October 2, 2019 – April 5, 2020
Bankside, London SE1 9TG
tate.org.uk

American exceptionalism is a very real phenomenon, but it far too often obscures a British exceptionalism and a very British obliviousness to history. Whereas America is notorious around the world for its geography skills, that antagonism of history – crystallised through the struggles for civil rights – has long been in the public consciousness, however unwelcome it might be. Few people in Britain are so keenly aware of their own country’s actions, of Oliver Cromwell’s massacres in Ireland (in Britain he’s instead remembered for banning mince pies), of the East India Company, of the Opium Wars, of dividing and redividing the world according to its designs. 

Entering Tate Modern and being greeted, in the distance, by Walker’s Fons Americanus (2019) – the 2019 Hyundai Commission for the Hall – is almost overwhelming. In the Turbine Hall you’re first met with Shell Grotto (2019), a large, water-borne shell, reminiscent of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1486), standing at the front of the Hall. But the goddess herself is absent, and instead a young boy’s head is overcome by waves at the shell’s bottom as he gazes into the sky; instead of the contained swirl of water that circles the shell and the feet of Venus in Botticelli’s painting, there is a boy drowning with tears running down his face.

Venus, absent from her stage, is at the head of Fons Americanus itself, at the back of the Turbine Hall. Whereas on top of the Victoria Memorial, which informed Walker’s piece, is a gilded personification of victory, wings and all, above a seated statue of Victoria herself flanked by truth and justice, here Venus is throwing back her arms and baring her breasts as water flows from them as easily as from her neck – downward past a caricature of Victoria flanked by a hanging tree, a ship’s captain, and a slaver. As a gift “to the heart of an Empire that redirected the fates of the world,” the didactic accompanying the 42-foot-tall statue reads, it not only “redirected the fates of the world” but also sharks’ migratory patterns to follow the British slave ships of the Middle Passage. 

“This is a piece about the oceans and seas, traversed fatally,” says Walker in her profile for the Tate, as an allegory of the Black Atlantic. And so, in the first of the two pools at the bottom of the fountain beneath Victoria and the slavers, instead of the proud bows of ships at the base of the Victoria Memorial we see sharks encircling slaves as they struggle to stay afloat. 

The lowest level of the fountain is sparser, with fewer figures. Here the sculptures are more expressionistic, with one figure resembling a Kathe Kollwitz woodcutting through its distress and mournfulness; another has a face that mirrors the anguish of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), as it’s hounded and harassed by a figure with a haircut suspiciously similar to Donald Trump’s. But Trump is only a small part of the fountain, as much as he is a small part of US and British imperialism.

Rianna Jade Parker, writing in ARTnews, is right in asking whether British artists would be commissioned on such a project, and be given the same resources and international stage that is granted to an American artist here – recalling that Boris Johnson’s promise in 2008 for a bronze statue memorializing the victims of British slavery went unfulfilled. Would another work by a British artist be more nuanced than Walker’s Fons Americanus, she asks, highlighting Walker’s misunderstanding of British history when Walker says slavery never happened on British soil – even failing to recognize the Tate’s own foundations that were built on slavery, and so failing to meet the criteria of the Hyundai commission that is to create a site-specific work for the Tate’s Turbine Hall. Had a British artist been commissioned to undertake this project, Parker writes, it would have been an opportunity to build and publicize a British discourse around race and slavery that is distinct from the American experience. But Walker herself deserves more credit.

Rather than an “an unnuanced portrayal of a subject Walker doesn’t know enough about,” as Parker claims, Walker recognizes the function of monuments and memorials beyond their official purpose. In discussing the forgettability of monuments, Walker describes first seeing the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace on her way to the airport, taking photographs in passing, and then promptly forgetting about it. “There’s this very peculiar quality that they have of being completely invisible,” she tells the Tate in a promotional video. “The larger they are, in fact, the more they sink into the background.”

And so Walker’s monument, contrary to Parker’s claim, does “what any good statue should – deal with its site and the context surrounding it.” Rather than adding another monument into the public that sits beside those like the Victoria Memorial, Nelson’s Column, or the Diana Memorial Fountain, any monument sanctioned by a British government that is headed by a notorious racist and which still fails to address basic inequality would have rung hollow. And so this is not a “counter” memorial but a negative memorial, a memorial to that failure and unfulfilled promise. When Parker “wonders whether a more introspective version of the monument was possible – and whether Walker was the right person for the job at all,” this refusal to have another memorial sit alongside them is this introspection. 

Walker’s monument then isn’t one that demands that it’s understood, but recognizes – however unjustly – its place in the British psyche. Slavery is thought as a purely American phenomenon that sullies that nation’s history, and which the US must still contend with. Britain instead celebrates its having ended slavery sooner than the US, without, of course, acknowledging its pivotal role in the American slave trade in the first place – and not to mention that its ships were still transporting slaves even after slavery itself was made illegal. It’s seen as an exclusively American problem; a novelty import from America that sits beside all its other cultural artefacts that gives us films about slavery as readily as Mad Men (2007–2015).  

Fons Americanus is a monument against this novelty of the British attitude towards slavery, that recognizes the intransigence of many of its viewers and the history of the country it exists in, presenting, as the didactic reads, “the Citizens of the Old World” and “The Monumental Misrememberings Of Colonial Exploits” in a way that putting a traditional monument a mile down the road from the Victoria Memorial could never achieve.

The post Fons Americanus: Kara Walker at the Tate appeared first on artcritical.

September 4 to November 3, 2018
11th Avenue and 59th Street
New York City, shivagallery.org

The #MeToo movement has focused urgent national and global recognition on the problem of sexual abuse, rape and violence against women. Attention is also being paid in the art world. A significant exhibition, curated by Monika Fabijanska, took place this fall at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. THE UN-HEROIC ACT: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S., presenting the work of twenty female artists, closed November 3. [See artcritical’s interview with Fabijanska by Karen E. Jones.]

The exhibition’s title references and inverts a chapter heading, ‘The Myth of the Heroic Rapist,’ in Susan Brownmiller’s landmark 1975 study, “Against Our Will: Men, Women And Rape.”While Brownmiller explores a “direct connection between manhood, achievement, conquest and rape,” citing Genghis Khan’s notion of “women as warrior’s booty, taken like their proud horses.” Fabijanska sets out to demonstrate the “un-heroic” reality of rape by focusing “on the lasting psychological devastation of the victim.” Located on the ground floor of John Jay College, the gallery affords floor-to-ceiling windows onto Eleventh Avenue creating a dramatic effect even from the street, with the exhibition’s title boldly stenciled on the wall.  The first two works you encounter portray rape in a classical mode, though cunningly subverted.

Susanna and the Elders, Restored with x-ray, 1998, by Kathleen Gilje, originally part of a diptych, riffs on the famous 1610 painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, presenting in pentimento Gentileschi herself as Susanna. With stroboscopic effect, a violent motion transforms themute and defenseless Susanna into a screaming Susanna struggling furiously against physical violation. Carolee Thea’s installation, Sabine Woman, 1991, adjacent to Gilje’s piece, is a recreation of the 1998 Central Park Jogger rape incident. Depicting five men gang raping a woman (as the crime was understood to have taken place at that time), the figures, crafted from chicken wire, are hauntingly spot lit by overhead lights that cast an eerie reflective sheen over the grisly scene. The installation has a looped, tape recording of the artist reading “fragments of news reports” of rape incidents, seeming to emanate from behind curtains as she speaks in a low, slightly inaudible tone, forcing the viewer into quiet witness in order to grasp what is being said. Gilje and Thea provided substantive historical context as an exercise in power, laying the groundwork for the rest of the exhibition.

Fabijanska groups the assembled sculptures, photographs, fabric installations, text-based wall panels, films, paintings and drawings into subject categories. But key works like Guerilla Girls’ Broadband poster and Ana Mendieta’s five “performance documentation” photographs constituting Rape Scene, though categorized under “College Rape Culture,” are situated, oddly, at opposite ends of the gallery. This sort of inconsistent placement happens frequently enough throughout the show to confuse and distract anyone seeking to explore how the exhibited works thematically interact.

Guarded Secrets, 2015, a sculpture by Sonya Kelliher-Combs, based on “Iñupiaq walrus tusk trim designs,” consists of semi-translucent phalluses of varying lengths made from sheep’s rawhide and punctured by porcupine quills. Posed in a random manner, some closed at both ends, others opened at one end, and with quills protruding on all sides of each piece, they are ready to pierce the skin of any wandering hand. Peering into the open end of one of the penis sculptures I spied an interior maze, consistent with the idea of a hidden, inaccessible and thus unknowable secret, even as the forms clearly portrayed penile rape as a crude, quite unmysterious and grisly form of torture.

In a small walled-off screening room the film, First Person Plural, by Lynn Hershman Leeson, deals with “things she was told not to speak about as a child” that one eavesdrops through headphones, The film montages images of the Holocaust, physically abused children, and other signifiers of atrocity and helplessness

A second film, “RAPE”, by Yoko Ono, seems not to be about rape per se but rather how physical harassment and constant attention can illicit and heighten a person’s sense of fear and paranoia. Categorized under Gender and Abuse of Power the film shows a woman flattered by the attentions of a camera-wielding man, but as the lens follows her to the point where she falls down from intimidation and the invasive threat of physical violence that such constant attention can suggest, the theme of intrusive attention morphs into a metaphor for rape.

A third film, And Nothing Happened, by Naima Ramos Chapman forms, to my mind, a triptych with the work of two other artists, Suzanne Lacy and Ana Mendieta, hung close by. Lacy’s monumental wall piece, Three Weeks in May, is a map charted from Los Angeles Police Department reports in which crime scenes are stamped with the word, “RAPE.” One is struck by the irony of this piece appearing on one side of a wall on the other side of which Chapman’s film on the aftermath of a rape is projected.

Sixteen minutes long, Chapman plays a restless young woman unable to regain any sense of who she once was after being raped. We see her lying in bed in her parent’s home, unable to sleep, or masturbating to porn on her i-phone. Whether showering, taking medication, eating a meal with her mother or dressing to go out, she is barely able to function. We hear her talk to herself as she walks about the apartment, and like the voice of rape consciousness in Thea’s installation, she cannot exorcise the demon of her trauma, or advance forward into life. I found this film to be a powerful Illustration of the damage that rape inflicts upon a woman’s psyche.

Exiting the screening room, I went to look at Ana Mendieta Rape Scene. Created when a student at the University of Iowa, , Mendieta’s “performance documentation” was made in response to the brutal, highly publicized rape and killing of a nursing student, Sara Ann Otten, by another student in March 1973. Mendieta replicated the rape with herself posed as the victim, and her much repeated comment about this work, “I can’t see being theoretical about an issue like that,” has the power of a mantra. While curator considers Mendieta’s Rape Scene to be a pinnacle of rape imagining and the undoing of “classical art depictions of rape,” by comparing Gilje and Thea’s works with Mendieta’s images in her press release commentary she unwittingly defuses the power of some of her own choices for this show. There is absolutely nothing “theoretical” about Mendieta’s work, which stands alone and apart in its power, and seeking to connect them to other works only underscores the others’ academically reductive perspectives—none of which possess the authenticity of Mendieta’s.

Mendieta’s work is also curatorially paired with Jenny Holzer’s series of color images, Untitled (Selections from Lustmord). But Holzer’s work requires extensive textual exegis to be understood in a way that weakens its immediacy and power in comparison with Mendiata. Fourteen images of tattooed sayings on bare skin are so cryptic as to verge on meaninglessness. I could not fathom, say, how a slogan such as “I try to excite myself so I stay crazy,” inscribed on skin, is illustrative of the show’s “un-heroic” theme. And while Holzer’s images are categorized under Rape in Wartime, ” Lustmord” (lust-killing) is a specific form of sex crime – almost always between lovers – from a very particular historical period, the Weimar Republic.

Holzer’s use of the term to characterize the mass rape and genocidal slaughter of Muslim woman during the Bosnian war in the 1990s feels not only inaccurate but wrong. The murder of Muslims by Serbs and Croatians were not private lover murders but acts of ethnic cleansing. Simply put, the linkage makes no sense.

Kara Walker, whose career is built on depictions of rape in the context of themes of slavery and race, has the the last wordt in this exhibition with a drawing hung at the end of the gallery. A large graphic depiction of the rape of a twelve-year old girl, it explicitly presents and personalizes in the face and posture of its victim the atrocity of rape as few or none of the other works in this exhibition succeed in doing. Not even her accompanying, hand-written account has the force of this picture. Yet, in the context of the exhibition as a whole, this drawing is a visual anomaly because it both represents Brownmiller’s use of the phrase “heroic rape” as a soldier’s prize, while successfully illustrating “the un-heroic act” in the face of its victim and the sense of dread and shame that hangs over the entire drawing. Both act and aftermath coexist in this drawing. If anything, it seems to linger in some kind of limbo between the historical crime and stag magazine pornography, adding another layer of meaning to an already complex work.

While looking at and studying these works on and about rape, I was impressed by how Fabijianska’s curation showed the complexities that arise when art and atrocity meet against the urgent backdrop of current events. Broadly conceived and explanatory in its narrative design, this was a powerful show that rewarded repeat visits.

The post Representing Rape: A Powerful Show at John Jay College appeared first on artcritical.

July 10 to August 17, 2018
510 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, pacegallery.com

Fred Wilson’s “Afro Kismet” is seeing its third iteration. Made for the 2017 Istanbul Biennial, it was also presented earlier this year by Pace in London. The installation follows the now familiar strategy Wilson pioneered in his breakthrough 1992 project, “Mining the Museum,” in which he reconfigured the Maryland Historical Society’s collection to focus on its exclusions and thereby illuminate the history of slavery in the United States. “Afro Kismet” expands on this idea, turning attention toward Venice and the Ottoman Empire to consider the African diaspora on a global scale.  

Wilson employs an extensive range of materials and strategies to explore this ambitious theme, exploiting his signature technique of blending the historical and the contemporary to its fullest extent. There are both appropriated historic tribal artifacts, such as a Yoruba Gelede mask, and objects that the artist has created, such as painted museum reproductions or works on raw canvas. Stand-outs – in terms of drama and scale – include a pair of large, opulent Ottoman-style black chandeliers hanging overhead. These not only add needed light to the space, but also, with their hefty chains, a sense of grounding. Black is deployed so forcefully throughout the show that it has the weight of a material in its own right. Historical prints – framed or encased with a sprinkling of cowrie shells – have been altered, as the black figures are spotlit through the near-erasure of white people under opaque vellum. Blackness is both textual reference and color choice in two tile walls emblazoned in Arabic letters with the phrases “Black is Beautiful” and “Mother Africa,” respectively. The African tribal pieces, in scattered vitrines,  are paired with quotes, in black vinyl, either from James Baldwin (who himself lived in Istanbul for a time) or from Othello, Shakespeare’s racially charged play partially set in Venice.

Wilson’s more delicate touches carry their own kind of unique power. Trade Winds (2017), a tabletop plastic globe, poetically and powerfully illustrates the worldwide movement of abducted Africans through criss-crossing black brushstrokes. The vaguest outlines of nations and continents remain visible through some of the thinner strokes, inviting viewers to step closer and see the path of the natural phenomenon of wind turned unnatural through the trading of flesh. Works from Wilson’s “drips” series frame the center of the gallery. These are arrangements on the wall of individual blown-glass elements that the artist has described as reminiscent of oil, ink, or tears. Regardless of what they bring to mind, these glossy black clusters add an elegant, crafted touch to the referential, appropriated objects in “Afro Kismet,” and attune the space to specific emotions. The cascading arrangement of frozen-in-time shapes imbues us with a heavy sense of loss, sadness, and disintegration.

Adjacent to “Afro Kismet” is a gallery of related recent glass works. In contrast to the abundance  of found and created objects next door, the more abstract glass works form a streamlined presentation of three “drips,” three “mirrors,” and Wilson’s most recent chandelier. This latter, A Moth of Peace (2018), hung at eye level in the center of the room, serves as a foil to the other chandeliers. It has a Venetian look, more organic than the Ottoman-inspired geometry of the other two, and is made of white and clear glass that extends upward, antigravitational in its vine-like progression. Wilson’s belief in “beauty in service to meaning and beauty as a seductive material that draws you in” feels particularly vindicated in this captivating work. Upon close inspection, one finds that it is not pure white, but that in fact there are a few small details of the design where a white piece has been replaced with a black one. These black bits prompt the eye to consider the rest of the room. The large, layered mirrors, each titled for moments in Othello, feature an intensely black high-gloss surface. Their dark mirroring allows visitors to see themselves in the work, particularly due to the light provided by the chandelier, which is itself always visible in the reflection as a looming white mass behind the viewer. The considerations of blackness that Wilson explores in “Afro Kismet” are thus distilled in this side of the gallery: whiteness is at the center of the room, and even when one turns away it is always looming close behind. The shadows of imperialism and colonialism remain, and, as “Afro Kismet” explores, they linger not only over the United States, but also above other historically slave-holding areas.

Wilson is not the only artist who uses black as both a subject and a material. His Where’s-Waldo-esque engravings bring to mind Kara Walker’s silhouette cutouts, while Rashid Johnson’s frequent use of black soap resonates with Wilson’s flags of African nations, reduced to black acrylic on raw canvas and hung across the highest point of the gallery walls, reducing people and nations to a few lines rendered in a single color. Kerry James Marshall’s mastery of black acrylic paint has cemented his signature style in his portraits, infusing them with individual personality and collective pride. Wilson’s pure black Murano glass, used in both the “drips” series and mirror works, achieves a similar effect. Such connections place this exhibition in a larger context of ongoing conversations of representation and identity politics.

The hopeful antidote to this legacy seems to come from the joy in Wilson’s pair of tiled walls (Mother Africa, 2017, and Black is Beautiful, 2017). After all, the installation is called “Afro Kismet,” which this viewer read as a redemptive view rather than accusatory history lesson. Like the “drips,” which tie together the two parts of the Pace show in their materiality, these walls can literally be seen in both parts of the gallery – monumentally in “Afro Kismet,” and framed within the doorway from the glass room. At nine feet tall and nineteen feet across, these gorgeously painted walls are more than just a backdrop for selfies (a popular phenomenon on this reviewer’s visit). Wilson adopts a rallying cry from the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States, and brings it face-to-face with a phrase symbolic of the history of displacement and reality of the vastness of the African diaspora. The traditional Turkish floral design of the tiles’ background offsets the almost-neon quality of the huge blue text. The deep purple, blue, and black tones of the walls, illuminated under the chandelier Eclipse (2017), diffuse a rich glow through the space.

Standing between these elegant walls, I felt embraced in the energy of the pattern and the light, causing peripheral thoughts to be subsumed by a profound sense of coming together. This might seem ironic, staged between two walls. Yet still, this space became an open channel for reconciliation, bridging the gap between “selfie” and “other.”

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Three years ago, Banners of Persuasion, a London-based arts organization, commissioned thirteen artists to design tapestries.  Artwork was then sent to a workshop in China to be woven by a team of experts.  The results, on display at the James Cohan Gallery, could not be more diverse.  Indeed, without the consistent medium, almost nothing seems to hold these works together visually.

While many prominent artists have used tapestry to their advantage (William Kentridge and Chuck Close come to mind) some pieces in this show are less suited than others to this particular translation of this medium.  That the artist never touched the object seems out of sync with the hand-heavy quality of these kinds of weavings.

The most interesting works were those in which tapestry added a level of meaning to the image.  Kara Walker’s A Warm Summer Evening in 1863 (2008) depicts a large black silhouette of a hanged female figure against a background of rioting masses and burning buildings.  Although it is a black and white image, it calls to mind the richness of Renaissance weavings in its composition and story-telling ability.  It is completely stunning in a way that a charcoal drawing or a photograph cannot match.

Fred Tomaselli’s After Migrant Fruit Thugs (2008) and Shahzia Sikander’s Pathology of Suspension (2008) are both enriched by making reference to the history of Middle Eastern weaving.  In Tomaselli’s work, two large birds, depicted with every feather colorfully articulated, sit in a tree amidst a starry nighttime sky.  The use of flat space and the decorative, stylized depiction of the birds, branches and stars harkens back to Middle Eastern pictorial rugs.  Sikander, whose work references Moghul craft traditions, uses a border motif, floral patterns and a strong, if off-centered, red rectangle typically seen in traditional Persian or Oriental rugs.

Grayson Perry’s Vote Alan Measles for God (2008) stands out as the only work that makes reference to war rugs.  These highly collected weavings started to appear in Afghanistan in the 1980’s and included images of bombs, tanks and guns.  Perry’s piece has a decidedly folk-art feel—the crooked writing along the border, the crowed cacophony of images, religious references.  Central to the image is a giant red Gumby-like character standing atop the twin towers waving an M16.  His body is strapped with a bomb, filled with grenades, and he’s surrounded by coffins, Osama Bin Laden, car bombs, fighter planes, crosses, dollar signs, images from Abu Ghraib and more.  It manages to be at once marvelously wacky and terrifying.

In Francesca Lowe’s Trump (2008), a mushroom cloud is a swirl of exploding body parts, thrusting feet and fists.  Clouds and smoke erupt from the central figure in an apocalyptic, almost religious ecstasy. The deep space, the rich color palate and the otherworldliness make the image compelling.  However, one has to imagine that the experience of looking at the tapestry and the original painting would not be much different.  As with other works in this show, one is left to wonder what the sheer amount of labor that went into its creation was ultimately for.

The post Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists at James Cohan Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

While the work of the two African American artists Mark Bradford and Kara Walker might not have much in common at first sight – the former being a figurative artist and the latter more of an abstractionist – this show makes a case for it.

The most obvious common denominator is that both artists favor paper as an expressive material. Walker became famous for transforming the 18th and 19th Century practice of cutting paper silhouettes into a contemporary medium.   Bradford, after years of installation work, has turned his focus increasingly towards collage. They both occasionally use text as a compositional element and also their choice of palette – Walker preferring stark black and white contrasts and Bradford large areas of white with occasional color accents- complement each other effectively.

What is more important, however, is that both artists share the ambition to create works that examine cultural and social issues, albeit in very different ways.

Walker draws from history. Exploring hereditary societal and cultural conflicts, her work is one of the most daring and acerbic comments on persisting racial problems. Her most prominent works are complex tableaux which address identity and gender issues, in particular those experienced by African-American women. Her visual vocabulary is rooted in stereotypical Black Americana, mined in part from objects she found in flea markets. In contrast, Mark Bradford studies his more immediate, contemporary surroundings. He collects everyday urban trivia.  His latest works involve billboards, posters, and magazines, for example, which he gathers in his neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. Like Walker, Bradford has an affinity for dense information.  His compositions are made of multiple layers, which he often distresses and abstracts through the act of sanding and scraping. Under this treatment, the posters and signs become abstracted layers of color. He literally aims to peel away the layers of information to see what is hiding underneath. To Walker and Bradford alike, density of visual information is an aesthetic choice that mirrors the mutliple layers of reality and complexity retrieved from subject matter.

In this restrained, elegant exhibition, works by the two artists are interspersed, allowing the audience to repeatedly compare the artists side by side. It is Walker, however, whose selection of works comes as a bit of a surprise. Rather than mounting another of her signature wall installations, Walker has selected panels in which her cutout figures are mounted on painted backgrounds, as well as paper sculptures and two videos featuring silhouette puppets for this show. While her oeuvre by nature is much more provocative and controversial than Bradford’s, who strives for compositional harmony and a sense of ethereality, this exhibition shows a subdued version of her bite.  It almost seems as if the usual tone and physicality of her work was adjusted in order to bridge the gap between the two artists. Though her efforts on panel are far from disenchanting, they lack the immediate impact of her black and white tableaux. Rather than being enveloped by a whirlwind of gruesome images of rape and lynching scenes, the viewers will find themselves studying more harmless depictions of ghosts and figures.

While the pairing of two of this gallery’s most prominent artists makes for an interesting comparison, it is hard to overlook that it is the artists’ careers that have just as much in common. Both rose fast in the art world. They both have already exhibited extensively in the museum circuit, including solo shows for each at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY in 2007 (Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love and Neither New Nor Correct: New Work by Mark Bradford). They are both in their forties, (Walker was born in 1969 and Bradford in 1961) and they both have received a so-called “genius” awards from the MacArthur Foundation, Walker in 1997 and Bradford this year.

Though Walker enthusiasts will appreciate the opportunity to see some of her works in the gallery, they will find themselves craving more. Ultimately, the exhibition is a showcase for Bradford, who as the lesser known of the pair, succeeds in holding his own and leaving a solid impression.

The post Mark Bradford and Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. appeared first on artcritical.

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Arthur Danto, Vincent Katz, and Linda Yablonsky joined David Cohen to discuss Kara Walker at the Whitney and Sikkema Jenkins, Karen Yasinsky at Mireille Mosler, Isaac Julien at Metro Pictures, Kate Shepherd at Galerie Lelong, and Antony Gormley at Sean Kelly.

The post November 2007: Arthur Danto, Vincent Katz, and Linda Yablonsky with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

October 15 through November 22, 2003

This show encompasses a number of different styles and formats, namely cutouts and collage, and the definition of “cutout” is meant to be multi-faceted.. Cutout generally means cutting out shapes and placing them on some sort of background. Cutouts allow artists to draw without the use of chiaroscuro. Crisp edged cutout forms have been used by artists to emphasize color and outline. Cutout has also been an essential part of modern art because of the way it flattens out forms and the picture space. Collage on the other hand, creates ambiguity in two-dimensional space. Photos, text, drawing, painting, and other materials, such as wallpaper, pieces of construction paper, and candy and food wrappers can be combined in the same composition. Through collage, artists have been able to subvert subject matter, add psychological or political dimensions to their work, approach drawing and painting in new ways, suggest new kinds of pictorial space, introduce text into their work, and redefine pictorial realism.

In Kara Walker’s work and the small pieces by Alex Katz in this show, notions of foreground and background are presented unambiguously; the picture plane is not deconstructed. The cutout is used either to sharpen the contrast between picture planes (Walker) or to heighten the tension between two-dimensional space and the suggestion of three-dimensional forms (Katz).

Walker uses stenciled cutouts to create a jarring contrast between fore and background, which makes her work more disturbing and surreal. The black stenciled forms she places on a solid white background (“Jockey,” 1995) have political implications, but also fool us into thinking we can easily read the action and the figures. In fact it is not clear exactly what we are looking at. The gender of the figures, what they are wearing and holding and doing is unclear. We are not sure how the figures are interacting with one another, even though their outlines are crisp.

Three small collages by Alex Katz from the fifties (“Cat,’ 1959, “Roadmaster,” 1955-56, and “Two Figures,” 1955) are perfect examples of how artists use simple means, snipping away at tiny pieces of colored paper, to portray complex relationships. The trimmed edges of the colored paper capture the nuances of the figure of a sleeping cat, two lovers lounging on the grass, and a parked car. Katz’s Rowboat, 1964, is a piece made of painted wood cutouts of two people in a rowboat floating on calmly rippling water. The cutout figures have been painted black, and when placed on a white background, create the illusion of three dimensional space, rippling water, shadow, and solid form and figure, without resorting to line drawing or the modulation of colors.

The isolating effect produced by the cut-out can be used in a variety of ways. One of Katz’s full length portrait cutouts of friends and colleagues (“Frank O’Hara,” 1959-60) transforms the gallery space into a background for the figure. The cut aluminum figure by William King (“Magic,” 1972) has a ghostly erotic presence. From one angle the shape looks like a female figure, bending to the floor with her rear end in the air. Viewed from another angle, this reading falls apart and the shape becomes completely abstract.

Like many artists in this show, Robert Motherwell uses collage to enhance the drawing process and reinvent form. Drawn or painted elements commingle with newspaper clippings, images, and text to form an agitated whole. Ellsworth Kelly juxtaposes different materials,a fragment of a naked woman over a row of mountains (“Horizontal Nude,” 1974), a bar of color pasted over the Statue of Liberty (“Statue of Liberty,” 1957) to create new kinds of pictorial space and to recontextualize cultural icons. A few artists in this show follow in the tradition of cubist collage and make new forms and new spaces using fragments of observed reality and patterns and textures such as Lee Krasner’s “Study for Mosaic at 2 Broadway, New York,” 1959, and Frank Stella’s “Lanckorona,” 1972.

The most exciting rarities in this show are “Woman,” 1969-70, by Willem de Kooning, believed to be an armature or study aid for a sculpture he never made, and a small but beautiful gouache découpée by Matisse (“Alga on Green Background,” 1947). An India ink drawing on a wood cutout, “Woman” is immediately recognizable as a de Kooning because of the familiar high heel shoes and flailing breast shapes. This object was probably one of the many fragments of unfinished projects or ideas the artist had strewn about his various work spaces. The Matisse consists of a purple tendril shape (which appears in many of Matisse’s late works) placed on a green background. The piece has an aqueous feel to it, and the colors are enchanting.

This show makes it clear that artists used collage and cutout to disrupt or flatten or complicate the picture plane and to introduce different materials into the same composition. Photography undermined the realism welded by painters and draftsman for centuries, but collage and cutout allowed visual artists to manipulate two-dimensional space in ways not available to the photographer, at least, notprior to the invention of graphics software. Collage and cutout transformed the very notions of abstraction and realism, and the works in this show exemplify the liberating spirit they brought to modern draftsmanship and painting.

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Kara Walker: Drawings, at Brent Sikkema, through July 25
530 W 22nd Street- 212-929-2262

Kara Walker and Lisa Yuskavage are showing right on the same block (West 22nd Street). Are they a chip off the same block, too? They both take postmodern intention-bending to new extremes, pitting authenticity and expression against style and posture. And for both, ambiguity is stock in trade: kitsch and craft collide in art that sets out to dazzle and unsettle.

Kara Walker is best known for her costume-drama silhouettes. Installations of Beardleyesque cut-out figures at first seem like joyous circus parades but on closer inspection are revealed to depict appaling acts of “blaxploitation.” Hieronymous Bosch meets “Gone with the Wind” in fiercely political, erotically fantastic meditations on the legacy of slavery. A profound subject is brought to a slick surface.

In terms of ideology, it’s hard to tell where her first allegiance lies: with Frantz Fanon or the Marquis de Sade. You’d think such imagery was cooked in a bubbling cauldron of rage. Her poetry, crudely (if artfully) typed on reference cards, bears vivid witness to depths of indignation. But, far from resulting in a radical call to arms, Ms. Walker’s art deposits maker and viewer alike in a limbo of moral bewilderment.

Ms. Walker doesn’t merely depict victimage; she embodies it, in the way her methods are always and pointedly labor intensive. The dexterous, exquisite cut-outs, especially, seem to require calm, patient, loving skill. Ambiguity, in other words, is as present in the fabrication as the product. The artist is alienated labor and wants us to know it.

In harmony with her cool skill, her sexual imagery – for all the grabbing and penetrating that goes on – entails little in the way of passion, for givers or receivers alike. (Again, Sade is a useful point of reference, for in “le divin marquis” sexual extremity is measured in numbers and times, not degrees or intensities.) A favored motif, drawn from medieval art, is that of Aristotle and his mistress, with the venerable philosopher ridden like a horse.

Ms. Walker’s graphic mark-making, in contrast to the silhouettes, can be rich in affect. In this show of works on paper of various sizes, including smaller cut-outs, at Brent Sikkema, there is considerable variety of line and texture. She has taken up a kind of smudged brass-rubbing technique, for instance, that recalls Larry Rivers. Her mannerist figuration brings to mind Paul Wunderlich and Pierre Klossowski. Recent forebears aside, some of her most scatalogical and psychologically involved drawings seem genuinely Goyaesque. A monstrously disengaged head, for instance, is endowed with a priapic nose which penetrates a passing naked “negress” (her caricature justifies the word) who nonchalantly holds on to her bucket of soapy suds.

The most acute ambiguity in Ms. Walker has to do with the free and easy manner with which she traverses the line between racist stereotype and an attitude of “black is beautiful,” as in a giant, voluptuously worked-up, graphite “Afro.” It is as if she is lost in iconography the way artists talk about being lost in form. But the deliberately unresolved tension of style and content in her work, an endless loop between what could equally be artworld posture and true feeling, ultimately denies any possibility of catharsis. Greek tragedy may have had its origin in the Dionysian orgy, but at the end of the day, Sade ain’t Sophocles.

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From tragedy to farce: Lisa Yuskavage’s absurdly big-busted, saucy postcard girlies are sisters under the skin of Yale classmate John Currin’s monstrous muses. The art world, it seems, will never tire of would-be alchemists extracting from the base matter of low culture a clever-clever fools’ gold.

What”s most depressing about the meteoric success of Ms. Yuskavage, however, is that champions and detractors alike have taken on trust her “masterful technique”, whereas actually all she boasts is the kind of nerdish facility high school students admire among their peers. A critic sharply upbraiding her for her content could compare her lurid luminosity to Georges de la Tour – of all artists! If an old master can be defined as the deceased author of painting with life in it, then Ms. Yuskavage, very much with us, is the opposite on both counts.

But we surely know where this critical malaise comes from. The ironic revival of painting – conceptual art had deemed the medium passé – presupposes that “technique” is something separate from an engagement with form, as if the laying down of brushstrokes is to a picture what production values are to a pop record.

The recent paintings, on view at Marianne Boesky, suggest that even on her own intellectually lethargic terms, Ms. Yuskavage is running out of steam. Since exchanging her old source material, vintage copies of Penthouse, for a live model (an old high school chum) a vacuous softcore humanism has crept into her work. But it is too little, too late. Her bead bikinis in “Couch” (2003), are blessed with a vague hint of Wayne Thiebaud, but elsewhere her dry-brush flowers are dead on arrival. In “Groom” (2003), there is a hint of painterly interest in the billowing pink clouds and in the skin against the servant’s purple bodice, but nothing where you’d expect it, the drapery folds or the mistress’s breasts. In truth, Ms. Yuskavage doesn’t have the stakes for any kind of high wager with ambiguity. Her technique is flimsy, and her imagery is boring. Neither her paint nor the flesh it purports to depict is remotely sexy.

This article first appeared in The New York Sun, June 19, 2003

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