Among other distinctions, Spring Break is the only Armory Week fair to spill over to Monday, which fits its image of youthful overreach. It is the most anarchic and exuberant of the fairs: each room of these administrative offices of the USPS (the space has a David Lynch-like quality, a time-capsule of New Deal-era bureaucracy) has its own curator. Myla Dalbesio, for instance, orchestrated a suite of rooms into “you can call me baby,” with various post-feminist takes on the overarching theme of the fair, “cut and paste.” Erin Riley’s  (2015), for instance, appropriates a moment of girl-on-girl porn frozen on an iPhone. A postmodern gesture if ever, except that if you look at old tapestries there’s often fun and naughtiness going on there, too.

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October 10 to November 22, 2015
260 Richardson Street (at Kingsland Ave.)
Brooklyn, 646 729 4682

Nicola Ginzel’s recent solo exhibition at Brooklyn’s Cathouse FUNeral featured a considerable amount of small-scale mixed media objects and embroidered works on paper. Occasionally framed but mostly hung directly on the wall, these works were shown in close proximity and at an unusual height. Allowing only a tall viewer to peruse them at eye-level, works could easily be inspected both frontally, as well as slightly from below. This made for an intimate acquaintance between viewer and subject, serving Ginzel’s work particularly well. Rooted in the playful mixture of eclectic materials, her enchanting concoctions aim to not only disguise but to reinvent the familiar; she adds value not where it was lost, but where it hardly existed in the first place.

Hybrids between sculpture and painting, Ginzel’s objects involve a staggering amount of found, fragmented, and usually random ingredients. The latter can range from tea bags, mohair, wax, thread, gaffers tape, wasp nest, felt, clothing remnants, rubber band and gold leaf, to dirt. Mixed, re-matched, and altered, the remnants are stripped off their former functionality and everyday context. However, that does not equate with a loss of meaning. In fact, Ginzel’s hand-sized objects can exude an almost shamanistic quality. One might easily imagine them playing an important part in some ritual. The fact that some of the materials involved are gathered in specific places, including dirt from the music haven Muscle Shoals in Alabama, for example, enhances this notion.

In addition to her three-dimensional works, Ginzel also continuously embroiders various scraps of paper. These can either be discarded snippets of mass-produced candy wrappers or popcorn packages, for example, or involve more personal notations, such as schedules, index cards, or specifically selected book pages. Stitch-by-stitch, these mundane items are elevated from the commonplace to the carefully considered. By tenderly abstracting her materials, Ginzel helps them to obtain a sense of preciousness and even an air of Romanticism.

In order to provide a comprehensive overview of Ginzel’s oeuvre, “My Bed is Made of Atoms” presented a selection of works from the past 15 years. In that period she has consistently found inspiration in mainstream culture. However, it is the elegant execution of her work, as well as her careful handling of her materials, that reveal a high regard for craft. She is interested in interacting with her subjects in a simple and yet profound way, or as she has pointed out: “It is in the simplicity and interaction, where the essence of life’s breath resides, not in the end result or goal achieved.”

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April 23 to May 24, 2015
327 Broome Street (between Bowery and Chrystie Street)
New York, 212 375 8043

There is a tendency in contemporary art which conflates facts with content. Too often artists will point to this or that and shout “Hey! Look at this thing I know about, isn’t it clever?!” On their surface, Louise Despont’s drawings organize themselves loosely around Balinese rites and rituals. But Despont’s renderings are closer to fetishism than to ritual, less a sacrament to the unruly gods and more a testament to an artist’s own will to succeed. By way of control and precision, the artist converts those unfamiliar or “exotic” mannerisms she finds compelling into a set of data: linguistic, sonic and seismologic — enveloped in an air of the bespoke. The work’s immaculateness is hard to surmount, it begs to be prodded, poked at and taken apart.

Elegance in art is tricky. It can come to stand for good taste, which in turn suggests a classed position. Bali is Despont’s Tahiti. And from its verdant shores and pumice beaches she distills elegant images more Hermes than Noa Noa. In her fourth solo exhibition with Nicelle Beauchene, the artist demonstrates her pitch-perfect technical skills and impeccable design sensibility. Her vocabulary is rich but affected: she draws heavily from South Asian textile design as well as antique maps; the works are robust, though she approaches them with the delicacy of a miniature. Offering in Appeasement (all 2014) is the most luxurious drawing here.. It is a roughly symmetrical composition of tropical fronds, stylized vegetal forms and rosettes. Despont’s artworks owe something to Tropicalia but without its zeal and musicality. Her color is subtle: soft rose, silvery green, myriad grey and inflections of pale gold and blue unify in a constellation of shapes that recall a medieval tapestry’s threadbare surface. Despont is drawing upon the local tradition of making offerings to the gods and goddesses who preside over the geologically volatile Sunda Strait. This marine passage is situated between Java and Borneo and was the site of the cataclysmic 1883 eruption of Krakatoa which killed more than 36,000 people. The eruption is cited as creating the loudest sound ever recorded in human history. The proliferation of lines which overlay Despont’s imagery correlate to the sonic activity of Krakatoa, or “the sound heard around the world.”

Though she utilizes stencils and hand-drawn grids, the work, over time, reveals unexpected buoyancy as a result of the artist’s uniformly light touch and muted palette. An image of two volcanoes drawn in shades of silver and grey appears in Anak Krakatau (or Child of Krakatau). The erupting volcanoes flank an island set within a stylized sea. At left, a text box reads: “anak krakatau, indonesia, sunda strait, emerged 1928.”

An entire constellation of narrative is embedded in Despont’s drawings: travel, ecological disaster, an interest in craftsmanship,colonialism and architecture. But the means by which she attempts to delve into the region’s multivalent history instead stylizes this very history into a kind of ornamentation. In this way, one might say that Despont is participating in an archetypal colonial narrative of mining an Eastern culture for its aesthetic and conceptual riches then dashing back to the West to capitalize. Two of the most successful works in the exhibition are Full Moons and Volcanic Centers. Both of these drawings show less literalism than the larger, more ambitious pieces. It seems that, in these, Despont has metabolized the ideas she is using and instead of illustrating events, she lets these events and ideas play out through the design and drawing. Another aspect here is that there is less filled-in space which lets the warm, rosy finish of the antique paper do its own work. Portions of frosty green and chalk white heighten the surface’s character.

The Sound Heard Around the World is a stylized depiction of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa rendered in shades of cool grey. Again, the event is flattened out and made decorative. Bands and cords radiate out from the volcano’s center, as if to illustrate the sonic aftershock of the eruption. Even the volcanoes she depicts are rendered like plumes — ebullient and decorative. It is evident when looking at these drawings that Despont gives care and attention, and this might be the work’s real subject.

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Sonia Delaunay: Les Couleurs de l’Abstraction at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

October 17, 2014 through February 22, 2015
11 Avenue de Président Wilson
Paris, +33 1 53 67 40 00

A blanket stitched by Sonia Delaunay for her baby Charles in 1911 is the most evocative piece in the exhibition “Les Couleurs de l’Abstraction” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (on display through the 22^nd of February and then at the Tate Modern from the 15^th of April through the 9^th of August). That is not to say that Delaunay’s ferocious output and creativity ended there — it was only the beginning. The blanket, crafted of 70 roughly rectangular and triangular pieces of shimmery cloth, placed in relation to each other based on principles of color resonance and harmony that were an obsession of her husband Robert (he drew his theories from the French chemist and color theorist Michel Eugene Chevreul), stands as an epic transition in the history of early abstraction. It also embodies the pragmatism in her approach to her work: she soon stretched and exhibited the blanket as her first work of pure abstraction. One may surmise she did this once the baby had outgrown his blanket.

Delaunay mixed the applied arts with “pure” painting throughout her career. This duality lies at the literal and metaphorical center of the exhibition where a gallery of coats and textiles, and even a promotional film she made in the 1920s, runs on an endless loop. The clothing, furniture and costume design do not have the same vibrancy or theoretical insistence as the paintings. Her striking Manteau pour Gloria Swanson (1925), with radiating rectangular bands, is a dazzling cross between a Russian soldier’s bulky overcoat and early Atari graphics — a bit of Delaunay’s Russian roots with some Aztec thrown in. It lacks the encompassing throbbing exhilaration of Le Bal Bullier of 1913, given pride of place a few rooms earlier.

Posed in counterpoint to the fashion film, which features models lounging in Delaunay fabrics in front of her paintings, is a mighty textile display machine on the opposite wall that the curators have conjured up. Beneath the word “Simultané” four bolts of fabric roll up or down constantly, contrasting the artist’s seemingly endless fountain of design ingenuity. Along the walls are swatches, sketches, kerchiefs and ties reinforcing this point. Unfortunately, it comes across as a bit crass — the same sinking feeling one got on seeing the Louis Vuitton shop placed smack in the center of the 2008 Murakami exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum.

But the baby blanket is not crass, and the clothing designs and the costumes for productions by Tristan Tszara and Sergei Diaghilev are full of the colorful and garish enthusiasm of post-WWI experimentation. They are wild deco colonialist interpretations of Ancient Egypt, for the ballets Cleopatra and Aida (1918). Does this interdisciplinary existence make Delaunay a feminist icon because she straddles both the at-the-time male dominated world of painting and the perceived woman’s sphere of sewing and clothing production? Perhaps her claim to icon status, beyond her talent as a painter, should be her very asexual approach to her practice, a personality trait that presaged later art/entrepreneurial giants such as Warhol, Koons and Hirst. Delaunay had a very sanguine relationship with her clothing and costume design — it was a career that only really took shape after the Russian revolution took place and the money from home (St. Petersburg) ran out. She adroitly hired Russian seamstresses to make her clothing and weave her textiles (the Delaunay sweatshop?) and felt liberated from her commercial responsibilities after the 1929 market crash for all intents and purposes put an end to her fashion business.

“Les Couleurs De l’Abstraction” shows Delaunay at her strongest at the beginning and the end. The exhibition begins with juvenilia — portraits of peasants and friends made on vacation in Finland with her aunt and uncle, then student work heavily influenced by Gauguin and the Fauves. This is followed by the strange process of mutual assimilation that was the marriage of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, one that birthed the Orphism movement (a term coined by Apollinaire), which set up a category of pure abstraction utilizing the methodological approaches of Cubism. Along with Le Bal Bullier is the illustration to accompany Blaise Cendrars’s travelogue poem “La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France,” probably the most successful evocation of the Delaunay’s concept of Simultaneity — a confusing theory based around a fascination with technology, applied color theory and interdisciplinary collaboration among the arts. The series “Prismes Electriques” was started in 1913 and became the defining image of both Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s careers — beacons of light with radiating waves or shells of colors.

After the stock market crash, Delaunay returned to painting with renewed vigor. Her most successful series of applied works, though, was a cycle of illustrative murals for the 1937 aerospace pavilion for the “Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques dans la Vie Moderne.” In these she isolates technological objects — the propeller, the cockpit, the dashboard, gears and sparkplugs — and renders them as symbols within a context aesthetically redolent of Orozco and Rivera’s great murals of a the early ‘30s.   The cycle achieves its goal of aggrandizing contemporary technology by injecting the Delaunays’ brand of radiating circles (now neatened up) into a well-crafted layout that has the punch, poignancy and mystique of an engineering blueprint. It is a design sensibility that wouldn’t be surprising on a website in 2015.

The exhibition is vast, as was Delaunay’s output. She remained active, painting and designing rugs and fabrics, well into the late 1970s: she died in 1979 at the age of 94.   Over that very long period she still focused on the circles that had so fascinated her and Robert in the teens — hybrid symbols of electric light-cum-wheel-cum-human head, an all-in-one beacon. Robert died in 1941, and perhaps freed from his influence, Sonia’s beacons become more introspective, as with L’Affereux Jojo (1947) which is less bright and less color-theory obsessed and overwhelmingly gray, the circle also becoming a half-circle now. Maybe the artist is blinking here and catching her breadth. Triptyque (1963) finds her even less obsessed with the ideology of the long-dusty Orphism; the forms are more distinct and freer, and again there are more blacks, ochres and slate colors, the paintings are less optimistic and more worldly. At the heart of the exhibition is the feat that Delaunay took an abstract trope that began with a baby blanket in 1911 and expanded and elaborated on it for almost seven decades, generating a visual/personal timeline that narrates the history of abstraction in the 20^th century.

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“Fiber Madness,” at the Palos Verdes Art Center through November 16, showcases the larger-than-life knits of fiber artist Mark Newport, also known as Sweaterman, whose work defies its own aesthetic whimsy, tackling social issues such as labor, gender, and domesticity. The artist is the head of the fiber arts program at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, where he is also the acting artist in residence. His fiber works are both bizarre and arresting, due in equal parts to their evocative resonance and massive scale.

The exhibition’s first gallery houses eight oversized hand-knit bodysuits crafted with cheap acrylic yarn. The suits’ hoods and colors create the impression of homespun superhero costumes, which hang lifeless like misshapen, stretched and molted skins. In Hollywood movies, Batman and Spiderman wear suits made from structured latex and polymers that cling to each muscle, ripple and bulge — the actor’s athletic and masculine physique left on full display. With works such as Newport’s 2008 piece Sweaterman 5, the artist queers this conventional superhero archetype, creating an impotent, cast-off hero using a traditionally “female” craft.

Newport’s suits sometimes include a corresponding element of performance in their production: outfitted from head to toe in one of his signature knits (which serves to both glove his hands and mask his face), Newport will work quietly in a rocking chair in the corner of the gallery, fumbling over his needles with yarn-covered fingers. Here, he embodies the figure of the crestfallen hero, the speed and dexterity associated with comic book warriors is replaced by quiet, frustrating tedium. This quality of impotence, even failure, which guides the work, touches upon an inquiry into gender normativity begun a decade earlier. In the 1990s, Newport designed a series of hand-embroidered sports trading cards.

By contrasting the hyper-masculinity of professional sports with a method of women’s labor, Newport puts gendered notions of professionalism in dialogue with cultural constructions of pastime, performance and dress. Unlike more “conventional” queer and feminist practice, which often takes for granted the artist’s marginalized subjectivity, Newport’s work stems from an inquiry into his internalized conceptions of masculinity and the ways in which he identifies with the associated tropes. By both embodying and critiquing his relation to this normative position, Newport reframes our understanding of gender and sexuality to resist binaries, upend classifications and embrace failure.

In the interest of full disclosure it serves to mention that Maddie Phinney curated an exhibition at the Palos Verdes Art Center earlier this year. 

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