February 18 to March 26, 2016
555 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 741 1111

Throughout much of her artistic career, Taryn Simon has utilized the power of visual media — including photography, sculpture, video, and performance — to critique systems of power. Her work exposes the dark side of existing practices and, in particular, the ways in which law affects the lives of people. Simon exploits the dual record-keeping and fiction-making role of photography to document and fabricate the invisible. For example, in The Innocents series (2003), the artist shames the flawed American criminal justice system by photographing wrongfully convicted men at the sites of their alleged crimes. Such works reveal the inadequacies or, more often, harms that result from the current systems in place. Her works compel the question: whom are these laws meant to serve?

Simon’s work answers that the law is meant to serve its people, but the practical applications of law often do not reflect this purpose. Law exists to maintain order that will facilitate a free society in which people can pursue happiness without impinging upon the pursuits of others. However, law is often used against the very people it was meant to serve and protect.

If Simon’s previous work exposed the perverse applications of law, her most recent body of works on display at Gagosian Gallery reveals another side of law: its empty and symbolic nature. Part humor, part lament, we often joke that politicians are full of crap. Unfortunately, the statement is funny because it is often true. Simon’s photographs and sculptures highlight the artificiality and hopelessly symbolic nature of international treaties: perhaps some of the emptiest promises by one group of politicians to another.

The 36 large-scale photographs depict recreated floral centerpieces that had ornamented press events announcing an international treaty or decree. Each photograph is accompanied by a description and the fates of the international agreements the flowers were meant to commemorate. Most agreements influenced systems of governance or economics, such as the Convention of Cluster Munitions in 2008, where 91 nations and the Holy See agreed to ban the use of cluster bombs, which continue to be used by countries today, including the United States. Simon framed the photographs and their descriptions in a rich mahogany, as though the works could be part of the very boardrooms at which these agreements took place. 12 sculptures in the center of the room consist of pressed flowers, specimens of the 36 centerpieces, sewn onto paper, that sit above or between tall concrete flower presses — the heavy masses bear their weight into the floor with the gravity of solemn monuments.

The power of these works — the large photographs in particular — stems from captivating images that, despite their startling vividness, remain harmless to the viewer.

We use flowers as harmless speech. We buy flowers most often as symbolic gestures to commemorate an occasion or to express particular sentiments to others. We use flowers as harmless objects of contemplation, to provide visual reminders of such sentiments and occasions.

Such speech-flowers are fragile and ephemeral. Their visual and olfactory pleasures expire as quickly as the feelings of the occasion begin to fade from our memories. When they lose their value as sensory pleasure-givers, we toss them out. Unlike other symbolic gifts, we readily dispose of flowers because of their purpose as temporary symbols. The other side of this sad fate of flowers as symbols is that if one does not wish their flowers to meet their inevitable destiny in the trash, one must prematurely remove them from their life-extending environments in water and place them between the pages of a book — or a flower-press, as Simon has — and crush them live in the name of preservation.

Simon highlights the utterly symbolic and superficial role of flowers — and the occasions they were to commemorate — by exaggerating the surface beauty of flowers that were once sitting on the tables where international powers signed various agreements. Most of the photographs show exquisite arrangements in intensely vivid colors, all against equally striking and beautifully color-blocked backgrounds. However, the texts accompanying the mesmerizing centerpieces state the common fate of all these treaties: failure of the signatories to implement them.

The artist thereby disturbs the easy assumptions held by many people: that once codified into law, the harms addressed by the law will remedy themselves. Her beautiful photos and their accompanying texts expose this as a faulty assumption, which presumes the automatic integration of such agreements into real life. However, laws do not execute themselves — people do.

First, many international treaties are not self-executing; local governments must pass laws that allow their execution. Even after the agreements are passed as local laws, law truly exists — and therefore holds power — only when it is enforced in everyday life. Without enforcement, these international agreements remain as mere words on paper, nice and fanciful ideas, and nice gestures by participating governments, yet nothing more.

The horror bestowed upon us by Simon’s beautiful work stems from the realization that this is actually how legal systems in general work, and that substantial harm can result from the nature of law as a multi-step process. A law may be passed because of a felt need to address existing problems, but the law can only fulfill its initial purpose when it is executed properly in everyday life, down to the policemen, government agencies, and the judiciary.

Today, when instances of misapplication and faulty enforcement of the law continue to demonstrate the shortcomings of the current system, Simon’s recent work prompts a second look at law as “mere words,” and invites us to emancipate it from its purely symbolic status toward a working system that better serves its true master: the people.

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October 27, 1915 to January 10, 2016
2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, 215-763-8100

consists of objects that, whether artificial or natural, are subordinate to man as elements of use, manipulation and enjoyment; these objects are smaller than ourselves, within arm’s reach, and owe their presence and place to a human action, a purpose.

His definition nicely hints at why it is a distinctive product of modern mercantile cultures, societies that thus celebrate their ability to assemble supplies of such objects. Still life is an art of plenitude. Indeed it would be worthwhile making a comprehensive list of the artifacts represented in the still life works in this exhibition: biscuits; dead animals; eyeglasses; fine china; fish; foodstuffs; heaps of flowers, fruits, and vegetables; hunting horns; insects; letters, business cards and other written materials; live birds; living and dead plants; oysters and shellfish; piles of books; paper money; picture frames; violins and sheet music; and watch gears. I’ve rarely attended an exhibition with so many depicted things on display. Since the early 19th Century, on the evidence demonstrated here, the United States has been a prosperous manufacturing culture.

Still life painting poses compelling challenges for its commentators. Interpreting history painting involves identifying the story displayed. Analyzing landscapes typically requires knowledge of the site depicted, and discussion of portraits often demands information about their subject. But since the identity of many (though not all) objects in these American still lifes is visually obvious, what is the legitimate role of commentary? Some these 130 still lifes, I grant, show strange subjects. The exhibition opens with two by Raphaelle Peale, the founder of the American still life tradition: Catalogue Deception (after 1813), a small trompe l’oeil image of a worn exhibition catalogue; and Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception (1822), in which a white cloth obstructs our view of the female nude. And it concludes with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964) and Jasper Johns’ Painted Bronze (1960), a coffee can container of paintbrushes, which are cast in bronze. But most of the subjects shown here are not unfamiliar.

We learn a great deal about America from still lifes, the exhibition catalogue argues, because these banal things at hand express our social history, define our relationships and illustrate our dominating personal desires and fears. Thus the currency and stamps in John Haberle’s The Changes of Time (1888) illustrate American history; WiIliam Michael Harnett’s After the Hunt (1885) presents the implements of the huntsmen and some of their animals caught; and Kate Safe’s The Answer is No (1958), painted when she was going blind – by depicting a vast array of blank canvases – shows her grim future. But merely identifying the subjects of these pictures, as I (following Schapiro) have done, does not identify what is perhaps their most aesthetically significant feature, the ways in which the groupings of these objects are composed. Just as, when bringing flowers home from the florist, you display them in a pleasing arrangement, so successful still life artists arrange their objects with care, constructing what might be called a group portrait of these things. Consider, for example, William Michael Harnett’s Music (1886), in which you see a rare Cremona violin balanced on top of a pile of sheet music, with books, a vase and a fine carpet. As in most of these still lifes, the objects are depicted in fine-focus naturalistic detail. But how strikingly unnatural is this composition, in which the violin extends over the edge of the table, pressing towards the viewer like the saint in some baroque altarpiece. A similar analysis could be offered of many of the pictures—the presentation of these things thus reflecting our aesthetic interests. The Art of American Still Life is an important exhibition because of the quality and quantity of art displayed, because the catalogue presents a challenging and plausible thesis, and above all because the art is such fun to look at.

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In the beginning was the Word; but after that came a whole lot of little tiny carefully cut-out-and-collaged pictures. Josh Dorman’s work, and his most recent cycle of paintings/collages in his solo exhibition, “Whorled” at Ryan Lee, seem initially to be about dainty narratives set up on some kind of floating Pollock’s Toy Theatre stage, but his fantasies are more about moving words: typologies, taxonomies and nuance. Because of this, Dorman has bridged the gap between the Word made flesh — via the excised bits of numerous catalogs, dictionaries and manuals — and evolution in all its forms: natural evolution, as well as industrial and architectural, though perhaps the point here is there is little difference. In the background of all the paintings (save one) Dorman has laminated the monotonous and regular, yet ever-changing pattern of a player piano roll, a visual metaphor of the flexible inclusiveness of his visual framework.

Scouring antique books to appropriate their diagrams and illustrations, Dorman tricks the viewer into thinking that his work is about images, but the proof is in the democratic way in which he weighs the individual collaged entities in expansive, landscape-format paintings, such as Memento Mori (all 2014). The collage depicts a wide variety of apes and monkeys frolic on the shores of a lake with a similarly variegated collection of architectural diagrams. There is the all around equanimity of man and nature that marks a Bierstadt-like sensibility, despite the gross-disparities if scale and rendering techniques.

In Memento Mori there are also machine parts such as cams and cogs. The unit within these paintings is not the organism, but the cut-out. Much like a Joseph Cornell box, Dorman creates his drama via an assortment of things. The artist reminds us of the origin of his search by including several entries from a dictionary: “myrrh,” “myrtle,” “myself,” “mysterious.” Past all the smoke and mirrors of feathers, antlers, gears and spots, all of this mess neatly falls into the space between A and Z — the fundamental logic of why everything is there in the first place is irrefutable. Though he flirts between the almighty and Darwin, Dorman plays it safe as a something of a technocrat, or perhaps an encyclopédiste.

He is definitely partial to images of the natural world and this is echoed in the themes of the pieces Unintelligible Design and Natural Selection. But there is a latent criticism of the human need to find a narrative direction in scientific law: the climax, so to speak, of Unitelligible Design is a de-railed locomotive in mid-air over a body of water. The march forward, which begins on the left side of the painting with a horse, ends in a steam-powered disaster. Similarly, in Memento Mori an otherwise innocent-looking primate is munching on the bloody wing of an unfortunate avian. The images are meticulously sliced from the yellowed pages of old books and prints — they are inky and decisive, crosshatched and precisely detailed in the way that only an etching can be. Dorman places his cutouts with fantastical natural backgrounds or dystopian urban/industrial nightmares of elevated bridges and walkways — within a stage set too wild to be real, ironically enough his characters/actors take on an increased individuality, often heightened with touches of color.

Book of Hours is the most didactic and ambitious of the pieces, where Dorman posits a narrative on par with his method. The triptych relies heavily on a series of painting tropes to get a message across of the inevitability of ruin; anthropocentric or otherwise. The first panel depicts a Hicks-like Peaceable Kingdom; in the middle, he pauses for breath in an inky and etched purgatory of a Piranesian Carceri; and comes to rest with a Pieter Breughel-like hell. Predictability is not an issue here; as a painter, Dorman has free access to use many of the time-worn images that his predecessors have used again and again, but is more concerned with contemporary questions of what these tropes mean for us now, and do they still mean at all? More poignant is the video piece Sometimes We Find a Broken Cup. As with Book of Hours it has a message, but similar to several of the collages, it moves in a circular motion, presenting good and bad within the context of the natural world where such moral and aesthetic judgments do not apply. It bears a lovely similarity to Tacita Dean’s gorgeous, nihilistic 2010 film The Friar’s Doodle, and in fact, paired with Dorman’s folded Chinese book A Clawfoot Lamp, the video shows his thoughtful drawing technique to great advantage.

In the end, Dorman’s message seems to be both anarchic and deeply rational, much like the expanse of ideology he encompasses in the work. The paintings are chaotic; streams of illustrations and diagrams act as stand-ins for a series of historical and art historical pantomimes, but there is such a profusion of actors that it almost seems the director has lost control of his set. The joy in looking at the works is getting lost in the detail — but as with evolution itself, the detail is so multitudinous that missing links are hard to find and it can all seem very haphazard and miraculous even. But here is where the methodology brings comfort even if it doesn’t make sense of the disorder (which it does not). Process at least allows the viewer some comfort — Dorman’s alliterative categorical practice reminds us that no matter what scene these actors are playing or how they overlap or distract from each other, they are merely taking a brief vacation from the pages from which they were liberated, and one merely needs to pull a book from the shelf, or google a few letters of their name in order to return them to their epistemological safe haven.

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Comics With Still Life: Finding The Inevitable Place at galleryHOMELAND
September 5 through October 17, 2014
2505 SE 11th #136
Portland, OR, 402 936 1379

Will Bruno’s new art exhibition launched at galleryHOMELAND early this month to a roomful of guests. Having quit his job to head out on the road, Bruno has returned to Portland from a residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. The Center is located on the banks of the Salmon River Estuary at the base of Oregon’s Cascade Head. Created away from smog-choked corners and cosmopolitan saloons, Bruno’s new works suggest keen effect of setting and season where south winds blow cool and flowers perfume the air. Made in flashe, oil, watercolor, acrylic, ink, graphite, colored pencil, and variously mixed media (wood, beach wood, flowers) the works evoke a clear sense of the artist amid deserts, beaches and untamable lands, open to the daily variations of light and landscape, engendering at all times the potential for revelation.

This exhibition of light-filled landscapes, interiors, portraits and still lifes is not without its avant-garde turns, with traditional painterly qualities augmented by wilder intervening abstractions and use of different media (even video). The show’s presentation adds to its variance, with canvas works hung on nails and dispersed, watercolors tacked in rows, comic works set behind glass, and spaces fashioned keenly to showcase installation pieces, both upon floored pedestals and dedicated wall-abutting shelves. GalleryHOMELAND curator Reese Kruse did a marvelous job of leading the viewers through, from work to work, with variations spread about the space.

A cataract of three diminutive dusky aquarelles with a fragmented comic aspect begins the show; entitled Wendy (2014), they share page-space with naturalistic paintings of burnished and slung fruits. Set to deckle-edged off-white papers and behind glass, the latter still lifes are situated below highly finished ink compositions — comic scenes of a people Bruno has named “The Oogleheads.” The recurring characters are a fictive “band of roguish villains that had nowhere to turn after all else in their lives went sour from thievery and inbreeding.” The en plein air elements of these works are wrought in gouache with opaque layers that give a sense of unrestraint and presage the exhibition’s abstraction.

At 42-by-44 inches, the show’s largest painting is Beach Comber With Still Life (2014), hung near the gallery’s entrance. At the center of the composition is a still life of a succulent on a table covered with a patterned yellow cloth, while a candy-striped mock drapery hangs behind it. This flashe-and-oil painting on canvas features the comic figure “The Beach Comber,” who furtively lurks behind the drape with his stylized silhouette repeating in orange upon the yellow tablecloth. The large striped curtain is modeled from a simple, iconic dishcloth Bruno had been using at Sitka. This elemental juxtaposition, with its muted green and white as the perfect backdrop for the brighter paint of the succulent and table, calls to mind the summerhouses and figures of Fairfield Porter, but more sinister, and with none of their pastiche, These are examples of the confluence of mundanity and grandeur, silliness and beauty seen throughout Bruno’s art. The tablecloth and its reappearance have little deeper meaning (a simple texture) but one could discern a deliberate nod to ordinary life in lieu of sophistication.

The still lifes, discursive comic narrative elements, warped landscapes, and mixed media works give impressions of locales found during Bruno’s journeying in Oregon, the Olympic Peninsula, Canada, Glacier National Park, Moab, and a stay in a straw-bale lean-to off the grid in Taos. There are painted dreamscapes that abandon hierarchies of nature, self, and other. There’s the 20-by-16-inch Windows (2014), an iconic three-window oil painting on canvas depiction of, in Bruno’s words, “the perfect gradient sunset,” with which Bruno realized the power of memory to augment the work “when paint’s not working the way I need it to.” This painting is unlike the rest, in that it has the sunset light seen in certain of his aquarelles but instead of a human figure, the architectural triptych of windows serves as the figures, and finely so.

Inspired by Porter, Andrew Wyeth, David Hockney, Bruno’s greatest influence was the land and working or wandering through it; his signature is the recurrent objects, figures, and combinations of detail seen throughout his career to date. Bruno’s work, while possessing the spiritual sublimity of natural landscapes, resolutely flips the hitherto precious and othering view of nature on its head, with a declaration that “we are the Earth; it’s not a separate thing.” His painted works playfully poke fun at astonished reverence seen in the work of earlier artists, with what he describes as a practice of “ironic sincerity.”

His view of the everyday amid the majestic intends, Bruno says, “to decode life around me.” He asserts that “creating confirms existence, and drawing things I see every day helps to see how they fit together, to reconnect patterns.” On the Pacific Crest Trail in 2007, Bruno found and re-enlivened the old world and common object: a boot, a truck, and a port-a-john, amid astonishing sunrises and a lushness that is quintessentially Western. Such images and objects are found in his new show, but with more of the surprising juxtaposition seen in works like Beach Comber, and the restrained continuity of the comic fragments, all of which differentiates the old-fashioned Impressionistic handling seen here, from the experimental flourishes of the avant-garde.

Correspondences throughout the exhibition offer strange (never weird-for-the-sake-of-weird) juxtapositions and splintered narratives, populating the paintings in the way many of us inhabit our dreams. To Bruno, the fragments are “more like life than linear ones ” seen in naturalistic narratives and history paintings. There’s In The Field (2014), an en media res dog’s-eye view of an old janitor in very large trousers, inexplicably mopping up a fallow, sloping field. There’s no context here but a figure (one who never reappears) in the landscape, and no perceptible reason for the mopping of earth, but the effects are both equanimity and disquietude: the mopping man seems calm in aspect and activity, but the perspective of him and the land are absolutely warped. The acrylic and oil brushstrokes look both fast and slow; and the light is distinctly thunderstorm, rumbling with doomy purples and grays and the chill of a haunting tale.

Images appear throughout this exhibition, and gather the way people do: often spontaneously. There are, visible in the works of Comics With Still Life: crustacean leitmotifs, collections of ephemera set in windowsills, architectural forms, geometric shapes, and old philosopher types fitted together with no reason but surprise. For Bruno, emblems are frequent but remain unconscious and sometimes unnoticed.

A final set of seven watercolors in purple with ink, Windowsill (2014), fills a large portion of a wall at the end of the show, with the white of the canvases furnishing their lights. Figures reappear in this abstract series, with portions painted with the sureness of ink-stroke seen in hanging scrolls by Japanese artists from past centuries. A magnificently plain ping-pong player seen from behind hangs below a still-life canvas with a giant rabbit. Another of the sequence sees the reappearance of a mustachioed giant peering beneath a magic rock: its magic is the addition of salt set into wet pigment to make it glimmer, a technique put into practice a handful of times in this series. Other watercolor-ink paintings in this cycle include a patinated arabesque and a series of abstract grisailles, which, like other works of the exhibition, supremely compliment the consummately diverse mood of the show.

Toward the exhibition’s end are more watercolors of snow-covered peaks, painted during Bruno’s time in Banff. He and his companion visited Canada to backpack along Lake Minnewanka, where “we heard a bear grunting outside our tent and ran the five miles back to the car in the middle of the night.” His ideas about man and nature are by no means spelled out plainly, but a study of the works within galleryHOMELAND show an artist with a congenial place in, and understanding of, nature. Bruno’s plan was to spend concentrated intervals in practice, and carry his tiny still lifes and sketches into new lands. The fruit of his adventuring is a collection emblematic of an inner, as well as outer, exploration.

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The Jewish Museum

May 10 to Sept 29, 2013
1109 5th Avenue
New York City, (212) 423-3200

JACK GOLDSTEIN x 10,000 speaks to the high voltage intensity that one artist can generate over the course of a lifetime. The exhibition at The Jewish Museum arrives by way of the Orange County Museum of Art in California where the show opened last year as the first American retrospective for the Canadian-born Jack Goldstein (1945-2003). Works featured include Goldstein’s infamous short 16mm films from the 1970s, experimental soundscapes on vinyl, epic 1980s paintings of dynamic weather, and his final philosophical writings exhibited in seventeen bound volumes.

In Goldstein’s performance-based 16mm films, such as A Glass of Milk (1972) and Some Plates (1972), we witness the artist first coming to terms with the kinetic dynamism of still life objects. These early films, along with four others, are projected onto a wall for forty minutes on a continuous loop. With the help of a charismatic projector, Goldstein’s films are bewitchingly charming, resembling a middle school reenactment of Isaac Newton’s first Law: an object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. In A Glass of Milk, for over four minutes, a fisted hand rhythmically pounds against a table upon which there sits a vulnerable glass of milk. Similarly, in Some Plates, a precarious stack of plates is as motionless as a still life on a table, until an outside force (the artist) enters. In the background behind the plates, a pair of legs begins to stubbornly stomp and jump. After about three minutes of stomping, the stack of plates, like the glass of milk, crashes, as we expected it to. Although these films are, to put it bluntly, experiments, Goldstein successfully captures the integrity of his objects as they act alongside and against the artist as force, or outside agent.

In A Spotlight, another film made the same year, Goldstein takes his place among his objects, challenging his own endurance over the course of eight minutes, running back and forth trying to escape the spotlight that pursues him. In one sense, Goldstein’s stomping, pounding, and fleeing can be understood as the common, eccentric gestures of a frustrated artist. As early experiments, these films exhibit one of Goldstein’s life-long, humbling preoccupations: How to breathe life into the still life?  It is Goldstein’s sensibility, his way of regarding the stack of plates, the glass of milk, or himself, that comes across as the main subject of the film work. At times, this sensibility carries with it Baldessari-like inflections of Cal Arts humor, but ultimately, what sets Goldstein apart is his sense of profound disappointment as he perpetually discovers objects, like characters, will and do endure, with, or without us—like Samuel Beckett’s characters, they go on.

The experience of the silent films is complimented by the overlay of Goldstein’s sound effects records compiled from Hollywood audio archives. In Two Cats Wrestling (1976) the distinct and disorienting sounds of cats fighting can be heard throughout the exhibition via overhead speakers. Among Goldstein’s Suite of 9 Records with Sound Effects (1976) the purple 45rpm, The Tornado, is simultaneously the least intrusive as well as the most haunting. As a soundscape, The Tornado’s howling winds successfully foregrounds the foreboding, moods one might experience alongside the artist’s later paintings made in New York during the 1980s, visible in an adjacent room.

Goldstein’s depictions of lightening storms, meteor showers, and volcanic eruptions, airbrushed to perfection by his assistants may strike a viewer initially as out of place. In their celestial aspirations, they appear overtly ambitious, especially in comparison to the memorable Mickey Mouse simplicity of a film like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975), a three minute portrait of the company’s famous roaring lion head logo. Given the heavily emphasized LA art context of the show (pop red and yellow painted gallery walls), these New York paintings appear especially strange, and saturnine with their high-contrast explosions, stormy weather, and apocalyptic undertones. The scale and High Definition-like quality of Goldstein’s appropriated nature scenes boasts in his untitled works a commercial presence in so far as they appear pristine, as well as pricey. What is fascinating to me is that they complicate, and contextualize how the commercially vibrant art world of the 1980s existed alongside the intellectual ambitions of the so-called Pictures Generation of the late 1970s. Within Goldstein’s oeuvre, the later paintings share in common with the earlier films the urge to add energy, momentum, and a sense of kineticism to the still life. Not unlike the final philosophical texts Goldstein was composing toward the end of his life, these darker works depict the torpor of being alongside the drama of exile.

Consistently across mediums, Goldstein uses found images, sounds, pets, and texts in order to interrogate the cosmic fact that our fragility, like the stack of plates, is our livelihood, our vitality. Perhaps that is what the 10,000 of the retrospective’s title speaks to. Ten thousand is a quantitative measure of Goldstein’s capacity, his wattage, so to speak. Or, perhaps 10,000 suggests the number of times, turns, and transformations it took for Goldstein to make the final artistic leap–as he did in his last film, The Jump (1978) moving from incandescence to something else. For the artist who seldom signed his paintings, that, it seems, would be Goldstein’s signature: trademarked transubstantiation, the movement from light into pictures and then from pictures into ether.

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