Art has the power to disrupt on many levels. It can resist efforts at easy interpretation. It can dredge up uncomfortable personal and historical associations. It can invade social space or just literally block our path. Three works that are disruptive in various ways are on view in artist-run spaces at Philadelphia’s alternative gallery building, 319 North 11th Street concurrently (March 3 to April 23, 2017).

Stephanie Bursese’s installation to skip, to gloss at Vox Populi poses itself in the passageway viewers normally take through the gallery. The artist constructed a diagonal wall that splits the entryway in two, forcing visitors to squeeze through to either of two wedge-shaped chambers. Each side yields a completely different experience. To the left is a brightly lit series of photographs, hung at eye level, of the demolition of a wall and doorway; to the right, a darkened chamber with a single pedestal in its midst.

Presented in non-linear sequence, the photographs sort themselves into an alternating pattern: front or back view; black or white surface; painted or bare drywall; assembled structure or two-by-four skeleton. The images lack human presence, and in spite of the fact that they depict a wall that the artist attacked with a sledgehammer, possess a kind of austere formalism. Peeled-back layers of material become flat shape patterns of flat black, white and brown. The jagged areas punched through with a hammer resemble the collage-like cutouts in Magritte’s paintings from the 1920s.

As we view these images, we notice a band of glass on the diagonal wall behind reflecting them back in opposite sequence. Visiting the other side of the split, we realize that this was a one-way mirror, and we were on view as we viewed the images. The delicate line of cotton swabs that the artist has displayed on top of her pedestal is a kind of metaphor for humans viewed from afar—diminutive, doll-like, breakable. Confounding expectations, Bursese has converted the bravado self-assurance of smashing a wall to the quiet vulnerability of being watched.

At Practice Gallery, Phil McGaughy’s The turbid tides disrupted a peaceful tour with an onslaught of sound and light. Accompanied opening night by a performance with collaborators the 181 collective, this piece touches every surface of the room. Walls are covered by molded plaster forms and bear the imprint of video images projected in opposing directions. The room was filled with a deafening rush of noise as members of the collective plied electronic keyboards and sound effects were piped through hand-wired amplifiers. Video feed showed water rushing into channels dug in a beach, and the cycles of flow, the flickering projection and the loud noise all ran together as a mesmerizing experiential collage.

Different from the watery world of Bill Viola’s Ocean Without a Shore on view at PAFA not long ago, The turbid tides does not enable you to sit back and enjoy your sensory immersion. Instead, viewers of the performance had to avoid tripping over the artists who crouched on the floor while playing their musical instruments. Ensconced in the middle of the room, the artists created a social as well as physical disruption, leaving viewers with the sense that we, not they, were intruding. In their abased posture the performers were like fools in the king’s court, drawing attention to a power relationship between entertainers and entertained, while ironically upending it.

Though calmer in demeanor, Yvette Brackman’s installation at Vox Populi is also disruptive in its way. At first glance, the piece seems distant and formal. On one wall there is a spread of newsprint sheets bearing the cryptic words “AGIT MEM”, and on another a projection of a troupe of characters sporting colorful shapes on their costumes.

The installation’s title, Underneath Father America’s Closed Eyelids Lies Russia, hints that something more than the decoding of formal elements will be needed to understand the work. We recognize that the actors’ colorful costumes owe a debt to Russian modern art, in particular the Constructivism of Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, and Varvara Stepanova. AGIT MEM, which is also the title of the play on the video, refers to agitprop, a term which has sincebecome a catch-all for political art but in the period following the 1917 revolution was a department of the communist party responsible for persuading the masses to follow government directives. An agitprop train, carrying a printing press and a troupe of actors, traveled from town to town distributing posters and presenting plays. Brackman’s presentation looks as if it might have come from that train.

Enacted in a propagandistic style, the play is populated by two-dimensional figures that embody broad ideas (“Father America,” “The Traveler through All Time,” “The Catalyst,”). In the mode of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, AGIT MEM uses several devices to remind viewers that they are watching a play, including a narrator who reads the stage directions and a chorus who summarize the significance of the characters’ actions.

Rather than convince us to use a tractor or not drink too much vodka, the play’s message is more personal and indicative of a set of conflicts that touch our own age. Brackman’s mother narrowly escaped the Holocaust to live as a refugee in the Soviet Union, and her father, who was imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag, married her mother as a means of obtaining passageway to the west. After a violent confrontation in her own life, Brackman decided to make this suppressed trauma the centerpiece of her work. The “MEM” in the play’s title is for Brackman’s family memories.

I doubt that anyone in the audience missed the fact that an installation entitled Underneath Father America’s Closed Eyelids Lies Russia opened on the weekend that our nation’s attorney general was found to have lied about his relations with the Russian ambassador. Behind the layers of history in Brackman’s work is also a very relevant message about how we view the refugee in our midst: that “they” who slip across borders to avoid certain death, or marry in order to obtain a visa, may actually be “we.” At its best, art can bring us uncomfortably close to facts, both personal and political, that we might prefer to conceal.

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It can be curious to find digital images in video: Jurassic Park (1993) still looks pretty sharp, while pixelated objects in more recent monster or action movies can stick out like a sore thumb. David Claerbout’s current show at Sean Kelly, his first at the gallery and his first in New York in eight years, plays both. His 2015–16 video, KING (after Alfred Wertheimer’s 1956 picture of a young man named Elvis Presley), digitally reconstructs, in the round, a 1956 photo of Elvis at home. The detail, while startling, in many places comes off as rubbery, like a video game. Nonetheless, it’s a wonder to have long-gone artifacts revivified, to walk through a still image. Even more striking is Oil Workers (from the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain (2013), another digital reconstruction, which inhabits the other end of the spectrum: of completely convincing virtual detail. As the camera pans through a picture of laborers sheltering under a flooded overpass, one is challenged to distinguish between Bill Viola-like slow motion and uncanny, still reproduction. Claerbout’s careful vision allows us to revel in still images precisely because he makes them almost live.

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March 3 to April 23, 2016
293 Tenth Avenue (at 27th Street)
New York, 212 563 4474

“James Nares: Portraits,” currently at Paul Kasmin, offers one of the more intriguing efforts by a contemporary artist to affect the portrait genre, currently enjoying a popular revival. Though appearing at first glance to be still photos, these portraits are actually shot with a special video camera that can record in excess of 300 frames per second, many more times a camera’s normal rate. Each portrait in the exhibition amounts to an extremely slow-motion video displayed on HD screens with their respective subjects posed mostly in conventional head-and-shoulders format. The result is that a viewer can track a subject’s movements as methodically as one can follow a snail on a branch. In acquiescing to this weirdly protracted form of observation, the effect is mesmerizing — just as mesmerizing as it was in Bill Viola’s “Quintet” videos 15 years ago.

The glacially slow movement of each subject certainly holds one’s attention, and to put this to use, Nares had each sitter accentuate a specific movement. Titled with the subject’s first name only, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, Jim (2015) offers a turn of the head, while film critic Amy Taubin, in Amy (2015), augments a similar gesture with a smile that replaces a grave stare. These examples are mere fragments, as some of the videos last up to 20 minutes. Art critic and curator Douglas Crimp, posing for Douglas (2015), clasps his hands together just under his chin, sometimes interlacing his long fingers in a series of gestures that resembles the sort of unconscious movement a portrait subject is likely to indulge in when an appropriate gesture escapes them.

Others display more calculated gestures, like Jahanara (2016), in which a young woman in South Asian dress performs dance-like motions with her arms gently ascending and descending. More than the other pieces in the show, her gestures seem calculated to complement the camera’s artifice. And this is where the work’s more contradictory aspect becomes apparent. Though charming, her attempt to cooperate with the artist’s intentions manages to put even greater emphasis on the camera’s unusual interpretive bias, coldly thwarting her effort to create something personal.

Jahanara is a portrait of one of Nares’s three daughters participating in the series. The remaining subjects are all well-known art world figures and friends of the artist, suggesting Nares wished to lend his project the standing of celebrity along with a note of personal and emotional involvement. Visual aspects are ordinary. The lighting of many is stark but not exaggeratedly so — softly diffused and aimed generally toward the front. Whatever contrast it creates naturally changes as the subject turns from left to right, or right to left. Backgrounds tend to be dark. A deep charcoal blue for instance does the job of offsetting the platinum shock of Jim Jarmusch’s hair.

A temporal medium like video applied to a still-image genre like portraiture brings the viewer into an unsettling space where neither a feeling for cinema nor any sensitivity toward still images are much help in coming to terms with what they are experiencing, mostly because as a hybrid their individual characteristics cancel each other out. To watch Amy morph from a frown to a smile holds our attention to the tiny muscle changes that create her expression. But in doing so, the expression itself becomes secondary — it feels bypassed. What can be appreciated of her humanity is undercut by the camera’s mechanism.

As social animals we are super sensitive to, yet almost entirely unaware of, how we read facial nuance. I challenge any parent to actually describe the physical subtleties that reveal their child is telling a fib, though their ability to read them is usually unquestionable. In watching Amy’s face dissected into many small moments, one is witness to the mundane mechanics of what makes a smile, the muscle contractions splayed out in laboratory fashion. It’s worth noting that the camera — a Fastec Troubleshooter — was designed as a scientific instrument.

There is a mildly absorbing yet ultimately alienating strangeness in these videos. The ambiguity Nares produces — hardly an unwanted aspect of an art work — is reflective of how he places the viewer in a conceptual no-man’s-land between the time the subject expended posing and the duration of the video one sees in the gallery. One ends up hovering between methods of seeing, alternating between intimacy and voyeurism.

Voyeurism has deep roots in Western art, extending from Johannes Vermeer to Andy Warhol; the latter’s screen tests of the late 1960s are characterized as influential by the artist in an essay by Max Lakin in last month’s Vanity Fair, which coincided with the show’s opening. The Warhol reference seems an odd choice, since Nares’s ostensible approach to his subjects is the opposite of Warhol’s cold-blooded gawking. Nares clearly seems interested in creating genuine engagement with his subjects. And yet this clichéd use of slow motion actually pushes a viewer away from the subject and repositions them behind the artist, who is behind the camera, which functions according to the methodically relentless purpose for which it was designed.

If I were to seek the missing link to the connection Nares claims between himself and Warhol, I’d look to Richard Avedon’s deer-in-the-headlights celebrity portrait work of the last century. Though Avedon is a still photographer, he makes for a better precursor to an artist working in the portrait mode. In Avedon, as in Nares and Warhol, the blending of celebrity (real or imagined) confrontation and the supremacy of the lens renders the camera’s intrusion inevitable. If I am to accept the context of portraiture that Nares insists upon, I cannot ignore the fact that the only real video content is the plain evidence, in each portrait, of time passing, the banality of which is overcome by the fantastic properties of the super slow aspect — not what I can grasp of the subject’s humanity. For all their close-up beauty and dream-like dawdling, as portraits they are more weighed down than lifted by the camera’s obstinate scan.

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October 26, 2013 to January 20, 2014
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

David Hockney’s “A Bigger Exhibition” is expansive and multifaceted, driven by Hockney’s unflagging curiosity about picture-making and his relentless rhythm of production.  Organized by the de Young Museum in cooperation with his personal curator, Gregory Evans, it follows up on the artist’s European show, “A Bigger Picture”, and features over 250 works in new and old media, many of large scale, completed since 2002.

Like Claude Monet, Hockney works in series; his paintings address time and optical truth, and they expand into large-scale decorations. Like Monet, he ignores the constraints of monocular perspective, and, just as Monet grew more ambitious over the turn of the past century, so Hockney aims to redefine painting for the digital age. Central to the show is his gallery of four nine-channel videos of Woldgate Woods near his home in Britain (2010-11) – a contemporary Orangerie, where viewers can follow, virtually, the road depicted in many of his paintings. A triumph of technology based in Renaissance optics is here displaced onto thirty-six different “eyes”, allowing the woods to unfold in different seasons in spectacular arrays of moving images. Viewers are forced to enact the multiple scans that make up our stable image of the visual field, much in the way Monet forced them to combine the retinal stimuli that supply its color.

Hockney questions not just the fixation of Western art on the single vanishing point but the look of “reality” it engenders. His “Great Wall”, a project from 2002 reconstructed in the exhibition, juxtaposes color reproductions of European portraits from 1300 to 1900, tracking the emergence of lens-based vision. Documenting painters’ experiments with the concave mirror and camera lucida, Hockney demonstrates the extent of its influence on painting and, he argues, on contemporary mass culture. In his own paintings here, he continues to move away from the photographic finish of his early portraits. Marks and gestures predominate, enlarged and stylized, the legacy of van Gogh, who sought to wrest a personal vision from direct encounters with his subjects.

Hockney likewise bases his work on direct observation, from pocket-size sketchbooks to the large, composite canvases completed on special easels outdoors. They call to mind the more restrained but intensely rendered panoramas of his countryman, Rackstraw Downes, who explores the curvature of the perceptual field with a photographic level of detail, but eschews the camera and technology in general. Hockney, on the other hand, relishes his enlistment of the iPhone and iPad in subverting the Western version of reality. His digital drawings extend the urbane informality and witty observations of his sketchbooks into uncharted electronic territory, where they can be animated and enlarged. Displayed on screens, they’re magically luminous, their dematerialized calligraphy sometimes dancing disconnected from the image, sometimes reinforcing it with emphatic highlights and shadows. Animated, they reveal their successive transformations; the process of revision is open-ended, and the “true” look of the world is always subject to reinterpretation.

Hockney refers to these works as drawings, perhaps to acknowledge their provisional status, yet they also involve their own sensibility, a tension between intimacy and detachment. There’s something similar in Chuck Close’s use of the photograph as a tool in his portraits, employing the gridded image to structure his expressionistic mark making and keep it detached from the sitter. The iPhone portraits bring Hockney closer to his subjects, eliminating the respectful social distance he maintains in his paintings, and they encourage freer mark making, yet when presented on screens or in high-resolution prints, these exploratory marks, the fluid strokes and linear scribbles that can lend them surprising density, remain in the virtual realm. Similar marks in the paintings are more physically immediate, even if they become increasingly stylized in his larger landscapes.

Hockney presents two suites of iPad landscapes enlarged into multi-panel compositions, where they assume a different character, like Alex Katz’s enlargements of his sketches into sharply focused images that celebrate their own artifice. One series of “tree tunnels”, related to the multi-channel video, documents the everyday beauty of nature, but their high-keyed colors, reflective mud puddles and stylized splashes of raindrops seem imported from Japanese animation. In the second series, images of Yosemite veiled in clouds allude to Chinese landscape paintings, and the enlarged gestural marks bring wondrous intimacy to the sublime vistas of the valley. Like both Monet and van Gogh, Hockney finds in Asian art, with its calligraphy, free use of perspective and flat areas of color, a means to liberate painting from Renaissance conventions.

Well before these digital experiments, an exceptional expansion was underway in Hockney’s landscape paintings. Beginning with his return to Yorkshire in 2004, his gestural marks become more urgent and also more differentiated as he tackles roadside vegetation and the close-up articulation of trees. There’s an increasing stylization to the large paintings, as though in groping for the look of the landscape he’s drawing on his experience in set design.  Tree tunnels, compositions with groves of trees in reverse perspective, and fantastical spring blossoms are increasingly regimented, clumped together, with differentiated colors for branches and leaves, and dots and hatches for ground cover and bark.

The largest work in the show, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (Twenty Eleven), Version 3, further isolates and stylizes the marks representing different sorts of leaves and flowers. Like the backdrop for a ballet, it also recalls the Symbolist landscapes of Maurice Bernard, as well as Japanese screens and William Morris’s wallpaper designs. Hockney aims for visual immersion through sheer scale, but its flattened shapes still keep us at a distance and don’t engage us as fully in virtual experience as the high-resolution videos.

In terms of immersion, it’s difficult for the hand to compete with electronic media. Technology is enormously seductive, and the receding landscapes of Hockney’s videos generate effects reminiscent of video games; could viewers be offered their own controllers? For all its ambition, Hockney’s exploration of electronic media remains at a relatively basic level, open to the everyday viewer – as opposed, for example, to Peter Campus’s slow-motion renderings of changing, pixillated colors in what amount to digitized neo-Impressionist paintings, or to Bill Viola’s rendering of Pontormo’s “Visitation”.

Engaging the audience is Hockney’s subject in A Bigger Message (2010), a thirty-panel reinterpretation of Claude Lorrain’s “Sermon on the Mount” (1656). Implicit is Hockney’s own sense of mission, his call for “wider vantages”. Everything centers on Christ on the distant crest, around which multitudes assemble for access to the “message”. His progressive re-workings of this painting recall Picasso’s riffs on earlier masterpieces. There’s even a cubist version, but Hockney doesn’t press it very far; he’s more about expansion than about compressing multiple views into a single image. With increasing exaggeration in color, the later versions take the painting in his own post-photographic direction. The scene becomes a stage set, a psychedelic media event, with a vermillion mount, and whimsical fortifications arising in the middle distance. If in Claude’s era, oil painting served to make visions of distant times and supernatural events convincingly real, here painting is absorbed into a larger spectacle.

Coming of age in the heyday of Warhol and popular visual culture, Hockney inhabits a media-saturated world and assumes a populist stance: if there’s no truthful image, just multiple views, our world image must evolve through broad cultural participation. As poet Charles Olson observed, “polis is eyes”.  Rethinking photography opens a field for individual play, and Hockney makes a case for painting, liberated from monocular vision, to assume an important role. Like Dziga Vertov, who created a Cubist cinema in the 1920s, Hockney proposes that we also use technology in a radical democratization of image making. The Jugglers (2012), an eighteen-screen projection near the end of the show, provides a model of playful and inventive social exchange, with its ongoing interplay of random displacements and boundary crossings. Hockney’s appeal, arising from his appreciation of nature’s attractions and his empathy with friends and society, is ultimately sustained through this empowerment of his audience.

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