PROW

ART IN GENERAL
79 Walker Street
January 22–March 20

PROW, Pyre (detail), 2010, aluminum, polyester, theatrical lighting, industrial fans, electric equipment, cello, violin, various technical parts, dimensions variable.

How might artists position themselves between entertainment culture and traditional techniques of representation such as drawing? How might those different possibilities map onto the display practices of commercial gallery venues or nonprofit art spaces? Peter Rostovsky and Olav Westphalen, collaborating under the name PROW, challenge conditions of spectacularization that entangle artistic practices, paradoxically by adopting elements of the most successful model of collective media production: cinema.

In “PROW: The Prequel,” the foyer of Sara Meltzer Gallery contains a series of light boxes displaying posters for sequels to nonexistent movies such as a slasher pic titled Pet II and the disaster flick Iceberg III (mischievously tagged MATTER HAS A MIND . . . ONCE MORE). Lining the main gallery’s walls are six watercolors appropriated from Google’s open-source 3-D modeling software. The drawings, each hand-rendered by one of the two artists, adopt an eclectic range of imagery conjured by wiki-culture’s anonymous users: a floating baby, a stunt actor hoisted aloft in a green-screen environment, a staged plane crash. The exhibition’s central kinetic sculpture, Pyre, 2010, is an agglomeration of B-movie gimmicks: As the lights dim, a dramatic chord is struck by a mechanized cello and violin, activating a phalanx of industrial fans that raise a curtain of theatrically lit fabric into a simulacral fire.

Replacing the gadgetry of Pyre, the central sculpture in the “Anti-Prow” exhibition at the nonprofit Art in General is a Tatlin-like monument consisting of an interlocking group of red ladders surrounded by walls papered with historic political and artistic manifestos. On each wall is a framed graphite drawing of an iconic public death scene (split along its vertical axis, with one side rendered by Rostovsky and the other by Westphalen): the bodies, lying in state, of Lenin and Mao, the corpses of Kurt Cobain and Che Guevara surrounded by police, and the victims of the Jonestown massacre. Like its Chelsea counterpart, “Anti-Prow” addresses a set of questions about the value of artistic labor—this time by taking up the legacy of political activism, and representations of politics, in the visual arts.

“Prow: The Prequel” is on view at Sara Meltzer Gallery, 525–531 West Twenty-sixth Street, until February 27.

— Eva Díaz

Markus Schinwald

YVON LAMBERT NEW YORK
550 West 21st Street
January 14–February 20

View of “Markus Schinwald,” 2010.

Markus Schinwald’s first solo exhibition in New York is subtle yet emphatic in its attempt to induce a state of unease in the viewer. An installation featuring large white pillars that cross the gallery space in orderly lines and angles, for instance, appears relatively benign until visitors are forced to step over and around the exhibition itself. Through the process of encountering and navigating these structures, both their decisive impact and an awareness of one’s own body become clear. Such works seem to progress naturally from Schinwald’s previous engagement with these themes in films and performances, which focus on participants who interact awkwardly with their surroundings and one another.

This sense of discomfort is increased by a number of oil portraits that seem at first to be antiquated and unremarkable depictions of staid, anonymous sitters. The works are, in fact, found canvases appropriated and manipulated by Schinwald. Only on close examination does the significance of this practice become clear: The visage of each subject has been modified by the addition of ambiguous bandages or prosthetic devices. These alterations indisputably conceal, restrain, and obscure their subjects, yet each of the men and women appears acutely disaffected. The artist eschews explanation of the meaning or purpose of these additions by giving only first names, such as Adam and Carola, as titles, leaving the viewer to interpret whether their jarring appearances might be the result of pleasure or of pain. As in Schinwald’s installation, the resulting contrast between the impact of the uncanny and these subjects’ impassivity to it invites the viewer to identify with them, leaving a marked sense of anxiety.

— Britany Salsbury

Cornelia Parker

D'AMELIO TERRAS
525 West 22nd Street, Ground Floor
January 9–February 13

Cornelia Parker, Bullet Drawing, 2009, lead from a bullet drawn into wire, 24 7/8 x 24 7/8".

If every .44 Magnum belonged to Cornelia Parker, the world would be a better place. In this exhibition, the British artist finds beauty not simply in the mundane but in the murderous. Using the lead from a lone melted bullet, she creates an elegant, spidery wire drawing. Each work is then suspended between panes of glass to cast spindly shadows against its white backdrop. (Like a skeptical child at a magic act, I craned my neck and squinted, desperate to decipher the tricks of her process.) In the nine small drawings, Parker develops a minimalist schema—the flat grid—extracting a rhythmic vitality in the successive irregularities and progressions. Her interest in 1950s encyclopedias is apparent in the works’ seriality; she is scientifically charting possibility: a single material, a single length, innumerable variations.

Parker maintains an improvisational quality in this exercise, as if even she were not privy to what form the material will take next. One drawing appears like a fence smashed in; another looks torn apart. One seems to be growing and another shrinking. Knots at the corner of interior squares recall those in a string of pearls; if a portion breaks, the whole is not lost. The .44 Magnum itself is laden with pop-cultural associations from Dirty Harry (1971) to Taxi Driver (1976). Parker decontextualizes the object, thus divorcing the material from both mythic and actual violence. With multiple layers to strip, she explores the point at which any idea or object becomes completely abstract. A heavy bullet with a high velocity becomes something light and deceptively static. Fear is made material, only to dissolve into quiet meditation. This is surely an exhibition about dualities, but instead of black and white, Parker seems to relish the multitude of grays.

— Cameron Shaw

Daniel Bozhkov

QUEENS MUSEUM OF ART
New York City Building, Flushing Meadows, Corona Park
November 1–March 13

View of “Daniel Bozhkov,” 2009.

Where traditional institutional critique often dissatisfies with self-congratulatory rhetoric or a failure to engage its audience, Daniel Bozhkov’s project at this museum engulfs the viewer in an eddy of the often entwined and at times competing narratives of art, urbanism, literature, and popular culture. His installation offers a decaying maze: old lockers from the building’s United Nations days, boxes of unused Moby-Dick-themed coloring books, administrative furnishings, and stacked glass bricks from the adjacent (and now closed) ice rink. Puncturing this wasteland of signs are abstracted details—paintings of images from the children’s version of Ahab’s tale and film that closely scans the flowing garments of Michelangelo’s Pietà, 1499, as well as short pedagogical texts.

The installation’s winding path leads to a cube built from the ice-rink bricks and enclosing a life-size replica of the Renaissance master’s sculpture, which has only once left the Vatican—for inclusion in the 1964 World’s Fair, held on these grounds in Flushing Meadows, Queens. A square gap in the protective shell reveals the work in cropped view, accompanied by an invitation for the viewer to touch it. Perhaps a nod to “new institutionalism”––the practice of artists who engage with institutions on a conceptual and an operational level––beyond this gesture the visitor literally, as well as figuratively, encounters the dead end of a white cube. Bozhkov’s project will continue to develop as he works with recent-immigrant residents of Queens as part of the museum’s educational program.

— Jess Wilcox

Skyler Brickley

MARVELLI GALLERY
526 West 26th Street, 2nd Floor
January 9–February 13

Skyler Brickley, Untitled, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 89 x 50".

Nearly every work in this small exhibition contains several, vertical rows of rough quadrilaterals––the syncopated fruits of Skyler Brickley’s roller. The tension between the rote, serial application of paint by roller and each canvas’s subtle variation adumbrates an interesting postscript to some of the fundamental questions related to modernist painting with regard to autonomy and originality. To what extent, that is, may these canvases be said to derive from his “hand”?

Those issues are further underscored by the canvases’s surfaces, both slick and pocked (derived from the raised bumps of Brickley’s paint tray) and resembling benday-derived newsprint. The handful of works featuring black and colored paint (rather than simply black and white) evince a further affinity with silk-screened surfaces, seeming to capture some blurred photographic incident. Yet their unrelenting abstraction foils any search for the iconicity with which we have come to associate that (eminently Warholian) medium. Like smeared film stills or motion studies, the canvases betray only a faded memory or intimation of eventness.

When juxtaposed side by side, however, the black-and-white works take on an appearance greater than the sum of their abstracted parts, cohering into a kind of cityscape. Here, the subtle, varying shades of their black and white intervals suggest a nocturnal forest of glowing Gotham edifices.

— Ara H. Merjian

“Vertically Integrated Manufacturing”

MURRAY GUY
453 West 17th Street
January 9–February 20

Allan McCollum, The Shapes Project: Shapes From Maine (detail), 2005/2008, 144 copper cookie cutters, each 4 x 6 x 1".

Murray Guy’s group show, “Vertically Integrated Manufacturing,” takes its name from the economic structure of corporations such as Walmart, which own both the supply and distribution ends of production. Though tempting in today’s cynical climate, it would be a grave mistake to read the title as an endorsement of commodity culture and its artistic collaborators. Instead, the exhibition looks at the artist as worker—at how, to borrow Helen Molesworth’s claim, artists in the postwar era “came to see themselves not as artists producing [in] a dreamworld, but as workers in capitalist America.”

Minimalism’s embrace of industrial materials—here represented by Carl Andre’s Base 7 Aluminum Stack, 2008, a triangular pile of aluminum ingots whose overall shape is determined by its individual parts—is a model of art-as-production that the younger artists in the show elaborate through more ambiguous media. Allan McCollum’s The Shapes Project: Shapes from Maine, 2005/2008, consists of 144 custom-made—though unrecognizably shaped—copper cookie cutters that both mass-produce and domesticate the Minimalist specific object. Momentarily embodying the role of the entrepreneur, Adele Röder for Das Institut presents Starline Necessary Couture, 2008, a catalogue of digitally created patterns that motivate the design of other objects; here, the artists have printed several graphics onto napkins displayed on glass wall mounts. In contrast, Seth Price’s sound track for the eight-hour workday, 8–4, 9–5, 10–6, 11–7, 2007, gestures toward art about production: It temporally indexes the schedules that signify blue- and white-collar labor.

Heavy on male artists, the show inadvertently reinforces gendered stereotypes surrounding artistic labor. But this elision is productive; it mobilizes the viewer to parse the operations of gender and class within cultural production—no easy task in an age when many would rather outsource the latter altogether.

— Jordan Troeller

Marlo Pascual

CASEY KAPLAN
525 West 21st Street
January 7–February 13

View of “Marlo Pascual,” 2010.

The line that lies between sculpture and photography has been explored to the point of near erasure in some recent art. In Marlo Pascual’s first solo exhibition at this gallery, she joins the conversation, exhibiting work that incorporates sourced images and found objects to smart, self-assured effect. The sculptural plays a role in the work here even before concrete objects come into (or, rather, into contact with) the picture. At the entrance to the show hangs a black-and-white print of a vintage photograph, depicting the back of a young woman’s head. Her hair is elaborately curled and plaited, and the spectacular attention it receives, not just in the original image (probably taken from a 1940s beauty manual) but especially via Pascual’s appropriation, highlights the photograph’s intense sculptural plasticity––so much so that we begin to wonder whether we are looking at what, actually, is the woman’s face––one that is, nightmarishly, all glossy, tactile hair.

The interest in the oddness of the seemingly innocuous continues in Pascual’s assemblages. Disembodied, hacked-up bits and bobs keep popping up in curious places: A photograph of a face is unevenly bisected by floor and wall, a potted houseplant sprouting surrealistically from its cheekbone; an enlarged head shot of a man with the handsomely faded looks of an obscure matinee idol is perched upside down on a rock; an image of flirty, heel-shod legs emerges from the wall, partitionlike; a photograph of a woman posing prettily as she gazes at her own reflection is divided by strips of mirror, accompanied nearby by a lamp atop an end table. All of this not only amounts to some very entertaining interior design but also directs us to a larger point. For Pascual, photography and sculpture are both, ultimately, more lamp than mirror: In playing with the spatial and theoretical relationship between the two, photography becomes less a mimesis-centered activity and more a pleasingly strange sculptural intervention.

— Naomi Fry

Pablo Bronstein

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
October 6–April 18

Pablo Bronstein, First and Second Installations of Precolumbian Objects at the Metropolitan Museum, 2009, ink and gouache on paper, 61 3/8 x 98 3/4".

The Metropolitan keeps a substantial part of its contemporary display in an awkward position: a horseshoe-shaped suite of galleries between the first and second floors. On the floor plan of the visitor’s guide, the area becomes a ghost hovering at the rear of the museum, and even the physical presence of the gallery hugging the south stairwell gives an impression of instability: Its ceiling is rutted with runners for moving walls and lights, underscoring the transience of the shows its hosts.

Pablo Bronstein has used his time in that gallery to show a series of large-scale ink and gouache drawings that reflect on museum architecture and the notions of art and display it facilitates. First and Second Installation of Precolumbian Objects at the Metropolitan Museum (all works 2009) comprises two arrangements of sculptures on preposterously ornate, three-tiered walls, with sphinxes and hulking male caryatids that distort the room’s scale and balance. It comes off as a smirk at the Met’s Greek and Roman galleries, the upper stretches of which are adorned with heterogeneous fake columns and functionless squares of crossed bars. Those very designs appear in Six Affordable Neo-Georgian Futures for the Metropolitan Museum as decorative patterns on architectural drawings of squat, conjoined facades expanding on the Met’s present shape. The plans, laid horizontally on tables in the center of the room, seem to speculate on what might have happened if Philippe de Montebello had been succeeded by Prince Charles. In the gallery’s back corner, The Departure of the Temple of Dendur from Egypt imagines an epically oversize version of the Met’s prized shrine being carted out of the desert by horses and slaves. As the viewer approaches the drawing to examine the details of the tableau, set under an inky wash of lightless sky, he can’t help but glance left and notice, in the shadows behind a partition, a door marked STAFF ONLY. Accident or not, the juxtaposition precisely articulates the humor and tension that make the exhibition strong—the fantasies of romance and grandeur prompted by the museum, and their abrupt encounter with its mundane realities.

— Brian Droitcour