October 28 to December 19, 2020
521 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, tanyabonakdargallery.com

This is as bracing a show as we have come to expect from the German painter Thomas Scheibitz. Didactic and ludic in equal measure, each of his paintings is charged with the task of bringing together opposing forces in a world where art is equally figurative and abstract. If the paintings prove they are something much more than pastiche, it is owing to further dialectic: that the paintings be handsomely realized yet left unsettled and unsettling.

How we know this is immediately apparent in an overview of the exhibition where each painting flaunts its singularity–in striking contrast with shows commonly seen wherein in a bid to convince the viewer of the career, all works on display are merely alike.  Consistency is not the goal when it comes to Scheibitz so much as inner stylistic coherence and purpose.

Pile (all works, 2020) is architecturally disposed, yet freely so. Linear squared elements and planar and volumetric spaces are conjoined in an unforced way to maintain a sense of perpetual experiment and exploration. If ever there was a painting that could claim to be descended from Friedrich Froebel’s kindergarten blocks, this is it. Founded in 1837 to induce learning in children through active play, Froebel developed his set of building blocks, which are still in manufacture, to stimulate inventiveness in relating objects in space. Universally known to induce spatial thought and so a child’s portal into adult worlds, this concrete genealogy was very evident in Scheibitz’s previous exhibition at Bonakdar, a show of paintings devoted to the topic of the studio. Geometric and volumetric figures conjoined in a kind of mental space of creative learning. In the current exhibition of deliberately disparate canvases, Pile has all the attributes of creative learning through mental alertness. But as cerebral as this may sound, when viewed up close the painting is typical of the artist’s sensitized craft.

Taken together, Key and the hanging sculpture Magnet , both from this year, are explicit as to method. Scheibitz’s visual vocabulary derives from abstract universal elements that lend themselves to being read as signs, elements he freely permutates Hanging together in Magnet are shapes in outline which create interference such that interior spaces proliferate. Permutations and combinations yield rich figure-ground ambiguities. Key has fused the spatial choices in a flattened quasi-cubist picture plane reminiscent of Juan Gris. Through such revision, Scheibitz has set himself an ambitious program of learning that also extends to embedded meaning and reference. Compelling attention in this regard is Speicher 1072. Budding stalks, perhaps? But this is not adequate to the ambiguities, not so innocent, neither as common motifs nor as universal elements set out in neutrality.

Simple clarity of figural elements in a straightforward-seeming planar space in this painting gives off an air of innocence, but this assumption is soon dispelled by consideration of its title. This contains a reference to Camp Memory, site of the 2014 massacre of Shias and non-Muslims by Islamic State in Tirkrit, Iraq. Implicit in Scheibitz’s practice is an indeterminacy of sense that lends itself to cultural associations of an unsettling kind, without these being allowed to impose themselves. Thanks to reworking the givens of composition, however, the artist leaves us with a difficulty. As spatiality involves social intensity stemming from relative geographical positions, the work induces dynamic intensities through transfigured compositions. We cannot be the facile decoders of signs.

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Nicole Wermers’s sculptures operate both as clever art-historical jibes and contemporary political satire. Their ergonomic and utilitarian construction, using industrially produced materials, continues a kind of mainline homage to Marcel Duchamp, staging objects in ways that highlight their alien nature. Her Vertical Awnings series (rolled-up awnings with colored stripes) is coyly reminiscent of Daniel Buren’s stripes and Nancy Shaver’s towering assemblages. Givers & Takers is a series of upturned restroom hand dryers whose blowers have been turned to jet air into stove exhaust fans with bowed glass hoods. The small differences between each iteration points to the constricted range of options that typify “consumer choice.” They resemble the caricature of jowly, top-hatted capitalists, and pricks at the rhetoric of entitlement that has dominated American politics for the last six plus years.

“Nicole Wermers: Givers & Takers” continues at Tanya Bonakdar through July 29, 521 West 21st Street, New York, 212 414 4144

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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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January 12 to February 18, 2012
521 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 414-4144

There’s no explicit message in Thomas Scheibitz’s multifaceted project at Tanya Bonakdar, but its sheer scale and ambitious organization demand interpretation. They evoke the idealistic Bauhaus vision of architectural synthesis, and Scheibitz’s inventive integration of collage, painting and sculpture, while rooted in the contemporary visual environment, is inspired by the high modernism of Bauhaus style, with its bold, functional forms and its basis in the grid. The large painting that lends the exhibition its title consists of a grid with nine compartments; the sharply defined planes that connect their disparate contents build tensions between flatness and depth. While Scheibitz inclines more towards the whimsy of Paul Klee than to the systematism of Walter Gropius, there’s nonetheless an underlying dialectic to his method.

Scheibitz begins by collecting images, from the visual information that populates our computer screens to more refined photos of fashion, art and typography, which he assembles on worksheets and then elaborates upon with hand-drawn riffs; these personally inflected images give rise to denser collages, with components loosely organized in vertical/horizontal arrays. Scheibitz brings a sophisticated eye for abstraction to these overall compositions, in which contrasts in context and color generate connections across boundaries: everyday objects combine with images of his own works, classical sculpture with advertisements, and black and white photos with neon. Suggesting a generative function to this cross-fertilization, the five digital prints in this series are entitled A.G.C.T., for the nucleic acids in DNA.

Sixteen small paintings, set widely apart on the walls of the large gallery, could then be seen as cultures, in which essential features of the archived materials are isolated and refined. Often taking geometric figures or motifs from typography as a basis for improvisation, Scheibitz uses bold, dark outlines to carve out shapes, sometimes with cubistic precision and sometimes with cartoonish animation. The outlines lend them a graphic quality, but with a human inflection. A photo of a wedge of cheese gives rise to a ghostly face. The one grid painting in this group, with its compartments ambiguously brushed out, is hung diagonally, like an eccentric window.

Sculptures also spin off from these images, sometimes with functional motifs, but elsewhere with more enigmatic whimsy. A white column bears a row of black frames, like an empty film clip, while a vertical box shaped something like a lower-case “h” sprouts a row of balls on its arched spine. But A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events, the major painting in the show, seems to work against this proliferation of images: it compresses its separate compartments into an overall composition.

Into this highly abstracted construction, Scheibitz weaves further allusions to modernist predecessors. Like Mondrian, he restricts himself to black, gray, and the primary colors, albeit freely modulated. At top center is a circle, suggesting the face of a clock – an organizing mechanism for “events”, but without hands, like the clock in Matisse’s Red Studio, an emblem of the timeless space of art. In the center below it, diagonal lines shift from flat patterns into the third dimension, recalling Paul Klee’s pedagogical diagrams of points developing into lines and planes; farther right, the planes open inward to construct a room. Other suggestions of depth imply a hidden internal structure. A wide brushstroke obscures part of the upper left panel, and the arc spanning the bottom center seems part of a bigger circle somewhere behind the grid – perhaps another, larger timepiece. This is a panorama that still leaves things covered up and ambiguous.

There’s an ad hoc quality to the central blue diagonal that breaks out of its frame – order here seems less imposed by the grid than to grow out of it. Scheibitz relies on the Bauhaus method of “Gestaltung”: arranging visual elements on a grid, so as to encourage intuitive orders to emerge. For all its finely articulated construction, “A Panoramic VIEW” retains some open-ended informality, an internalized restlessness. Some areas are only loosely brushed in; colors seep from under the borders of the planes at right center, in contrast to the sharp outlines that define the banana-shaped protrusion to their left, evidence of a constant dialectic between closing in and opening up. The “Basic Events” of the exhibition’s title might well refer to the ongoing proliferation of intuitive connections.

Scheibitz has extended a classical modernist style to embrace our late capitalist culture of constructed forms and digital images. From his informal collection of photographic reproductions emerge not modernism’s high visions of utilitarian progress, but impulses more playful and unexpected. There’s no returning to origins, but by winnowing out the basic visual elements in his archive, Scheibitz taps a reservoir of optimistic energy and affords our imaginations a space of free play.

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Carly Berwick, Ellie Bronson, and Ken Johnson join David Cohen to discuss Anthony Goicolea at Postmasters, Leandro Erlich at Sean Kelly, Alex Katz at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, and Haim Steinbach at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.

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Toys’R’U.S. (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth)
Skarstedt Fine Art
1018 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021
November 19 – December 21, 2005

“The Curiosity Shop” is a small, well constructed house cum store structure with a front porch and windows in the front door (there is no back door), and on the front and side of it. The artist, who made a brief appearance in the gallery with an attractive couple while I was there, was glowing as he told them that the house was constructed by a friend in a backyard in Rhode Island, that it is rainproof, and that it has been bought and will be kept outdoors by the new owner. After lingering for a few moments on the front porch they disappeared into a private backroom. Their muffled laughter resonated throughout the gallery during my visit.

The sign hanging in the front porch has three words on it in descending order: ANTIQUES, CURIOSITIES and COLLECTIBLES. The lighting in the completely sealed off shop is dim and self-consciously atmospheric. The shop is chock full of objects, many of which we can’t make out. The objects are definitely arranged or ordered in loose categories; ceramic animals, flowers, humanoid statuettes and figurines, various types of birds and stuffed animals, books, hats, models or kitschy sculptures of cars/vehicles, different types of lanterns, piles of cigar boxes, rows of tools, stacked cans of paints and varnishes, bottles, stacked and almost completely obscured paintings against the back wall, a pedestal with an assortment of small busts arranged on it, time keeping devices such as clocks and egg timers, and much more.

What are we to make of this busy assortment of stuff? Dion does not try completely to avoid verisimilitude. Anyone familiar with the experience of visiting a rural antique shop will see connections between the real and this natural wood interior. Keys hang near the shop-owners desk like they would in a real shop. There is a desk and chair for the make believe owner to sit at. There is a magnifying light on the desk for the proprietor to examine goods with. The simple interior and exterior design of the shop is meant to suggest a real place. At least this is a model of the real upon which Dion attempts to superimpose metaphysical dimensions.

We learn about the metaphysical dimensions of The Curiosity Shop, those relating to “a reality beyond what is perceptible to the senses,” in the accompanying gallery. In it there are a number of competent but uninspired drawings, leftovers from past installations that are meant to satisfy those seeking to own a Dion, and a few Dadaist sculptures. In one drawing titled The Curiosity Shop there is a book shelf divided into two rows, and the sections in each row are labeled in descending order. The left column reads, Vision, Hearing, Touch, Taste, Smell, and Allegory of Vision, and the right column reads, Air, Earth, Water, Fire, The Underworld, and Realms of the Cosmos.

Dion attempts to connect elements of the real, a highly subjective use of classification “systems” (I use the term loosely because intuition is involved. Intuition plays an important part in the composing process and the selection process that brings these objects together.), and a powerful critique of and haunting display of our complete immersion in the unreal. Dion’s installations are simulating devices, in that they are created in order to examine aspects of human behavior which can never be subject to direct experimentation. Subtle traces of the artist’s conceptual framework are present, but they do not completely dispel the imitative representation on display. We are supposed to look at the groupings of things and wonder if they symbolize some concept or idea and why groupings are juxtaposed.

After looking at the drawing I returned to the shop and got up close to the small windows on the side of the structure and tried to find the shelf in the drawing I looked at. More or less in front of me there was a bookshelf that did not look exactly like the one in the drawing with respect to its size and shape and the number of shelves. On each shelf in one of the two rows of shelves there was a plaster cast of a body part: Mouth/Chin, Ear, Fingers or Hand, Eye, Nose. Surrounding the casts, some of them obscured by a swathe of colored fabric, were objects that relate to a specific sense, magnifying devices, textured bric-a-bracs, and things that produce sounds. We are forced to strain our eyes and imagination when peering into the murky depths of the shop and one wonders what the act of looking for that special something in a real junk shop means. The atmospheric lighting resembles after hours lighting in a real junk shop. Are we searching for a lost life of the senses when we purchase things we don’t really need to improve our quality of life? Is consumer fetishism a poor substitute for bodily satisfactions? When we shop for curios or buy works of art do we really seek out a lost past or a banished metaphysical worldview?

Most shoppers who frequent antique shops think there is some ideal moment in the past when objects were purer because they were handmade not mass produced, and the fact that all tactile sensations are thwarted by the sealed off shop and we must rely on our gaze to examine the objects within the shop, we slowly come to realize that language constitutes reality and we can never have true consummation with things without the mediation of words. This installation proves the Heisenbergian concept that “the very act of observing alters the object being observed.” The antique shop acts as a supplement for a lack of full presence (we can’t touch anything in the shop). We search for something amidst the semi-orderly displays of the antique shop, perhaps for a romanticized past, but we are left with supplements of this past. This installation is an autopsy of nostalgia. Dion re-presents the experience shared by buyer and seller, when they have what Carl Freedman describes as “no relation to…things but that of possession.”

Mark Dion’s second installment in his “Toys ‘R’ U.S.” series, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, on display at Skarstedt Fine Art until December 21, is a blunt and horrifying exploration of our deep attachment to simulations and the way simulations do not replace real things or concepts but are the sole substance of our knowledge of the past and often the present. The collection and display of simulations of dinosaurs or perverted and completely transformed dinosaur-ness in this tableau of a child’s bedroom exudes obsessive energy. There is a desk and chair, a dresser with its drawers open and a television on top of it playing trailers for movies that feature dinosaur special effects (“The Lost World,” “One Million Years, B.C.,” ”The Land Unknown,” “Dinosaurus,” and some installment of the Godzilla saga), a bed, and a night table with a lamp covered with dinosaur decals. Socks, pajamas, underwear, shirts, ties, and shoelaces emblazoned with things we call dinosaurs hang out of the drawers. There are so many dinosaur related products in this installation that I can’t mention all of them, but they can be divided into categories: books, food, dishware and utensils, bathroom items including an antibiotic ointment with a dinosaur on the packaging, clothing, toys, action figures, games, bedding, graphic material such as wallpaper, posters, stamps, decals and stickers, illustrations, and pages from a coloring book. Dion includes a partially filled in page from a child’s coloring book in this installation so that gallerygoers intermittently feel or think they are in an actual bedroom. Of course Dion doesn’t attempt to make the verisimilitude of the installation seamless. The white cube is always present but this obscene amassing of consumer crap would leave less of an impression if everything was behind a glass display. These “dinosaurs” have little to do with real dinosaurs, and Dion emphasizes the fact that our understanding of the world is a product of capitalism. Recognizability trumps knowledge. Therefore, the solace we received throughout our childhood from imaginary forms that signify dinosaurs was preparation for a life of impossible longings and willful ignorance. Signifiers are not what they signify and the signified is always absent.

Dion tells us that a museum’s mission to popularize the sciences is just as insidious as any other deformation of the real perpetrated by Hollywood or Chef Boyardee. Dion once complained about the inaccuracy of many of the brilliant dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. This wasn’t just nitpicking. Science related products such as “Eyewitness Books: Dinosaurs.” or a poster for a new dinosaur exhibit at the Nat. Hist. Museum blend in with the dinosaur fruit snacks, dinosaur keychains, dinosaur calendar, dinosaur underwear and socks, dinosaur pins (“Party ‘til You’re Extinct”), dinosaur gummi candy, dinosaur straws, dinosaur gumball dispenser, dinosaur trading cards, dinosaur baseball caps, dinosaur pillows, dinosaur shaped pasta, et alia.

It is hard not to take Jean Baudrillard’s ideas seriously when standing amidst all of these signifiers. This installation makes us think about the concept of dinosaur. The sparse knowledge most people have about them and the distorted images the word dinosaur conjures up, do not relate to the real but owe their entire existence to consumer processes, the making of useless goods, the generating of desire for these goods, and the marketing of them. The overload accompanying this installation is an integral part of its message. It is easy to imagine installations similar to this one focusing on dogs, or people, or heart shapes, or anything we have completely transformed into banal and ubiquitous symbols. This installation examines cultural processes that distort, repackage and recontextualize the real. The installation shows us a world of consumer friendly signifiers that the individual is immersed in before she/he has a chance to experience the real or at least a coherent pictorial and textual account of the real. How many people really take the time to learn about real dinosaurs and is it even possible to do so?

On a more optimistic note, Dion also points out the malleability of our signifiers or symbols. The general concept of dinosaur is associated with comfort and nourishment (cookies, fudge, bubblegum and bedsheets), playfulness and camaraderie (Barney the purple dinosaur makes a few appearances and plastic and stuffed dinosaurs abound), hygiene and health (adhesive bandages and toothbrushes), fearful amoral monsters (Godzilla and Jurassic Park). Dion shows us how comfortable we have become with this commodity filled hyperreality. These dinosaur signifiers change through time and become more sophisticated formally and on a psychic level. Advances in filmmaking and manufacturing processes allow companies and directors to add detail of form and sophisticated movements to their dinosaurs. They can make them scarier and ickier for adult audiences. For toddlers and preschoolers the dinosaur signifier is scrubbed of all things messy and biological and made soft edged and cute. The unreal, whether it contains viscous and fanged monsters or cuddly and bright colored squeeze toys, has pervaded our lives, our habits and routines, our leisure time and hobbies, our imaginations. We are so accustomed to these distortions that the real has gone missing, and we like it that way.

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