September 10 to October 24, 2015
456 W 18th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 680 9467

In her exhibition eight years ago at Zach Feuer gallery, Dana Schutz showed a series of “How We Would…” paintings – fantasies of accomplishment or desire. Especially striking was How We Would Give Birth (2007), which depicted a woman on a bed distracting herself by staring at a Hudson River School painting on the wall while a bloody infant struggles to emerge from her open womb. This painting came to mind while confronting twelve huge exuberant paintings (one close to 10 by 20 feet) and four drawings in her present show at Petzel, and realizing all but one were done in the past several months of 2015 after the birth of her child, a little more than a year ago.

While usually her paintings look out at a world gone wild, most of these paintings seem to gaze inward. Schutz’s images have always seemed like proscenia, upon which are enacted the dramatic complexity of her own ambivalent feelings. And in this spirit we might consider the animating engine of her current exhibition to be Post-partum Expression. Whatever her fantasy of parenthood might have been eight years ago, these paintings are the palpable result.

The human-scaled Sleepwalker (2015) in Petzel’s entryway guides us into the exhibit. It displays a person in a yellow t-shirt, hands outstretched zombie-like, having just descended, or ascended, or about to tumble down (the perspective is ambiguous) a long flight of stairs. The vision is reminiscent of those post-childbirth, middle-of-the-night walks to quiet a crying infant: trying to be awake just enough to accomplish the task, yet still able to fall back to sleep afterwards. Ironically, the “Adidas” emblazoned across her chest has its final “s” obscured or missing to become Adida, the past participle of the Spanish verb adir — to accept.

Acceptance of the present moment, of chaos and loss of control, is not only a condition of parenthood, but of painting, as well. Some of these images might seem incoherent at first, but the confusing, fractured, and contradictory points of view of Cubist space, which frustrates stable analysis, seems to have become the ideal tool for Schutz to explore her emotional state.

Lion Eating Its Tamer (2015) introduces us to this ravaged pictorial space where every brushstroke simultaneously creates form and is a form itself. Being consumed by what one is trying to control calls to mind the experience of being physically and emotionally devoured by one’s child, probably every nursing mother’s nightmare. The lion is an implacably ferocious stone idol upon whose altar the tamer has been sacrificed. The various objects contained in this flattened image — a ball, a sperm-like whip, a ring of milky flames, a nipple shaped pedestal, a purple streaked square of paper or diaper, a broken wooden joint and nails — are arranged around the central action like iconographs in a Byzantine Madonna and Child painting. The tamer seems less terrified than resigned or sleep-deprived, engulfed by, or perhaps ejected from, the mouth/womb of the chimeric beast. The drama is staged not in a circus ring but on a trapezoidal examination table under overhead surgical lighting.

A yet more mysterious painting, The Glider (2015) is as bewildering as any Cubist Pablo Picasso, and at first the central female’s face seems pulled from one of his paintings. Learning that this glider is not an airborne one, but the term for a reclining nursing chair clarifies the image. The wood chair, the red infant, elongated funnel breasts (there seems to be four), and various glasses with water and straws create a private moment that we share. The Picassoid face of the nursing mother, as fractured as it may seem, expresses a specific emotion somewhere between shock and ecstasy, and locates a head that is leaning back and seen from below, which would be the nursing infant’s point of view, and becomes our own, pulling us into this intimate experience.

This sense of introspection and privacy, despite the manic energy of their execution, extends even to the two titular paintings of the show with their metaphors of a brawl in the enclosed space of an elevator. The calm abstractions of flat brushed metal doors, either opening or closing like curtains on the intense energy of wildly painted forms at the center, separate us from the drama. The chaotic confrontations of a contained world are in the process of being concealed or revealed to our isolated view. The quite wonderful Slow Motion Shower far from a salacious view of a naked female bather offers a hunched over, multi-armed and possibly weeping Shiva, whose tears blend with the shower spray and conveys the feeling of a retreat from the demands of human contact and the one place to find solitude and release.

The immense Shaking Out the Bed (2015) in the last room depicts not only a locus of pleasure and conception (certainly not sleep here) but also a fraught arena for any new family. Initially so chaotic seeming, the painting slowly reveals how Schutz has structured this boudoir explosion.

Several different points of view here have been woven together. Seen frontally the stable entry point into this eruption, at the center bottom, is the dark surface of a night table. Upon it rests an ominous hammer, a water glass, a crumpled paper, and a giant cockroach. Anchoring the right side of the painting is the flat top of a headboard seen from above, displaying four ornamental ceramic pots. The upper part of the painting is held in place by a lamp on a blond night table, drawer expressionistically askew, and on the left side, looking down past the foot of the bed is a laundry basket possibly containing soiled diapers.

The “shaking out” of the title occurs in the center of the painting where coins, newspaper and pizza slice fly out at us like a big bang. Bang might be the operative word as it is generated by two figures caught in coitus, as evinced by their straining appendages and bare buttocks, and the concentrated expressions of their giant Philip Guston-like heads pressed intimately together, trying unsuccessfully not to disturb the diapered infant at the foot of the bed. Mostly we are looking down on this scene, which throws us into the air as well.

Schutz emphasizes how personally significant this painting must be for her, not only through the scale and the intimacy of the activity, but in the specificity of markers around the edge: the stack of Self magazines under the bed, the calendar page in one corner showing the date June 27, and the digital clock in another revealing the time to be 12:31.

Evident here is the influence of other artists who have explored the metaphoric significance of family experience, whether Guston, Elizabeth Murray, Nicole Eisenman or Judith Linhares, each in entirely different ways. But the boldness and fearlessness of Schutz’s approach, her constant risky experimentation with both form and subject matter, and an almost desperate desire to get to the bottom of her feelings through paint, reveal her, to my mind, as one of the great painters of our time. Julian Schnabel once bragged that he was the closest thing to Picasso we were going to get in our lifetime, but he’s now been pushed aside.

The post Creation Anxieties: Dana Schutz at Petzel appeared first on artcritical.

February 21 to March 28, 2015
548 West 22nd St. (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 989 7700

Chelsea galleries show a range of innovative contemporary artists, but I question whether their motivations are quantitative or qualitative. Do they showcase work based on the art’s provocation, ideas, and craft or simply on hype? My curiosity brought me to see the work of the viral Internet artist Brad Troemel, at Zach Feuer Gallery. Troemel’s online popularity and the attention garnered by his collaborative Tumblr blog, Jogging, led me to expect new forms of digital media in discourse with web culture. However, his cultural references and use of materials produced only ambivalence. In his show, “On View: Selections from the Troemel Collection,” he explores ideas of ownership, appropriation, and inherent value through the eyes of his persona, “the collector.” It is through the curation and consolidation of commonplace objects that Troemel exposes the insipid nature of the creation and trade of contemporary art.

In one series here, Troemel presents appropriated paintings by celebrities, each adorned with a set of collectible coins and vacuum-sealed onto a brightly colored panel. Tiger Lilies, a 1946 lithograph by Gloria Vanderbilt, is re-purposed due to her status as an artist, socialite, and blue jeans designer. In taking ownership of the celebrity-turned-artists’ paintings, he describes a complex relationship between fame, authenticity and value. Additionally, he questions the integrity of these famous artists and points a finger at the art market‘s infatuated intercourse with fame, as recently demonstrated by Jeff Koons’s collaboration with Lady Gaga, James Franco and Jay-Z at Pace, and Björk’s current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

I find, though, that Troemel’s series of paintings don’t expand upon one another, instead they re-emphasize a singular, over-determined concept. Rather than existing as stand-alone artworks, the entire series becomes a redundancy. They all follow the same visual formula, without any complication. The celebrity-turned-artists’ images could readily be substituted while still maintaining an analogous reading. The images he has selected seem to be arbitrary, and instead of addressing the specific inclusions, Troemel broadly digs at the psychology of capitalism, fame and appropriation.

What I find more productive than Troemel’s exploration of ownership and the gaze of the collector is the work’s pressing social undertones. Although these ideas are nothing new, I find his materialization of them to be effective. The show reexamines early 21^st century memorabilia — such as the furry robotic dolls called Furbies and Chuck-E-Cheez tokens — presenting us with a dark reality cloaked in a friendly, nostalgic façade. Through his collection of cultural objects he negotiates the murky waters of surveillance, privacy, and ownership. For example, Troemel’s minimal, lucid, yet demanding wall installation features a myriad of neon-colored rock-climbing mounts and vintage Furbies, covering the gallery wall from floor to ceiling. The space’s periphery becomes animated through the Furbies’ watchful gaze. Interestingly, the installation takes on a pessimistic tone despite its vivid brightness. This piece instantly attracts, due to its color and scale, while simultaneously repelling all sense of audience collaboration. Troemel subverts the nature of this inherently conquerable rock-climbing obstacle by occupying all the holds with Furbies, thus eliminating the prospect of surmounting his metaphorical installation. The wall becomes an oppressive monument, a Big Brother presence that speaks to the unease induced by surveillance. The Furbies’ observant gaze, juxtaposed with the gallery’s own surveillance camera, help focus these themes of supervision, security, and privacy. The two create an engaging visual and conceptual power dynamic that speaks to many of the immediate realities faced by contemporary Internet culture.

Within the entire show, this piece, visually and phenomenologically, was the most articulate. Its focus and repetition of few elements within one piece was far more engaging than the repeated motif found in the painting-and-coin assemblages. In contrast to his other works, where readings became opaque, there wasn’t a disparity between elements that competed for my attention.

Regardless, the exhibition wavered in terms of coherence. Troemel’s investment in his role as collector conveyed some truths about art being a marketable commodity. However, he did not sufficiently reveal the qualities that his press release claims make are into a “highly potent bundle of commodities.” The collectibles held the potential to be read as “diversified portfolios” (also from the press release), but never expands on the metaphor beyond a rhetorical device. As a viewer, I felt my attention being unreciprocated by the inconsistency between the artworks. A substantial edit and centralization of materials would be conducive to conveying Troemel’s ideas.

The post The Collector’s Take on Ownership: Brad Troemel at Zach Feuer appeared first on artcritical.

May 6 – June 11, 2011
548 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 989 7700

In electric, Kool-Aid-colored acid fever-dreams Dasha Shishkin depicts death, amputation, glamour, deviance, ritual, and the mundane, often all at once.  The narratives are obscure, veiled by an abundance of line and color delineating violent and quotidian moments with equal dispassion.

The title of Shishkin’s current exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery, Desaparecido, translates as “one who has been disappeared,” and every one of the hominoid creatures in her phantasmagorical world could easily be “disappeared” at any moment. Recurrent motifs of coffins, dismembered torsos, severed breasts and phalluses abound, though the horrors are apparently routine for the inhabitants – the breasts are served prettily on a platter in a cannibalistic patisserie, and judging by the number of mutilated living corpses scattered about smoking cigarettes, they are quite fresh.  The sketchy markmaking and cluttered splotchy surfaces camouflage a ferocity simmering under the surface.

To focus entirely on the macabre grotesquery of Shishkin’s imagery would be (however pruriently satisfying) a shame, for there is great beauty here as well. A gleeful riot of color runs through her exhibition like a hybrid beast escaped from her paintbrush.  It is unabashedly pleasing, as is her delicate linear style, despite the barbarities depicted.  Though the artist has often been compared to Egon Schiele and Henry Darger – her predecessors both in style and content – hers is an entirely new synthesis of delirium and graphically compelling presentation.  The inhabitants of her fantastical land are mutant creatures with human limbs and distorted features – elongated phallic or devilishly pointed noses abound.  Sometimes the figures are clothed in grey dresses; occasionally they sport rat-like tails.  Their skin tones range from pale pink to bright green to a Simpsons yellow.

These quasi-people enact celebration scenes, funerals, bizarre medical procedures and scientific experiments.  In Butter is the Passport to Pleasure, slender pink and blue figures are served wine at a long banquet table in a spacious interior decorated with palm fronds, while small figures lie end-to-end in caskets before them.  With the Dark Comes Dinner I Hope depicts graceful yellow female figures, sporting high heels and rodent tails, carrying bright pink and red coffins, upon which sit comely polka-dotted sprites with ferns for hands. In A Boy’s Best Friend is His Mother one of the few male figures disgorges red berry-like entrails while a female torso gives birth to tiny birds in a hospital-like environment with a tiled floor.  All Prayer All the Time presents a similarly medical interior where elaborate human and animal dissection takes place – perhaps experimental cross breeding or a search for a cure has gone drastically awry. Though the scattered body parts and ever-present splatters of red paint could have sprung from the demented dreams of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, there are rare moments of heroism to counter-balance the savagery.  The rare outdoor scene of Sure Like Shite Sticks to the Blanket shows a chain of grey-clad figures rescuing one of their own from a perilous fall from a grassy cliff.  Though sometimes these beings function as food for one another, apparently there is also a sense of community, even caring.  Clearly this strange brutal world has an order to it, albeit one that is impossible to comprehend.

It is tempting to read an intended social commentary into Shishkin’s works – could this frightening yet strangely alluring world be a nightmare mirror image of our own, where brutality, aggression, and the fatality of life itself are laid bare for our examination?  It is possible, yet perhaps a too-literal interpretation.  After all, the artist deliberately obfuscates the reading of her works with catchy yet unrelated titles;for example, Enthusiasm is a Fever of Reason.

The post Putting the Gore into Phantasmagoria: Dasha Shiskin at Zach Feuer appeared first on artcritical.

on view at Henning’s exhibition, German Enlightenment, closing today, Wednesday, at Zach Feuer Gallery, 530 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212 989 7700.

This was an artcritical PIC in November 2008.

The post Anton Henning at Zach Feuer Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, August 22, 2008 under the heading “Locating Propriety in the Inappropriate”

There is something appropriate in finding Zach Feuer Gallery open for business in mid-August with a Phoebe Washburn’s installation, when the rest of Chelsea is a ghost town. Seeing this Dadaistic riff on productivity in a gallery district that feels like the artistic equivalent of the rust belt cannot but accent an initial response to it. Almost every door on West 24th Street has notices of apology as galleries prep themselves for the relaunch of the season, after Labor Day.

Ms. Washburn’s sprawling, complex, decidedly nutty piece, “Tickling the Shitstem,” which is something of a “happening” in the old-fashioned sense, a work poised between sculpture and performance, is all about the foibles of an improvised production-line. Because it is a zany exploration of progress and decay, this is a work that, by its very nature, will unfold and only fully realize itself with the passage of time, when the built in failures inevitable in such as wacko system are bound to take effect.

By the time the art world throngs to the gallery for the delayed private view on September 4, therefore, the piece will have had a couple of weeks head start on its audience. This probably explains the odd choice of opening time for such a highflying young artist who, at 35, has already been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Berlin Guggenheim and UCLA’s Hammer Museum.

As you enter the gallery, you are confronted with what has become the trademark look of a Washburn piece: a shimmering surface of at first seemingly randomly knocked together 2-by-4s, appearing like a cross between panicked or lackluster carpentry and some outgrowth of nature. But this ramshackle first impression is deceptive, and this is a robust, if primitive seeming, workable structure. Turn the corner and you see that it houses a hive of industry — or to be more precise, commerce, as a pair of workers offer an odd mix of merchandise, in the form of unappetizing soft drinks, printed tee-shirts, and various inexplicable souvenirs whose enigma is their sole attraction.

Penetrate further into the gallery and another workstation presents itself, linked to the sales barn by various tubes and wires. There is a washing machine feeding a stepped arrangement of glass tanks, the top three of which are filled with brightly colored golf balls, and the last a hardy water plant. Off to one side, though again linked with hosing, is a big orange Igloo drinks cooler, filled with sand, and feeding a garbage bin over the top of which a dirt tee-shirt is stretched, attached with bright orange pegs that match the cooler and one tank of golf balls.

In a third space is a water feature, a fountain surrounded by garishly colored rolled up towels, once again linked to the goings on of the other elements of this playful factory. Such Heath Robinsonian ingenuity — everything works, but only just, and by the most circuitous and intentionally obtuse means — serves to underscore how, despite the efforts of Andy Warhol, “art” and “factory” are a contradiction in terms. A factory, after all, turns out something useful with streamlined efficiency, whereas art, as Oscar Wilde insisted, is by definition useless. The aesthetic experience, in fact, is what is exposed by inefficiency, in the cracks between expectation and actualization.

By now, the viewer is itching for explication which is at hand from the press release, or the salespeople back at the souvenir shop. The industry here revolves around the machine washing of found tee-shirts, and the management of the liquid waste emerging from that process. The stuff for sale — soft drinks of the same colors as the golf balls, the bottles to be filled afterwards by undrinkable waste liquids of the same colors — is secondary to the process of its own manufacture. In fact, the “shitstem,” as its name implies, conflates waste and productivity.

Faux-industriousness has a long pedigree in the Dada tradition, dating right back to Marcel Duchamp’s meditations on constellations of displaced mechanical objects (chocolate grinders being a favorite) in such works as “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even” (1915–23). This proceeds via the twittery, jerky pointless-seeming machines of Jean Tinguely to Ms. Washburn’s neo-Dada contemporaries. These include the late Jason Rhoades, with his manically compulsive arrangements of appropriated detritus; Ms. Washburn’s stablemate at Zach Feuer, Danica Phelps, with whom she shares an obsession with color-coding; and the technophile absurdist Roxy Paine, with his elaborate machines for making art. Semantically close to the scatalogy of Ms. Washburn’s Shitstem is Wim Delvoye’s “Cloaca,” a super-elaborate machine that produces excrement.

But while there might be some shared intentions and values with these waste generators, with a humor tinged by ecology, Ms. Washburn’s aesthetic stands in contrast to that of Messrs. Paine and Delvoye in that it eschews mechanical streamlining to insist on a homey, hippy aesthetic of the handmade and pieced-together, recalling instead — though without the heavy handed moralizing — the not much fun fair aesthetic of the Swiss Thomas Hirschhorn. Another distinction of Ms. Washburn’s strategy, bringing her closer to the American installation artist Sarah Sze, is a willingness to create elaborate mechanisms in which an allowance of some kind of erosion or failure is built into the life of the work.

What Ms. Washburn does have in common with all these artists is a need for narrative. This, however, is a departure from her artistic origins. When she first came to public attention with her staggeringly sumptuous installation of stacked and tacked together shards, such as “Nothing’s Cutie,” her debut solo exhibition at LFL (the precursor of Zach Feuer), the emphasis was on the formal experience, not its underlying meaning, although the very use of detritus and the rushed sense of improvisation undeniably gave the piece an ecological edge. This was a moment in her development when the experience could only be described in abstract, phenomenological terms: Kim Levin, for instance, aptly observed how Ms. Washburn’s “improvisational logic is rhizomic, fractal and not nearly as precarious as it looks.” Now, the emphasis has heavily tipped from form to content, from stasis to process. With more “happening” there is correspondingly less that is sculptural.

Recalling the impact of that early work, it is hard not to regret Ms. Washburn’s progress, and to yearn for a reconnection with her initial ecstatic creativity. In the meantime, though, and taken on its own terms, her funky aesthetic affords plenty that is fun and thoughtful, which is not a bad place to be.

The post Phoebe Washburn: Locating Propriety in the Inappropriate appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201583163″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Andrea K. Scott and Katy Siegel joined David Cohen to discuss Kathy Butterly at Tibor de Nagy, Tim Hawkinson at PaceWildenstein and Nyehaus, Julianne Swartz at Josee Bienvenu, Dana Schutz at Zach Feuer, and Rebecca Warren at Matthew Marks.

The post May 2007: Andrea K. Scott and Katy Siegel with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

January 11 to February 24, 2007

Historically speaking, the emphasis on written language in works of visual art, whether it is done in a mocking, disruptive, or sculptural way, introduced a level of criticality that was not there before. If a visual artist decides to use text in their paintings, text unattached to representational imagery, they expose themselves to a dual system of judgment. Not only will viewers judge whether or not the imagery used is effective they will also evaluate the language component of the work. Are the fragments, single words, or sentences poetic, disturbing, or funny? Do non sequiturs strengthen an image, distract from it, increase the layers of meaning, or generate forced meanings and interpretations? Or even worse, are they simply artsy-fartsy?

Justin Lieberman uses text in his art for comedic purposes and to recontextualize, subvert, critique, and perversely celebrate the mass media environment we are submerged in from birth to death. The words he paints onto his painting/collages, posed photographs, assemblages, and appropriated and modified images can be read as graffiti, a defacement of the visual elements. It is graffiti in the sense that it is meant to redirect the intentions of the original images in order to point out the repressed content. He also injects an element of the personal into his appropriations by borrowing slogans and images from products he himself uses as a consumer. Lieberman is able to manifest his own neuroses, obsessions, and twisted humor in the context of the world of advertising and this provides insights into our conscious and unconscious immersion in the media. He uses his own image in many works to create an art world persona and to critique and investigation art world mechanisms. It is primarily a form of branding.

The tension between words and images and the handmade and commercially produced are recurrent themes. Although he has stated that he uses appropriation as a way of avoiding the obscurity of ambiguous forms, it is important for him to deface his appropriations in some way, to remind us of the presence of the individual. Playing the role of clownish sad sack, marginalized bohemian druggie, and manipulative careerist in various works, he reminds us of the art market’s reliance upon the cult of personality to increase market value. His face and body appear in many of his works. This suggests that the art making process is equivalent to the advertising or branding process. The art consumer demands the same sort of brand recognition that the average consumer demands when she/he is choosing a ketchup, soda, or aspirin. It is not about talent but who has made the art object. One work in this exhibition, “For Successful Living (diesel),” 2006 consists of a photo of Lieberman’s face, the Diesel logo and the blunt musings of a heartless, but also savvy and pragmatic art world careerist. This work has a dual edge because we don’t know how much of it is confessional and how much is theatrics. Is Lieberman the victim of the person reciting these words or letting us know what kind of person he is? The work is energized by the black humor of the text and the ransom note-like lettering.

“National Peanut Board” (2006), a series of six shrunken and copied subway advertisements with the original text changed from, “Why pay a therapist to get in touch with your inner child?” to “Why pay a rapist to touch your child?” transforms sentimental tripe into an unsettling and provocative one liner. In this series the source material was meant to appeal to our domestic fantasies but instead we are reminded of the monsters in the closet, the suppressed underside of family life. The intentionally drippy blocks of cheap acrylic paint that Lieberman applied over the original lettering draws a contrast between individual impulses, our instinct to leave our mark behind, and the slick impersonal format of advertisements, meant to appeal to large swathes of people and no one in particular. Perhaps Lieberman is a big fan of Philip Roth’s book, “My Life As a Man,” in which the ethics of psychotherapy are explored in horrifying detail.

A unique part of the three artworks that incorporate transparencies in light boxes in this exhibition is the artist’s use of electronic watermarks or signatures commonly found on digital images on the Internet. A faint, whitish “JL” is visible on each digital collage. Again Lieberman is treating his own identity, in this case his initials, as a brand name.

“Lexapro” (2006) consists of a photograph of the artist with a beard hunched over in a wheelchair clinging tightly to an opened umbrella while sitting on a train track, with a train racing towards him. The phrase “DON’T LET IT COME TO THIS” appears above the action and the Lexapro logo with the active ingredient listed below it appears in a white box in the lower right corner. According to the artist he uses or has used the drug. What looks to be a morbid spoof has a confessional element to it. This shifts the moral tenor of the work. Lieberman is not mocking the pharmaceutical industry for trying to push happy pills on us or those people who need them to get by, he is admitting that he also benefits from pharmacological therapy and perhaps wants to remind himself where he would be without it. The goal of an advertisement is to have customers connect with the generically familiar worlds they conjure, but Lieberman reminds us that these computer enhanced fables have a real impact on us. One is also reminded that one of the ironic side effects of taking the anti-depressant/anxiety medication is an increased risk of suicidal thoughts or behavior. So does Lexapro save us or kill us?

The apotheosis of Lieberman’s tendency to insert facets of his own life into found images is a collage located in the backroom of the exhibition, sarcastically called the Janitor’s Closet. “February” (2003) is a collage that includes a magazine cut out of a spread-eagled pinup with a crammed word bubble above her head. The handwritten text is a transcription of a break up letter the artist received from an ex. Juvenile and brilliant at the same time, this combination of the artist’s personal life and generic pornographic imagery emphasizes the ways in which our emotional lives, for better or worse, maneuver through the world of mediated images. No matter how shaped we are by the media we will always find a way to express ourselves, no matter how depraved our utterances might be.

The post Justin Lieberman: Agency (Open House) appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201581395″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Lance Esplund, Deborah Garwood, and Raphael Rubinstein joined David Cohen to review Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Elizabeth Murray at the Museum of Modern Art, Jeremy Blake at Feigen Contemporary and Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed at Zach Feuer.

The post November 2005: Lance Esplund, Deborah Garwood, and Raphael Rubinstein with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

DANICA PHELPS: WAKE
Zach Feuer to October 1
530 West 24 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 989 7700

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 22, 2005

Philip Pearlstein is a collector of oddities, in life and within his paintings.  A typical studio set up juxtaposes assorted toys and curios—kitsch or decrepit in varying degrees—amidst his trademark emotionally vacant, lithe, naked models.

The poses and arrangements are studiedly weird, but somehow, the more tricksy his jumbled and skewed images become, the more disconcertingly prosaic his paint handling seems in comparison.  The same hand is used, in an even, measured way, to render volumetrically complex flesh and flat fabrics, solid forms and elusive shadows.  It is as if in the execution of his mannerist compositions he has an attitude to match the disconnect of his models from their contorted repose.  The viewer is left in a similar space, poised between tedium and fancy, alienation and intrigue.

The artist would have us believe, apparently, that his sole concerns are perception itself and formal construction.  But such an array of at once functional and fantasy objects as a Chinese kite, decoys, a butcher’s sign, iconic pop trademarks, cartoon characters, a weathervane airplane, Americana, and tribal artefacts, not to mention the nude as “play thing” –at once locus and signifier of desire—cannot but operate at some level of metaphor, if not allegory.  Catalogue essayist Alexi Worth identifies for these recent paintings “a tricky middle zone where symbolism and formalism cohabit.”  At the very least, the images operate as object poems, even if they resist decoding.

But often as not, the symbolism seems as literal as the perception.  “Model on Bamboo Lounge with Artist Mannequin” (2005) is almost a manifesto piece for an artist concerned with teasing the boundaries between nature and artifice, what is alive and what is art.  The dramatis personae have interchangeable designations: the wooden lay figure could accurately be deemed a model, while the reclining female figure, by virtue of being in the employ of Mr. Pearlstein, could be termed, following the French term, an artist’s mannequin.  Her pose, kimono akimbo to reveal brown suntanned flesh, one hand upon her thigh, the other pressed on her brow, is oddly stilted (“wooden”) while the light lends a teasingly animated quality to the polished, heavily grained, actually wooden figurine.

Mr. Pearlstein often singles out this African-American model for images that play on visual-verbal issues of color and tone.  In an earlier series she would sprawl over a dollshouse model of the White House, for instance.  In the current group she poses a couple of times on a funky, 1970s inflatable blue blow-up chair in images whose titles reference her dreadlocks—again, the buzz words that go off, consciously or not, on registering the object and its perceptual properties are “color,” “skin,” “otherness.”

There are two pictures which feature a model with her legs crossed over an African drum, both from 2005.  In terms of visual metaphor there seems to be a play on tautness, a sense of stretched skin and tightened muscle uniting instrument and sitter.  The drum has stylised animals carved in relief—at yet another level, a verbal pun on the mannerism of the model’s pose in which tension and relaxation play off against each other.

Apart from the conflict between the literal and the metaphorical, the psychological responses that a Pearlstein elicits are complex.  Within the formal terms the artist seems to prefer there’s a confusion about status: are they “realist” in the sense of using a received language to achieve an impact and immediacy comparable to photography, or are they perceptualist, in the sense of really being about looking afresh and putting down what is seen and experienced, however odd and surprising and actually different from photography that turns out to be?  The awkwardness and distortion that arise from cheating or doing without singlepoint perspective suggest the latter: it is about fresh seeing.  But with all the years that he has been doing it Mr Pearlstein has generated his own set of tropes—radical foreshortening, shadow play, the play of fabrics that are already flattened against volumetric forms that he himself flattens—that are as much a language as is realism.  His naivite is a form of sophistication, and vice versa.

Time is an implicit element in the paintings of Mr. Pearlstein.  Although the surfaces give off, so to speak, conflicting reports—they are chock full of facts but dutifully delivered—the sense of detail and attention, not to mention the cheesed off expression of the models, suggest the long haul.  Danica Phelps, however, leaves no ambiguity about time in her work: It is the work.  Taking the diaristic to a literalist extreme, her show at Zach Feuer presents erotic doodles, flow diagrams, and expenditure charts that list her daily activities on an hourly, not to mention cent by cent basis.

Her hand—whether offering graphic designerish rendering or vaguely expressive, langourous figuration, and whether drawing or writing—is at once neat and dashed off, fastidious and fiddly.  She constructs Filofax-like (but handmade) charts filled in, retrospectively, with the activities that have accounted for her day.  “STUDIO” in block letters will account for long stretches (but not as long, one suspects, as Mr. Pearlstein or his sitters) while other repeating activities are walking the dog, paying bills, chatting with Debi, eating with Debi, making love with the lucky Debi.

The lovemaking brings out the draughtsman in Ms. Phelps, in overlapping, outlined wire figures in minimally defined interior spaces.  Expenditure alone however brings out the colorist.  Ms. Phelps continues from earlier shows an elaborate notational system of income and expenditure in barcodes of reds, yellows and greens.

Despite coming from a very different culture (feminism, conceptualism and fluxus) Ms. Phelps is definitely a coda of sorts to Mr. Pearlstein: Think nutty observation, repeating patterns, overlapping languages, and oddly compelling tedium.

The post Philip Pearlstein at Betty Cuningham and Danica Phelps: Wake at Zach Feuer appeared first on artcritical.

December 6, 2004 to January 22, 2005

Tom McGrath’s second solo exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery continues to explore themes of the road and car culture that he initiated in 2002. While a broad tradition of landscape painting informs the work, their true foundation rests upon a fair amount of heady contemporary urban theory, ranging from pop to the apocalyptic. In practice, this means that Mr. McGrath has set himself the task of translating a lot of ideas into his painterly process – no small undertaking. The artist focuses not so much on landscape per se as the observer’s movement through it. He starts with his own experience on the road as his primary visual model: a driver in flight on American highways in our era of satellite broadband. McGrath paints for an audience accustomed to seeing references to pop culture and appropriated imagery in serious art – not the case when Warhol silkscreened newspaper photos of car crashes onto canvas – which is to say that irony is not the point here. The sensibility is wry, but high-minded.

There are just five paintings dating from 2003-2004 hanging in the show. Canvases are fairly large, in horizontal formats at widths of 96 inches, featuring imagery of cars, parking lots, and roadside suburbia. However, the pictorial logic of McGrath’s loosely photo-based realist style is continually interrupted by something that makes the scene waver. Is it a time warp? Heavy weather from the 4th dimension rolls down the mountainside and plops on a Dunkin’ Donuts shack…. Other than this striking feature of spatial disruption, which is different in each painting, McGrath keeps it simple. The paintings have titles such as “Untitled” (Dunkin’ Donuts), “Untitled” (car crash), “Intersection”. Color tends towards warm neutral tones of ochres, grays, and browns with accents such as rich red cadmium and deep viridian green.

In fact, McGrath is far less interested in color relationships than the modulation of space and time through painted form. The viscosity of oil paint is the perfect vehicle, as it were, for McGrath’s ends, and his painterly touch feels full, even fat. Surface textures range from melted plastic to chalk and velvet. The façade of the Dunkin’ Donuts franchise mentioned above wobbles like a pink, orange, and brown mirage, as though rain or the liquefy tool in Photoshop had been dragged across both architecture and atmosphere. The artist is obliged to support the canvas with a solid board while working to achieve different effects by controlled chance, wherein he stains, sprays, mottles, or allows rivulets of medium to dissolve their way through thick, bog-like islands of paint. Altogether a sense of nonchalance and deliberation is at odds with the idea of rushing highway transit. The speed of light gets stuck in the muck of the picture plane, as it were, where history, perspective, and algorithm pile up in instantaneous but inconsistent flows. (The term algorithm, incidentally, is named after a 1st century Arab mathematician.)

Truth be known, the artist makes photo collage studies for the paintings using photographs he took himself. They’re destroyed during the painting process, which seems a pity. But the very difficulty of visualizing what different types of intersecting space might look like is the point of making them – to have a point of departure for the paintings. These days, the genre most inclined to explore discontinuous time zones is moving image media, not painting. McGrath’s interest in spatial discontinuity brings him close, at least conceptually, to the work of artists such as Paul Pfeiffer, Douglas Gordon, or Theresa Hubbard, all of whom reconstruct the space-time continuum somewhere between feature film and applet. However that may be, the ambitious overlap of urban theory, his own experience, and the painting process is reason enough to see McGrath’s latest exhibition.

The post Tom McGrath appeared first on artcritical.