September 6 to October 6, 2018
535 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, dcmooregallery.com

In a 2013 interview with Robert Kushner, Barbara Takenaga relayed her process in nautical terms: “I feel like I am on this really giant ocean liner, and I’ve got this little tiny steering wheel, and I’m turning and turning and turning it.” In this analogy, she describes the shifting directions and momentum through both individual paintings and her entire body of work. She’s also talking about navigating between control and the changes she courts to explore new territory.

This image was on my mind viewing Takenaga’s new show, “Outset,” at DC Moore, her fifth with the gallery. The ship seems straightened now, leaner, and many familiar motifs appear to be thrown overboard. The tarmacs of Nebraska are long behind her, horizon lines have all but disappeared, and with them allusions to her home state skies, suburban hallucinatory wonder, and a certain kind of intentional goofiness. Ahead is somewhere unknown, and acceleration is palpable.

As with earlier work, we are flying, floating, or dreaming through hyperconsciousness, o maybe all of these at once. References to explosions, ecstasy, space travel, aerial views of drifting land masses, and microbiology are well established elements of Takenaga’s vocabulary, as is her ability to deliver this iconography with masterful, exquisite clarity. The surface of the painting is a statement in itself– her signature palette of steel blue-gray delivered in taut flawless satin, a sheet touched and frosted everywhere with iridescence, sometimes in fuschia.

Takenaga plays through octaves of weight. Tiny brushstrokes, hairlines, and rendered dots of white are made with the lightest touch, skittering across a heavy lava flow of poured and puddled acrylic. She knows her chemistry. Untold hours of attention, focus and devotion to her craft are haptically present, the paintings suggest strenuous concentration and, like mediation, allow the viewer to escape the pressures of time and distraction. Takenaga has practiced and honed these qualities through decades, and now she thoroughly owns them.

As Takenaga has recently been categorized as a “mature” artist, like the battered ship and stormy skies of Thomas Cole’s allegorical “The Voyage of Life: Manhood,” she seems to be veering into deep and confrontational turbulence, ready to relinquish some control, take more chances and partner with chaos. The “black holes” of Aeaea (all works, 2018) and Hello rip into the center of her compositions and in this body of work she not only allows them to stay, she cultivates them into the strongest figure-ground relationships in her work to date. Black centered pours cover a third of these two canvases, and the backgrounds have the least amount of pattern. Takenaga embellishes the pour in Hello outlining the shape with thin white and yellow lines, a kind of halo. While working on Aeaea she noticed a long accidental drip along the right side—an outlier of iridescent insect-leaf green—which she incorporated it into the composition. The black shape stretches from left to right, and pulls to all four directions, vaguely figurative and certainly muscular. Delicate Japanese patterns spring forth to inhabit its wildness with waves of fish scales or mountains, a net of pattern that gently tames and lands the form into the blue-gray ground. Her boldness is confirmed in Manifold 5, a sprawling five-paneled painting suggestive of rupture and emotional separation. An immense phallic ellipse divides a pitch black void. Takenaga is unabashedly poetic here and invites, or rather incites, the viewer’s imagination to follow hers. She riffs wonderfully on associations between Japanese screens and patterns, candles floating on the Ganges, submarines, and Whistler’s nocturnes.

As a young artist Takenaga found inspiration in Japanese prints, patterns, Indian painting and mandalas, as well as the work of Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse, and Yayoi Kusama. It’s interesting to note that while Takenaga was a student at the University of Colorado, Boulder during the mid 1970s, the pattern focused Criss-Cross artists’ collective was still very active. In an interview with Leslie Wayne for “Two Coats of Paint,” Takenaga lets us in on a personal dimension embedded in her use of patterns: “References to my grandmother were coded into mountain shapes … Lots of hiding and coding. The whole series of dot mandalas from 2001-2009 were about my mother, sliding away into space.” In her new show, paintings like Serrulata spell it out for us in rhythmic, ebullient language. Sumi ink-like splotches on a shell pink ground make a koan of cherry blossoms and time, and like the work of another great student of Japanese art, Roland Flexner, the painting coalesenses before our eyes. Taking a cue from the vision of time revealed to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, Takenaga has seen her universe blow open, and she’s taking action.

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What with finessing the installation and a checklist of 41 artists (who are also editors, writers, interns and staff at artcritical and/or guest speakers on The Review Panel) I managed to forget to secure the services of a photographer. Luckily several guests had cell phones to hand, and extra shots have found their way to us via social media. An ad hoc arrangement which fits nicely with the collective and impromptu nature of the show.

Click on the photo below to launch the slideshow.

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September 9 to October 9, 2016
155 Suffolk Street, between Houston and Stanton streets
New York City, pierogi2000.com

For the past 20 years, Sarah Walker has been developing super complex paintings that speak to the technological imagination—webs and labyrinths of densely layered patterns and lines that hum with things we’ve never quite seen, but intuitively recognize.  Networks and nerves, conduits and constellations, all mash up in a hovering, aerial perspective.  Her work alludes, also, to a scientific, radiant mental space of indeterminate scale and equivocal organization, one that reverberates more brainbow than intergalactic awe.

Her multiple realities are hard-edged and clear. It is essential to her purpose that the work function at the edge of overload, dazzling and hypnotic.  Her paintings have been described as orgasmic and psychedelic, and they’re only getting more so, on both counts.

“Space Machines” is Walker’s 5th solo show at Pierogi gallery, and her debut in the gallery’s new Manhattan space. In the new work, the superimposition of forms has become more pronounced, with an increased implication of motion and depth.  Hot orange and yellow clusters of circuits, organs, or perhaps a cyborgian combination of both, orbit from a central spot, lifting off, or maybe levitating from the painterly ground, mapped with coagulated acrylic pools.

I met with Walker in her Brooklyn studio where she works and lives with the artist Andrew Ginzel, and their son, Walker, now 10.

MARY JONES: I want to ask about your father. He went from medicine to neuroscience and then to psychiatry and you’ve described his way of thinking as an important influence on your work. Does that account for your merging of the technological with the psychological?

SARAH WALKER: My father was in some sense the initiator of how I regard space and how I think through process in my paintings. I remember my childhood foremost as the dynamics between people, which solidified for me- a visual thinker- the reality of mental space and its “objects”. In abstraction this might be described as a grasp of embodied patterns of occurrence. I often view technological space as an extension of mental space. Space and pattern are key elements for me.

Do you feel a relationship with other artists with a similar aesthetic?

Though different from mine I feel connected to the work of Bill Komoski, Tom Burckhardt, Sharon Horvath, Glenn Goldberg and Barbara Takenaga.  Each in their own way coalesces from their spaces “figures” that blink into form, but just. I respond to these as selves in the midst of multiple forces, both material and nonmaterial. It’s my way to describe to myself living in the midst of change.

There’s a greater duality in the new work, more separation between the figure and ground. 
Are you relating to a mind/body dialectic? I thought of Gaspar Noé’s film, “Enter The Void,” while considering your hovering compositions.

It’s a growing preoccupation, this momentary contraction of space into object, which could be described as figure and ground or self and other. Held within the architecture of the painting a multifaceted occurrence flickers into being, emerging from multiple fields yet somehow separate and unique. This may be coming about because the painting’s physical aspects adhere to psychological principles. I’m interested in gravity as attraction; the gravitational pull of one form wanting to be next to or merged with another. As this process happens, other things will get displaced, repressed, projected; they move around through the layers, alternately subsumed then revealed by way of psychological movements.

Does the “Space Machine” of the show’s title refer to anything specific?

I use outer objects to describe inner ones but I don’t think people will necessarily see literal machines. Instead, the paintings themselves offer a way to move through lots of spaces or states at the same time. I hope they work on the viewer’s psyche as visual devices.

Are these mandalas?

Yes, perhaps in how they function. I feel the title “Space Machines” is relevant here, in that my work can generate a different sensibility of existing in space, an alternate form of cosmos.  I feel they can operate as useful filters for complexity. We have a simplified perceptual structure that filters out information to aid our survival. It seems, however, that the terms of survival are changing fast, and we have to be more porous and flexible in how we view the intersection of all the different kinds of material and nonmaterial realities that exists around and inside of us.  What happens when all these are influencing one another in subtle and not so subtle ways is how these paintings are built, nothing goes away, it all sticks around.

Surface seems very important to you, the canvases are very considered, smooth and meticulous, a synthesis and compression of the painterly events that really show your control of the medium.

I suppose it’s a sensory thing- riding the line between seeming flawlessness and the ardent physicality of liquid pigment feels really good. The zone I’m after is where the surface seems dematerialized yet is thick with visceral activity, gritty yet flat, expanding and contracting simultaneously. That place is the seam between mind and body, technology and reality; the physicality of one’s mental space that’s shot through with feelings and textures, time and memory. That’s what I’m after.

How intuitive are they? How do you begin?

Intuition is a great tool. I begin with a totally fluid situation, pouring on a lot of very thin paint.  The drying pattern is important.  Sometimes I’ll flood the surface with water and drop color into it.  I allow those events to flow in whatever direction the surface chooses.  Once dry those chaotic liquid forms become the skeletal structure of the painting and they remain emphatically visible through all its layers.

To what degree does the process determine your images?

In the beginning to a great degree, then in the end there’s more negotiation. The paintings are formed slowly over time, arising from all that’s happened on the first liquid layer. It’s parallel to how a child grows into an adult. You don’t get to set the terms so much in the beginning, but one gets to play one’s hand more or less effectively as time goes on. The more risk, the more interesting and transformative the choices must be. The more wayward, awkward or poor those choices, the better the chance the painting will turn out vivid and come bundled with some new language. I can’t game the system, I must make my wrong turns and deal with unintended detours. It’s very important to me that I save the voice of every layer, even the disappointments, so they influence everything that comes after. Save everything, keep building.

I think of you as having a signature palette, in particular a very warm blue. Is this an intentional metaphor for space?

Yes, when I use blue it underscores space itself. Increasingly technology’s screens reinvent space to be even more blue, more cool, narcotic yet sleepless. Then I find myself using orange and other warm colors to tug in another direction. There’s an urge to make the oldest or least solid layer appear to be the last thing added- what should be sinking pulls forward and vice-versa. The painting breathes with this conundrum.

What are the rewards of complexity?

Multiplicity is what I’m after. My favorite position is where I can entertain several very different trains of thought at the same time, or be able to grasp something holistically as it’s happening.  My paintings help me do that. They create a context for me to actually build the state of mind I most enjoy. That place is ambiguous, not one thing or another, maybe it is “yes, and…”.

Is science something that you follow alongside your work?

Science, also fringe science even pseudoscience. I’m intrigued by how people arrange information to create their facts. The edge of physics now is particularly fraught with ambiguity and contradiction, which makes it so fascinating. I decide to take seriously beliefs or certain worldviews if only for a period of time. I marinate in several of these narratives and the work adopts the shapes that arise from their collision or collusion.

For instance…  

A recent favorite is the asteroid narrative, “Planet X”, for which I named my last Pierogi exhibition.  We don’t know what Planet X is, but a lot of people think they do, and project upon it. Whole world-views have been assembled around this possibly totally fictional entity crashing into Earth or that it is an alien space craft, or our sun’s binary star on a dangerous elliptical orbit, or… So it’s an open ended scholar’s rock, a mandala, a narrative generating machine. It sparks fires in the limbic system, and can adapt itself to any association it meets. It’s always due back any day now, and ironically it was supposed to smack into our planet on my birthday, July 29th.

What was the narrative for this series?

Among other things I was reading on reincarnation. Thinking about a cyclical view of the human soul lent its language to how I approach the painting process.  Alongside this I was entertaining the idea of morphic resonance, as developed by biologist Rupert Sheldrake. For him memory is stored outside of the brain in electromagnetic fields, the brain being the receiver. His idea is that you tap more specifically into that which is most related to you, and then less so the more general the connection. Preoccupying myself with these things provides me a way of moving through the painting process- it’s like choreography.

Do you think these narratives and ideas are discernible to the viewer?

No, I hope they fall away. The ideas were scaffolding. Narrative structures that play in my imagination, like color choices, guide the process. However where I cared and where I pushed away, or focused and then fell apart, what I loved and then rejected that nonetheless returned- people can feel those movements. The weave of decisions and positions is dense enough so that the painting can assemble itself for each viewer using their own unconscious diagram. Each painting is different, allowed to develop through improvisation along its own path. Each is like an egg; carrying with it the nutrients needed to sustain scrutiny. They are sturdy enough to exist anywhere and still transfix someone, anyone.

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Robert Berlind, Eleanor Heartney, and Mark Stevens joined David Cohen to discuss Hans Haacke at Paula Cooper, Nancy Spero at Galerie Lelong, Duncan Hannah at James Graham & Sons, and Barbara Takenaga at McKenzie Fine Art.

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JAMES SIENA
PaceWildenstein until January 28, 2006 (534 W 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 929 7000)

BARBARA TAKENAGA
McKenzie Fine Art through December 17 (511 West 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 989 5467)

SUZAN FRECON
Peter Blum through January 14, 2006 (99 Wooster Street, between Prince and Spring, 212 343 0441)

James Siena is like a one-man lost civilization. An odd mix of diversity and unity, his work is uniquely his own, yet charged with a suprapersonal force more familiar from enthnographic artefacts.  His first exhibition at his new gallery, PaceWildenstein, offers a dozen new paintings and two dozen drawings that extend a pictorial language he has made familiar in the last fifteen years of complex lattices, at once tight and wayward, and repeating patterns of mesh, of herring bone, or of bento box-like structures of rectangles within rectangles, Russian-doll like in their endless succession. His use of sign-painter’s enamel on metal lends his compelling, enigmatic works surfaces of cool succulence, glowing but distant.

There are numerous shades of other artists and cultures—this viewer is reminded, on the collective side, of African textiles, Maori tatoos and Tantric art and such individuals as Gustav Klimt (his decorative backgrounds), Joaquin Torres Garcia, and the obsessive outsider artist Friedensreich Huntertwasser.  Rather than coming across as referential, Mr. Siena seems something of an outsider himself, plumbing his own depths to arrive at an authentic, primordial intensity.

He couldn’t be less of an outsider, as it happens: a Cornell graduate, a star of the last Whitney Biennnial, and an acknowledged leader of his generation, he’s as clued in as any artworld insider.  But his abstract language has a remarkable freedom from either the old fashioned modernist fusion of disparate primitive and prehistoric influences into a generalized soup of Ur-forms, or a postmodernist deliberate cacophany of styles.  Instead his weirdly exquisite, compulsively detailed, fanatically methodical designs seem disarmingly practical, charged with the kind of energy you might get in a precolumbian proto-computer, or cosmologies from a vanished religion.

This purposiveness is hard won, for Mr. Siena works within stringent rules. Homo ludens—the man who plays—his drawings are elaborations of what he himself describes as visual algorithms.  Each work has its own predetermined set of procedures in relation to which the results both adhere and deviate, as a title like “Coffered Divided Sagging Grid (with glitch)” reveals.  Despite his art having great warmth, charm and empathy, Mr. Siena is, par excellence, a conceptual artist, as he is interested in seeing what happens if you submit your art to the realization of a preconceived idea.

Some pictures, like put me in mind of Mr. Close’s almost occult portrayal of a Svengali-like Lucas Samaras.

The nutty, trippy, transcendentally labor intensive aspect of Mr. Siena’s work places him in the company of a broad spectrum of contemporary artists whose art taps a finely wrought psychedia. Peers in this realm would certainly include Bruce Pearson and Fred Tomaselli. The Whitney Museum’s recent “Remote Viewing” exhibition of painters of invented worlds, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s survey of art that explores the narcotic, “Ecstasy: In and About Altered States” point to a spaced-out strand in the zeitgeist.

Barbara Takenaga is a priestess in this cult.  She creates sumptuous decorations of mind boggling complexity that fill you with a sense of awe not just because of the exhilerating cosmos they depict but because of a sense of the heightened consciousness required for such creation. Once the eye adjusts to a sense of gaudy overload, and overcomes the prejudice of feeling you might have seen such imagery on the cover of a molecular chemistry textbook, it becomes clear that she is an image crafter of formidable power.

Each of the fourteen paintings on display, which range from 12 by 10 inches to 70 x 60, a significant jump in size for this artist, must have required staggering feats of patience and mental organization.  “Rubazu” and “Corona #2 (Golden), both of 2005, are spirals packed with vibrant balls of radically disjunctive scale.  At the heart of each vortex are tiny little dots that such the eye into infinite space.

She favors a much tighter, neater delivery than we get in Mr. Siena, with a bright, dense all-overness and dazzling synthetic color.  As a result, we don’t get the sense, as we do in Mr. Siena, of a hand leading directly to mental presence.  But for an art that seems at first to be all about special effects there is a surprising amount of surface pleasure to be had in Ms. Takenaga.  This comes out especially in a play of solid against acqueous paint, which corresponds with a theme of flatness versus depth, as in “Gold + Red” 2005, where the orbs, distributed in an almost Paisley-like spiral, each have a sense of being a contained world, filled with wobbly light.

While Ms. Takenaga complements Mr. Siena’s near-psychotic obsessiveness, his timeless, archaic quality resonates with another remarkable exhibition opening today, also a debut with a new gallery, Suzan Frecon at Peter Blum. She has half a dozen large paintings, three of them in fact diptychs of horizonal canvases stacked to nine foot high by 87-3/8 inches.

Her art can be described, in a contradiction that also recalls Mr. Siena, as hand-made hard edge: Patiently crafted, unegotistical, lovingly carved-out forms whose sense of the definitive feels personally won rather than merely given.

A consumate colorist, Ms. Frecon concocts her own mixtures of oil and pigment, favoring subtly discrepant tones rather than contrastive hues.  “composition with red earth and red earth,” 2005, uses the stacked canvses to posit one tone of terracotta against another, the top slightly more paprika, the bottom chocolate.

While some of the forms are strictly rectangular, a favorite motif is a curved shape of vaguely Islamic reference, somewhere between a turban and a dome, depending whether you read them in positive or negative against their ground.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 17, 2005

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AUGUSTIN FERNANDEZ
Mitchell Algus until July 16
511 W. 25th Street, 212-242-6242

GOOD VIBRATIONS
McKenzie until July 30
511 W. 25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-989-5467

The Pre-Raphaelites still have a lot to answer for. The cult of wan Ophelias, Madonna-vampires, and socialite sirens that began with Rossetti and Millais reached its apogee in Munch and Klimt, only surviving at this stage in history as a kitsch parody of itself. But a new show at Bellwether suggests the reign of sultry and sinister lovelies continues unabated. “Idols of Perversity” is a portrait gallery packed cheek-by-jowl with killer damsels.

If dead critics could be resurrected for the purpose of reviewing contemporary art, this show might be the occasion to disturb the slumber of Max Nordau, as it is an almost willful vindication of the vituperative anathemas expressed in his notorious 1892 polemic, “Degeneration.” The title of the show comes from Bram Dijkstra’s illuminating, level-headed analysis of fin-de-siècle artistic misogyny; ironically, Amazon’s “customers also bought” list for Dijkstra’s book is topped by Nordau.

John Currin, the best-known artist in the show, is by no means the sickest or silliest — a sure indication of the general level here. His fusion of schlock taste and appeal to tested academic technique does set a standard tactic, however, which others in this show follow or aspire to. His “Chewy,” a bald-headed rococo dame at her morning toilette, about to choose her wig for the day, has a tame finesse out of keeping with the company it keeps (or the artist’s own norm).

More in line with the standards of curators Thomas Woodruff and Becky Smith is Christoph Steinmeyer’s high-artifice, greased-up “Dryade” (2003), which derives its mild, nerdish intensity from a relentless symmetry. The contribution of Graham Little (an artist paired with Mr. Currin in a shared room at MoMA’s 2003 drawing exhibition, “Eight Propositions”), a portrait on gesso of a supermodel in suede boots and brown jacket, seated against a vaguely Old Masterish neutral brown ground, is brought to life by an exquisitely rendered face and gaudily Klimtian Lycra leggings.

This show brings together artists of different intentions and skill levels. Many make obvious and familiar jests about art and kitsch. A vulgar pastoral of a nymph and a spaniel by Catherine Howe, a Currin wannabe, falls between the stools of Rococo and Dada. A double portrait in contrastingly smooth and impastoed finish by Pieter Schoolwerth is essentially an academic warm-up exercise. Others look like genuine strays from tattoo parlors (June Kim, Mel Odom), prison art programs (Sas Christian), or the art departments of publishers of sci-fi books and heavy-metal albums (Ted Mineo, Lori Earley).

Yet there are also displays of genuine artistry. Ben Blatt, Ray Caesar, and Mr. Woodruff himself have the formidably obsessive and inventive skills of 16th-century Mannerists. Julie Heffernen could have been drafted to keep them company.

The emphasis in this show is on the idols, not the perversity. With the exception of a tattooed, moderately hirsute gent in a leather jacket, one or two extremely convincing transvestites, and a smattering of prepubescent schoolgirls, every other model on display, even the ones with horns and tails, could get a job at a Playboy Club. Most of the artists, in other words, may be ironic about style but are earnest about their — and our — libidos. The mild porn-quotient ensures a work’s status as kitsch, thus making it respectable as an iconoclastic gesture. The problem–as Dada fast approaches its centennial–is that such a gesture is no longer in the least perverse. Idolatry is an orthodox article of avant-garde faith.

The fault line in this show isn’t between irony and earnestness: The best kind of mannerism of necessity has both. The redoubtable Duncan Hannah, represented by four works scattered around the show, makes works steeped in enigmatic, fey awkwardness. His trademark Balthusian languor, knowing amateurishness, and wistful, obsessive heroine worship remind us that, long before Degeneration came along, there was good, wholesome Melancholia.

Viewers with a real taste for the painterly perverse should check out Agustín Fernández at Mitchell Algus. Mr. Algus is renowned as the champion of older artists battling artworld indifference or memory loss, a brief amply met by the valiant Mr. Fernández.  Born in Havana in 1928, trained at New York’s Art Students League and the subject of some success in Paris Surrealist circles in the 1960s, the artist has lived in New York since 1972 without staging a single solo exhibition prior to this one.

He did enjoyed some exposure, though, when a canvas from 1961 was used as a prop in Brian de Palma’s 1980 movie, “Dressed to Kill” (the still graced his announcement card).  The painting in question, “Développement d’Un Délire,” (above left) is actually a tour de force of fantasty and invention.  Rendered with a luscious painterly containment that looks like a cross between Yves Tanguy and Carravagio, its ambiguous personages are at once erotic and menacing, compelling and otherworldly.

This tastefully installed  historic overview demonstrates stylistic and iconographical diversity but consistent aesthetic concerns: like Matta, Bacon and Balthus, Mr. Fernández’s imagery does service to the kinky without giving way to the kitsch.  He has ways to convey an idealised sensation of bound flesh and penetrated orifice without being anatomically explicit.  At the same time, he has a private vocabulary of armor and heraldry that achieves high artifice without being camp.  A memorable set of square canvases of abstracted but teasing finesse (the three canvases stacked at the center of the right image) consist of fleshlike forms which pucker to expose a hole at their center, over which hover suggestively an object Mr. Fernández’s background encourages one to read as Havana cigar.

“Good Vibrations” at McKenzie Fine Art surveys the recent, widespread revival of Op Art, the abstract style from the 1960s that played psychological games with image cognition— close-knit lines, repeating sequences, and jarring chromas that serate your vision. Like Seurat’s pointillism, Op Art leaves the final mixing of forms and colors to the viewer’s brain.

This show focuses insistently on contemporary work in the Op Art field. The only veteran of the original “perceptual abstraction,” as Peter Selz named the tendency in a famous Museum of Modern Art exhibition, is Julian Stanczak. The younger artists tap the “retro” appeal of the scientific optimism of the original movement but bring fresh and disparate influences: mysticism, primitivism, acid trips, screensavers.

Susie Rosemarin’s technique is redolent of Mr. Stanczak’s: slight variations on a strict lattice to induce a blurry sensation of movement. Only she uses the technique to induce the illusion of a Cross of St. Andrew pulsating against a white Iron Cross, a sort of visual pun on “visionary.” Sara Sosnowy’s intense, obsessive drawings, combining Op Art and Australian Aboriginal painting, recall James Siena. Tom Martinelli induces a familiar buzz from the simple misregistration of one colored ball superimposed upon another. And Barbara Takenaga plumbs exquisite depths in her mind-numbingly fastidious concentric arrangement of little blobs of diminishing scale, inducing the mystical sensation of being sucked into a vortex.

The cheery palette and compositional fizz of “Good Vibrations” might seem a perfect palate-cleanser after the fetid decadence of “Idols,” but in a funny way it is a chip off the same block. Bellwether’s idols and McKenzie’s vibrations both trade in the frisson of revival, after all, require fastidious skill, and make appeal to basic bodily experiences, whether libidinal or retinal.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 7, 2005

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