November 12, 2018 – March 31, 2019
99 Gansevoort Street, between 10th Avenue and Washington Street
New York City, whitney.org

Eighteenth century commentators made a nice distinction between ‘celebrity’ which they defined as fleeting achieved during but not outlasting one’s lifetime, and fame (fama) as a noble and fitting reward for great works, usually military valor or literary achievement, which would inspire posterity to virtuous emulation. – James Delbourgo

Andy Warhol was obsessed with celebrity and that obsession undoubtedly brought him fame in the 18th-century sense of the term. He also coined the ubiquitous phrase, that “in the future, everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes” which resonates sharply in the current era of reality TV and social media. The exhibition’s first nod to the famous and the celebrated is the Lobby Gallery where a salon-style hang of Warhol’s trademark portraits are displayed from ceiling to floor. These paintings of the wealthy and the celebrated serve as modern versions of traditional oil painting portraiture, albeit constructed using photography-based silk-screen methods.

Warhol’s artist’s proofs were used to create a sort of pantheon of the 20 Century. Figures such as Mick Jagger, Lee Radziwell, Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar form a tableau of such luminaries that sat for portraits in the Factory. Warhol’s self-professed “Business Art,” part of which was portrait production, lined his coffers, allowing him to advance his experimental and avant-garde projects in unremunerative areas such as film, video, music and journalism.

Warhol’s collection of leading figures from the 1970s and ‘80s recalls the 19th-century project of Nadar who captured images of “Le tout-Paris” in his legendary early photo studio. In a direct antecedent to Warhol’s “Interview” magazine, Nadar envisioned a type of subscription service to circulate images of leading figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Eugene Delacroix, Alexandre Dumas and Emile Zola. The portraits situated in the Lobby Gallery are single source elements of final artworks that were usually comprised multiple image panels. Thus, the Ground Floor gallery stands in as an image feed of Warhol’s Factory portrait production.

The exhibition opened on the fifth floor with a large camouflage painting and a vitrine with contents from one of Warhol’s Time Capsules (1973-74). Warhol filled and then sealed boxes with various objects from his Factory. The example here included a drawing of a chair by Yves Saint Laurent, a Lou Reed album, a book on Marcel Duchamp, a postcard of the Empire State Building, The Beatles coloring book, a Cy Twombly catalog, and a variety of personal letters: a snapshot of the denoted time period through detritus and ephemera. There is a random quality to the selection of the packed contents as each box reveals an archeological object-based narrative.

The “Time Capsule” formula seems to have been the inspiration for an exhibition that crams in voluminous quantities of material without a strong organizing arc. The temptation to amass a profusion of artworks was taken to an extreme often at the expense of thoughtful display strategies and attention to audience viewing experience. An exhibition itself should never be source material for a catalogue, but unfortunately this show often falls into just such a trap. That said, the resultant publication is highly comprehensive and will serve as an invaluable scholarly resource for generations to come.

One fifth floor gallery was packed with iconic works such as 32 of his Campbells’ Soup Cans installed as a grid. While this grid is the traditional Museum of Modern Art hang with which museum goers are now quite familiar, one wonder why, for this outing, the curators chose not revisit the original Ferus Gallery (1962) horizontal shelf installation? The Brillo Boxes are massed in a crowded corner. Coke Bottles, S & H Green Stamps and One Dollar Bills with Dance Diagram hung on the horizontal in the center of the gallery demonstrate a glut of famous Warhol artworks. Groupings of such well known pieces struck this viewer as crowded and unimaginative.

In an adjacent gallery, Warhol’s Bull Wallpaper served as a backdrop for several renditions of his Flower Painting. This doubled-up presentation is justified by the fact that Warhol intended for artwork to be hung on the wallpaper artwork, as is noted in accompanying wall text. The opportunity to include Silver Clouds, the mylar pillow balloon installation ,that would have created an interactive environment, is lost by the serial repetition of Flower Paintings groupings in yet another curatorial insistence on creating their own installation art.

Early works of commercial illustrations were situated in a vitrine in an attempt to perhaps separate them from Warhol’s fine art practice. The shoe drawings as gifted to various influencers highlights Warhol’s early business acumen. The ephemera in the wall vitrine offered highly informative material on Warhol’s commercial art career. However, the disastrous early Living Room (1948) oil painting adds little to his artistic legacy. There was too much emphasis on early works: Two walls of very similar drawings was particularly superfluous.

The gallery dedicated to Warhol’s use of mass media images with corresponding drawings powerfully revealed his inventive image selection and highly skilled painting process. The impact of comic book figures such as Dick Tracy and Superman stand in as potent examples of the radicality of Pop Art’s High/Low innovations.  The drawings based on news events reveal careful studies that again demonstrate both Warhol’s fascination with mass media content and his skilled draftsmanship.

The elegiac paintings Mustard Race Riot, Lavender Death (Rosenberg execution) and the haunting Electric Chair are potent political statements while the Disaster series, that includes works such as Tuna Fish Disaster, Suicide Fallen Body and Orange Car Crash are a critical commentary on print journalism and its sensationalist depictions of tragic human events. However, the distinction between clearly political images and the sensational media topics is something the curators did not lucidly demarcate.

A strength of the exhibition was the compilation of video footage on the second floor with a bank of six TV monitors displaying highlights ranging from Factory footage (David Bowie visits) to Interview TV segments (Brooke Shield, male models). The archival quality of the presentation managed to bring the Factory era to life. Another research point presented weel was Warhol’s collaborative projects with artists such as Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring and most notably Jean-Michel Basquiat. Likewise, Gallery 3 was stunning as the large-scale works were given ample space to breath. The pairing of two abstract Rorschach paintings – the monumental Last Supper with Camouflage and White Mona Lisa – offered a model of exactly the kind of thoughtful, spare installation that allows artworks to resonate within an impressive gallery space lacking in earlier phases of this exhibition.

Overall, Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again brought out everything and the kitchen sink in a profession of the “more is more” ethos. There was a lack of focus on the political content of Warhol’s practice and the social radicality of the Factory’s highly experimental environment. At the Factory, Warhol pioneered highly collaborative production practices, fusing fashion, music, journalism, and filmmaking and fostering a cult-like entourage of downtown denizens – an aspect that is not adequately expressed in this exhibition.

Warhol created a “world apart” that reflects an era when social worlds collided and sometimes merged in venues such as the Factory and later Studio 54 where the artist and his entourage were regulars. Equally, he created an alternative environment, specifically as a gay male figure, not unlike Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Joel-Peter Witkin. Warhol surrounded himself with a family-like cohort of “Superstars” and Factory workers that operated in opposition to the routine status quo of traditional white male dominated workplaces.

The social environment of Warhol’s cultural space reflects a High/Low dichotomy that is often assigned only to the visual language of the Pop Art movement. Warhol radically extended this phenomenon into social space in both his portrait and interview subjects, the Factory social milieu, and the contents of his numerous Time Capsules. This essential component to the artist’s legacy is lost under the weight of an overabundance of artworks and archival materials that comprised – and compromised – an overly encyclopedic retrospective.

The post The Time-Capsule Formula: Warhol at the Whitney appeared first on artcritical.

June 20 to September 2, 2018
235 Bowery, between Stanton and Rivington streets
New York City, newmuseum.org

Thomas Bayrle is a systems man. This five-decade survey at the New Museum, whose 115 works include paintings, moving sculptures, prints, textiles, wallpaper, video, and more, delves into systems of culture, politics, economics, infrastructure. “Playtime,” is the German artist’s first major museum show in New York. Although hardly a household name in this country, Bayrle is something of a national treasure in his native land.

A preoccupation with repetition and dissemination predated Bayrle’s becoming an artist. Born in Berlin in 1937, he had worked already in advertising and publishing, and was first exposed to mechanization as an apprentice at a weaving company. But don’t picture young Bayrle as a cog in anyone’s machine: He threw himself into the student protest movement of the 1960s. “Playtime” reflects the tension between these dynamic experiences.  

The two floors of this show present such different visitor experiences that it might color your ultimate takeaway. Starting on the fourth floor, I found myself in the company of Bayrle’s signature idioms, the “super forms” and “praying machines,” along with a selection of small portrait prints, and a hanging textile. The “super forms” are images that comprise a large object tessellated from myriad tiny versions of the same. For example, Flugzeug [Airplane] (1982-3), Bayrle’s biggest work in this series at approximately 26 by 44 feet, is a photo collage of more than one million airplanes. At first, these look like small exact replicas of the macro image, but upon closer inspection it is revealed that Bayrle has taken a Warholian approach. Despite the mass, each digit is unique, juxtaposing ideas of mass production with a distinct artist’s hand. These slight alterations mark the difference between a consumer ad and a more interesting art object. As Bayrle says in his catalog interview, “Even in billions, everything is singular and unique. Every cell, every atom, they are singular. I think that’s the richness of art, to define this singularity in the mass.”  

These mammoth collages are set to an odd audio accompaniment at the New Museum, emanating from a selection of four of Bayrle’s “praying machines” in the middle of the gallery. Comprised of car, plane, or motorcycle engines with exposed moving gears, belts, and pulleys, these objects each have their own built-in soundtrack. The robotic sculptures, individualized but inhuman, splice together human voices and mechanical growls. As most feature Catholic prayers, the high-ceilinged gallery takes on a cathedral-like atmosphere, inspiring reverence in visitors. The heavy use of Catholic iconography and symbolism in both this series and other works might incorrectly make one think that Bayrle is Catholic. He is actually Protestant, but from a young age was drawn to Catholicism by the structure and rhythm of its traditions and imagery. In the praying machines, Bayrle unsteadies that rhythm, making the soulless robots recite the rosary (another mechanical process), taking on a human effort to save themselves.

The repetition within the objects is echoed in the space – the neutral colors, the aural buzz from the machines and visual buzz from the repeated super forms. However, this is oddly broken by the inclusion of the only hanging textile: iPhone Pietà (2017). An instance, perhaps, of curatorial tongue-in-cheek anticipating visitors capturing their visit with a photo or video (which, during my visit, was a popular trend with the praying machines), ultimately I thought the piece felt out of place. It’s blue fabric and lack of the traditional super form patterning didn’t fit among the monotone paper and metal. True, it did connect thematically with its interesting contemporary meditation on technology as religion and the worship of the smartphone, but ultimately this break in the organized system of the gallery went too far.

The sparseness of this floor is all but thrown out the window in the near-clutter of the almost 100 objects downstairs. And yet, this part too – with its proliferation of neon-colored wallpapers, prints, videos, and paintings (either still or his “painted machines,” whose small parts move to reveal a new image) – cleverly reinforces Bayrle’s central themes. Going through the space, shocked in my transition from the upper floor, I thought: Where do I fit in amidst this overwhelming repetition?

With his investigation of individualism and early adoption of innovative, pre-digital technologies, Bayrle made his mark. This legacy was explored at a July 19th panel at the museum, “Social Fabric: Thomas Bayrle’s Expanded Network,” which featured artists Jordan Wolfson, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Lena Henke. Moderated by art historian Alex Kitnick, each artist addressed how their work deals with various of Bayrle’s themes, including digital technologies, systems, production, and – most prominently – the relationship between pop aesthetics and politics. This younger generation meditated on how subversion and any definition of “radical” isn’t just about materiality and process – as in Bayrle’s inventive copy techniques, or in contemporary digital video art – but has to include a sense of the artist as witness to change, of art as intervention. For Jordan Wolfson, the contemporary artist has to “make pop and politics subvert each other.”

Bayrle’s “painted machine” Mao (1966) is an early example of just this process of intervention. In this piece, small moving wooden pieces slowly morph the paramount leader’s portrait into the communist star. Bayrle would later witness communism first hand in visits to China in the late 1970s. (Fun fact: His Mao actually predates Warhol’s by about five years.)

Among the plethora of objects on this floor, there was one piece that I kept going back to, placed in an alcove at the back of the gallery, almost shrine-like in its forced intimacy. In Himmelfahrt [Ascension] (1988), crucified Jesus is made of fractured, repeated images of the autobahn, which also constitutes the work’s background. Looking at this piece I was reminded of the voices in the sculptures upstairs – the prayers on repeat in a gallery-cum-cathedral – reset for the road: I could imagine someone praying for traffic to ease up among a chorus of car horns. Standing in front of Jesus on his cross, I kept trying to pick apart the comedy and the tragedy of this contemporary purgatory. I tried to reconcile the image of a monumental religious icon slipping into the scene like a commercial break in the middle of regularly scheduled programming. The geometric energy of the repeated autobahn making up the vulnerable Christ forced me to stop and look and think about the disruption taking place. This experience captured the show as a whole: at once an overwhelming fun house questioning the structures by which we live, and a wake up call to shift my perspective within the routines of daily life. Despite all of the stimuli of the gallery, I felt asked to focus and notice the quirks throughout – the distortions of the tiny airplanes, the not-quite-aligned edges of the autobahn-Jesus shards, the slight shudder of the painted machines’ movements. I left wondering if looking closely at the kinks in the system would become a trend of its own.

The post Disrupting the System: Thomas Bayrle at the New Museum appeared first on artcritical.

November 2, 2016 to January 14, 2017
980 Madison Avenue, between 76 and 77 streets
New York City, nahmadcontemporary.com

Across the room, one of Warhol’s “Rorschach” paintings imitates the legendary “inkblot” test developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach –evidently some of the only imagery for which the artist developed his own painting, rather than repurposing photographs. Like Warhol’s Rorschach, the silkscreened ink splatter of Christopher Wool’s Minor Mishap (Black) (2001) conjures up the death – or perhaps the afterlife – of Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, much of Wool’s mature work has gone on to address such questions. The silk-screened reproduction of painted, gestural brushstrokes raises questions about autonomy and authority in painting – questions which Warhol’s work unleashed with a vengeance. In its chromatic austerity, this room obliged viewers to concentrate on formal rhymes and contrasts, many of which reward patient looking.

Individual canvases could also bear their own mysteries. In Warhol’s series of silkscreened crosses, a few of the white forms bleed into each other – exceptions that instigate attention to the rule of their order. Near the middle of the canvas one finds the faintest line, traced in such a way – however unwittingly – to suggest a horizon, which contravenes the relentless flatness of the painting. The formal details of Wool’s paintings frequently come in the form of the pixels of which they are composed, again suggesting an update of Lichtenstein’s Ben-Day dots for the virtual age.

The exhibition’s second room bursts into color. From the slightly ribbed surface of Guyton’s untitled fireplace white dots seem almost to rise like ash or sparks from the proverbial fire, while red “paint” appears smeared upwards in one area. A more dramatic smearing appears in Wool’s Double Blue Nose (2003), which almost suggests an erased Brice Marden painting – evoking once again the fate of abstraction, this time by way of Rauschenberg’s erasure of De Kooning’s drawing. The slightly earlier Untitled (2001) appears looser in the skeins and loops of its red lines. Not all of the works here are painterly. The primary colors of Guyton’s wayward X’s (the red letter shadowed by a black counterpart) bring to mind Mondrian’s neoplasticism. Once again, the repetition of the two, seemingly identical blue X’s makes technological reproduction unavoidable as a point of reference. Based on a shadow photographed in his office, Warhol called his Shadow paintings silkscreens “that I mop over with paint.” A close view of the canvases reveals the almost impasto swirls of giant brushstrokes. Nearly all of the spontaneous, “autonomous” brushwork in this exhibition appears in reified form, in the abeyance of photographic or scanned reproduction. But the eddy of Warhol’s (or an assistant’s, however the case was) brush betrays – just on the eve of the 1980s – a renewed investment in the hand’s trace.

The post Autonomous Brushwork: Warhol, Wool, Guyton at Nahmad Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.

November 10, 2016 to January 7, 2017
980 Madison Avenue, between 76th and 77th Street
yoshiigallery.com

Christened Derek Rowen, Guggi, a former member of the band, Virgin Prunes, is an Irish cult-figure. Usually we expect self-taught artists to deal in unabashed self-expression. Certainly that is what we anticipate in art made by onetime punk musicians. But Guggi’s art, which is as strange as his chosen name, is marked by restraint, delicacy and elusiveness.

The medium-sized oil paintings (the largest is 46 by 57 inches) in his current exhibition depict rows of empty bowls on fields of color. Sometimes he draws additional bowls on the background. Working within this basic fixed format, he creates pictures that are surprisingly varied. Conjoined I (2016) depicts three copper-colored bowls on a shelf; Crimson (2016) shows nine bowls, each on an individual panel, with the panels set three-by-three on a grid; and Turquoise Drawing (2016), which despite its title is a painting, shows a bottle, and drawings of bottles on a gray field..

The title of this exhibition, which may seem excessively elusive, actually is a statement by the artist’s father, Robbie Rowen, made in response to an earlier display of Guggi’s art in a Dublin hotel. An exhibition of his son’s art, whose subjects are domestic utensils, he presumably means to say, transforms the public hotel space into that private place where you usually find bowls in a home, the kitchen.

Guggi may not be technically skilled, but aesthetically speaking, he is very sophisticated. Friendly commentators, quoted at his web site, have compared him with Chardin and, inevitably, Morandi, but in truth he’s a very different painter from these exemplars, very much a law unto himself. If we need an Irish reference, who better than Samuel Beckett, who also got much artistic mileage out of repetition? But ultimately, all of these associations are aesthetically irrelevant. When on a busy morning, I walked into Yoshii Gallery, which is a tiny space, knowing nothing about Guggi, I was immediately spell-bound by these oddly winning paintings. I loved the way the display cunningly forces the viewer to get close up. What attracted me to these modernist compositions, which make singularly potent use of grids and repetition of simple, banal forms, was their modesty. And I was fascinated with their variety, which Guggi achieves with a limited format.

Often an artist’s chosen still life subject has apparent emotional significance. Some painters represent natural artifacts. Think of Cézanne’s apples, the humble foodstuffs of Chardin, or the posh spreads of seafood in Dutch Golden Age art. When, however, Andy Warhol presents rows of banal manufactured artifacts, soup cans, coke bottles, or photographs, he reveals a very different visual culture. Guggi’s simple unornamented bowls are also manufactured, and often they too are in rows, but unlike Warhol’s still life objects they have great individual character.

What attitude does he take towards his bowls—what do they mean to him or, indeed, to you and me? And why display them in rows?. These obvious questions are oddly difficult to answer. A bowl contains whatever you choose to put in it—almost anything at all. But that these depicted bowls are mere containers does not make them aesthetically indifferent. The longer I look at Guggi’s enchanting pictures, the more puzzles I find.

The post Serial Bowls: The Still Life Paintings of Guggi appeared first on artcritical.

Marcel Broodthaers: Écriture at Michael Werner Gallery
January 28 to March 26, 2016
4 E 77th Street (between Madison and 5th avenues)
New York, 212 988 1623

Marcel Broodthaers at Paul Kasmin Gallery
March 3 to April 23, 2016
515 W 27th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 563 4474

Marcel Broodthaers: Invitation to a Voyage at Alden Projects
March 5 to May 8, 2016
34 Orchard Street (between Hester and Canal)
New York, 212 229 2453

Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76) was a late starter, only becoming a visual artist when he was 40, having spent 20 years trying to make a living as a poet. And he died relatively young, on his 52nd birthday. But as demonstrated by three concurrent shows — at Paul Kasmin, Michael Werner, and the Museum of Modern Art — he was highly productive during a short period. An additional show at Alden Projects displays exhibition invitations, posters, letters, and other similar materials.

There are 200 works, on view at his MoMA survey, including books of poetry and photographs, works made before Broodthaers formally entered the visual arts. His transition can also be seen there, when he turned the unsold copies of his last volume of poetry into the sculpture Pense-Bête (“Memory aid,” 1964), his first artwork, for his first solo exhibition. Once he turned to making art, he created a number of sculptures, which recycle mussels and eggshells, his signature materials. They are ordinary, used-up organic forms. Mussels are often served in Belgian restaurants and he thought of them as poetic. Mussel shells, he wrote, are hulls, two conjoined complete forms. And eggs, of course, are symbols of life and fecundity.

He put eggshells on furniture in Armoire blanche et table blanche (“White cabinet and white table,” 1965), on painted canvas in Untitled (Triptych) (1965-66), and in a box labeled as containing exhibition invitations, in Je retrouve à la matière, je retrouve la tradition des primitifs, peinture à l’oeuf, peinture à l’oeuf (“I return to matter, I rediscover the tradition of the primitives, painting with egg, painting with egg,” 1966). Cooked mussels are found piled in a pot in Grande casserole de moules (“Large casserole of mussels,” 1966) and displayed in crates in Parc à moules (“Tray of mussels,” 1966).

In 1968, announcing that he was no longer an artist, Broodthaers appointed himself director of his own museum: Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (“Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles”), an installation project that began in his home and was later restaged at documenta and at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. MoMA displays documentation — announcements, films, slide shows and also objects — generated by that career. One finds postcards of paintings, maps of the museum, photographs of the exhibitions, slide shows and display cases. Untitled (General with cigar) (1970), features a found thrift-shop painting of General Philippe Pétain (treasonous Chief of State in Vichy France) with a cigar stuck in his mouth, part of Broodthaers’s recurring interest in smoking and its prohibition as poetic and bureaucratic propositions.

Four years later, in 1972, Broodthaers announced that he again was an artist, and hired a sign painter to print words on canvas, and on the walls and ceiling of a gallery. He made Série en language française (Series de neuf peintures sur un sujet littéraire) (“Series in the French language, Series of nine paintings on a literary subject,” 1972), which includes “Andre Gide smoking,” “Paul Valery smoking,” and so on. And, written in English, he produced nine painted canvases, Série anglaise (“English series,” 1972): a set of prints featuring the names and birth and death dates of English luminaries such as Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and others.

Starting in 1974, he recycled his earlier work, employing old-fashioned displays with palm trees, carpets and 19th-century display cases, in exhibitions that he documented on film, calling them “Décors,” which can be translated as “installations” as well as “film sets.”

The gallery shows provide a valuable supplement to the MoMA exhibition. Uptown, “Marcel Broodthaers: Écriture,” at Michael Werner, focuses on his writing, one of his major concerns, and includes collages, drawings, films, collage, sculptures and one of his décors, Dites Partout Que Je L’Ai Dit (“Say Everywhere What I Have Said,” 1974). In Chelsea, Paul Kasmin presents paintings on plastic and Broodthaers’s books, along with the reconstruction of another décor, Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas it- Le Perroquet (“Don’t Say I Didn’t Say So — The Parrot,” 1974), a recording of him reciting his poem “Moi Je Dis Mois Je Dis Je…“

Starting with Hegel, and extended by Marx and, more recently, by any number of Marxist critics, the idea that history (and art) proceeds by critical negation has become received opinion among many leftists. This is how T. J. Clark understands Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, and how Theodor W. Adorno described Modernist music. And it is how Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who contributes to a catalogue produced for the MoMA retrospective, understands Broodthaers.

By now, however, it should be apparent that art-as-critique has become a ritual, just another artistic tradition. Our museums (and art galleries) embrace their most distinguished critics. Just as the once-feared “death of painting” has yielded an ongoing tradition of painting, so the deconstructive art of Broodthaers has become part-and-parcel of both the gallery system and the public art museum, though he certainly aimed to upend this dialectical narrative by such acts as the destruction and/or reuse of his own previous work. Duchamp showed that any banal artifact might become a readymade; Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons demonstrated that a replica of a commercial product might become art. Hans Haacke made commercial art critiquing the commercial gallery system, and Broodthaers (among others) revealed that anti-art might itself be the subject of display and commerce.

I suspect that some leftists are frustrated by this situation. I’m fascinated with the ways that our culture honors and supports its critics. The narrative of the Hegelian dialectic, which is the conceptual basis for this process of negation, has come to a standstill, which isn’t to say that the history of art has ended, as Hegel feared-and-hoped, but only that the seemingly radical pursuit of negating gestures, having become an end in itself, is a source of objects which are as aesthetically delectable as any Modernist masterpieces. Broodthaers critiques the art world from within, and so leaves its practice, to which he contributed, more firmly in place. In his catalogue essay, Buchloh argues that Broodthaers disputes “the false and preposterous claims that artistic practices could engender radical political or cultural transformations.” That, I think, is not quite correct. In fact, the present apotheosis of Broodthaers as an artist is a radical cultural transformation, just not the liberatory one that people of the arts so often talk of in vague and longing terms. Indeed, in a marvelous posthumous revelation of the reach of Broodthaers’s idea, MoMA is publishing a limited-edition facsimile of his book Atlas (1975). The deluxe version, which contains a supplement, the uncut press sheet included by Broodthaers in the original publication, is sold exclusively at MoMA stores.

The post Poet, Printer, Prankster: Marcel Broodthaers in Retrospect appeared first on artcritical.

January 7 to February 6, 2016
530 W 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 924 2178

“Noah Becker Presents… Something” is a New Yorker’s show. As children of glam, gold, glitter and garbage, much of the 26 artworks dance at the shiny-dusty feet of Andy Warhol, the city’s veritable king of things. These could easily turn trite as riffs on the classics of Pop and abstraction, mixed media and montage; however, curator Noah Becker has thoughtfully gathered the artists by their more subtle connections of something or another.

On entering the gallery, one steps directly into Marc Dennis’s Out of this World (2015), a painting of a woman contemplating Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866). Skillfully rendered, the infamously provocative artwork is presented — frame and all — within Dennis’s picture plane. The observer’s long hair strategically obstructs the very thing she is contemplating. Lovers of Shakespearean punning might be brought to the wordplay of “nothing in Hamlet:

Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.

For Dennis to so strategically censor this nothing, and for Mr. Becker to juxtapose his own painting, Something (2015), right next to it, makes for a playful introduction to the show.

Irena Jurek, an artist of boundless energy and glitter, presents her iconic, anthropomorphic cat people in Something to Talk About (2015). The cats, considered intrinsically female by the artist, stand, crawl and strut across the canvas in velvety purples, blue highlights and metallic pen. Cartoonishly grotesque and yet powerfully present, these sex kittens celebrate the fuzziness of their eroticism, and even of their species, within city life.

Aaron Michael Skolnick’s watercolor series, Choking on the Ashes of a Memory (2015), reference Warhol’s images of “nothing” as depicted in his late, fairly vapid shadow paintings. On a smaller scale (11 x 8 1/2 inches each) and with a decidedly more delicate medium than Warhol’s, Skolnick’s work presents the shadow-bearing image of something rather than nothing: a burning cross, repeated 24 times. The pages, loosely arranged, are jarring as they jump from matte blacks to milky bright blues and reds. This use of such a disturbingly American symbol transcends the clear act of appropriation to highlight the persistently long shadow of racial injustice across the decades.

Something is largely a show of painters, but a few sculptural pieces are to be found in the coy ceramics of John LaMacchia — a New York artist known for his street-wise ability to artfully utilize the trash of a city. Sporting images of Smucker’s jars, coffee filters, and ads for transgender escorts, LaMacchia’s vases are decorative, blue-and-white ware containing nothing. But they’re also disruptive artifacts of pop culture (viewers should note the lovingly aligned cigarette butts).

One of the most familiar explorations of something may be found in the gold sheen of Nir Hod’s Fame (2015). Composed of oil and acid on an oxidized chromed canvas, Fame, captures the blues of living in New York — a city as acidic as it is gilded. Certainly after the recent passing of David Bowie (an idol, like Warhol, of shifting ambiguity), this work hangs heavier against the wall. Through the small and personal scale of the piece, and its visual spareness, Hod warily approaches the realities of fame: the something and the nothing that makes up lonely glamour.

In a calculated yet celebratory balance of joy and nihilism, something and nothing, precedent and pop, this group exhibition of “Something” feels as bright as it is deep. Though the past looms large in some of the flagrant appropriations, there is still a strong and genuine sense of the present by the close curation of the artwork. The range of style, the varied handling of paint and the seemingly disparate subjects all fall comfortably into that field of glittered something that New York loves. Separated, it is not certain that these artworks would be as powerful. However, like Jurek’s gang of cats, when put together really they’re something else.

The post Something Old, Something New: Glitter and Glam at Berry Campbell appeared first on artcritical.

July 17 to September 13, 2015
50 Orange Street
New Haven, CT, 203 772 2709

This summer marks one year since New York City police choked Eric Garner to death. Since and before then, an uprising of activism and conversation has highlighted systemic racism and its link to criminalization and brutality. Artspace’s “Arresting Patterns,” curated by Sarah Fritchey with Titus Kaphar and Leland Moore, tackles these issues in a group show innovatively framed around seriality.

Titus Kaphar’s The Jerome Project (2011–present) began with the artist discovering a series of other men in the criminal justice system sharing his father’s name. From the project’s Asphalt and Chalk Series, X (2015) overlaps three black men killed by police: Michael Brown, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo; while XVII (2015) stacks three Jeromes on top of each other. The poignant connections made in these pieces through repetition set the tone for the show.

Adrian Piper also explores the connotations of names with Everything #19.3: NYT Portrait of Megan Williams (2007-8). A search for images of a twenty-year-old African American woman named Megan Williams kidnapped by white perpetrators resulted in exclusively white women and men unrelated to the incident. Piper tightly prints the Megans from the image results and repeats the mug shots of the perpetrators.

Andy Warhol was obsessed with how images of death and disaster could be repeated until they became meaningless. His obsession remains pertinent in our contemporary 24-hour news cycles and perpetually refreshed feeds. Warhol’s Birmingham Race Riot (1964) reflects upon the persistent question of police brutality. The piece’s appropriation of a Life magazine image feels immediate in its cold, blurred reproduction.

Connecticut-based Iyaba Ibo Mandingo’s Grave Marker Series (2014) reads with the pop sensibility of Warhol’s protégé Jean-Michel Basquiat and uses bright house paint, oil sticks, and crayon on recycled paper. The pieces commemorate black parents of murdered sons and allude visually and linguistically to African patterns. The language scribbled and repeated on the markers (“Boo!,” “Y do I frighten?,” “I am ur boogie man”) addresses the systemic fear of black bodies.

Language is also central to Jamal Cyrus’s Eroding Witness 7 Series (2014), four pages of laser-cut papyrus reproducing headlines covering the 1970 shooting of organizer Carl Hampton. These works, which include both mainstream and alternative presses from Houston, demonstrate the range of language used to report the event (“Black Militant Slain on Dowling” contrasts with “Exclusive Eyewitness Accounts: Police Fired First”).

“Arresting Patterns” insists on plain and direct confrontation. Dread Scott’s two-channel video Stop (2008) (in collaboration with Joann Kushner) depicts six men of color from New York and London stating how many times they have been stopped by police. Adrian Piper’s Safe (#1-4) (1990) corners the viewer with four images of smiling black families captioned “We are around you,” “You are safe,” “We are among you,” and “We are within you.” The installation, which contemplates questions of assimilation, includes self-aware audio of the artist talking as a white viewer who is having a “really hard time” with the piece.

The works in the show are as much about looking as they are about looking away: Kaphar’s dizzying portraits contain multiple pairs of eyes; Scott’s stopped men stare; Piper’s black families wave. The show is aware of the things that we can’t look at—either because they’re blurred by Google Maps like the unseen jail in the work of Maria Gaspar (Wretches and Paramount (Extreme Landscape Series; Google study of Cook County Jail in Chicago), 2014-5) or because they’re fading and fragile like Jamal Cyrus’s papyrus newspapers. It knows that we’re constantly doing both.

Along with “Arresting Patterns,” Artspace is also showcasing work from The 15th Annual Summer Apprenticeship Program, this year led by Titus Kaphar, Aaron Jafferis, and Dexter Singleton and inspired by The Jerome Project. The New Haven high school apprentices worked closely with visual and performance artists to create work contextualized by a curriculum and field trips. Kaphar discussed processing the heavy experience of visiting a corrections facility with the apprentices and assuring them that there was art to be made about those moments.

The work impressively echoes the ideas of “Arresting Patterns” and shows a range of approaches: from Ruby Gonzalez’s acrylic abstractions (Untitled I) to Emanuel Luck’s realistic white pencil portrait, Don’t Chalk Your Ancestors. In collective collages (Sinque 1, Sinque 2), the apprentices also addressed complex the history of their city, researching New Haven’s cartography and its role in the Amistad trials to inform their art.

The work of Arianna Alamo, entitled Martyrs and The Prophet (MLK), depicts the mug shots of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, among others. Using tar paper and white chalk (like Kaphar), Alamo frames the figures in a gold Byzantine halo, achieving an almost Warholian allusion to devotion. Most striking was the halo around King: a pop collage composed of gold, consumerist jewelry.

Artspace’s approach to both shows is effectively interdisciplinary. Looking beyond the language of art and the space itself, the works are contextualized not just through wall labels, but also through takeaway cards with statistics relevant to the ideas presented in the show. Further contextualization is provided with the space’s reading room, which includes a timeline of American racial violence and books such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010).

The conversation about race and criminalization goes beyond the content of this (or any) show. Less explicit in the works displayed are the patterns of policing femininity, queerness, and nationality—which often also intersect with race and with violence.

Still, Artspace’s “Arresting Patterns” and the work from The 15th Annual Summer Apprenticeship Program make important and engaging connections through seriality, language, and confrontation. No matter the age of the work or the artist, the show’s selections feel immediate and challenging.

In continuing the urgent advocacy activism addressing these layered issues, admitting patterns and highlighting repeating acts—of violence, of incarceration, of policing—will remain critical.

Artspace aims to continue the conversation with a free two-day conference on September 12th and 13th at the Yale University Art Gallery. Visit arrestingpatterns.org for registration and more information.

The post Aesthetics and Social Justice: “Arresting Patterns” at ArtSpace appeared first on artcritical.

January 8 to February 7, 2015
515 W. 27th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 563 4474

When viewing a painting, we usually have some conception (perhaps vague) of how it was made. We know that doing frescos required marking off sections of the wall, starting with sinopia, the underdrawings underneath the painted surface. We realize that an old master easel painting done in oil pigment involves a different manner of making, one more readily accommodating of reworking of the image. And we are aware that Modernists, too, employed diverse techniques — Morris Louis poured his abstract acrylics, as if making a tie-dyed shirt, working in a studio too small to allow unfurling his canvases, while Andy Warhol used silkscreens made from his photographic images to paint portraits in the Factory. In this marvelous show we see that Dokoupil, too, has added to the repertoire of art-making techniques. Starting in the early 1990s, he has made soap bubble paintings by placing metallic pigments and diamond dust on soap-lye, and allowing these forms to settle on his canvas. To properly understand the expressive significance of these works you need to know how they are made.

Everyone knows the children’s game in which you plunge a shaped wire into the liquid solution, and then wave it in the air, making small soap bubbles, which float upward, capturing the colors of the rainbow as they swiftly vanish. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Soap Bubbles (1733-1735) shows such a game. Viewing his painting, you are reminded that sometimes visual beauty, like life itself, may provide only fleeting pleasures. Dokoupil’s much larger, industrial scale bubbles, they are a-foot-and-a-half across, glow in high-pitched, pale colors set on an absorbent black background. Because normal soap bubbles are transparent, you look through them. In his big paintings, the largest are three meters square, those fleeting soup-bubble effects are fixed permanently, as if depicting glowing enlarged microscopic images — but of what? The pictures look like abstractions, but it could be argued that they are representational pictures with an unfamiliar subject. However we identify their content, they certainly are very beautiful works of art. And being presented in Kasmin’s magnificent 27th Street gallery, one of the most visually welcoming Chelsea spaces, significantly enhanced this exhibition. Looking from the street through the glass entrance wall, even before entering you could see the glowing paintings lit from the row of skylights.

Contemporary art, Dokoupil seems to be saying, can still have the magical power to give pleasure by making transient visual effects permanent.

The post Pop History: Jiri Georg Dokoupil’s Modernist Bubbles appeared first on artcritical.

In 1973, Candy Darling invited the photographer Peter Hujar to her hospital room at Columbia University Medical Center. She was dying, and she wanted him to take her picture. The resulting photograph, the last taken before her death, appears very still. The velvety blacks and satin whites of the gelatin silver print render a glamorous woman lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by flowers. It is, in a word, beautiful. After the initial captivation of Darling’s gaze and the sensory pleasure of the photograph loosens its grip, this aesthetic quality, however pure, quickly begins disintegrating into an image saturated with contradictions.

Born in 1944 as James Slattery, her youth was filled with the banal tyranny of the suburbs in Long Island, followed by several experiments with different transsexual identities in New York City, Candy Darling entered the world in the early 1960s. The duality of Darling’s identity gave her no shortage of discrimination and misunderstanding, yet there are countless stories of people overcoming their close-mindedness because of her undeniable beauty and femininity. When Darling’s mother, Theresa, first confronted James about the rumors she heard of him cross-dressing, he left the room and returned fully transformed into Candy Darling. Theresa later recalled, “I knew then… that I couldn’t stop Jimmy. Candy was just too beautiful and talented.”

Through Darling’s early realization that she was destined for something more important and more fantastic than the paths of her bucolic peers, she idolized classical Hollywood starlets. She was fascinated by Kim Novak and her piercing presence; in a home video of Darling reciting Novak’s lines from a scene in the 1955 film Picnic, Darling morphs into the character with total commitment, then says to the others in the room, “She was so strong, that’s what I liked about her. Something stable and so strong… but Kim was also vulnerable.” The combination of strength and vulnerability defined Darling throughout her short life. She filled pages of her diary with manifestos of tenacity: “I will not cease to be myself for foolish people. For foolish people make harsh judgments on me. You must always be yourself, no matter what the price. It is the highest form of morality.” As well as descriptions of her despondence and hardship: “I feel like I’m living in a prison. There are so many things I may not experience. I cannot go swimming. Can’t visit relatives. Can’t get a job. Can’t have a boyfriend. I see so much of life I cannot have. I am living in a veritable prison.”

Despite consistent poverty and frequent homelessness, Darling’s determination carried her to the stardom she so desperately desired, albeit briefly. In the five years during which she starred in several of Andy Warhol’s films, and in Tennessee Williams’ play, Small Craft Warnings (1970), Darling got a taste of the life she always wanted. But it all fell apart when Andy Warhol lost interest in her, claiming he did not want to use “chicks with dicks,” instead, he wanted to use “real women.” When Warhol made his film Heat in 1972, he did not invite Darling to play any roll, which left her devastated. Two years later, Darling was diagnosed with lymphoma. Those close to her suspect it was caused by the hormones she took to grow breasts — at Warhol’s suggestion. In the ultimate tragedy, it may have been her effort to transform into what she believed was her true self that killed her.

As she faced the last days of her life, she received one final, perfect tribute in the photograph, Candy Darling On Her Deathbed (1973) by her friend Peter Hujar. Fran Lebowitz — a friend of both Darling and Hujar — recalled the day they visited Darling in the hospital, and that she was too scared to see her friend so close to death, let alone photograph her. But Hujar was uniquely suited for the act because he had an innate understanding and appreciation for subjects in liminal states of contradiction. Lebowitz said: “No one else could have taken that photograph. Peter never thought of Candy as a freak… I think that’s why Candy responded to Peter. He thought of her in the way that my mother thinks of her best friend or anyone she would meet, the most usual kind of person. Candy loved that.” That was typical of Hujar in both his life and his artistic practice; subjects that existed outside the norms of orthodox culture fascinated him, but they were not abnormal to him. They were mysteries he wanted understand, and knew that the camera could help him reveal their enigmatic secrets. In both his portraits of humans and animals, Hujar captured an unconcerned openness and intimacy; there is an understanding and collaboration between the photographer and his subjects. Candy Darling On Her Deathbed, considered by many to be the apotheosis of Hujar’s career, contains everything that made Darling’s personality and Hujar’s photographs so alluring.

Technically, the photograph is masterful. Hujar expertly rendered the high contrast between the darkened room, Darling’s alabaster skin, her dark shirt, the white hospital bed sheets, and the fluffy white chrysanthemums floating on a darkened back wall, recalling the classic Hollywood glamour she loved so dearly. If the photograph were in color, the sconce above her would cast the room in a sickly florescent light, but in black and white it glows softly. The title of the photograph, despite being purely descriptive, carries a lyrical quality when spoken aloud; it is almost impossible not to sing it. Mirroring the content of the image, the sweetness of the title’s cadence and of Darling’s name fractures with the inclusion of her dying state. In her reclined pose, common to Hujar portraits, Darling looks as though she could be relaxing in her own bed if it were not for the strange sterility of the hospital room décor. With her perfectly applied make up and famously blond hair, Darling looks ready to go to a party, but upon remembering her illness, her dark eye make up and angular physiognomy turn her face into a skull, prophesying her impending death. The image complicates its viewing — continually shifting between seducing with its beauty and repelling with its morbidity. Darling lived and died in that space; when John Waters compared Darling to other transsexuals at the time he said: “The others were freakish and she was beautiful in a way that really put people off and drew them to her because she confused them.”

Hujar captured this confusion of expectation, reality, and fantasy that permeated Darling’s entire life with an eloquence that no one else could have matched. The combination of Hujar’s open-minded inquisitiveness with Darling’s undeniable magnetism infuses the image with a charisma worthy of them both. There is something magical that happens when a photographer and his or her subject share a generosity and willingness to be honest; it’s something ineffable that can only be felt, like the haunting sense of déjà-vu.

The post Candy Says: Remembering Two Artists and One Image appeared first on artcritical.

Born in 1941, in Sharon, Pa., Leffingwell took art classes as a teenager at the nearby Butler Institute in Youngstown, Ohio, stimulating the interests in art making and museums that would eventually define his life. Arriving in New York in the mid-1960s, he became a regular at Max’s Kansas City and Warhol’s Factory, enthralled by the iconoclastic spirit of Lower Manhattan. His friends at the time ranged from the likes of political activist Abbie Hoffman to Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, Warhol superstar Ultra Violet to sculptor John Chamberlain (who became a lifelong friend). He was equally at home in the art world of Los Angeles, also spending much time there. In 1978, he returned home to care for his mother and to finish his schooling, earning a B.A. at Youngstown State University in 1982 and an M.A. in art history from the University of Cincinnati in 1984.

In 1983, he presented “Chinese Chance: An American Collection” at the Butler, his first curatorial project, featuring the collection of Mickey Ruskin of Max’s Kansas City, who had recently died of a drug overdose. It was followed by an exhibition by Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner at the University of Cincinnati. In 1985, Leffingwell returned to New York as the program director, then chief curator of P.S. 1, hired by Alanna Heiss, its founding director. Heiss said that Leffingwell preferred artists of “extreme vision” whose work his own vision would make coherent. He curated shows of James Rosenquist, Neil Williams and Michael Tracy. One of his most notable exhibitions for P.S. 1 featured John McCracken, the first comprehensive survey of the Californian minimalist sculptor on the East Coast. Leffingwell often introduced little known artists from California and elsewhere to New York. It seemed natural, then, when in 1988 he was appointed director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Art Park. His most ambitious venture for the gallery was “LAX: The Los Angeles Exhibition” in 1992, a seven-venue biennial installed throughout the city, conceived as a model for future exhibitions.  He returned to New York in 1992 after his job was eliminated due to budgetary cuts. In 1997, he curated an important, critically acclaimed exhibition of Jack Smith at P.S. 1, renewing interest in the provocative artist who is now acknowledged as a major influence in the history of performance art, experimental filmmaking and queer cinema.

In 1989, Leffingwell became a contributor to Art in America, writing hundreds of reviews and articles over a 20-year span. He also began to visit Brazil with increasing frequency as his interest in South American art and his love of the country deepened.  He was named the magazine’s corresponding editor from Brazil, reporting on six of the São Paulo biennials and becoming an authority on contemporary Brazilian art. Elizabeth C. Baker, former editor-in-chief of Art in America, credited his curatorial experience and acumen for his ability to write on “an unusually broad range of artists. He brought us things we didn’t know about and he was willing to tackle almost any subject we might suggest.”

He wrote numerous essays and monographs; one of his last published essays was a contribution to AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE (1960-2007), a catalogue documenting more than 40 years of the work of Lawrence Weiner, co-published by LA MOCA and the Whitney Museum in 2007.

For much of the time after he returned to New York from L.A., Ed lived in a tiny walk-up apartment on Sullivan Street, elegantly jam-packed with ornate and curious objects, artworks, books and the memorabilia he had acquired during an eventful, multifaceted life. It was his castle, where he cooked bouillabaisse for friends and entertained them with endless, often digressive, sometimes scandalously humorous anecdotes about the art world—true and not—enjoying himself immensely.

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