABSKY and ROBERTA SMITH join DAVID COHEN to discuss

Frank Bowling: Make It New
Alexander Gray Associates, 510 West 26 Street, New York alexandergray.com

Charline von Heyl: New Work
Petzel, 456 West 18th Street, New York petzel.com

Yasumasa Morimura: In the Room of Art History
Luhring Augustine Bushwick, 25 Knickerbocker Avenue, Brooklyn luhringaugustine.com

Pope.L: One thing after another (part two)
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, New York miandn.com

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LAILA PEDRO, BARRY SCHWABSKY and ROBERTA SMITH join DAVID COHEN to discuss

Frank Bowling: Make It New
Alexander Gray Associates, 510 West 26 Street, New York alexandergray.com

Charline von Heyl: New Work
Petzel, 456 West 18th Street, New York petzel.com

Yasumasa Morimura: In the Room of Art History
Luhring Augustine Bushwick, 25 Knickerbocker Avenue, Brooklyn luhringaugustine.com

Pope.L: One thing after another (part two)
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, New York miandn.com

artcritical.com/reserve

Explore the archives: This will be Roberta Smith‘s tenth appearance on The Review Panel, Barry Schwabsky‘s sixth, and Laila Pedro‘s second. Podcasts go back to the series’ debut at the National Academy Museum in 2004 and can be accessed here at artcritical. Here are the most recent appearances of the October guests:

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For the final meet up of its tenth anniversary season at the National Academy Museum,  it looks like some scratching and biting can be expected at The Review Panel. Power critics Christina Kee, Peter Plagens and Roberta Smith will join moderator David Cohen on May 29, and the shows they are considering, all downtown for a change, somehow reference or allude to wild beasts. They are “Natalie Frank: The Brother Grimm,” at the Drawing Center, “Rosy Keyser: The Hell Bitch,” at Maccarone; C. “Michael Norton: The Wolf I Feed,” at Brian Morris Gallery and “Buddy Warren, Inc.,” and “Christine Rebet: Paysage Fautif at Bureau.” Let’s see if fur flies.

Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm at The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, 212 219 2166
Rosy Keyser: The Hell Bitch at Maccarone,  630 Greenwich Street, 212 431 4977
C. Michael Norton: The Wolf I Feed at Brian Morris Gallery and Buddy Warren, Inc., 171 Chrystie Street, 347 261 8228
Christine Rebet: Paysage Fautif at Bureau, 178 Norfolk Street, 212 227 2783

The post From the archives: Peter Plagens in 2015, with Christina Kee and Roberta Smith appeared first on artcritical.

“Did you really call Roberta Smith a Dalek last night?” painter Kyle Staver, who was in the audience for the first night of The Review Panel at Brooklyn Public Library, asked moderator David Cohen on Facebook Wednesday morning. She was referring to the formidable New York Times critic and thus doubting her memory.  It was standing room only in the 220-seat Dweck Cultural Center on February 9, and by the end of the presentation the crowd was still animate with ideas as debate spilled out into a frigid Eastern Parkway.

What occasioned the strange pop cultural remark had nothing to do with the Doctor Who robots’ infamous “Exterminate, Exterminate” – although that might be some people’s misconception of the role of art criticism. What occasioned the remark instead was the on-stage seating arrangement. At the library artcritical ditched the “Politburo-style” set up, as Cohen called it, with speakers lined up behind a table, the format familiar in the panel’s first decade at the National Academy, Instead, speakers were given snazzy swiveling office chairs that made it easier to sweep around and watch the videos for the shows under review – Glenn Ligon at Luhring Augustine Bushwick, Charles Harlan at Pioneer Works in Redhook, and Katherine Bradford and Elisabeth Kley at CANADA on the Lower East Side. The seating was good for chemistry, that brew of consensus and dissent that is The Review Panel. Cohen’s other guests were novelist and nonfiction writer Siri Hustvedt and artist Alexi Worth. But as the evening wore on, the Times co-chief critic progressively rolled into a private corner, occasioning Cohen’s irreverent remark.

Judgements defied expectations, according to another Brooklyn artist, Brenda Zlamany, who attended a welcoming party in honor of artcritical at the Gallery at 1GAP over the street from the library. She had fully expected a love-in for studio neighbor Bradford, an artist with almost cult status in the Williamsburg scene, and was more worried for old college friend Ligon, who in his exhibition was venturing into split screen video for the first time. But there was equivocation from some towards Bradford’s largest canvases to date whereas speakers fell over each other in praise of Ligon’s subtle, novel take of a Richard Pryor performance. And there were as many remarks about Pryor as Ligon from a much exercised audience during the half-time open mic.  The podcast, due soon, will reveal all.

Up next in the series, March 8, are renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers joined, in their series debuts, by painter-critics Laurie Fendrich and longtime Brooklyn resident David Salle. They will be tackling Amy Sillman, Karen Kilimnik, Cameron Rowland and Mika Tajimo (for show titles and venue details, see the flyer below). The best way to ensure a seat in what will be an extra-crowded event during Armory week is to use the library’s ticketing service: brownpapertickets

The post Hot Gossip: Brooklyn and The Review Panel are Apparently an Item appeared first on artcritical.

For the final meet up of its tenth anniversary season at the National Academy Museum,  it looks like some scratching and biting can be expected at The Review Panel. Power critics Christina Kee, Peter Plagens and Roberta Smith will join moderator David Cohen on May 29, and the shows they are considering, all downtown for a change, somehow reference or allude to wild beasts. They are “Natalie Frank: The Brother Grimm,” at the Drawing Center, “Rosy Keyser: The Hell Bitch,” at Maccarone; C. “Michael Norton: The Wolf I Feed,” at Brian Morris Gallery and “Buddy Warren, Inc.,” and “Christine Rebet: Paysage Fautif at Bureau.” Let’s see if fur flies.

Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm at The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, 212 219 2166
Rosy Keyser: The Hell Bitch at Maccarone,  630 Greenwich Street, 212 431 4977
C. Michael Norton: The Wolf I Feed at Brian Morris Gallery and Buddy Warren, Inc., 171 Chrystie Street, 347 261 8228
Christine Rebet: Paysage Fautif at Bureau, 178 Norfolk Street, 212 227 2783

The post May 2015: Christina Kee, Peter Plagens and Roberta Smith with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

Roberta Smith begins her review of “The Production Line of Happiness,” the Christopher Williams retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, by describing one of Williams’ photographs as an “act of elegant iconoclasm.” Based on her explanation and the exhibition itself, though, Williams more accurately represents a smug iconophilia. The photograph in question features a sliced-open wide-angle lens made by the renowned German manufacturer, Carl Zeiss AG. In the image, we see the lens’ “guts,” as Smith calls them, laid out in a pristine description of the device’s inner workings. Smith continues that, “Mr. Williams produced a big color close-up of a cross section that is as formal as an official oil portrait, as alluring as a high-end fashion shot and yet as startlingly exotic as an image from National Geographic.” This statement is problematic for a couple reasons. First, I like to think that we are past the knee-jerk reaction to compare photography to painting, as though photography still doesn’t have its own history of highly skilled execution, as exemplified by Williams’ impressive craftsmanship (or at least the craftsmanship of the studios he employs). Secondly, the exoticism and fetishization that Smith notes amplify the contrived perfection Williams supposedly undermines. He does include a few details that negate the shiny rhetoric of advertisements: an ill-fitting shirt, the dirty soles of a model’s bare feet, the naturally pendulous breasts of a Netherlands Playboy Playmate of the Year. But these slight indiscretions hardly count as subversions of commercial realism.

One reason for the images’ conceptual opacity is Williams’s highly considered use of the visual language of advertising, and what he, in the wall text outside the main exhibition galleries, called a “semiotic reduction” and the “strategic use of ambivalence.” The issue I have with this approach is that, at least in Williams’s case, his ambivalence begets the audience’s ambivalence, whether it is aimed at Williams as an artist, or at the exhibition’s subject matter. In Richard Woodward’s review of the exhibition for the Wall Street Journal, he questions Williams’s claim that the work critiques late capitalist society: “Don’t they actually function here more as promotional ads for the artist himself, proof of his cleverness, such as it is?” Woodward generally writes off Williams as an uninteresting photographer trying too hard to appear smart, and whom he doesn’t feel the need to consider further. This attitude would be fine if there weren’t a dearth of attention given to Williams’s elitist approach to complex issues, for which he offers no real alternative. As such, critics’ tepid dismissal or giddy celebration creates a volatile credulity.

Something I haven’t seen mentioned in the writing on “The Production Line of Happiness,” is the relationship between white masculinity and the otherness of females and non-white males. The only portraits in the gallery are of women (often in “domestic” situations especially those involving bathing) and black men, while white, male fingers hold the camera — the power — both literally in the photographs, and figuratively in the authorship of Williams, a white male. He might say, Of course the images objectify women and “exotic” races, because that’s what advertising does — and that’s what he criticizes in his gesture to mock Capitalism. But the elitism of the exhibition’s presentation contrasted with the pedantic style of the catalog makes his commentary largely inaccessible. The irony would not be so troubling if it weren’t receiving such grand support: “The Production Line of Happiness” occupies half of the 6th floor of the MoMA, which he shares with the exhibition of Henri Matisse’s seminal cutouts, placing him temporarily at the top of the institutional art world. Has the urgency of socially and politically responsible artworks dissolved so much that the curators see no problem in celebrating Williams’s impertinent banalities? Or perhaps they were satisfied that he sits comfortably within the art-historical lineage of his predecessors such as Institutional Critique all-star Michael Asher. How he utilizes this pedigree to contribute to art or culture today is unclear. Just four floors below the Williams spectacle however, I found works that actually do something.

“Robert Gober: The Heart is Not a Metaphor,” organized by Gober and the MoMA’s Anne Tempkin, has room upon room filled with evocative and politically charged works that do not let you turn away from the issues he addresses. Gober’s silk-screened wallpapers of a sleeping white man and a lynched black man stand as a prime antithesis to Williams’s startling combination of sugar coating and ostracizing. Gober plastered the walls of one of the galleries with the repeating pattern of racial injustice to remind us that our history contains the same pattern, regardless of whether or not we want to acknowledge it. Throughout the exhibit, he balances the straightforwardness of his chosen subject matter — sexuality, religion, politics, and the indelible scars they leave on American culture — with the bizarre lyricism of his objects and the materials he used to make them. Gober also embedded within the retrospective a smaller show he curated of works by artists Anni Albers, Joan Semmel, Nancy Shaver, Robert Beck, and Caty Noland. The humility of this gesture — in addition to his numerous curations of other artists’ works in the past — acts as a reminder that we are in this together, and that ambivalence is not an option.

One main difference between Gober and Williams is in the ways they communicate with their audiences. Gober invites empathy and dialogue. Williams delivers a message, which only after complex decoding reveals what he’s really getting at: an often-anticlimactic endeavor. Furthermore, Williams relieves himself of his responsibility as an artist to effectively convey his idea, saying: “Everything is interesting, and if it isn’t interesting, it’s more your inability to activate it.” If that isn’t an emperor exulting his new clothes, then I don’t know what is. Art need not be obvious or definite, but it should be generous in the way it engages its audience. Even if ambivalence is ironic, it perpetuates apathy instead of acting against it. In today’s tumultuous social and political environments, we can’t afford not to care.

The post The Production Line of Credulity: The Rhetoric of Christopher Williams appeared first on artcritical.

discussing exhibitions of  David Adamo and James Castle at Peter Freeman, Inc; David Adamo at Untitled Gallery; Anna Betbeze at Kate Werble;  Matthew Day Jackson at Hauser & Wirth; and Nan Swid at Margaret Thatcher Projects.

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artcritical.com and the hosts of The Review Panel and The Review Panel Philadelphia – the National Academy Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, respectively – have announced speakers and dates for 2013 and 2014.  The panel discussion series, founded and moderated by David Cohen, enters its ninth year in New York and its second in Philadelphia.

At each event, four critics join Cohen to discuss current exhibitions the audience has had the chance to see ahead of time.  The October 4 line-up at the National Academy sees the return of three past participants in the series: critic and NYU professor Ara Merjian, New York Times co-chief critic and Review Panel regular Roberta Smith and painter and writer Stephen Westfall.  They join Cohen to review shows of David Adamo, Anna Betbeze, Matthew Day Jackson and Nan Swid.

Matthew Day Jackson’s show, titled “Something Ancient, Something New, Something Stolen, Something Blue”, opened Thursday night (September 6) at Hauser & Wirth’s Chelsea space, 511 West 18th Street.  David Adamo is the subject of two shows under review: a solo at Untitled, 30 Orchard Street, opening tomorrow (September 8) and a two-person show with legendary outsider artist James Castle, opening tonight at Peter Freeman, Inc., 140 Grand Street.  Also opening tonight in Soho is Anna Betbeze at Kate Werbel, 83 Vandam Street.  The fourth artist, Nan Swid, opens at Margaret Thatcher Projects, 539 West 23rd Street, September 19.

The Review Panel and The Review Panel Philadelphia are recorded for later podcast.  The June 2013 panel featuring Eva Díaz, Ken Johnson and Chloé Rossetti, for example, is posted here.

The Philadelphia season launches October 16 with panelists Tom Csaszar, Donald Kuspit and Edith Newhall.  The exhibitions under review will be confirmed presently.

The New York series sees a number of new participants later this year, amongst them the painter and critic Dennis Kardon, whose began writing for artcritical earlier this year; Hrag Vartanian, Editor-in-Chief at the blogzine, Hyperallergic; painter and critic Drew Lowenstein, a longstanding contributor to artcritical; Joseph Wolin, whose writings are familiar to readers of Time Out New York and artforum.com; and veteran critic and curator Saul Ostrow.  In Philadelphia Cohen in joined by locally-based commentators, including Inquirer critic Edith Newhall, returning to the series for a second appearance, along with past contributors to the New York series, who this season include Donald Kuspit, Ariella Budick and Hilarie Sheets.

Here are the complete line-ups for the two series.  The moderator at all events is David Cohen:

The Review Panel, Fridays at 6.30PM, National Academy Museum, 1089 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, New York City.

October 4: Ara Merjian, Roberta Smith and Stephen Westfall

November 1: Faye Hirsch, Stephen Maine and Joan Waltemath

December 6: Becky Brown, Dennis Kardon, and Raphael Rubinstein

January 24: Christina Kee, Hrag Vartanian and Christian Viveros-Faune

March 7: Nora Griffin, Drew Lowenstein, and Barry Schwabsky

April 4: Colleen Asper, Donald Kuspit and Joseph Wolin

May 2: Stephanie Buhmann, Mario Naves and Saul Ostrow

The Review Panel Philadelphia, Wednesdays at 6:00PM, Pennsylvania Academy for the Fine Arts, 118 North Broad Street at Arch Street, Philadelphia

October 16:, Tom Csaszar, Donald Kuspit, Edith Newhall

November 13: Astrid Bowlby, Ariella Budick, Philip Glahn

February 19: Monica Amor, Jennie Hirsh, Kevin Richards

April 16: Edward Epstein, Hilarie Sheets, Stuart Shils

The post REVIEW PANEL NEWS: Line-Up for 2013/14, New York, Philadelphia appeared first on artcritical.

Joining Moderator David Cohen to review shows of Diana Al-Hadid at Marianne Boesky Gallery, Mernet Larsen at Vogt Gallery, Gerhard Richter at Marian Goodman Galley and Andrea Zittel at Andrea Rosen Gallery

The post September 2012: Ariella Budick, Roberta Smith and Marjorie Welish with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

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Svletlana Alpers, Roberta Smith, and Christian Viveros-Faune joined David Cohen to discuss the 2010 Whitney Biennial.

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