April 23 to June 13, 2015
533 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 727 2070

The paintings and pastels in Lisa Yuskavage’s fourth gallery show at David Zwirner continue to problematize the gendered gaze. The figures in these new works are the least exaggerated and abstracted of all Yuskavage’s girls. In fact, they look uncomfortably close to the Penthouse models the artist has referenced for the past 25 years. This shift towards the source further complicates the artist’s ambiguously feminist oeuvre.

The most notable change in this new series is the addition of male figures. Like much of Yuskavage’s past paintings, the men appear both bold and unsure. Dude looks like Jesus (2014), Mardi Gras Dude (2014) and God of Hippies (2014) all feature three-quarter portraits of men standing exposed, delicate and self-conscious. In The Neighbors, a man lays supine at a woman’s feet, gazing up at her with Rubens-esque flushed cheeks, pacified by his blond-afroed queen, who smiles menacingly at the viewer. A fence enclosing the couple, along with the title, suggests an opportunity to peek inside the domestic — a lawless, private realm frequently explored by women artists. Yuskavage’s paintings often aggressively invite voyeurism. This act of self-referential display calls attention to the eroticizing of the gaze, which in turn questions its practice and conflates the object and the subject.

The painter may or may not consider her work to operate within the context of feminism, but it has been a contentious issue since she first began exhibiting. Questions about whether and how her work is sexist, feminist, neither, or something else entirely, arose in response to her shows during the 80s and 90s, though, the discourse of feminism has changed since then under the pressures of Judith Butler’s interrogations, the development of queer theory and the advent of post-colonialism. Recent publications that champion contradiction and/or complacency as a political strategy such as Johanna Fateman’s essay in the March 2015 issue of Artforum, entitled “Women on the Verge”; Roxane Gay’s 2014 essay collection, Bad Feminist; and Kate Zambreno’s novel Green Girl (2014), provide more context for Yuskavage’s work. As Gay puts it, building on Butler, “Women are sometimes trapped by how they are expected to perform their gender.”[1] Many of Yuskavage’s early figures seem trapped in their squishy, redolent bodies and befuddled by their own allurement. This relationship between women, media representations of women and subsequent body neuroses made her early work compelling, possibly because the work did not claim to offer an oversimplified solution to complex issues of self-representation.

Sari (2015) and In the Park (2014) depict the hyper-sexualized ingénues that have incited allegations of sexism in response to Yuskavage’s work over the years. However, placed among paintings like The Neighbors or the aforementioned dudes and gods, where the men are just as helpless, the performance of the feminine becomes more complex. More curiously still, less apologetic, and even thriving, ebullient figures make an appearance in this series. For example, in Around the House (2015), a small painting by comparison to most of the canvases in the show, a nude figure poses on a kitchen counter, backlit by a landscape of luminous rainbow, an optical device that demonstrates Yuskavage’s skill as queen colorist throughout the series. The figure sits unchallenged atop the counter — wild in her element, the domestic. Here Yuskavage’s private psychosexual girl world seems cured of past disconsolate body anxiety, even if only temporarily. As a woman, I find solace in all of these expressions of self-discovery: self-critical despair, salvation through self-indulgence, and unapologetic absolutism over anyone who wants in, or by contrast, complacent surrender. After all, are these not contradictory musings of self-examination the result of a life on display?

The puffy-eyed girl posed on the counter in Around the House gazes back at the viewer, stylized but conspicuously Yuskavage, or some imagined version of herself. Self-portraiture as a means of self-expression has a long tradition with women painters. Artists such as Maria Lassnig, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo and Joan Semmel all depicted themselves in an effort to complicate simplified versions of the feminine experience popular during their careers. Some used their own bodies to go up against the enduring tradition of the painted female nude in an attempt to depict something closer to a woman’s actual lived experience. All of these artists, Yuskavage included, chronologized a lifelong interest in the wildness of the self within gendered lines, as a respite, a revisionary exhibit for the exhibited.

As an elaboration of the artist’s previous reflections on tropes of the feminine, this recent exhibition culminates in her most curious and revealing body of work yet. The new work depicts scenes of Yuskavage’s girls liberated within spaces that once hunted them, namely the domestic, a realm long since negatively associated with the feminine. By blurring the subjective and objective dimensions of her figures, Yuskavage’s professed apolitical paintings remain ambiguous. Other painters who focus on performances of femininity such as Heidi Hahn, Genieve Figgis, Allison Schulnik and Ella Kruglyanskaya come to mind. All of these artists, albeit some more deliberately than others, take on the problem of continuing the feminist project: how to revise it within the changing discourse of gender.

[1] Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (Harper Collins: New York, 2014), 72.

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April 2 to May 2, 2015
525 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 727 2070

Primarily known for his staged photographs of seemingly natural scenes from everyday life, Philip-Lorca diCorcia has spent the last three decades considering artificiality, ambiguity and narratives veiled by emptiness. Whereas his previous series have tended to be organized around single motifs — whether prostitutes (Hustlers, 1990 – 92), anonymous street pedestrians (Heads, 1999 – 2001), or pole dancers (Lucky Thirteen, 2003 – 04) — the photographer’s fifth solo exhibition at David Zwirner refreshingly veered towards a less rigid premise, both conceptually and aesthetically, while maintaining the scrupulous execution for which he has been credited.

Entitled East of Eden (2008 – ongoing), this work-in-progress was stimulated by the 2008 financial collapse. Although a moment of great despair, diCorcia realized that there were people who still thought “they were just going to keep getting rich and buy another car.” His intention, therefore, was for the photographs to act as a revelation of sorts, depicting national disillusion and American decline. diCorcia perceived connections between this catastrophic mess and narratives from the Bible. The central motif, to which the series title alludes,[1] denotes the place in the Old Testament from which God expelled Adam and Eve for their original sin. References to other biblical tales, concerning notions such as guilt and redemption, are also invoked in the works, although loosely. Indeed, the photographer recently hinted at the happenstance of the biblical associations, and stated that he felt he was “already stretching it quite a bit.”’ The series was first shown at Zwirner’s London location in 2013 and, given its rooted linkage to the US, it’s perhaps intriguing to find that the exhibition marks the first time that the works have been presented in this country.

Generously spaced out across nine walls, the exhibition consisted of 15 framed inkjet prints, all over three feet at their shortest point. Arranged into two seemingly random groupings, five photographs were presented in the front gallery and another nine in a connected second room. Oddly, the last photograph in the set was hung in a different space altogether, detached from the main display and easy to miss.

The stark layout created a strangely solemn atmosphere, both curious and cold. This mirrored the contents of the photographs on display: whether sprawling landscapes, grave interiors or object- and figure-focused compositions, diCorcia’s pictures evoke the discomfort endured by a scarred America. Gloom was counteracted, though, by the sharpness of diCorcia’s lighting, which added vigor to each frame.

Outward appearances are kept in tact by neat houses, as in Mount Ararat, Pennsylvania (2012) and Stockton, California (2009). Indoors, it’s a different story. Lynn and Shirley (2008) centers on a blind couple at their homely dining table, their faces just missing the spotlight. Their guide dog rests in the background. DiCorcia allows them to gaze towards the camera — the only figures in the exhibition captured in this way. The solitary elderly woman at the center of Iolanda (2011) looks out to the dark skyscrapers emerging from the grim, gray river viewed from her bedroom. Her own somber expression is reflected back to the viewer through the large, rectangular window that consumes the composition.

Although many of the titles make explicit biblical allusions, it would likely be difficult to relate any of these images to the thematic aspects of the series unless the viewer had prior knowledge of the artist’s intent. As diCorcia has previously commented, although the Book of Genesis was a starting point for the work, he didn’t think that this was especially apparent and claimed that “most people would need a press release to work out what the series is about.”

But the symbolism is there, if you’re looking for it, and the handful of pictures that seem to directly make such references are, for the most part, obvious. This is more owing to their deliberately staged quality, rather than a commitment to offering any literal translation of a story. Works such as Cain and Abel (2013) and Abraham (2010) reveal obscure narratives bathed in suspense. The former portrays an unclothed pregnant woman watching two men entangled in an embrace. The latter shows a dart being thrown in the direction of a teenage boy, who stands frozen, statue-like, awaiting the outcome.

In the end, nature reigns. In Upstate (2009), the lusciousness of the sun-saturated tree, which looks like it flourished from out of nowhere, is punctuated by the vivid red apples it bears on branches climbing towards the sky. Sylmar, California (2008), with its panoramic view of dust-colored mountains and earth-filled plains, is practically painterly. The cowboy situated at the corner of the picture may look out to a landscape that has, in fact, been deeply scorched, but it cannot be doubted that the American sublime is still present.

[1] diCorcia has disclaimed any reference to John Steinbeck’s book of the same name.

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David Brody, Paddy Johnson, and Peter Plagens joined David Cohen to review shows by Francis Alÿs at David Zwirner, Song Dong at Pace, David Shrigley at Anton Kern, and Diana Cooper at Postmasters.

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John McLaughlin: Hard Edge Classicist
Paintings from the 1950s to the 1970s
January 7 – February 13, 2010
Greenberg Van Doren Gallery
730 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street
New York City 212 445 0444

Laddie John Dill: Contained Radiance
January 15 – February 20, 2010
Nyehaus
358 West 20th Street (East of 9th Ave.)
New York City, 212 995 1785

Ronald Davis: Monochrome Paintings From The 1960s
Franklin Parrasch Gallery
January 6 – February 20, 2010
20 West 57th Street
New York City, 212 246 5360

“Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970” at David Zwirner Gallery, curated by Tim Nye and Kristine Bell,  is a must see for anyone who wants to appreciate the creative energy that boiled over in the mid-to late 1960s in Los Angeles.  While seven of the ten artists in this show have had one person shows in New York within the past few years, it isn’t until you see these artists together that you can appreciate the multiple ways in which they shared an L.A. aesthetic at the same time as maintaining easily recognizable individual styles.
Several artists in this show reflect the Light and Space Movement (Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, and Laddie Dill) while others represent the Finish Fetish Group (Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, and De Wain Valentine).  However, the boundaries are permeable:   Alexander, whose tall wedges disappear at the top and Bell, whose cubes are both solid and transparent, belong in both groups.

The Light and Space artists make us question the reliability of what we see.  The Irwin room has three works that are best seen in midday light.  Some visitors experience the room as empty when they first enter it.  The large slightly convex almost square dot painting by Robert Irwin (Untitled, 1963-65) is like a fuzzy Josef Albers painting observed from behind a scrim.  This is a slow work where patience is rewarded.  You begin to see a series of soft-edged nested squares that hover on the surface.   Directly opposite it is Irwin’s white formed acrylic plastic convex disc  (Untitled, 1969).  A black horizontal line in the center of the diameter first captures your attention.  After that, the disc became visible and then its sides and bottom edge slowly disappear into the wall surrounding it.  There is visual magic and ascetic beauty here: virtually everyone seeing this work walks up to the wall to look at its acrylic lacquered surface and what lies behind it.

A few steps away in a perfectly proportioned, dimly lit, sterile, white room with white painted floors is Doug Wheeler’s Untitled (1969).  This soft-edged acrylic and wood square box, the same color as the walls, has a perimeter of fuzzy white neon light that provides an experience of a transcendental floating rectangle. In two totally darkened rooms, Turrell’s mastery of light goes one step further.  Projections of light read as solid forms.  Juke Green (1969) appears to be a green cube that is leaning against the back corner of one room.  Gard Red (1969) reads as a solid pyramid that has been chiseled out of one corner wall in the other room.  Irwin, Wheeler, and Turrell expand our perception by forcing us to use our eyes, our bodies and our minds to disambiguate what we’re seeing.

A dimly lit room on the way to the Finish Fetish works contains a mesmerizing floor installation by Laddie John Dill, an artist whose in-between location is a bridge between the two L.A. groups.  Untitled (1969) consists of graceful mounds of brown and tan sand that are sliced through at an angle by large squares of glass revealing marble-cake sand patterns.  Smaller pieces of square glass are placed horizontally to the viewer above a row of green argon with mercury lights that are hidden below the sand.  The lights can only be seen in the reflections at the top and fronts of the glass, creating an otherworldly landscape.

The last two rooms of the show are devoted to artists captivated by new industrial materials available to them largely from the aerospace industry.  It is widely acknowledged that these artists were inspired by the glossy finishes used on the fast cars, sleek motorcycles, exquisite aerodynamic surf boards, and alluring billboards around them.  When Walter Brooke advises Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967), “I want to say one word to you… Plastics”, his advice had already been heeded in L.A.  Plastics of all types opened up new options in the realms of color, shape, translucency and size.  But, less well known is that some of these artists (for example, Alexander, Valentine, and Dill) also turned to nature for their inspiration. They tried to capture the transient beauty of sea, sky and sand, a beauty that extended to smog besotted colors.  As a result, some of their works transgressed the boundaries between Light and Space and Finish Fetish.  In this connection, Peter Alexander’s work is particularly interesting because he creates immaculate objects that also have the perceptual concerns associated with the Light and Space artists.  However, when his works merged into their surroundings, he was less concerned with formal considerations than with capturing the transiency of the L.A.. sea and sky.  Two cast polyester resin pedestal pieces, Untitled (Window, 1968) and Green Wedge,(1969) and a tall floor piece (Blue Wedge, 1970) virtually disappear at the top as they become thinner and fade from dark pigment to no pigment.  De Wain Valentine, the acknowledged alchemist of the group, also made resin pieces (some of them vast and weighing several tons) during this period.  In this exhibition, he is represented by Triple Disk Red Metal Flake—Black Edge (1966), a sensuous molded fiberglass reinforced acrylic piece with the speckled iridescent finish of a car, motorcycle, or boat.  In fact, its gracefully rounded forms can allude to a series of breasts or the bows of three oncoming ships.

Helen Pashgian’s two small polyester and resin sculptures (both Untitled, 1968-69) have a complexity that belies their size.  One, a murky crystal-ball shaped work reveals two cylindrical forms that cut through the piece.  The other, a clear igloo-shaped work has two mirror-image half-spheres embedded at the top and near the bottom.  Larry Bell’s cubes are magical.  Placed in the center of the room, several of them reflect the works and the people that surround them.  Others can also be seen as allusionistic, as vessels that capture the L.A. smog. Two are particularly arresting.  The first is a small vacuum coated glass and chromium plated brass cube (1966) that has both bronze and turquoise vertical edges depending on where you stand.  The second, Glass Box with Ellipses (1964), with oval mirrored areas allows you to see yourself and then look inside the piece and straight down for an illusion of infinite depth.  Craig Kauffman used Plexiglas to create sensuous vacuum formed molded reliefs of intense colors with varying degrees of translucency.  Spray-painted on the back, three of these acrylic and lacquer Untitled Wall Reliefs (1968) in seductive hues of green, orange, and blue were attached to the wall. Among the John McCracken pieces are two of his signature polyester and resin planks (Think Pink and Red Plank, both 1967) that combine seductive color and immaculate surface with minimalist rigor of form, while functioning both as paintings and sculpture.

It is important to note that while others in the Finish Fetish group showed in New York in the 1960s, McCracken and Bell were more often included in Minimalism surveys in New York and Los Angeles.   It is perhaps not accidental, given Donald Judd’s friendship with Bell and his trips to L.A. that Judd, in the middle 1960s, began designing boxes and stacks using seductively colored Plexiglas.  The result was works that easily could fit in with aspects of the Finish Fetish L.A. culture.  Indeed, in reviewing a Judd exhibition, Rosalind Krauss observed that Judd’s works were both beautiful and illusionistic, properties that sharply transgress Judd’s own writings regarding what properties “specific objects” should have.  Even more telling, Robert Smithson’s labeling of “uncanny materiality” to aspects of Judd’s oeuvre could easily be applied as a general description of the Primary Atmospheres exhibition.  Indeed, perhaps the increasing use of plastics in New York eventually eroded some of the phenotypic differences between East and West Coast Minimalism, creating what James Meyer in his scholarly essay in “A Minimal Future?” (2004) referred to as a “Bicoastal Minimalism”.

It is indeed fortunate that concurrent with the Primary Atmospheres exhibition, there are three other Southern California artists exhibiting who relate either directly or indirectly to the David Zwirner show.  In particular, the exhibition of John McLaughlin’s work at Greenberg Van Doren is highly informative regarding the evolution of the L.A.  minimalist aesthetic.  His hard-edge reductive paintings created a climate for L.A. Minimalism.  McLaughlin progressively reduced his paintings to allow geometry and color to move from figure to ground, as line increasingly became a vehicle to explore space as pure form.  One could argue that the de-materialization of McLaughlin’s painting from its constructivist roots in geometry of varied forms and color—his “Finish Fetish” phase, exemplified by Untitled, (1952) – leads to his “Light and Space” phase in the 1960s and early 1970s (#8, 1963).  These largely black and white paintings synthesize Western Modernism and Eastern Philosophy.  They resonate with the attempt by Irwin, Turrell, and Wheeler to make the boundaries of their images merge with their surroundings.  In each case, the simplicity, clarity and self-discipline of the void creates a phenomenological experience that allows the observer, in McLaughlin’s terms, to learn more about himself than the artist.

The other two L.A. exhibits deserving of attention are Laddie John Dill at Nyehaus and Ron Davis at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery.  In Dill’s exhibition, we can observe the evolution from his horizontal and vertical pure “light sentences” affixed to the wall to his glass, sand, and light floor installations similar to the one at David Zwirner Gallery.   Light Sentence (1973) was inspired by the changing daylight during an average day in Taos, New Mexico.   While his light and sand works parallel Sonnier’s light pieces and Smithson’s dirt, gravel, mirror, and glass installations, his light sentences anticipate the fluorescent light pieces of Spencer Finch who sets about simulating the light at a specific time and place. The most dramatic piece in the Nyehaus show isDeath in Venice (1969), a large floor piece on the second floor of the gallery that calls to mind the canyon fires Dill experienced in the California landscape.  The red, yellow and blue neon and argon tubes lying on and under the sand create an aura of smoldering heat.

Ron Davis’s monochromatic pastel-colored, shaped canvases have never been exhibited in New York.  Of particular note are two works—the beautiful and majestic Big Orchid (1965), an angular pink painting in two sections and Bent Corner Slab (1965) a diamond-shaped green gold painting that is highly illusionistic with apparent folds in the canvas somewhat like Dorothea Rockburne’s work of the early 1970s.  These “in-between” works are the beginning of Davis’ move from painter to object maker.  Specifically, they anticipate his large geometrically shaped floor pieces (the Dodecagon Series) that use Finish Fetish materials of resin and fiberglass along with new technologies to trap the splatters and abstract forms of his expressionist brush strokes while maintaining the clarity of his high key colors.

These four exhibitions provide a nuanced view of Californian Minimalism that includes some of the most perceptually challenging, technically innovative, and downright beautiful works of the last fifty years.  We still have much to learn about California’s cool recasting of New York’s cold Minimalism, but these shows provide a good place to start.

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Adel Abdessemed’s first solo show in New York uses all three gallery spaces of David Zwirner Gallery, creating a fragmented experience. The different pieces in the show never truly coalesce to generate meaning while the intensity and immediacy of the pieces vary so dramatically that the viewer eventually becomes disengaged.

The monumental sculpture Telle mèr tel fils (2008) is a braid of three airplanes and measures sixty-five feet, taking over one of the gallery spaces. The cockpits and tailfins are originals, while the fuselages are reconstructed from felt and air. The tension between the metal body of the plane and the felt, combined with the seemingly malleable body of the vast vehicles is poignant; the artist plays with the form of the plane to defamiliarize and destabilize the viewer. The sculpture subverts the Duchampian readymade as the braided planes do not belong to the space both in size and function and yet the planes are the medium that the artist uses to create a new, alien form.

The artist mobilizes the space with the overbearing presence of the planes and it is the inherent spectacular nature of the work that draws the viewer in. He plays with ideas of destruction/construction/reconstruction in a playful, infantile way that thrills the viewer. It is precisely for this reason that the association with Joseph Beuys becomes problematic. It is impossible to look at felt used in making an airplane without thinking about the origin myth that Beuys created for himself. Abdessemed’s art historical references throughout the show and in particular this one, are unnecessary and somewhat irrelevant as the pieces depend on a more immediate reaction from the viewer. The title of the work, translated as “like mother like son”, also fails to take on meaning and becomes a confusing reference to the common phrase “like father like son”, which is a linguistic reversal that has no real bearing on the work.

The extraneous references to art history take on a more visual role in the most recent piece of the show, The Sea (2009). In this looped video segment, the artist is balancing on a slab of wood on what seems to be the open ocean, writing the words “politically correct”. The futile action of trying to write while balancing on water becomes comical yet meaningful as the viewer is able to appreciate Abdessemed’s self-critical perspective. However, the visual language used is too heavily borrowed from the Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), acquainting the artist’s work with a medium and formal vocabulary that diminishes the work rather than the legitimizing the work, which is what  the artist seems to be aiming for.

Abdessemed’s show is an exhilarating introduction to his work as the artist’s “acts” (as he calls his works) have a truly visceral resonance for every viewer. Yet, the show suffers from the ubiquitous interests of the artist, his “fascination with the world” as he himself identifies it. Although Abdessemed’s investment with any and every thing in the world does lead to instances of immediate and powerful experience, the loose curation and the overt references take away from what could be an encompassing experience. Abdessemed’s work does not need the pedantic embellishments nor does the show require as many pieces and spaces. One yearns for the initial phases of this work before it got to where it did.

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May 10 to June 19, 2004

This is Daniel Richter’s first show in New York. In Germany and elsewhere in Europe he is a big deal and much, very much, has been written and said about this provocative work. It seems Richter was an abstract painter for a short while and has recently taken to making politically charged figurative paintings of urban confusion, ritual and violence. These are very large-format paintings done in an apocalyptic-illustrational style. Well versed in the conventions of nineteenth century history painting, from France to Russia, Richter uses this format to capture enigmatic moments in seemingly staged or ritual events of violence and confusion.

In “Tuwenig” a cabaret-style performer (boots, top hat, bare legs) entertains a pack of glaring wolf-dogs in a sylvan setting at night. In “Tefzen” a showgirlish befeathered circus performer poses-appliance model style-in the midst of what appears to have been a gladiatorial battle of the animals; the victors are still snarling, and the vanquished are rigid in defeat and death. This is theater of the absurd spectacle: cruel, sometimes solemn, and delivered with “what you see is what you get” bluntness, conveyed in a panoply of painterly technique and reference, from the deliberately awkward to the skillfully rendered.

The variety of paint applications is dazzling. Color ranges from psychedelic to fecal. The combination of elements in the paintings sometimes verges on the hokey. The political stance is never quite clear and Richter’s anarchistic response to query is fairly opaque. He’s determined to be socially engaged as well as a painter. This is fine, at least until the illustrators at Rolling Stone catch up to his madness.

The sources of these works range from famous news photos and sundry magazine clippings to children’s books. There is a feeling of familiarity about all the paintings even though the goings on are outrageous and sometimes deeply funny. There is a sense of inevitability in the proceedings, as if it has been enacted before and likely will again. This theatricality may be saying more about the cyclical nature of history than it wants to. For now the paintings pass as art and wicked entertainment.

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