New York

· “Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s”

· fierce pussy

· Jenny Perlin

· An-My Lê

· Mel Bochner

· "Shaker Design: Out of This World"

· “Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000”

Los Angeles

· Soo Kim

· Bernard Rudofsky

· "Make Art/Stop AIDS"

San Francisco

· "Cut: Revealing the Section"

Atlanta

· Jack Whitten

Chicago

· "Black Is, Black Ain't"

· Shannon Stratton

· "Ed Ruscha and Photography"

Detroit

· Amy Vogel

Nashville

· Angelo Filomeno

New Orleans

· Luis Cruz Azaceta

Washington, DC

· Paula Rego

London

· Mat Collishaw

Paris

· David Renggli

Berlin

· Erik Schmidt

· Dan Attoe

· Jorinde Voigt

Milan

· Rirkrit Tiravanija

· Luis Molina-Pantin

Rome

· Nahum Tevet

Turin

· "Greenwashing"

Vienna

· Andy Coolquitt, Frank Haines, William J. O'Brien

Beijing

· Huang Yong Ping

Tokyo

· Naoya Hatakeyama

New York

“Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s”

SCULPTURE CENTER
44 - 19 Purves Street
May 4–July 28

Decoys, complexes, and triggers are pivotal to cause-and-effect relations; they are objects that provoke reactions. This survey, organized by Catherine Morris, brings together works that sculpt viewers’ awareness of their surroundings with precision. An opening in the octagonal tower of Mary Miss’s Screened Court, 1979, draws viewers inward through a loose circle of fencing, but a tighter row of steel mesh at the tower’s base frustrates attempts at entrance. The perch at the top of Alice Aycock’s Stairs (These Can Be Climbed), 1974/2008, offers a sweeping view of the exhibition—a spatial sensation contradicted by the cramped feeling of crouching against the gallery’s ceiling. Housed in Sculpture Center, “Decoys” convincingly demonstrates how Land art can achieve its effects even where land is scarce. The inclusion of documentary photography and video reminds viewers of the art’s original outdoor contexts and gives the exhibition an archive’s authority by expanding its scope to some fifty works by ten women.

Projecting identity politics onto this art is problematic, especially since—as Morris acknowledges—several of the artists featured have consistently rejected the "feminist" label. Nonetheless, “Decoys” opens a useful dialogue with the seminal survey “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” which can only be deliberate given Sculpture Center’s proximity to P.S. 1 and the weeklong overlap of the two shows’ runs. “WACK!” presented visual languages of ephemera and performance, liquidity and softness—a resistance to patriarchal values of mastery and permanence—while setting forth the proliferation of roles that women (and later, anyone) could assume as artists: the craftworker, the shaman, the activist, the diarist. “Decoys” adds to that by accounting for women artists who operated as architects, another mode current in the 1970s, and downplayed direct involvement of their hands and bodies. It might seem ironic that an ostensibly feminist show has documentation revealing that the “men’s work” of the art was done by men—in a video about Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, 1976, male construction workers arrange massive tubes, and men in tractors drive tractors in pictures of Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield—A Confrontation, 1982. But the true nature of these artists’ practices is reflected by Aycock’s drawings of a large-scale land piece, Project for Elevation with Obstructed Sight Lines, 1972, and a photograph of Denes, waist-high in wheat with downtown’s skyscrapers at her back, surveying the field where her vision bloomed.

—Brian Droitcour

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fierce pussy

PRINTED MATTER INC.
195 Tenth Avenue
April 5–May 24

fierce pussy was a New York–based collective of queer women that emerged in 1991 from the ferment spawned by ACT UP. Promoting lesbian visibility and self-defined identity, fierce pussy helped politicize the urban landscape by wheat-pasting posters, distributing stickers and T-shirts, and “renaming” a number of New York streets after lesbian heroines.

Their low-tech aesthetic is exemplified by photocopied posters, which have been reissued in a book published by Printed Matter and are exhibited there above vitrines of related ephemera. Members’ childhood snapshots are emblazoned with words like MUFFDIVER and DYKE; the phrase LESBIAN CHIC MY ASS is illustrated with a bathroom-stall-worthy rendering of an ass followed by the words FUCK 15 MINUTES OF FAME. WE DEMAND OUR CIVIL RIGHTS. NOW. Contemporaneous groups such as Queer Nation, Dyke Action Machine, and the aforementioned ACT UP pioneered an activist appropriation of the slick language of advertising, taking a cue from Situationist détournement and the work of Barbara Kruger. fierce pussy’s posters share aesthetic kinship with the more punkish 1979 publication Durhing Durhing by Joseph Wolman (founder, with Guy Debord, of the Letterist International), in which random faces are overprinted with Marxist-inflected words.

This kind of contextualization, however, distances the work from the queer bodies that made it, and queer bodies are still not visible enough. Riding that wave of lesbian chic, The L Word now epitomizes self-defined lesbian (with little mention of gender-queer or trans) identity. fierce pussy’s book, the most vital part of the exhibition, opens with reprints of three nearly twenty-year-old posters comprising a more diverse spectrum of identities, among them dyke, butch, pervert, femme, feminist, and queer. The pages are detachable and reconfigurable. Just add wheat paste.

—Amoreen Armetta

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Jenny Perlin

MIREILLE MOSLER LTD.
35 East 67th Street
March 26–May 31

For a 2003 film, Brooklyn-based artist Jenny Perlin considers the painstaking, repetitive tasks prescribed by the 1915 book Perseverance: How to Develop It in the context of America’s obsession with assembly-line productivity. One can imagine Sequence (all works 2007), included in this exhibition, as the result of such an exercise: Every day for forty days, Perlin covered four fresh sheets of vellum with a monochrome grid of five hundred squares each, dipping her brush in ink only when it ran out. The resulting wall-size installation presents a minimalist grid made not by endless mechanical repetition but through a time-based cycle of exhaustion and replenishment. Perlin stages a similar retroaction in Flight, a 16-mm film for which she hand-copied receipts from purchases in airports around the world. Shot using stop-motion animation, one letter at a time, the script unfolds as if generated by some kind of analogue proto-computer. These indexical re-creations retain information—the time of a purchase, an employee’s name—that reminds viewers of the web of concrete data we produce as we traverse the “abstract space” of the modern world. (They also convey the banal courtesy phrases of commerce, rendered suddenly endearing in Perlin’s irregular hand.) In the back room, Addendum’s bright, layered diagrams of cell phones, trees, and keyboard tunings seem whimsical but belie a more troubling concern. The fine print, literally, is legalese regarding the case of a Somalian immigrant charged in 2004 with plotting to blow up a mall in Ohio. Perlin draws from details of the case to chart a lexicon of repetition and restriction in which this unnamed individual—and individuality—is circumscribed. Perhaps in an era of secret wiretaps and ghost detainees, a simple act of copying can be a form of political resistance.

—Frances Jacobus-Parker

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An-My Lê

MURRAY GUY
453 West 17th Street
April 26–May 31

An-My Lê’s last show at Murray Guy, in 2004, presented black-and-white photographs of a virtual Iraq that the US military has constructed in the American West. It was about reality and fiction. In Lê’s new show, titled “Events Ashore,” the pictures are in color, and their more straightforward subjects at first seem to bring us one step closer to the simply real.

There are pictures of the huge hovercraft used to unload returning troops onto American beaches, of small-arms practice on the deck of military ships, and of a woman dressed for combat on the deck of an oil rig off the Iraqi coast. But even these realities seem mostly chosen for the hint of the unreal one finds built into them. The targets taking small-arms fire are perched on the very edge of a ship’s deck, with the open sea beyond. There’s something odd about a bunch of navy marksmen shooting out toward the empty horizon. It seems an inescapable metaphor for unreachable goals and missions forever unaccomplished. The “materiel” around the woman on the rig includes teak garden furniture that might as well be poolside in a suburb. The photograph seems to witness the full melding of the domestic and the martial. It isn’t an ironic in the mode of Martha Rosler’s classic images—but it hints at such effects. Another of Lê’s pictures might be a classic Vietnam War photo: White men in green camo disappear into the verdure of a tropical forest. But something about their relaxed poses—or maybe the Australian setting announced in the photograph’s title—defuses any sense of threat. This training exercise for battle ends up looking stangely sylvan, almost Poussinesque.

—Blake Gopnik

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Mel Bochner

PETER FREEMAN GALLERY
560 Broadway #602/603
March 27–May 24

Language is its own catalyst, provoking and (re)producing itself in Mel Bochner’s new “Thesaurus” paintings. In these canvases, words trigger a litany of synonyms, painted in hand-scripted white capitals over large gestural AbEx fields of muted grays, browns, and dirty whites. Continuing a career-long fascination with rhetorical inventories established by his 1960s “word portraits,” each of the “Thesaurus” paintings on view takes a common word as the starting point from which numerous repetitions and variations extend in rows. The synonyms become progressively more colloquial, funny, and vulgar in tone, until the canvas is crammed full of charged verbiage. Bochner selects decidedly negative words—Vulgar, No, Obsolete, Fool, Uncertain, Liar, Indifferent (all 2007)—whose cumulative presence, painted over and combining with the strokes of the aggressive cover-up jobs underneath, reads as both jokingly self-deprecating and bitingly self-punishing. FOOL permutes through PATSY, STOOGE, JACKASS, BOOB, PUTZ, JERKOFF, and DIPSHIT (among others), before finally arriving at OLD FART.

Momentum and drama build as the listing gathers steam, generating about forty or so synonyms per painting. Though premeditated in notes beautifully drawn on paper (six of which are on display) with the help of Roget’s Thesaurus, Bochner’s language flows with the stream-of-consciousness ease and exuberance of running off at the mouth. Coming to the end of each painting’s list is cathartic, like the purgative release after a rant or the exhaustion following a concentrated bout of writing. In his systematic and exhaustive listing of synonyms, Bochner distills the process of writing into a searching project of repetition through variation that attempts to refine expression continually. This descriptive process of searching for the right word is communication’s perpetual challenge, the art writer’s primary work. As both painted and written descriptions, these canvases generously expand the space of meaning around an initial word, a space of possibility characterized by shades of gray, layered washes of nuanced differentiation, and countless subtle shifts of tone.

—Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

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"Shaker Design: Out of This World"

THE BARD GRADUATE CENTER
18 West 86th Street
March 13–June 15

It is important to keep in mind that there is nothing purely decorative about the furniture, gift drawings, and retail products in this large survey of Shaker design at Bard College’s New York outpost for studies in the decorative arts, design, and culture. The objects created for use within Shaker communities, which at one point numbered nineteen and ranged from Maine to Kentucky, hew to the precepts of their religious devotion, in particular the aspiration to honesty, utility, and order. Those items created for “the World’s people,” the denomination’s catch-all term for anyone outside its communities, betray a savvy knowledge of what would possess commercial appeal. This latter point is particularly important to the exhibition’s organizer, Jean M. Burks, who aims to highlight links between members of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing and wider American society, countering stereotypical notions of the Shakers as intentionally and thoroughly segregated.

Among the exemplary furniture presented in a ground-floor gallery are an enormous cherry-and-pine double trustees’ desk (used by family members responsible for dealings with the World) and a slender, comparatively small trestle table. Like classical civilizations, which come to mind now largely tethered to images of white marble artifacts, the Shaker world was not the stripped-down domain we imagine, but rather a polychrome environment. To that end, the gallery floor is painted yellow, a color common in Shaker rooms, and a few pieces bear other original hues. A second-floor gallery hosts a number of gift drawings, manifestations of divine revelation (often in the form of communications from past generations) that encompass decorative patterns; calligraphic text; and assemblies of doves of peace, trees, clocks, fruit, and musical instruments. (New Yorkers more familiar with modern art than nineteenth-century religious artifacts might recall the Drawing Center’s 2005 exhibition “3 x Abstraction.”) Although the exhibition does not present Hannah Cohoon’s Tree of Life, 1854, perhaps the movement’s most iconic image, it does include her A Little Basket Full of Beautiful Apples for the Ministry, 1846, a touching ink-and-watercolor drawing of fourteen apples arranged within the schematic outline of a basket. Another room teems with commercial products, from toothache pellets and sachets of cabbage seeds to “screwballs” (table-clamped pincushions) and oval-shaped boxes. For context, the exhibition presents early-nineteenth-century American Fancy furniture and objects, which the Shakers rejected because of their ornate designs, and examples of modern Scandinavian furniture and contemporary designs (by Roy McMakin and Antonio Citterio, among others) inspired by Shaker objects. A full slate of public programs further ensures that this exhibition is the most important New York presentation of Shaker design since the Whitney Museum’s 1986 survey.

—Brian Sholis

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“Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000”

EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO
1230 Fifth Avenue
January 30–June 8

Classified as part of the seminal 1960s political art movement Destructivism, performance artist Raphael Montañez-Ortiz’s work (part communal happening, part chaotic smashup) was fused with protest and social engagement. His radical manifesto, along with those of others, opens “Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000.” The exhibition examines performance art by seventy-five artists of Caribbean, Latino, and Latin American descent, many of whom, like Montañez-Ortiz, El Museo del Barrio’s founding director, formed international art-activist communities. Organized by Deborah Cullen, the show posits the evolution of “action art” as a form of both response and resistance to the political events of the second half of the twentieth century. As the negation implied by its title suggests, the exhibition makes a potent point: Art approximates life rather than constituting it.

Given the ephemeral nature of action art, many of the works are exhibited as archival fragments. Graciela Carnevale’s imprisonment of gallerygoers, Encierro y Escape (Confinement and Escape), 1968, which was included in Documenta 12, consists of a poster and a few photographs taken before and after her unwilling participants broke free. Leopoldo Maler’s Crane Ballet, 1971, a site-specific interaction between moving construction cranes and human dancers, is shown via BBC news footage. This is not to say there is no primary material. The show includes, for example, the hilarious audio exchange between Tate Museum guards and Felipe Ehrenberg, recorded during the artist’s 1970 performance intervention at the museum, A Date with Fate at the Tate (or Tate Bait), in which he tries to gain admission while in costume. Also on view is Hélio Oiticica’s rarely seen Showing the Parangolés, 1964–68, a film demonstrating how the titular artworks are worn, and thus activated, by members of Brazil’s carnival corps. The exhibition’s broad categories are arranged in a loose chronology—“The Medium Is the Message,” followed by “Happenings,” and so on—emphasizing that concurrent tendencies occurred on multiple continents and in multiple media; Ehrenberg’s work, for example, is seen to complement Los Angeles collective ASCO’s museum interventions involving spray paint. The exhibition’s premise about the near miss of art and life runs evenly throughout, provoking new questions about the histories of performance art.

—Courtney J. Martin

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