March 9 to April 15, 2018
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, nyss.org

“BICYCLE LANE CLOSED PROCEED WITH CAUTION” is emblazoned on a firehouse red police placard flexible enough to buckle slightly at the point at which it’s fastened to a similarly hued plastic barricade. The signage and street furniture are off duty, variously nested, falling over each other or willy-nilly abandoned, cordoned off by more orange in the form of trestles and cones. Huddling up to this scrum is an alien, though still color coordinated object that takes its chances in the street like a parked vehicle. It is, in fact, something familiar to aficionados of the author of the photograph being described, Diana Cooper: one of her few freestanding sculptures, Speedway (2000-03). At its reverse the sculpture is also furniture-like, albeit with warped functionality, exposing a dollhouse grid of cubbyholes, but on the side visible in this photograph it is a veritable Mappa Mundi of circuitry and squiggles that encourages the illusion of a vortex at its center. As if all this perspectival overload were not enough, in the distance a fantastical mural can be spied in which gnarled tree roots frame a naively rendered cityscape intimating streets beyond the street.

Packing a semiotic punch, this photograph marks the bottom right corner of a salon hang of over four dozen disparate smallish pieces in two and three dimensions (vents and meshes being popular starting points for the sculptural objects) to constitute Wall Piece (2018). This show-within-a-show aggregate (something Cooper has done before, incidentally, in an accumulator piece titled “Watch Your Step,” 2012) Wall Piece is the most recent of the 13 works in “Gleanings”, a 21-year overview of this intrepid “explorer of situational geometry,” as the critic Barbara Pollack has described the artist. Pulling back to reveal a contained scene that is, itself, but a microscopic detail of a larger picture could, indeed, be deemed Cooper’s trademark idiom. Such micro-macro progression, now familiar from the periodic repixilating of Google Maps, proceeds within and between works such that a given Diana Cooper exhibition is a teeming matrix of focal points, layers, associations.

Photography, with its clean, mechanical precision, is very much in a minority among Cooper’s mediums: Most of her work, in this show and beyond, is resolutely handmade in a way that refuses to disguise the human agency of the maker, although there is no effort, either, to achieve expressivity or a projection of selfhood. Her touch has the casual obsessiveness of a visionary – nerdy, dutiful, sometimes urgent, other times repetitive, always matter of fact. Her vision, on the other hand, is systematizing, committed in earnest to taxonomies of form and function. There is something almost unnerving about the way the found and the fabricated cohabit within this artist’s soul: It is as if she operates within one mode for organization and another for execution, to produce something simultaneously neat and ambiguous, clean cut and mushy, scientific and craftsy.

She is not alone in the contemporary landscape in the pursuit of either mode. Born in 1964, she is five years junior to Jessica Stockholder, with whom she shares a formalist willingness to misread, color code and otherwise redesignate as raw things cooked already by the culture that produced them; and senior by the same number of years to Sarah Sze who plays similar games with scale within exquisitely precarious ecologies. Cooper stands alone, however, in the starkness of her split.

One way of making sense of this divided sensibility is to think of everything she makes, regardless of size or resolution, as a sketch. It is as if she didn’t get the memo that drawing has an end, in both the sense of a place where it ought to stop and in the sense of a preparatory function. Whatever medium a work of hers seems to inhabit – in terms of dimensions or impact or scale – it remains within the orbit of drawing. Recalling Jean Baudrillard’s fable so popular at the time of Cooper’s education, it is as if she is mapping the world to scale. Even in the earliest piece in the show, The Black One (1997), a painterly work executed on canvas, the support expressively activated in areas of tearing and lacing, with a metastasizing sculptural protrusion in black pipe cleaner, the quality of line is insistently graphic. This is equally true of the cutout or taped lines in reduction works like Façade (2016) or Silver City (2010-13). Drawing, it would seem, is Cooper’s way of being in the world.

But drawing would seem to occupy a spectrum in Cooper, the axes of which are collage and doodle. The street scene with which we started extends to photography a collage mentality, one that juxtaposes environmentally encountered banalities and personally generated marks in a string of associations. The doodle, on the other hand, pulls back – at least in its moment of becoming – from the clarity and purposiveness with which the artist organizes and orders materials, amongst which, ultimately, the doodle will be one more. Nonchalant, resigned to a state of semi-consciousness, fiddled but unfussed, the doodle is yarn from which imagery is spun.

Overdrive (2007) a mammoth double-sheeted framed drawing 80 inches wide in ink, colored pencil and marker, is a tour de force of doodling, reveling in the oxymoron of that designation. Recalling Mark Bradford in its cartographic density, it reads like a stack of maps on transparent pages where somehow lines and patches bleed between layers, the choice of red abetting such sanguinary, cellular associations. The drawing relates to an important sculpture/installation in Cooper’s career, All Our Wandering (2007), a telescoping ziggurat of red cubes whose exposed interior physically literalizes the receding planes suggested by Overdrive. Addressing her love of maps, systems, color coding and the like, Copper has said (in interview):

Systems are a way people try to make sense of things or create order. They also are all around us, in the natural world and in the man-made world, and I am intrigued by how they intersect, echo one another, or come into conflict. But I am less drawn to the specific content or narrative of a given system, which for me is just raw material. In fact, I am interested when something like a diagram or a graph disassociates itself from its origins and becomes something else entirely.

Some commentators have argued that, by hand rendering complex systems, Cooper re-humanizes them, both mitigating their oppressive impersonality and exposing their fragility, and thus the vulnerability of those who depend on them. This is a valid though somewhat reductive interpretation as it detracts from the inner logic of drawing. A more compelling way to view the relationship of the handmade and the systemic that incorporates the seismographic aspect of the artist’s hand is to think of the doodling, sifting, categorizing artist as a cog within a bigger machine, a cell within a pulsating organism, a spider in her web.

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September 10 to October 17, 2015
521 West 21st Street (between 10th and 11 avenues)
New York, 212 414 4144

Sarah Sze makes art from a sci-fi future. Though we recognize objects, they seem to have evolved past our understanding, to be organized by unfamiliar principles, and bound by forces we cannot see. During a conversation with the artist on October 3 at Tanya Bonakdar gallery, curator Russell Ferguson compared her work to “a scientific experiment run off the rails.” Sze is known for employing everyday materials: Q-tips, water bottles, matchbooks, loose change, aspirin, and so on. But this exhibition presents an uncharacteristic embrace of both technology (sound and video), and traditional art materials such as chalk, wood, glassine, and paint. A delicate work on the gallery’s second floor, made of stones, steel, paper and a solitary branch, titled Night Standing (all works 2015), looks like the kind of pet a robot would make for company after all the humans are gone.

Paint is front, center, and all over the sides of this show. Acrylic on various plywood, newspaper, or plastic supports stands, leans, or dribbles on to the floor. Lacy white sheets of it hang from crossbars, mirroring and good-naturedly mocking the “white cube” of gallery walls, and a great swath on the floor at the entrance resembles a rather messy installation in progress, deliberately confusing visitors who often pause, thinking the show not open yet.

This ambiguity is deliberate. Sze believes her work is most interesting when our understanding teeters in a precarious way — and she courts our uncertainty accordingly. That is the moment when the work ceases to be in conversation only with its maker, and starts to interact with the viewer.

The gallery visitor is set several challenges in this show. Not only must he or she tread lightly and carefully around the seemingly fragile works (a limited number of people are allowed into the exhibition at one time), but once in, one must embark on the conceptual unpacking of these deconstructed paintings. In Mirror with Landscape Leaning (Fragment Series) a torn picture of pink clouds in a blue sky floats on a wall while organized lines of white paint trail from plywood balanced on a chair. In Lost Image Standing there is practically no paint at all, yet scraps of archival prints of sunsets clamped to a large rectangle formed of stainless steel rods seem to indicate a refreshing new kind of landscape.

Art about artmaking is a difficult enterprise but Sze succeeds in connecting the artist’s challenges — and those she sets the viewer — with our greater challenges as a species. No answers are given, so understanding is not easy.

Upstairs, Sze’s focus expands from interaction with art to interaction with the Earth and the cosmos. Occasionally we see this literally as the artist’s hand in the making, as in the case of a glazed ceramic sculpture titled Grey Matter, where peeled and twisted shavings of clay have been wrested from a squarish block and litter the floor around it — an intervention that seems almost violent. A hammock called Hammock (inspired in part by Robert Rauschenberg’s famous 1955 combine, Bed) conjures the idea of a comfy rest, but a closer look reveals that the hammock’s strings are already occupied by a smattering pattern of acrylic paint. In Measuring Stick, a desk previously used by Sze for video and sound editing is now densely clustered with steel armatures supporting assorted unsettling objects, including broken glass and an egg, and video projectors positioned amongst the clutter stream NASA’s feed from the Voyager 1, our only lonely spacecraft in interstellar space. The desk is both the site and the evidence of the creative process, and the NASA feed, of creation itself. Outside Measuring Stick’s dark room, smooth grey rocks are neatly bifurcated and lined up by size, a secret bird’s nest made out of archival prints, branches, stone, thread, and enamel is hidden in a skylight, and blue chalk dust liberally dusted over the floor functions as a visual signifier of water, doubly so when gallery goers blithely wander into it as they did one recent rainy day, tracking blue footprints all over the gallery, down the stairs, and out into the street.

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Michèle C. Cone,  Ana Finel-Honigman and Anthony Haden-Guest joined David Cohen to review exhibitions of Ai Weiwei, Slater Bradley, Sarah Sze, and Lola Montes Schnabel.

The post January 2012: Michèle C. Cone, Ana Finel-Honigman and Anthony Haden-Guest with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

artcritical’s The Review Panel  returns to the National Academy Museum January 27 at the new start time of 6.30 PM.  Anthony Haden-Guest is welcomed as a new voice on the panel where he joins veterans Michèle Cone and Berlin-based Ana Finel Honigman, and the program’s founder moderator David Cohen

Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds, installed in 2010 at the Tate Turbine Hall in London, has its first New York exposure at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea where it opened January 7.  Slater Bradley is showing a video titled “Don’t Let Me Disappear” at Team in SoHo, which opened yesterday (January 12).  The panelists have also picked Sarah Sze’s ongoing exhibition, Infinite Line, at the Asia Society, consisting of a small display of older work and a large new body of work, and a show by the young expressionist painter, Lola Montes Schnabel, title “Love Before Intimacy,” at the Hole.

PLAY OUR NEW YEAR’S QUIZ AND WIN A DRAWING BY DAVID COHEN

artcritical takes this opportunity to wish readers and followers of The Review Panel a year of stimulating reading and impassioned debate.  The New Year’s Quiz at artcritical has this drawing by David Cohen as its prize.

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“Collage/Construction” at Pavel Zoubok until August 15 (1014 Madison Avenue, at 78th Street, 212-879-5858)

With her installation “The Triple Point of Water” in the Whitney’s appropriately moat-like sculpture court, Sarah Sze has once again pulled off a provocative fusion of whimsy and grandeur. She proves herself a successor of one of the house gods of the Whitney: Alexander Calder. In both artists, gaiety, wit, and invention prove to be vehicles, not obstacles, to aesthetic depth. Both achieve an oxymoronically bravura fragility.

In a zany, cartoonish, and schematic way, Ms. Sze’s installation represents an eco-system. The word “represents,” in this case, could equally be used to mean “depicts” or “constitutes.” For the true marvel of Ms. Sze’s creation is that interdependence is not just the work’s subject matter but its defining quality. The way in which artifice and nature interact in her handling of materials, the relationship between the found and the manipulated, the micro and the macro, are all symbiotic. The real beauty is that ultimately even what could be construed as faults – flimsiness, arbitrariness – are folded back into the meaning of the work: stabilizing as a metaphor of the preciousness of life.

The piece incorporates actual plants, which sit primly in their pots, leaves and branches stuck into squares of insulation board that are punched along the edges to read like eroded continental plates. These squares rest horizontally on a complex grid of vertical pipework sending water through the installation, coursing out here and there to fill a fish tank or sprinkle a plant. The flora sometimes grow out, sometimes through, this unlikely support. There’s no attempt to disguise the found quality of this polyurethane material, which still sports its trademark “Pactiv.” Intermingling with the plants and grasses are finely modelled mountain ranges, which entirely throw any sense of scale. (These could equally be artist-made or readymade from a model kit, and cutely recall the Whitney’s Charles Simonds sculpture, “Dwellings” [1981], permanently installed in their stairwells.)

And then there are scattered household objects – push-pins, scissors, a tape measure, and so on. Typically of Ms. Sze, these are color-coded; on the top layer, for instance, orange is the predominant color, which could relate to an idea of light, because rays of light in the form of orange string crown the whole of her creation.

The wall label invites a somewhat literal reading of the piece in site-specific terms (life beneath the sidewalk), but this is arguably too limiting. It is much more fun to imagine “Triple Point” as a mad scientist’s model of the world. That adds an element of desperation to the hi-jinks, to the kindergarten-cum-green warrior determination to find in materials at hand a means to give persuasive shape to ecological concerns. That her installation is set off by the concrete brutalism of Marcel Breuer’s Whitney lends weight to a sense of a life-bearing planet floating precariously in a cold universe.

***

Sarah Sze’s genius is to intuit the dual nature of the found object as thing in itself and freed form. In her handling, a half-used bottle of Windex is at once a signifier of false consciousness (a pollutant that cleans) and a bright blue shape, jarring and harmonizing simultaneously. This instinct is invariably lacking in those invited to make large-scale museum installations, but it thrives quietly among artists working on a private, even intimate scale within the tradition of collage. A felicitous complement to the Sarah Sze experience is offered close at hand by Pavel Zoubok, a young dealer who represents important practitioners, contemporary and historical, in this now somewhat specialist niche.

His summer show deftly pairs collages and assemblages he has collected by a roster of artists. Collage, of course, is intrinsically actual, but the comparison between two- and three-dimensional appropriation and manipulation proves rich in yield. You’d expect the sculptural objects to be more visceral than their pictorial counterparts, and yet often with the artists at hand the objects are encased or boxed, or – in the case of Ray Johnson’s chopped in half-volume of Robert Frost poems – wrapped up, somehow making what’s contained more ethereal.

Joseph Cornell leads the way in this respect: He is represented by an exquisitely mysterious boxed glass rabbit; the dark, coppery luminous glow of the box’s interior is bounced around by shards of mirror. Other box makers like Joan Hall and Varujan Boghosian share with Cornell a connection with the votary, but they do not tap his particular vein of preciousness. In the case of May Wilson, her papier collé, though seamless, is also visceral, whereas her found objects are sprayed in silver paint that makes them seem sealed in like cast sculptures.

Michael Cooper is an artist who links Cornell’s and Ms. Sze’s sensibilities. Mr. Cooper’s objects are diptychs of plexi boxes which contain accumulated scraps – keys, screws, ornaments – collected by color. According to Mr. Zoubok, the artist continues to add to the collection until a piece is sold. His collages here are similarly monochromatic arrangements of metallic reflective material.

Assemblages of a traditionalist stripe are provided by the redoubtable Hannelore Baron, and a kindred spirit, Ilse Getz, who offsets an artfully distressed wooden paddle with porcelain balls and a tiny doll. This is classic assemblage, a depiction of precarious beauty alienated in a brutal world.

Nostalgia is, across the board, a defining aspect of the collagists at Zoubok, which might ultimately be what edges Sarah Sze apart from their sensibility. Mind you, Al Hansen is free of it, too, with his outsiderish Venuses of Willendorf created out of cigarettes or matches. You have to love the prurient visual and verbal punning with which he intimates the pubic region with heads of spent matches.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 10, 2003

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27th October to 18th November 2000

Sarah Sze is my pick of the week, month, so far year even. Her earlier installation-agglomerations (for example, the window piece in the Whitney Biennial) could sometimes seem too determinedly whimsical, edging towards the cloying. This time, though, they’re more dynamic, stretching and soaring across the airspaces of the gallery. They’re also simpler. Most are essentially a single piece of furniture – a bureau drawer, for example – capriciously disassembled and reanimated. Sze owes debts to people like Jessica Stockholder and Judy Pfaff, even to Robert Rauschenberg and Alexander Calder, but her work, with its fusion of cartoon surrealism and hardware store materialism, feels utterly fresh. If you’re skeptical about the connection to Calder, by the way, ask to see the tabletop piece hidden away in the gallery’s offices.

David Cohen writes:

I share Alexi Worth’s view that we haven’t seen better from Sze yet. I first admired her work at the Fondation Cartier in Paris where she filled an already exquisite space with a sculptural exuberance at once funky and precious. But these pieces at Boesky are both more focused and resolved, and more wittily interactive with the space. I love in particular the futuristic-cum-comic strip star-shaped points of impact which puncture the walls. You can almost hear the word “Whaam” as the indentation occurs. Her inventiveness is protean, and to my mind she leaves Pfaff and Stockholder behind in her understanding of the dualism of the found object as thing-in-itself and pure shape/color: electric cable, desk lamps, clamps etc. But while at times we can marvel at the tension between structure and the density of components out of which it is composed, she loses us in the decorative footnotes, those prissy, pointless and poorly soldered plastic test tube things, for instance, clustering and fussing at her edges.

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