Carol Rhodes depicts what have been called “edgelands,” the environmentalist Marion Shoard’s term for the kind of non-descript terrains given over to transit, storage, mineral extraction, reservoirs and landing strips. Landscapes never given back to nature, these are places defined by human exploitation rather than habitation. Rhodes is a “realist” in the sense of the acuteness of her politics and the unsentimental report of her gaze. But her compositions are also inventions, made up non-sites conjoining disparate details from the aerial photographs that are her source material.

Literally as well as metaphorically, she paints in no man’s land, an “edgeland” of categories that is at once documentary and fictional, idealized and anti-idealist. Despite the relentless quotidian drabness of the world she describes, her paintings are caprices of sorts, making her perhaps a latter-day Canaletto, one shot through with something of the ethos of Robert Smithson. At once delicate and diffident, composed and plain spoken, her paintings hover between the prosaic and the metaphysical.

Looking at a reproduction of Airport, 1995, one of two paintings by the artist in the Tate collection, there is a peculiar back and forth between empathetic, brushy, emotionally invested-in passages of scrubland or the delicately-insisted upon shadows of walkways, on the one hand, and the almost schematic monochrome of unusable lawns caught in the loops of runways and service roads and a uniformly dispatched stretch of tarmac, on the other, as if the distance and perhaps implied movement of the observation point has vision teetering between reduction and specificity.

Despite the composite, impersonal fictions that she generates, there is an oddly loving sense of the observed about these always handmade-feeling, modest sized, faux-plein-air oils on board. A better comparison than Canaletto, therefore, might be the 18th-century Welsh painter of Neapolitan backstreets, Thomas Jones. Like him, she delights in strange moments of tenderness and surprise in the relationships of form she uncovers, although where Jones homes in upon “pleasing states of decay” (in English painter John Piper’s felicitous phrase) Rhodes pulls back to the bland despondency of damage done on an industrial scale. Her bird’s eye perspective ought to be distant enough to reduce any details to near abstract alloverness, and yet there is often a dainty, toy like sense of the contained in the anonymous functional structures that populate her unpeopled vistas.

Born in Edinburgh in 1959 and raised in India where her parents were missionaries, Rhodes based herself in Glasgow. She was active in a burgeoning group of artists centered on Transmissions, the cooperative gallery of which she was a founder, and the Glasgow School of Art, where she taught for many years. Illness in the last several years has curtailed her output, and she was, in any event, a fastidious and notoriously slow producer, and yet, as Skira’s fulsome, handsomely produced monograph demonstrates, she is leaving the world a thoughtful, deeply original body of work, one that evolved over the course of a highly industrious career. In addition to a dialogue with the artist by her longstanding dealer, Andrew Mummery, who edited the volume, the book has essays by Moira Jeffrey, who places the oeuvre in art historical and political contexts, and Lynda Morris, who takes a biographical approach, considering the impact on the young artist of a screening at elementary school of a moon landing, for instance, and the social perspective engendered by her Indian childhood. The book includes a number of reproductions of preparatory cartoons, quite startling images in their own right that Rhodes has previously been reluctant to exhibit. All in all, this very welcome publication will enrich appreciation of a singularly remarkable artist.

Carol Rhodes. Published by Skira Editore (Lausanne, 2018). Edited by Andrew Mummery, with contributions by Carol Rhodes, Moira Jeffrey and Lynda Morris. 196pp. 116 color illustrations. ISBN 885723814. €41

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February 17 to March 31, 2018
54 Franklin Street at Cortlandt Alley (between Broadway and Lafayette Street)
New York City, postmastersart.com

In Perry Hoberman’s Suspensions, detritus collected from an abandoned town in the California desert is assembled into bungee-corded chains hung from the Postmasters ceiling. Rather like refrigerator magnet poems, each “suspension” conforms to something bordering on syntax in its assemblage of small to medium sized objects: flattened toys and rusty cans, orphaned gears and transistors; shiny round things; jagged, plastic things. A portion of the gallery is given over to hanging, scroll-like digital prints of the same objects in silhouette. Individual chains have mordant titles like Low Credit Risk and Pinched Nerve Jamboree, and do not seem overly concerned with sculptural or taxonomic rigor. But nonchalance flips to obsessive literality when the visitor puts on one of the virtual reality headsets placed around the installation. Each suspension has been mapped and recreated in digital space, with scores of individual objects, each corresponding in shape, surface detail and location to the physical ones in the gallery. Yet the differences are striking: with the motion-sensitive headsets projecting a stereoscopic view exactly synchronous to the turning of one’s head, the viewer notices first of all that one nearby digital Suspension jiggles like a child needing to pee, while others swing slowly like porch hangings in a breeze, naturalistic gravity and bungee bounce having been modeled into the virtual dynamics. In the really real world of the gallery all remains decorously still, but the viewer is likely to remove the goggles again and again in order confirm the fact.

That is only the beginning, however, of this “non-trip to a Non-site,” to use a typically open-ended phrase of Robert Smithson’s, whose ideas about 3-D mapping, displacement, landscape as quarry, the neutral abstraction of the gallery, and much more seem pertinent to both the critical and the visionary polarities of Hoberman’s practice. With goggles back in place, the gallery walls unfold like, well, a white box. The suspensions now hang weirdly from an infinite blue sky, and a stark, barely differentiated desert panorama is available if you spin your view. The ground drops away as you look down, then piles of rock float underfoot and one fears to take a step. Projective geometry hems you in. A stereoscopic slideshow plays haphazardly behind the confabulated digital sculptures hanging in the foreground. You can walk into the slides, towards a recurring giant who traverses the barren landscape and explores the decaying innards of cheap, prefabricated homesteads. The giant is the artist himself, and the strange scale shift an effect endemic to 3-D VR, which fixes the viewer, unlike in cinema, at an absolute location, which in this case is the end of Hoberman’s selfie stick.

Hoberman is an artist/researcher who has been on the circuit-building front lines of a wide range of simulation technologies since the 1980s. He currently teaches and leads study labs at the University of Southern California and consults on the development of VR systems with rival acronyms (AR, MxR, and MEML, et al.). But if Hoberman is an insider he is a dissident one, a skeptical historian of every dropped thread and wasted opportunity of virtual reality precursors, which in modern times can be said to date to Wheatstone’s invention of stereoscopic drawing in 1838. Hoberman has proposed recreating Daguerre’s once-legendary painted and mechanized diorama with digital technology.

Though clearly enraptured by sensory illusion, Hoberman is anything but an uncritical technophile. Previous works have typically programmed computers to malfunction with the banal malevolence of the corporate culture that proliferates with them. A show at Postmasters in 2003 included a digital still from an interactive home screen with a pop-up window reading, “Security forces have been alerted, and will be arriving shortly.” Users could mouse-click on three bitterly hilarious options: “Read Me My Rights,” “Call A Taxi,” or “Surrender.”

The hanging shards in Suspensions are garnered from abandoned homes that were sold cheap to military families from a nearby base that has already featured in Hoberman’s work. His recent multimedia collaboration with performance artist Julia Heyward, 29 SpaceTime, delved into the juju of this same desert Non-site with mesmerizing paranoia.

One thing that is, unfortunately, missing from Suspensions is Hoberman’s expertise at vivisecting image and sound. He began his performance activities in the 1980s, collaborating extensively with Laurie Anderson (he was artistic director on the O Superman video, among others), but at Postmasters the only sound accompanying his piece is incidental: an audio bleed from Jillian Mayer’s adjacent installation fills the void plausibly enough with a soothing electronic score. This imposed mood softens Hoberman’s deliberate rough edges and visible seams, which are intended to show us what VR can’t do as much as what it can, and we may miss how the artist is cackling under his breath at an essential absurdity: after all, what is the point of painstakingly simulating garbage? Garbage, what’s more, which is already right here?

The viewer, contemplating the truth of the illusion, may be all the more awed by VR’s transformative potential, as Hoberman surely is. His decades-long quest for sensory engineering could only have been fueled by optimism worthy of a Quattrocento perspectivist, if not by the fevered Wagnerian dream of a totally enveloping artwork. Of course, whether in fascist or rampantly capitalist regimes, gesamtkunstwerken have a way of ending badly, and few dreamers understand so intimately as does Hoberman the inevitability with which visionary artistic research enables corporate bread and circuses. If dark thoughts of interactive shooting games and their full-metal VR counterparts used in mechanized wars of occupation come to mind when you put on the high tech headsets, you’re paying attention.

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December 9, 2016 to January 22, 2017
291 Grand Street, between Eldridge and Allen streets
New York City, jamescohan.com

What is skin color detached from a body?   What is the residue of trauma disambiguated? Such questions came to mind in Byron Kim’s recent exhibition at James Cohan – Lower East Side. Of these stained, dyed and pigmented canvases Kim has said:

The thing that became analogous to me was how much the bruise can look like something celestial. Like photos of deep space taken by telescopes, or from satellites. I am always trying to relate the very small and the vast.

The inspiration of the bruise itself initially emerged from a poem by Carl Phillips (Alba: Innocence), in which Phillips describes sunlight illuminating a bruise on the body of his sleeping lover.

Kim’s work has often taken on subject matter which brings together the macro and the micro, translating the encompassing into a single color or corresponding abstraction. His ongoing series Synecdoche, included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, places 10 by 8 inch painted panels of the skin color of friends and strangers into an ever-reconstituting grid of monochromes. Another body of work, largely from 2010, attempts to capture the exact color of the night sky.

Despite a similar use of abstract imagery to conflate scale, it would be easy to read the physicality of process and distinct materiality in the works exhibited in Mud Root Ochre Leaf Star as somewhat of a departure for Kim, who has traditionally worked in oil paint. Coming out of a group of paintings using pigment on steel, in this new process Kim dyes and stains raw canvas, sometimes many times, with natural dyes and pigments such as indigo, sandalwood and ochre. The paintings, which range in scale from chest to body size, are then rubbed with rags soaked in hide glue and oil.

By negating a distance between the hand and the canvas, Kim gives the paintings both a sense of their own physicality, and a memory of being touched. In Distant Ancient, for instance, the dye has sunk so deeply into the fabric that the weave of the canvas has become as striking a presence as the colors applied to it. In Innocence over Blue, the wrinkles are preserved like veins, emphasizing a relationship to a woundable body. Throughout the installation, one becomes aware of how the unexpected smears – marks of blue, brown, and magenta – speak to an activity of the studio, revealing that these works have emerged from an environment that was neither sterile nor segregated.

It is in how Kim negotiates a response to the activity and unpredictability of process, as well as through his relational subject matter, that I locate these paintings not as a departure at all, but as a translation of a continuing discourse. As a conceptually driven painter, Kim often directs our contemplation to how close looking at specific imagery can begins to intertwine with an endlessly unfolding, often unbounded subject matter. I see this within his efforts to paint the sky, or in how Kim’s paintings of his children’s hair whorls – for example, Whorl (Ella and Emmett) (1997),  not in the current exhibition — could easily be mistaken for galaxies.

In his new works, Kim’s compositional response to material happenstance functions similarly, emphasizing both the literal matter of pigment, and the possibility of something celestial. In Blue Lift Sandalwood Fall, for example, the dye is allowed to fall back on itself, leaving the radiating color to resemble either the haloes of Renaissance saints or the residuals of radiation. When the paintings are installed together, each corresponding stain begins to pulse like the nimbus of a star.

Taking influence from Robert Smithson’s writings on deep time, as well as Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu’s The Inner Chapters, Kim interweaves intimacy with vastness to encompass both the specific (the bruise, the exploding supernova), as well as qualities of non-referential abstraction. A bruise, like the instance at which we are reached by starlight, is the momentary at ease with the continuous. A mark of traumatic happening that is, simultaneously, a sign that the body has begun to heal. When I look at these paintings I feel as if I am able also to diminish the conditions of dichotomy within my own body.

I am given permission to experience the mark of my trauma as trauma, and simultaneously to celebrate my own ability for transformation. My ability to be bruised is a reminder that I am in constant reconfiguration, as is my world, as is my universe- it is our living bodies, not our corpses that visually transform the vestiges of collision. Without simplifying or pacifying violence (just because it is complex, doesn’t mean it isn’t painful), Kim’s paintings bring me to a more empathic understanding of impact.

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Social Ecologies: Curated by Greg Lindquist, at the Gallery at Industry City

December 10, 2015 to February 21, 2016

A contemporary landscape painter himself, curator Greg Lindquist offers in this important exhibition an array of strategies to address the notion of environment, ranging from simply acknowledging a deep connection with the earth to documenting eco-destruction to making art that ventures remedies to the crisis. “Social Ecologies” comes out of Lindquist’s interest in the “intertwined relationship between humans and the natural world [that has existed] for centuries,” as he put it in an essay in the November 2015 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, stressing that we now face an existential crisis brought on by runaway climate change. In fact, humans have been significantly altering the biosphere since the early hunters wiped out the big fauna and agriculture began its slow degradation of the soil stock of the planet. There is no Garden to go back to; humans must create a balance with nature never before imagined or achieved.

The 1970s saw artists exploring new ideas of their relationship with nature.   Robert Smithson introduced an investigation of art and place – and how each informed and identified the other. He took the work of art out of the gallery and located it in an outdoor setting, and at the same time he put a signifier of the natural site into the gallery, thus demonstrating what he called “non-site”. He located his art not just in a natural setting but in the earth itself, penetrating soil and water.

Charles Simonds is represented by enlarged stills from “Birth,” a film in which he symbolically gives birth to himself out of the earth – specifically, the pit in New Jersey where Simonds has for a long time extracted the clay to make his art. Simonds’ art is about culture from the ground up; the ground is essential for the building of culture.

British-born Rackstraw Downes declared he had no “New World sense of the antithesis between unspoiled nature and human culture; a landscape to me is a place where people live and work.” (Quoted by Stephen Maine in “Rackstraw Downes: Infrastructures”, Art in America Nov. 2010.) His pictures are horizontal scans of a view, including finely-tuned details, that construct pictorial space with curved lines creating a picture that feels distorted compared to traditional landscape painting. We are clearly shown that the human vision of nature is anthropocentric. Downes simultaneously makes a passionate pitch for objective empirical reality as he paradoxically displays its biases by curving space to establish the artist’s viewpoint. An art that successfully combines these “oppositions” pins viewers with a double vision that puts the onus on us to form our own understanding of what is going on.

Mary Miss and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, artists who also started working in the 1970’s, represent the land art movement and feminism, both of which critiqued earlier notions of art making its “mark” on nature and instead took a receptive, integrative stance. Along with a younger artist, Ellie Irons, they put their work at the service of natural topologies and human systems. Laderman Ukeles, since 1977 the artist-in-residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation, is represented by her Sanitation Manifesto, 1984 in which she writes poetically as artist, feminist, wife, mother about the responsibilities of “maintenance.”

Miss has built a long career of public sculpture that marries art, nature and humanity, and working collaboratively, an example of which is the South Cove Project at Battery Park. It’s challenging to conveying Miss’s work in a gallery setting, but the small schematic drawing here of a site in Indianapolis does the job nicely. The project employs mirrors and beams of red light to visually connect inhabitants with their streams and waterways. Miss takes in a work site experiencing its geological features, history and surrounds to create a vision that amplifies and harmonizes with Alexander Pope’s conception of the genius loci. Miss has written that Broadway is the “native American ridgeline” and intrinsically important to the experience of Manhattan.

Irons transformed a corner of the gallery into a “sanctuary for weeds” collected from native Bushwick plants.   A helpful booklet explains Why Weeds?: “Co-evolved with humans, they are well-suited to do the tough work of greening a heavily altered anthropogenic landscape.”

Alyson Vieira’s environmentalism lies in her choice of materials and her historicism. She employs baled post-industrial plastics to build giant forms that suggest archaic ruins. Making art using the industrial vernacular material – recycling the recycled – posits a culture that is constantly being built, decaying and then rebuilt. “Natural resources” are no longer timber and stone but plastics that can never break down – themselves by-products of modernity’s life-blood: carbon in its solid, liquid and gas forms.

Alexis Rockman’s Loam, 2008, is a witty painting that can be read both as a cracked tooth being mined by ants in which seedlings are taking root – and a painting from Morris Louis’s Veil series. This is art about layered ecologies: human host, plant and animal parasites – except, it could be asked, who is the ultimate destructive parasite on the planet if not, ironically, the only one capable of making art?

Soviet period bath building, Tsakltubo, a photograph by Georgian artist Gio Sumbadze, examines the recent past showing a crumbling Soviet building overgrown with new vegetation. Soviet-era architecture in an exhibition with these themes might have us thinking Chernobyl and accounts of driving for days through dead forests.   Yet the hopeful note of verdant wild growth pushing through the crumbling concrete in this photograph offers a post-eco-apocalyptic vision akin to Margaret Atwood’s fiction. One is allowed to imagine a future welcoming back the forest and building on the ruins of the old world in an egalitarian, human culture integrated and interdependent with nature.

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In 1967, Robert Smithson took a bus from New York City to Passaic, New Jersey, to investigate the definition of the word “monument.” Instead of any grand structures meant to mark history and stand the test of time, Smithson found significance in the mundane: a bridge, a parking lot, a sandbox. Nearly 50 years later, curator Joseph del Pesco from The Kadist Foundation in San Francisco asked photographer Jason Fulford to read Smithson’s essay, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” and visit Passaic to make photographs, using the essay as a point of departure. Fulford invited writer Hernán Díaz to join him and to create Monument (2015), an online, multi-media photo essay presented on The Kadist’s website.

Fulford’s photographs demonstrate a masterful ability to illuminate uncanny correlations and bizarre banalities of vernacular culture through sequences of otherwise unrelated images. In Monument, the combination of Fulford’s imagery with Díaz’s words exists in a translational loop, where information transitions back and forth between visual, textual, and abstract forms. Whatever manifestation the information takes, it remains anchored to the concepts of codes and ruins. The final sequence in Monument begins with an image of a pharmacy’s façade where an awning and a wall sign both read “Lucy’s Pharmacy.” While one sign is clearly worn and the other is newer, they create an almost perfect redundancy — a visual stutter. Beneath the image, Díaz’s words appear onscreen, typed letter by letter, as a female voice reads a Spanish translation of the text. A few slides later, a question in Spanish types onto a black screen as the same female voice recites the English translation. On the next slide Morse code beeps as it types below an image of a two-dimensional black dog on a stake casting its two-dimensional black shadow on the lawn it ornaments — another visual stutter. The Morse code answers the previous slide’s question:

Q: ¿QUÉ ES LO QUE QUEDA CUANDO NO HAY RUINAS? [trans: “WHAT IS LEFT WHEN THERE ARE NO RUINS?”]

A: … ___ __ . _ …. .. _. __. .._ _. _ ._. ._ _. … ._.. ._ _ ._ _… ._.. .

[“SOMETHINGUNTRANSLATABLE”]

The next and last slide is black and silent, then the whole sequence starts again in an infinite loop of its own.

Monument functions much like a book, albeit a digital one, though without the tacky skeuomorphic designs like animated “page” turning. Instead, Monument translates the qualities of a book into the digital, multi-media platform. In general, reading a book and using a computer are solitary, private pastimes. They can occur in public, but the reader/user focuses on the book or computer, and not her surroundings. Books and the Internet can connect us with billions of other people, and they can freeze time, existing in a temporal limbo when they are closed.

With the seemingly endless torrent of artist websites, blogs, and online magazines, it is easy to ignore — or at least be ambivalent about — the majority of art displayed on the Internet. In almost every case, viewers experience the work through some kind of standardized manner, such as an image carousel, slideshow, or grid. When we click, scroll, and swipe through countless images, how many truly affect us? On its most basic level, Monument is a digital slideshow of images, text, and sound. In this iteration, however, Fulford, Díaz, and Pesco elevate the format’s stale viewing experience to a method that is both novel and nostalgic. As an alternative to the monotonous click- or scroll-through presentation pervading the web-based photo world, Fulford, Díaz, and Pesco developed a dynamic and interactive method that necessitates greater participation and offers a greater reward.

Monument requires decoding, both literally and figuratively, and in this way the project takes full advantage of its digital existence. Fulford and Díaz insisted that the Morse code be copy-pastable so that viewers could translate the anachronistic cipher. Reading Smithson’s essay alongside Monument amplifies the project’s process of re-contextualizing the past within the present, making the essay’s online presence in PDF form a valuable asset (unless you have a copy of the 1967 Artforum lying around). In his essay, Smithson writes about a landscape by Samuel F.B. Morse, and remarks on its lack of finitude: “A little statue with right arm held high faced a pond (or was it the sea?). ‘Gothic’ buildings in the allegory had a faded look, while an unnecessary tree (or was it a cloud of smoke?) seemed to puff up on the left side of the landscape.” Fulford and Díaz continue Smithson’s line of questioning comparison of fabricated binaries: pond/sea, tree/smoke, dots/dashes, zeroes/ones, monument/parking lot. And they propose “Samuel Morse put an end to vastness. With the telegraph, immensity became a ruin.” The telegraph imploded our notions of size and speed in the 19^th century. Today, we can carry infinity in our pockets and the instantaneous speed of digital technology erases the present: the future is immediately translated into the past, a ruin. Monument asks, “What is left when there are no ruins?” A more appropriate question may be “what is left when there is nothing but ruins?”

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Cézanne Site/Non-site was at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, February 4 – May 18, 2014

In this exhibition, curated by the museum’s artistic director Guillermo Solano, two concepts coined by the New York artist Robert Smithson during the 1960s have been used to explore aspects of the landscape and still life paintings of Paul Cézanne. For Smithson “site” was the outdoors and “non-site,” the studio. As well as nearly sixty watercolors and paintings by Cézanne, this exhibition includes twelve paintings by artists associated with him, including Pissaro, Gauguin, Derain and Braque. In 1967 Smithson argued that Cézanne’s formal achievements had been over emphasized — beginning with the Cubists — at the expense of the important relationship he believed the paintings held to location and environment. Although it might actually seem impossible, to overestimate Cézanne’s formal impact on painters who came after him – only two names need be mentioned, Matisse and Picasso – the consideration of the physical context in the production of Cézanne’s painting is indeed very rewarding. The exhibition rigorously explores the dialectic between open air and studio, convincingly demonstrating an eventual synthesis of the hitherto mutually exclusive experiences.   Whereas the impressionists concentrated on landscape alone, Cézanne consistently painted both landscape and still life, eventually seeking to integrate the two, erasing the boundaries  (both imaginary and physical) of inside and outside.

The exhibition has been sub-divided into five parts each addressing specific aspects of this two-way traffic. Portrait of an Unknown Man, which opens the exhibition,presents just a single painting, Portrait of a Peasant, 1905-1906.  One of the last paintings he is known to have completed before his death, the identity of the sitter is unclear and could easily be the artist himself,. Its inclusion illustrates how – given that the wall on which the figure sits is effectively dividing the studio area from the out doors beyond –the subject is situated at the juncture between inside and outside. There is much intermingling between broken brush mark and echoed color: the blue jacket, sky and rocks appear as if made of the same material and are treated across the surface in the same way, conflating distance and proximity. Cézanne appears to be proposing that human beings are just as much part of their environment as other organic elements are.

The point being made in the second section of the exhibition, The Bend in the Road is that rather than use the disappearing road as a means to lure the viewer into the recessive space of landscape, as is traditional in a landscape painting, the exact opposite happens in Cézanne. Rocks or trees block the view effectively closing off distance like a screen. A focusing of the gaze within a shallow picture plane is noted extensively by Michel Foucault in his lectures on Manet (Manet and the Object of Painting,2011) and this rejection of renaissance space and perspective that had already begun in Manet continues with Cézanne. In the studio, the “non-site,” still life is the structural mode.

Nudes and Trees explores the possible equivalence of these motifs. A key difference between the two, however, is that over a period of 30 years, Cézanne never painted a nude from life, in clear contrast with trees.  In the Chestnut Trees of Jas de Bouffan, (1885) with its sequence of trees through which – rather like the shaped, negative spaces between things in Piero della Francesa’s paintings – the relationship between figure and ground is clear but equal, with the ground acting laterally, a shape in itself. His trees can be viewed as sublimated anthropomorphic substitutes, again proposing the simultaneity of man with nature. The Phantom of Sainte-Victoire segment of the exhibition returns to the integration of landscape and still life by identifying the motif of Sainte Victoire in some of the still life paintings. The Buffet (1877-1879) and Stoneware Picher (1890-1893), both have crumpled, raised areas of tablecloth that in their faceted surfaces and silhouettes recall the mountain. Much as in Matisse’s paintings of his studio, the introduction and increasing use of cloth to cover angular forms suggests a desire for a less structured, more fluid subject. The control possible with the intimate space and form of still life rather than the expansive size of landscape is no longer seen as an alternative approach as structures from one can now be found in the other.  This leads directly to the final rooms of the exhibition titled Construction Game.

In still life, Cézanne brought haptic, concentrated and relational qualities to the fore.  Each object is precisely measured and visually placed so as progressively to undermine and transform their relationship, treating the objects and their closed surroundings to the same restless interrogations as geological contours found in mountain and rock surfaces. In the other direction, Cézanne finds equivalence in the use of built structures – houses and walls – when he isolates them like still life elements in the landscape. The house of House in Provence (1885) sits between vertical mountainous background and a horizontal grass foreground as if an object on a tablecloth, surrounded by comparable folds and layers. Smithson’s description of his studio sculptures as “indoor earth works” resonates with this commonality of still life and landscape, generating an unanticipated exchange between Cézanne and an entirely different engagement with landscape on another continent and half a century later.

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July 1 to September 15, 2013

The occasion of my first visit to the Gramsci Monument was a three and a half hour “Art School” led by its creator, the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. I had read his brief text introducing “Energy: Yes! Quality: No!” — the title and doctrine of the workshop — so I knew that each participant would present a work to be judged by this criteria. Skeptical, I stuffed a few loose drawings into a manila folder and set off. I located Forest Houses with the help of my smartphone’s GPS device, first mistakenly wandering around the adjacent McKinley development. I realized at this point that in my thirty years of nearly-continuous residence in New York City, I had walked hurriedly through housing projects only by accident. As I entered Forest Houses not scanning for the nearest exit but intending to stay, I experienced my first sensation that something brand new was happening. And in, of all places, the domain of contemporary art.

Taking my seat in a circle of plastic patio chairs scrawled with the words “Gramsci Monument” in Hirschhorn’s signature thick black Sharpie, I observed my surroundings: a group of mostly 25-35 year-old art types, like myself, and a handful of older folks. Three of the roughly 15 were residents of Forest Houses, and Hirschhorn addressed them familiarly because among the group, only they had participated in the Art School before. After releasing us for 45 minutes so that people who had not brought a work with them could generate one on-site, Hirschhorn began a critique more organized and truly democratic than any I endured while earning my MFA. A work was placed in the center of the circle, and each person answered “Yes” or “No” (with a few phrases of explanation) to the question of whether it contained Energy. By the end, I learned a number of things: 1. I am lot more generous in the assessment of Energy than Thomas Hirschhorn. 2. Judgment is always personal but a sum of judgments can approach the Universal (in other words, Democracy Works!). 3. The condition of Energy is complicated. 4. Judgment is always preceded by assumption. 5. Structural precision, when sustained, can be very productive.

In the following weeks, I attended a number of other events, activities and informal gatherings at the Gramsci Monument: three daily philosophy lectures (with Marcus Steinweg); three weekly Gramsci Seminars (visiting scholars speaking about his work and legacy); one Running Event with Jamar Foster; one Field Trip to Walter’s de Maria’s Earth Room and Broken Kilometer; and one Open Microphone. Events I was sad to miss: the weekly Gramsci Theater (local high school students performing an Absurdist script with philosophers as characters), Fields Trips to Dia: Beacon, Yankee Stadium, the United Nations and Socrates Sculpture Park; and the weekly Poetry Session (Reading and Workshop). To utilize this Monument in its entirety was impossible for any one individual.

Totality and (near) excess characterize the project in a number of aspects: presence, transparency, sincerity and documentation. There are copious photos archived on its extensive website (gramsci-monument.com) including every artwork presented in every Art School over 11 weeks and high-resolution images as part of a press kit downloadable by anyone. These gestures are in stark contrast with fellow Relational artist Tino Sehgal, who famously forbids the circulation of images of his work. Total presence is not just that of the artist, but of a large crew of staff and collaborators (residents and non-residents) whose activities seem to fluctuate between and around these roles. I never once visited the Monument and did not see Hirschhorn himself; Ambassador (and Dia curator) Yasmil Raymond, Art Workshop leader Lex Brown, emcee DJ Baby Dee, a young man relentlessly taking photos, at least one librarian, at least one cook, and various others assisting and/or participating. In addition, there were always residents, visitors, and children utilizing the facility in a range of ways (sometimes a crowd, sometimes a handful; depending on the day): listening to a lecture or performance, reading in the library, painting in the Art Workshop, using the Internet, having lunch, inspecting Gramsci’s slippers, exploring, chatting with friends, playing chess, climbing on jungle-gyms or running through sprinklers. The Monument was a truly multi-use space for a truly multilateral public.

Hirschhorn’s total transparency is manifest in his willingness to talk to whomever will listen about his values and goals in this Monument and beyond, and his wide release of texts which make explicit every aspect of the project’s origins, operations, conceptual framework and philosophical implications. Words that recur in these texts as values and aspirations include: Form, Equality, Resistance, Positiveness, Universality, Energy, Belief. Words that recur as adversaries: Quality, Culture, Tradition, Exclusivity, Identity, Particularism. As well as (surprise!): Collaboration and Participation. (These words, Hirschhorn writes, have a way of diffusing responsibility, which he, as an artist, wishes to fully assume.) His texts match classic manifestos of the 20th century avant-garde in their rhetoric, grandiosity, theatrics, redundancy and revolutionary zeal. He diverges from this tradition (pardon the word), and from most of contemporary art, in his total sincerity. While the classic manifesto is always hyperbolic for dramatic effect, even humorous (recall Hugo Ball performing the Dada Manifesto in his cardboard hat and cape), Hirschhorn, I believe, is dead serious. There is no sideways smirk — irony, satire — when he writes “I believe in Universality, and in the universal power of art to transform each human being.”

With its inevitable clashes of race, ethnicity, class and culture, the Gramsci Monument is a land mine of potential problems. But isn’t it better to confront these clashes, however difficult, than to pretend they don’t exist? The novelty and discomfort of visiting a housing project for many of the art- and philosophy-minded is proof that we live in “a tale of two cities,” the oft-repeated credo of likely mayor-to-be Bill de Blasio (who I saw in the audience with his son Dante at a Gramsci Monument lecture). Hirschhorn has written: “To address a ‘non-exclusive’ audience means to face reality, failure, unsuccessfulness, the cruelty of disinterest and the incommensurability of a complex situation.” He found a catalyst in his personal hero Antonio Gramsci, whose Marxist philosophy is worth reinvestigating as class divisions in New York City, and around the world, worsen.

Gramsci’s assertion that “All human beings are intellectuals,” a prominent slogan of the Monument, serves to introduce his theory of “organic intellectuals” — the kind not determined by class or profession, but through thought and activity in one’s own community. This is an empowering notion, but access to it (like most advanced philosophy and art) is usually gained through higher education, where the target audience will not likely be. While the Monument may not get every participant (resident or visitor) reading Gramsci, it does bring these ideas into a new kind of circulation — library books, banners, brochures, web and radio — in the unique context of a NYCHA development. Robert Smithson also extrapolates the Monument-form, albeit in a different direction. For him, it expands (or contracts) to include a barren sandbox and other such “ruins in reverse.” While Hirschhorn is a soldier of Energy (Yes!), Smithson celebrates entropy or “energy-drain” as reflected in the works of Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, and the landscape of Passaic, New Jersey. Earning the title by ironic pronouncement, these “monuments” have very little to offer, and Smithson means to critique the systemic failures that created them. Hirschhorn takes the opposite approach: injecting the Monument with more giving-power than its ever had before.

I have seen and heard firsthand what this project has offered to Forest Houses. For me personally, benefits gained from the Gramsci Monument include: discovering the work of “Afro-Pessimist” scholar Frank Wilderson; bumping into all kinds of old friends; re-reading Gramsci for the first time since college; finding the perfect birthday gift for my boyfriend at a Conway department store on the advice of a Forest Houses resident; sitting beside my Dad at a lecture called “For the Love of Philosophy,” and many more. It made me proud to be an artist and a New Yorker — because this is what art can do, and it can still happen here. William H. Gass wrote, “The successful monument has offspring.” In the sense of ongoing activity, dialogue and friendship born of the Gramsci Monument, I have no doubt. In the sense of future projects that approach its monumental ambition — here’s hoping.

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The soft glowing orange of Lindquist’s first wall painting in You are Nature appears to take its slanted oblong shape from a sunbeam, one which must at a particular time of day stretch across the white of one of the gallery’s pillars. Standing marker-like amid the paintings on canvas which make up the better part of the show, the wall-work signals what is for this artist a new and successful engagement with color: evident everywhere in distinctive greens, yellows, turquoises and vermillion. The wall piece is equally emblematic, however, of a pervasive restlessness that runs like a current through the exhibition. Lindquist’s works often suggest origins in a questioning, even uneasy, relationship to the conventions of painting and sometimes even a paradoxical desire to take the traditional attributes of the form somewhere outside the constraints of the canvas altogether. The resulting works feel like active meditations on the nature of the pictorial surface, played out through layered depictions of earth-sites, still-lifes, water-scapes and screens.

Accompanying the new spectrum of color in these works is a broader range of subject matter, and a more varied approach to painterly execution. Lindquist’s previous work has most often addressed the life-cycles of the urban landscape, the processes of construction and decay visible in the landmarks and anonymous buildings of our human environment. Past imagery has focused on factories in ruin, such as those found along the Brooklyn waterfront, depicted with clarity in photo-silhouette,usually from the easily-read perspective of an earth-bound passer-by.

The current exhibition takes the project past the city limits and what feels like off the ground through several outdoor scenarios and underwater vistas. What Lies Beneath (The Galaxy of Space and Time), (2012) is among the most striking works in the show. It depicts, in an almost apocalyptic color scheme (from rusts to day-glo orange) Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. While the iconic forms of the earthwork are unmistakably articulated in the midground of the painting, they are partially obscured by a tempest of brushstrokes in the foreground, and then again towards the top of the canvas in an inexplicable burst of bright – as suggestive of an atomic bomb as the sun – which is left to drip pure whiteness straight down the otherwise recessive space. Two outer asymmetrical bands running alongside the canvas suggest a view from a window, its slanting angle playing against the picture plane. The viewpoint from which this scene is drawn is otherwise uncertain. The scale and proximity to the subject is oddly ambiguous despite a striving for representational rigor and, as in the case of many paintings here, almost disembodiesthe vantage point.

Central to the strength of these works is their painterly experimentation. By this I don’t simply mean a more physical sense of the medium, but more specifically a resonant relationship built between color, application and subject matter – a rapprochement of form to content. The grayscale precision of Lindquist’s earlier work is now, for example, translated into color. This tone-by-tone chromatic amplification yields powerful imagistic presence, as with the mass of coral-yellow in Phosphorescent Cloud (2012) which seems to be actively emerging from a depth of ocean turquoise. Particularly effective is the way Lindquist constructs form through staggered layers of color, as in Meditation/ Mediation (2012), where an entity of unknown identity, perhaps an old wood piling or a geyser seen from above, is built-up from crisply-outlined modulations of the same silhouette. Time Has Fallen Asleep (2012) is a poetic image of a plant in its vertical and reverse form; its delicate branches touching, hiding and interrupting each other in glazes of yellow and purple transparency. This superimposition effect visually references stencil or silkscreen techniques. It brings to mind a step-by-step process of image making, and by extension serves as a reminder of the selective and successive properties of perception. The two paintings of actual screens which appear in the show – one of an iPhone, the other of an airplane TV monitor – figure in this context not as the odd-ones-out in a slate of landscape paintings, but as further exploration into the mediated, even pixilated, nature of so much contemporary visual experience.

A key concern for Lindquist seems to be the expression of a kind of “substance” of depicted space. Light, distance, water and atmosphere are given special care, often felt out in fine spackles which form a pigmented fog. The technique is in itself beautiful, and indicates a draftsman’s concerns with the pictorial expansiveness possible within illusionistic parameters. It can also, however, on occasion lend a sort of “faux-finish” quality to the work, like a polishing touch used to complete a painting. Coming from a skilled, thoughtful painter, this veneer-like aspect in some of the works reveals a sense of vulnerability, a lack of faith in the communicative power of the image prior to its blurring finish.

The various framing devices seen in many of the works – nearly all of which are inventive and formally successful – similarly suggest apprehension about the emotionally direct implications of the face-on picture plane. In Apnea (2012) the mythical image of a free-diver immersed in blue is offset by a darkened half-border, suggestive of a screen-shot or underwater frame. Although the finished work is evocative and resolved, the image unfettered by device might have been more to the point. The cerebral, even aloof, quality of much of Lindquist’s work is alternately distancing and intriguing, as it seems to be indicative of a skepticism of the form built-in to its own execution. It’s a crucial issue for a dedicated painter to address, and the strength and charge evident in the current show suggests very good things will come from its resolution.

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June 23 – October 23, 2005

The Robert Smithson retrospective on view at the Whitney, which originated at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, thoughtfully presents the singular intelligence of Smithson’s radical vision. The exhibition features a representative selection of his sculptures, photographs, diagrams, and unrealized projects. Importantly, several films he made are on continuous view. All are worth watching from start to finish, including a quirky slide lecture about a damp and rotting hotel in Mexico.

It is well known that geological history and photographic technologies became important tools as Smithson investigated the subject of an artist’s coexistence with industrialization. Almost unknown are the drawings and paintings he made before his work found mature expression around 1964.

The curators rightly felt that these early works’ relationship to Smithson’s better known oeuvre would be of interest. Religious themes, motifs from popular culture, and surrealist – style gore, not to mention prancing art deco-like nude figures, all speak of an early preoccupation with the body. After 1964, the figure disappears as subject matter, but enters the work as Smithson himself begins to interact with landscapes ranging from New Jersey and Ohio to Rome and Holland. The truly cosmological dimension of his artistic practice comes to light through the inclusion of these emotional youthful works alongside the rocks, maps, films, and mirrors of his mature period.

Smithson is justly famous for creating a signature earthwork of the 1970s entitled Spiral Jetty. After staking out its form in shallow waters off the coast of the Great Salt Lake of Utah like a surveyor, he built this coiling path of black basalt rocks with the help of professionals operating an industrial dumptruck and plow. He simultaneously arranged for the construction to be filmed on land and by helicopter. This footage was later incorporated in a science fiction-like film entitled Spiral Jetty that has acquired almost legendary status in the art world today.

Renewed interest in Smithson’s work is no doubt due to the earth’s own response to Spiral Jetty. For a period of several years, the jetty was submerged, then resurfaced in surprising form: as the lake receded, the rocks arose from their saline bath encrusted with brilliant white salt crystals. The artist never saw this come to pass; he died in 1973 while surveying the site of a new earthwork in Texas. But chances are he expected something like it. He had that kind of mind.

Smithson’s theories entwining art and earthly forces have reached payola if not apotheosis in the salted Spiral Jetty. The salt literally crystallizes Smithson’s preoccupation with time’s passage and earth’s natural processes. It validates the foresight he brought to the planning of his earthworks and their aftermath. At the same time, it unleashes a paradox he might have enjoyed: Can it still be said to be the work of an artist, now that Earth has worked on it too? Smithson’s sense of humor is nerdy but droll.    The passage of 30 years has enhanced Spiral Jetty’s visual aspect as well as its meaning, especially at a time when other earthworks from the 1960s and 1970s are crumbling. The coil’s otherworldly apparition is striking, even in black and white newpaper ads. That most viewers would experience Spiral Jetty as a photograph, vicariously and at a location remote from Utah, was also anticipated by the artist.

Smithson was born in Passaic, NJ, in 1938. Considered to be one of the central artists of the Minimalist movement, this show demonstrates that his foresight – in hindsight – was remarkable. Young enough to present himself to the company of artists and poets at the Cedar Bar during the 1950s, he intuited that the scale of their ambitions required nothing less than an engagement with Earth itself. He now appears to be a transitional figure who was three – or more – decades ahead of his time. At the end of Spiral Jetty, the film, there’s a long aerial shot of Smithson running the length of the coil while the noisy chopper chases him. We may not have caught up with him yet.

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