November 15 – December 22, 2018
535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor (between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, ppowgallery.com

In her second solo exhibition at P.P.O.W., “Will She Ever Shut Up?”, Betty Tompkins, ever the bold tinkerer and experimenter, finds ingenious new ways to speak her mind. The formal link between three rooms of stylistically diverse, modestly scaled artworks is Tompkins’ strategy of placing socially charged phrases – handwritten, stencil-lettered or directly painted – on top of a separate visual field. These pointed juxtapositions poke us to puzzle out the connections, to think through the implications.

In the first room Tompkins unfurls the latest chapter of “Women Words”, a series she began in 2002. These incorporate phrases by and about women the artist solicits from the public. Interspersed here are companion works derived from the #MeToo movement in a separate series she titles “Apologia,” directly quoting public statements made by prominent men accused of assaulting women. Both categories of text are cleverly applied onto book page reproductions of canonical images by the likes of Titian, Raphael, Gainsborough, Cassatt, Rembrandt, Ingres and Artemisia Gentileschi. For the acrylic paintings in the second gallery, all from this year, selected “Women Words” expressions and accounts overlay her signature monochrome airbrushed, gracefully cropped close ups of genitalia.

As a suffused, solemn backdrop for these timely new works, the third gallery presents her text-only paintings and drawings on paper from the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Bringing to mind their on-going significance, Tompkins hand-copied fragments of our country’s founding legal documents painted in warm colonial hues over a subtle background grid of painted and penciled words. This group from the artist’s considerable archive is a reminder that her earliest, monumental paintings from 1969 through 1974, based on pornographic photographs her first husband had ordered illegally through the mail, were not shown for over 30 years. Since “discovered” in 2003, these and others Tompkins has since created have been shown virtually non-stop in museums and galleries around the world.

Perusing Tompkins’ word-image juxtaposition it is impossible not to think of Marcel Duchamp’s infamous “L.H.O.O.Q,” (1919) created by doctoring a post-card reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee. Duchamp’s sly pencil marks succinctly highlight gender ambiguity in Leonardo’s oeuvre. Likewise, Tompkins’ satiric defacement of historical masterworks allows us to scrutinize her repurposed works for lessons in identity formation and gender role definition. Her clustered expressions of scorn, praise, pride and contrition loosely hand lettered in opaque pink paint completely cover single figures in the reproductions of well-known paintings and photographs. The resulting frozen pastel silhouettes also call to mind another historic reference, the ancient catastrophic volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. As with this end-of-days event, Tompkins’  verbal flows have seemingly stopped the solitary men and women in their tracks ensnaring them for our analysis. Notably, the artist reverses her formula in an outlier work installed on the gallery’s smaller foyer wall, Women Words (Anon #11) (2017). On this vintage photograph, rather than the figure it’s the rural background that is filled with hand painted crude expressions such as, “Bean flicker,” “flesh wallet,” “Hagia Sophia,” “Love Socket”, ”put a bag over her head and fuck her for old glory.”  The young woman is fully dressed but seated in a way that modestly displays her underclothing. Unlike the other 50 plus readymades in the show, this woman is fully visible. She appears protected from the insults by her self-esteem and safe within her self-knowledge—indeed, wearing a quiet Mona Lisa smile.

Naomi Wolf’s landmark book, “Vagina” (2012) explores the implications of new research on the neuroscience of women’s reproductive organs. We now know there are multiple direct nerve connections between these organs and the brain. Wolf discusses how the impact of physical and verbal abuse on women’s psyches can now be more precisely measured. She also presents important correlations between erotic pleasure and personal agency. Tompkins’ seven pale pink and blue-grey paintings in the second gallery combine two contrasting techniques. Her signature soft airbrushed compositions of the swooning folds and creases of a woman’s labia and clitoris are counterposed with hard-edged stencil letters that have been removed to reveal the artwork’s under painting. Despite having its origin in exploitative pornography, Tompkins’ gentle yet emphatically clinical presentation of women’s genitalia tells of the importance for women of having a full understanding of the workings of their own sexuality. Being aware of the profound positive power of full female sexual expression for both men and women is the best defense against the attitudes expressed in the crowd-sourced phrases and narratives “pressed” into the genitalia in Tompkins’ paintings. My ex’s favorite…(2018) perfectly portrays this dynamic by hypnotically balancing the work’s two compositional elements within its floating painted space.

Let me suggest one way to consider the show’s composite truth that listening to each other with mutual respect is vital to the survival of our country. Imagine a vocal performance based on all the artworks in this show, simultaneously read aloud by their original authors. Men’s and women’s voices would create a calibrated cacophony merging insults, confessions, revelations and apologies pertaining to the opposite sex. Next, the phrases from Tompkins’ history works with key fragments from our Constitution and Bill of Rights would be recited by male voices. In these works, there is an underlying grid of the single word, “law,” repeated in rows. This would become a chant demanding “Law, law, law, law…” performed in a long, slow crescendo by an all-female chorus in the tens of thousands echoing the recent women’s marches. This multilayered vocal performance would reply to the question in Tompkins’ title with a resounding and hope filled “No!”

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Betty Tompkins: Small in the Viewing Room at Marlborough Contemporary
April 19 – May 20, 2017
545 West 25th Street

In her 1989 book Hardcore: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, Linda Williams identified a key impulse behind the consumption of porn. This was the desire to see everything, particularly something that cannot be directly shown: the inner state of ecstasy in the bodies of the performers. This desire cannot be fulfilled — and thus becomes endlessly alluring — because of the ways in which the personhood of the performers is diminished in the production of pornographic media: subjects become objects, bodies become organs, and pleasure becomes theater. In her paintings on view in two concurrent exhibitions at P.P.O.W. and Marlborough Contemporary, Betty Tompkins looks at porn from a feminist viewpoint, not to praise as “liberating” or condemn it as “exploitative,” but to explore this very particular way of visualizing sexuality. She intensifies the feelings of objectification and fragmentation found in her source material and follows them to their logical conclusion, producing works that are so pornographic that they have been drained of any trace of humanity or sensuality.

P.P.O.W.’s main gallery is dominated by canvases depicting sexual acts ranging from Instagram-friendly kissing and toe-sucking to explicit portrayals of genital penetration. Starting with pictures culled from vintage and contemporary pornography, Tompkins strips away layer after layer of residual humanity in her appropriated images until there is nothing left to move the viewer at an emotional or physical level. Her canvases eschew expressionistic brushstrokes or textural “skin” in an airbrush process that eliminates human touch from the equation. Her strict grisaille palette drains the arousing colors from flesh leaving it numb and detached. These distancing gestures are compounded by the size of her work, particularly the seven-foot-tall “Fuck” paintings. These bodily fragments are so far beyond life-size that they become alien, lacking the emotional resonance that comes with work that maintains a human scale. The coldness of these works is not a deficit: it creates an internal contradiction, resulting in paintings that are at once explicit and unarousing.

In the room behind the “Fuck” paintings is a wall with a grid of nine “Pussy” paintings. While each is still slightly larger than life-size at sixteen inches square, they present the viewer with an intimate (or, at least, less alienating) experience that Tompkins’s monumental works barely approach. They are more colorful, if only marginally, than her larger works: around the edges of each painting a colored ground can be seen peeking out. Tompkins’s airbrushed grisaille is tinted by these background colors, like blood flowing under the skin. Each panel depicts the genitalia of a different anonymous female performer. While each woman’s vulva is just as individual as her face, each of these combinations of lips, folds, and hair serves as a marker of physical uniqueness that offers no clues to the personality of sitter herself, something that could have been expressed by the parts cropped out of the frame and out of the image.

Installed in the rear gallery at P.P.O.W. is a series of works on paper. The bright colors that were hidden behind the surface of the “Pussy” paintings are in full view in this room, with each piece consisting of wisps of smoky black on top of a vibrant ground intersected by a penciled-in grid. On one level, this grid is a tool for the artist, a method of enlargement as old as painting itself. In these pieces, Tompkins’s thin airbrush technique leaves this organizational structure visible, fragmenting the depicted body parts into even smaller bits. At the same time, the grid provides an armature for the image, a structure that pulls the fragments together. Tompkins breaks the body apart and reassembles it in a contradictory oscillation that gives these works a tension not present in the paintings on canvas.

The process behind Tompkins’s use of grids and framing devices is shown in greater detail in two, small framed pieces situated near the entrance to her show in the viewing room at Marlborough Contemporary, Collage #2 and Collage #3 (both 1970). Neither being much larger than a trading card, they started out as pictures clipped from porn magazines. With layers of masking tape, Tompkins framed a section of each image focusing on the genital action between the two figures. Within this frame, a precise grid of centimeter-scale squares serves up the image for use in a future painting. These preliminary “sketches” reveal the extent of Tompkins’s editorial process: the faces of the performers — though barely recognizable in the grainy photos — are excluded from the frame and the grid. The cropped and gridded area, about the size of a postage stamp, is the embryo of a “Fuck” painting that may or may not have been completed; the remainder of the image is evidence of what has been discarded in the creation of such works. The high numbers, meanwhile, in titles like Cunt Painting #29, hint at the presence of a larger body of work than can be shown in Marlborough’s back room. The viewer of these works is offered a quick peep, teasing something that, like the elusive ecstatic spark identified by Williams, cannot be shown in any kind of totality.

Tompkins’s paintings are pornographic but not sexual: what she depicts isn’t sex but a commodified simulacrum of it, an artificial replacement that originated with the “Porno Chic” of the 1970s and has been amplified by the proliferation of pornography online. In this world of hyper-sexuality, intercourse is a mechanical process carried out between disembodied organs. There is no visible evidence of physical pleasure for any of the participants: the messy secretions or fluids that could testify to some kind of ecstatic state are absent or edited out. For “dirty” paintings, they are suspiciously clean. Similarly absent is the climactic “money shot” — external ejaculation on a performer’s body — that signals the end of a scene in most pornographic movies. Tompkins’s work depicts perpetual penetration without resolution, an act that could continue forever. There may be an occasional change of positions or orifices, or even a climactic buildup of tension, but climax must not be mistaken for satisfaction: there is always another anonymous participant ready to tag in and another void to be temporarily filled. Tompkins’s paintings are never satisfying, and therein lies their power: they depict the very impossibility of depicting sex.

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Salon Zürcher is to fair weeks what New Hampshire is to primary elections. Armory Week 2017 kicks off Monday with the 16th edition of this boutique fair, an early bird special that hands the keys to Zürcher’s Bleecker Street premises to six galleries from Paris, Brussels, Oslo, Provincetown (MA) and Hangzhou, China, whose Inna Art Space’s booth is pictured here.

Tuesday, February 28: Moving Image New York at The Tunnel, 269 11th Avenue

Jefferson Pinder’s Afro-Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise) is, according to his gallery, Curator’s Office of Bathesda, Md., “an escapist video narrative that ends in destruction when the protagonist plummets back to Earth after a mystical space journey. Like the doomed Icarus of Ancient Greek myth, the epic fall comes after reaching a brilliant zenith that is both mesmerizing and lethal. This white-faced Butoh-inspired performance is a crude metaphor of the civil rights legacy. Taking cues from experimental films, Pinder plants himself within the work, asking the viewers to watch the images of propulsion and power.”

Wednesday, March 1: Spring/Break Art Show, 4 Times Square

Spring/Break was the most anarchic and exuberant of the fairs back in the days when it was staged in the old USPS administrative offices – a David Lynch-like time-capsule of New Deal bureacracy. Now Spring/Break has been given a break in the form of two floors of a glass and steel high-rise 22 stories above Times Square. But there is no corresponding corporateness in the resulting display. The organizing principle remains: each room has its own curators who sometimes include the exhibiting artists themselves. It was gratifying for artcritical to see some of its own writers among the curators. Eric Sutphin, for instance, has brought together an inspired coupling of New York School painter Rosemarie Beck, who was active from the 1950s onwards with classically sourced, abstractly composed multi-figure compositions, and contemporary mannerist, Angela Dufresne, with her swirling, voluptuous, cinematic scenes. Each display has a neat little office of its own, with spectacular views of the midtown skyline. Too spectacular, sometimes, as it can overwhelm what’s on view. Inspired, therefore, was the decision to hang works in the blinds-drawn windows in one mini show, Thing Gap Method, selected by artcritical writer Megan Liu Kincheloe and featuring Sophia Flood, Sascha Ingber, Kelly McCafferty, Sarah Tortora and Kincheloe herself, whose Dice (2017) is pictured here. DAVID COHEN

Thursday, March 2: The Armory Show at Piers 92 & 94

It’s a good year for texture. Well, so is any year probably, and a good year for anything else if all you want to do is scatter evidence for some such glib hunch amidst the labyrinth that is the city’s biggest art fair, conceptual bread crumbs, so to speak, to trace your way back to the front door. But as the first piece to grab my eye was a fabric work by Jayson Musson at Philadelphia’s Fleisher-Ollman texture became my trail. Next stop, a cunningly camp “salon” for Florine Stettheimer, presented by Jeffrey Deitch, showing latter-day acolytes of the society heiress pioneer of the American avant garde where a 1990s shlock horror wedding cake of impasto by the unjustly forgotten Thomas Trosch abstractly emulated Florine’s Harlem beach scene that presides over the display. From there it was texture everywhere, whether the geological encrustations of Bosco Sodi, preponderant in the fair and to be seen, for instance, at Galeria Hilario Galguera of Mexico City, Blain Southern and Paul Kasmin; the very 1950s-looking sculpted netted grids of Michelle Grabner at James Cohan; or the painterly reliefs of Miguel Barcelo at Thaddeus Ropac. The tactility can even manifest vicariously, as in the Vik Muniz Isis print of a strangely mottled version of Picasso’s The Dreamer, at Edwin Houk. Haptic experiences grounded the gaze amidst the accelerating flow of spectacle. DAVID COHEN

Featured item from The Armory Show 2017: Mernet Larsen at Various Small Fires

Various Small Fires, the Los Angeles gallery, has a solo show of preparatory sketches by Tampa, Florida-based painter Mernet Larsen in the Presents section of The Armory Show 2017. Larsen, who also has a work on view at James Cohan Gallery’s booth at the same fair, has only recently come into her own since retiring from a distinguished career in art education, memories of which pervade her frequent return to the motif of the faculty meeting. Rooted in an earlier abstract practice as well as explorations of Japanese prints, Larsen’s jocular imagery thinly disguises her fascination with unconventional perspective systems. She pursues radical spatial solutions that eschew conventional single-point perspective in favor of parallel perspective, reverse perspective and eccentric, seemingly improvised but in fact rigorous fusions of different systems within the same work. By destabilizing the location of the viewer, sometimes indeed to the point of inducing vertigo, she forces us to know, rather than merely see, the situation. DAVID COHEN

Friday, March 3: VOLTA NY at Pier 90, 12th Avenue @ 50th Street

Ruth Hardinger’s striking Volta display at David&Scheweitzer Contemporary draws together disparate forces: the artist’s passionate environmental activism, her longstanding affinity with Mesoamerican culture, and historically informed, critically sharpened investigations of working methods. These are all felt in works such works as Bundle of Rights, a sculpture in plaster and rope, and Reading the Clouds, a tapestry collaboration with Mexican weavers, seen at the Piers. Meanwhile, back at the rancheros, that is to say 56 Bogart Street, the same gallery presents an ongoing retrospective overview of Hardinger work in different media. There are tapestries, a calendar, hanging works in paper and assembled sculptures. Obsessive-compulsive minimalist hatch drawings worked on varyingly rough and smooth surfaces are installed in a grid that conforms to the Golden Rule. Dating from the 1970s, this work manages to resonate with a recent, altogether more robust and spontaneous cast concrete and found slate sculptural arrangement. What binds these efforts across the decades is the humble yet inventive presentness of their maker. DAVID COHEN

Saturday, March 4: The Art Show at Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue @ 66th Street

The New York art fair scene can be confusing to the uninitiated: the most prominent fair, The Armory Show, takes place at a convention center on the Hudson while the Park Avenue Armory hosts an unrelated fair of its own, The Art Show by the Art Dealer’s Association of America. The work shown in the actual armory tends to be more conservative than the offerings of most of the other fairs, but there can be some surprises. PPOW’s booth this year is devoted to the work of Betty Tompkins, an artist who has been painting portraits of the pudendum for over forty years. Today she is best known for her colossal coital canvases, but her smaller works on paper, such as “Censored Grid #1” from 1974, provide a more intimate view of an intimate act. ROMAN KALINOVSKI

Independent (Art Fair) at Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street

Memo to Independent Art Fair, organizers and exhibitors alike: Enough already, put up some labels.

In the early days of the Basel Art Fair (the real one, in Basel, Switzerland) galleries would get an official reprimand from the all-powerful committee if the labels didn’t include prices. Dealers complained that having to ask was an icebreaker with collectors. But to have to ask who the artist is – never mind the title, medium, date? This is elitist, pretentious and anti-intellectual. To the innocent “general public” this says, this isn’t for you folks. To professionals it is impertinent and irritating, putting one in the humiliating position of asking when you half-know and gobbling up precious time in doing so. For new, unknown artists with foreign names it is a total downer: who is going to remember it, next time? And for collectors, having to beg for basic information has all the novelty and subtlety of a robo-telecall.

Despite this mishegas. Independent is still one of the most pleasing visitor experiences, thanks in no small measure to the gorgeous venue. My epiphanies on this visit were mostly three-dimensional for some reason: Beverly Buchanan’s shack constructions at Andrew Edlin; a bafflingly kinky saddle mounted on a scaffold “horse” by Magali Reus at London’s Approach; and a dynamically voluptuous bronze by the late Hungarian-born Norwegian sculptor Ervin Løffler, exquisitely installed by Oslo gallery VI, VII with works in dye on canvas by young New Yorker Landon Metz (Photo: Sebastiano Pellion) DAVID COHEN

Sunday, March 5: NADA New York at Skylight Clarkson North, 572 Washington Street

A work by Brenda Goodman presented by Jeff Bailey at NADA, the New Art Dealers Association, 2017 fair. NADA was founded in 2002, launching its first fair that year in Miami. This year sees some changes in its New York outing: the time slot has switched from Frieze Week to Armory Week, and they have a new venue in west Soho. In tune with the self-styled progressive profile of the association, half of ticket sales are to be donated to the ACLU. DAVID COHEN

This year’s iteration of the NADA fair was probably the most visually exhausting of the art fair week group, with dozens of galleries competing for attention in micro-booths that barely allowed one person to stand comfortably inside. Most of the galleries were from around New York but there were some international standouts, such as a selection of digital prints by Chris Dorland, courtesy of Super Dakota gallery from Brussels. Dorland’s glitchy work, made using a broken scanner and printed on eight foot tall aluminum panels, offered something monumental and digital in a fair that leaned towards the modest and traditional. Pictured: Untitled (corporate cannibal), 2017. ROMAN KALINOVSKI

Monday, March 6: Spring/Break Art Show, 4 Times Square

As befits the most youthful of the fairs, Spring/Break has an extra 24 hours of energy and determination than the others: it is the one fair in Fair Week that makes it to the Monday of the next. And here is an artist who knows how to capture zest. Aneta Bartos, whose dad Zbigniew Bartos has a lifetime of competitive bodybuilding behind him. Naturally, it was to her that he would turn, aged 68, to capture his musculature in its last glory. A room of buff, nicely toned father-daughter photographs takes home trophies for audacity and composure. DAVID COHEN

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Organized by Jake Palmert and Nolan Simon
June 23 to July 29, 2016
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 8634

Art dealer Jake Palmert and painter Nolan Simon, both from a thriving Midwest art scene, have put together a group show this July that is worth a stroll over to Marlborough Chelsea. Called simply “Landscapes,” its uncomplicated title implies, misleadingly as it turns out, a conventional look at a conventional genre.

The key sentence in a densely formulated curatorial statement doubling as a press release explains how they sought to “…tease out the developments in visual culture that have so fundamentally realigned relations between the artist and the art work, art’s content to its audience, and the art-world to society at large.” Despite the somewhat muddled argument that follows this sweeping outline, Palmert and Simon’s choices for the exhibition were certainly adventurous, offering juxtapositions highlighting the many intriguing dilemmas facing those concerned not just with landscape, but with any basic genre’s survivability in a whirlpool of media-soaked contemporary art.

The theme I gathered from the selection was how much and how permanent are the changes to the landscape genre that are hinted at in the show. What effect can radical change have on a genre that has been both flexible and consistent for several centuries? For instance, a stark and cold vision of the Himalayas called View of Nepal (2010), by photo-realist founding father Richard Estes, hangs next to a pair of untitled and clearly kitschy forest scenes that Ull Hohn created in the 1990s as an overtly ironic take on the Bob Ross painting method. Placing Hohn’s jarring cultural critique beside Estes’s subtle dissociation from traditional realism reinvigorates an early judgment that Estes was primarily concerned with the media properties of the photographic image.

Palmert and Simon characterize this aspect of Estes’s work as “National Geographic.” But does their media metaphor explain Estes’s only motivation? It’s worth noting that Estes’s recent canvases remain unpopulated, carrying over a feature of his work that dates back to his often depopulated views of upper Broadway in the late 1960s. Could it be that his figureless sensibility, which has deep roots in 19^th century American landscape painting, led him to the naturally barren landscapes at the Earth’s poles? And if so, is this not a development one might associate with a conventional landscape approach, seeking views to match a sensibility?

How often such questions arise in “Landscapes” is a function of the curators’ having admirably avoided the easier path of choosing exclusively from artists dedicated to painting’s realignment (their term, not mine) and wisely including less radical examples of the genre. Rackstraw Downes’s Presidio: In the Sand Hills Looking West with ATV Tracks & Cell Tower (2012) fits the show’s thesis to the extent that it is a view of a somewhat industrialized location. However, the expansive and near greedy absorption of a site that has long been Downes’s métier, is also one of the older and more sustaining tropes of landscape painting. It is no surprise to me that his feeling for landscape as open space is unmatched in this show.

The conceptual touchstone of the exhibition is Simon’s own work, of which there are three examples around the gallery. They range from blatantly illustrative of the idea of a “…discourse on truth as a distorted image of itself,” as in Unisex Medium (2016), to New Location (2016) where Simon is at his best, offering an interior looking out onto a courtyard with the upper windows revealing a partial view of the walls surrounding the space, while the lower windows replace the courtyard with a shepherd and a flock of sheep surrounded by green mountains. Why he chose May in Mount Carmel, Texas (2016) as his third entry is difficult to assess. It is as unpretentious a landscape as one can imagine, though its unadventurous color and brush handling exemplify Simon’s stated determination to keep the viewer’s focus on idea over execution.

A few notable inclusions seem, with respect to the exhibition’s thesis, neutral at best. An aptly seasonal watercolor called Summer (1913) lets John Marin hold the line on landscape as a concentrated study of nature; John Miller’s Untitled (1984) Fauvist inspired waterfall is both lively and benignly distant from its subject; and FLAME’s beach scene is vaguely Picasso-like acrobats (or perhaps Dali-like self-immolating hulks). All three strive to complete the landscape context that serves as a counterpoint to the more radical entries. FLAME, possibly a reference to the high-end video editing program of the same name, serves here as a moniker for a collaboration between multi-media artists Taslima Ahmed and Manuel Gnam, whose computer graphic vision, though technically exotic, maintains a conventional sense of space.

I read Sylvia Pilmack Mangold’s Untitled (yellow painting) (1977) as a provisional work that ended up in a strange place. Cropped with masking tape, perhaps as an adjustment to a reconsideration of its original idea, the outer canvas received several shades of yellow before the artist either gave up on it or found its unfinished look appealing. The latter is more likely, as Mangold actually completed a series of similar canvases in the mid-1970s.

Alex Katz’s North 2 (2015) could be construed as a view from the artist’s studio. It has that sense of the rediscovery of an overly familiar sight. With its blank wall punctured by windows, uniform in appearance but for one, it echoes the sunlit cheerlessness of Edward Hopper’s city views. Moreover, hinting at the poetry of old age — looking to the cold north (could Estes be doing the same thing?) — it brings a poignant human vulnerability to the show’s otherwise cerebral orientation.

Paintings by several artists in the show suffer from not having enough examples available to provide more than a glimpse of each artist’s unique conceptual framework. Assuming these frameworks were the essential element for their inclusion in the show, their sparse representation inadvertently pointed to the weakness of their individual pieces. These include Keith Mayerson, Paul Thek and Mary Ann Aitken. In contemplating Aitken’s painterly riffs on billboards, Thek’s watercolors, and Mayerson’s Grand Canyon (2016), it became obvious that each needed a fuller representation of their self-defined contexts.

John Kelsey’s four watercolors are focused on landscapes surrounding politically charged institutional buildings, including an Apple Data Center in North Carolina, an NSA building in Utah, the VMWare Data Center in Washington State, and an unidentified Google facility. As a side note, Google’s undisclosed location infers that Kelsey feels Google to be most ubiquitously threating of the lot — a consistent position considering the show’s focus on media imagery. As watercolors they are nothing special, but the artist’s allegiance to disaffection, expressed in his mounting and framing each piece on a cool aluminum sheet, comes through loud and clear.

Mathew Cerletty’s Almost Done (2015), a witty rendering of a lawn mower’s progress across a carpet-smooth hillside, makes for quite a contrast to Jeanette Mundt’s Heroin: Cape Cod, USA paintings, made this year. Underscoring a grim subject — the paintings were inspired by the HBO documentary of the same name — each canvas offers a somber bluish New England landscape, some with narrow strokes of white scattered across the surface in a manner similar to Van Gogh’s attempts at painting rain. In an exhibition bent on addressing painting and media imagery, Mundt’s landscapes are a perfect fit. How they address the disturbing subject of drug addiction is less clear.

Marring an otherwise thoughtful selection is the seemingly transparent decision to include a work by radical feminist Betty Tompkins. Though an argument can be made for a nude in a landscape context — Titian, Giorgione, Joan Semmel, Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) — Tompkins’s uncompromising Cunt Painting #9 (2008) is fiercely feminist, and in this exhibition shows just how stubbornly her work resists attempts to transpose its intensity to a disinterested environment.

Considering that the exhibition was limited for the most part to Marlborough’s holdings, I thought the show managed to address its subject broadly and with imagination. Painting’s current struggles with a welcome rebirth of subject matter is the story of the decade, and how this story unfolds, specifically how the merging of media imagery with fundamental genres like landscape resolves itself, will likely remain the heart of the narrative.

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Three Brooklyn-based critics join David Cohen at the podium April 12 for The Review Panel at Brooklyn Public Library in what should be another stormy, contentious evening of critical debate: Lance Esplund, Kara Rooney and Robert Storr. And as added spurs to liveliness, a radical feminist twist or two. Judith Braun, subject of a two-part (and two-borough) show at McKenzie Fine Art on the Lower East Side and Simuvac Projects in Greenpoint, was one of the original “Bad Girls” in Marcia Tucker’s thus titled 1994 show at the New Museum, while the title of Betty Tompkins’ show at the FLAG Art Foundation, “WOMEN Words, Phrases and Stories,” gives a fair flavor of the feistiness to expect there. Also prone to the prodding and probing of the panel, shows of Omer Fast at James Cohan and Molly Lowe at Pioneer Works.

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The exhibition “Rear Window Treatment,” currently at Louis B. James Gallery, is a group show that explores the concept of voyeurism, and by extension, implicates the viewer in voyeuristic acts as well. While it is traditionally considered a shameful thing to be a voyeur, the six artists in this show are unabashed in their representation of voyeuristic perspectives, exposing the extent to which the desiring gaze has come to inform contemporary sexuality and interpersonal perception in general. These are artists who like to look.

The star of the show is Betty Tompkins, who in recent decades has met with belated critical acclaim for her “Fuck Paintings”: large-scale reproductions of pornographic close-ups, usually depicting heterosexual penetration. Scandalous at the time of their debut in 1969, her paintings have garnered more and more attention over the years. Whether this is due to a gradual acceptance of women artists into the canon or a gradual decrease in American prudishness is open to debate.

Tompkins’s paintings aren’t on display here, rather, a group of small studies in ink on paper and photographs. Created between 2012 and 2014, these six drawings are more reserved than her photorealistic paintings in that the explicit content has been drawn (or drawn over) with loosely quivering scribbles of ink. Some of the scribblier works depicting vaginas, such as Photo Drawing #7 (2013), begin to approach a transcendental level of abstraction. Other works, such as Photo Drawing #3 (2012), with its highly explicit depiction of double penetration, are more in keeping with her original oeuvre while also incorporating the expressionistic scribbles to pleasing effect.

Other artists in the show invite us to look at porn, and invite us to touch it too. Michael Mahalchick’s Acid Rain (2014) consists of cardboard DVD covers from porno films, folded together so as to create a “crude” un-bound book that sits on a shelf. Visitors are welcome to flip through it, although they might not want to, as the covers have a used look about them. The absence of actual DVDs hints at the hollowness of pornographic consumption, wherein the object of desire is inevitably elsewhere. The DVD covers feel anachronistic when considered in relation to Deric Carner’s interactive Tip If You Love Me (2014), a spidery black sculpture proffering touch-screen tablets streaming live-cam pornography. The structure resembles a mutant mic-stand carved out of wood, and the tablets are all tuned to the website chaturbate.com, each one showing a different sort of pornography. The wooden armature lends the installation an organic tactility that offsets the impersonality of the cyber-sex component, perhaps suggesting that digital voyeurism is a natural extension of human sexuality.

The title of the exhibition, “Rear Window Treatment,” is adapted from Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), in which Jimmy Stewart plays a newspaper photographer with a broken leg who passes his convalescence by watching his neighbors from the window of his apartment. Barb Choit, a Vancouver-based photographer, mimics this scenario by presenting photographs of her neighbors going about their daily affairs. The pictures are simply exquisite: taken under low light, the colors are rich and saturated, and the framing device of the window lends them extra drama. The scenes hover between the banal and the touching, such as a cheesy kiss on television glimpsed through a neighbor’s drapes. In another, a beautiful woman brushes her hair behind slatted blinds. The photographs are so loaded with untold stories that they feel like film stills.

The exhibition’s only film work, William E. Jones’s Mansfield 1962 (2006), consists of edited archival footage taken by the police through a two-way mirror in a public bathroom during a gay sex sting operation in 1962. Many of the men in the video were prosecuted under sodomy laws, a chilling reminder of the restrictions on gay rights less than 50 years ago. Back then, state-of-the-art visual technologies were being used to out gay people; today, the latest visual technologies are being used for things such as chaturbate.org.

Finally, Brad Phillips pays homage to the legendary Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý with a series of watercolors based on Polaroids that Phillips took of women in New York City. Tichý (1926 – 2011) was often mistaken for a crazy person with a fake camera because of his sketchy appearance and his homemade cameras constructed from cardboard tubes with hand-ground lenses. He almost exclusively photographed women in public, which eventually got him banned from the local swimming pool in his hometown of Kyjov. The four watercolors by Phillips are each titled Your Miroslav Tichý (all 2014), and they emulate Tichý’s style by depicting sexy women’s legs with all else cropped from the frame. However, the conceptual connection ends there, since Phillips’ watercolors lack the dream-like soft focus that makes Tichý’s photographs so magical. There is a clean quality about Phillips’s work that betrays the fact that he is not an inveterate voyeur like Tichý, although he may aspire to be.

The exhibition raises questions about the morality of spying on people for one’s own pleasure, but most of these artists appear to be in favor of the practice. The exception might be Jones, whose work reads as a condemnation of police surveillance and discrimination. Nevertheless, even Jones’s video carries an element of voyeuristicdétournement in that the source footage has been repurposed for our pleasure and edification. We want to see everything (especially sex) and the evolution of visual technology is being employed towards that end. Mahalchick’s empty DVD sleeves remind us that the voyeuristic gaze can be an unfulfilling substitute for a physical human connection, but if you like to look, rest assured you are not alone.

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On the ground floor in the very narrow, five story Upper East Side townhouse of Luxembourg & Dayan is Glenn Brown’s Oscillate Wildly (After “Autumnal Cannibalism” by Salvador Dali) (1999). Up the steep stairs you come upon Willem van de Velde the Elder’s pen and ink drawing, A Dutch Harbor in Calm, with small vessels inshore and beached among fisherman, a Kaag at anchor and other ships (late 1640s); and then you view oil paintings by Alex Katz, (Provincetown, 1959) Christopher Wool (Jazz and AWOL, 2005) and Alberto Giacometti (Téte de Diego, 1958).  And still further upstairs, amid austere abstractions by Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Brice Marden and Robert Morris, Betty Tompkins’ large acrylic Fuck Painting #4 (1972) is something of a surprise.

All these works are in grisaille, which here is understood not just as another color but the non-color remaining when all other colors are eliminated. North Renaissance masters sometimes painted the outer wings of altarpieces in grisaille. Imitating the look of stone, these constrained images were generally visible only during Lent. Because grisaille is perceptually inert, that non-color is ideally suited to conceptual and minimal art.  Jasper Johns’ Screen Piece 5 (1968) feels withdrawn, and Daniel Buren’s Photo-souvenir: Peinture acrylique blance sur tassi rayé, blanc et gris anthracite (1966) looks sullen. We do, it is true, think of ‘a grey day’ as depressing, but in this gallery, set against intensely colored walls, this ensemble of grisaille works is oddly exhilarating.  When academic art historians have devoted so much bookish attention to identifying relationships between the old masters, the modernists and contemporary”artists, how exciting, how positively life-enhancing it is to see the way “grisaille’ relates American and European art from historically distant periods. The great modernist art writer Adrian Stokes argued that color allows pictorial “organization to be  . . .  intricate: a mutual evocation between forms must take place at all angles and at all distances and in all directions throughout a picture, so that each part will seem rooted in its place and working there.” By asking us to identify felt affinities between very diverse paintings and sculptures, savoring the connections between Jeff Koons’s Italian Woman (1986), Gerhard Richter’s Grau (1974), and John Currin’s L’intimité (2011), all installed in front of five lengths of Joesph Dufour et Cie’s panoramic wallpaper entitled Reconciliation of Venus and Psyche: Psyche Abandoned, Psyche Wafted by Zephyrs (1815), this grisaille ensemble functions as a total work of art.

Luxembourg & Dayan has generously supported this sensationally good exhibition, which was first seen in London last month, with a lavish catalogue containing tipped-in plates, like those found in Skira publications of a half-century ago, a nicely luxurious touch.

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