Frank Stella

L&M ARTS | NEW YORK
45 East 78th Street
April 12–June 2

View of “Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, and Copper Paintings,” 2012.

The impact of Frank Stella’s early fusillades in black, aluminum, and copper is too enormous to distill, nearly fifty years after their conception. Beloved and enigmatic, the paintings are marked by a rigorous pragmatism and restraint that have prompted scores of artists to eliminate overt moral or philosophical standpoints within their own work. “What you see is what you see.” But it’s also been hard to gauge the relationship between these influential heavy hitters and his subsequent, multihued and exuberant pieces—the “Protractors” of the mid-1960s, as well as the more baroque paintings that ensued. (In 1971 Lee Lozano astutely lodged a general comment: “If an artist does very good work at one period in life, he or she is always actually competing with their own great body of work.”)

L&M’s knockout show of the paintings, which have been lent from private collections and museums, is revelatory, but not only as a swift précis on the evolution of Stella’s reductive abstraction from 1958 to 1962. Each deadpan brushstroke is the same width on each work, though their pigments vary: The Black Paintings were made with low-cost house paint on raw canvas; the Aluminums with enamel typically used as undercoating on radiators; and the Coppers with paint for boats’ hulls, to protect them from barnacles. Despite art history’s sequential, simplified read, such gauche materials don’t readily conjure Minimalism. (Not once in my encounter with them did I think about Flavin or Judd.) And while the survey goes a long way towards revising this stale narrative, for some it may also bring to mind painters we often see today reconfiguring and redeploying Stella’s method, surfaces, and patterns, whether taking them on as discrete found items (like cheap paint) or as gestalt to be borrowed wholesale—prêt-à-porter.

— Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency

THE JAMES GALLERY OF THE CUNY GRADUATE CENTER
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue
March 14–June 2

View of “Common Assembly,” 2012.

For their debut exhibition in New York, Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency (DAAR) presents Common Assembly, 2011, an ongoing project by the Israeli-Palestinian collective (founded in 2007 by Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, and Eyal Weizman). The group seeks to “employ tactical physical interventions” as a means for the transformation of society, enabling creative discourse rather than seeking one-dimensional solutions. Common Assembly began with the discovery that the Palestinian parliament building in Abu Dis sat directly on the 1967 Jerusalem border. Construction on the building started in 1996 during the euphoria of the Oslo peace process, and was abandoned in 2003 without being completed—just like the talks. In the main gallery space, a film titled Cleaning the Parliament, 2011, demonstrates DAAR’s intervention in the Abu Dis building: sweeping and scraping the dust away from the otherwise unmarked borderline that runs down the center of the building, making the invisible visible.

A panoramic photograph, Palestinian Legislative Council, Abu Dis - Jerusalem, 2011, which shows the inside of the parliament building today, hangs in a small room near the entrance to the gallery. The final result of the scraping is seen in the photograph as a light gray line that represents an extraterritorial territory: a “common” space for potential political transformations.

The centerpiece of the show, a three-dimensional replica of that line divides the main gallery space diagonally. Titled The Line, 2012, it is a site-specific installation that stands as a monument to the collapsed peace process. Providing no concrete solutions, the exhibition reevaluates the poltical and creative potentials of architecture. The “line” here stands as a metaphor for an innovative process, enabling the smallest space to be an opportunity for a free creative dialogue.

— Naomi Lev

Xylor Jane

CANADA
55 Chrystie Street
May 6–June 3

Xylor Jane, Nox Rex #23 (Fiver), 2012, oil on panel, 44 x 41”.

Order, in Xylor Jane’s recent body of work, is like skin: It keeps out and invites in at the same time. And like skin, alive, these paintings breathe and shift and seem never to be the same thing twice. Depending on where one is in relation to them, they lay bare the detail of their dots, or reveal larger patterns that dance and shake: perceptible but fleeting. Stare at these pieces and their patterns shimmy, then shift out of sight; but gaze into them and something opens, revealing their order as flexible, like the lay of the warp before weaving.

In Nox Rex #22 (Puff) (all works cited, 2012) a series of 0s, 8s, and 1s comes into relief through tiny multihued dots that fill in the negative space around the numbers so that they become visible by virtue of their emptiness. The dark field of Nox Rex #25 (NYX for MD) does the opposite and the numbers are made by the dots themselves. Seen from far away, double lines of X’s reveal themselves in both works. Up close, the oscillating X’s are tiny smatterings of dots laid inside the holes of the numbers in a way that seems innocently random. In a time when answers seem available, if only we could see them, these works suggest another way of looking.

In Nox Rex 25 (Fiver) forms like chromosomes or the shapes made from static on a television move madly, refusing to still. Standing close, this movement is made by patterns of dots inside triangles on a black background. Yellow leads. Peaks of paint crest each dot, reminding us of the painter’s hand, interrupting the anonymity of order. These paintings promise answers when the figuring mind is laid aside. Quiet it, they seem to say, and let another form of knowing seep in.

— Litia Perta

Tauba Auerbach

PAULA COOPER GALLERY
534 W 21 Street
May 9–June 9

Tauba Auerbach, Slice I, 2012, woven canvas on wooden stretcher, 60 x 45".

Concrete verbs form the foundation of Tauba Auerbach’s latest show, “Float.” Possessed of the systematic logic of Sol LeWitt and the perceptual fetish of Bridget Riley, Auerbach effects permutations of quotidian actions—weaving, folding, bending, and cutting—to create objects that both resist and reinstate illusion.

For her series of “Weave” paintings (all works 2012), Auerbach deconstructs the canvas by literalizing its form. In the seven such works on view, taut strips of canvas traverse a wooden stretcher, proceeding along the frame’s prescribed verticals and horizontals to produce patterns at once legible and labyrinthine. Iterated themes, predicated on translations of basic geometries, dissolve into subtly different motifs without a clear point of inflection. In some, such as Slice, Bend, and Ray, transformations thread diagonally through the canvas in a discrete band; in others, such as Shift Wave, the entire surface undulates. As their intercalated layers alternately dilate and contract, Auerbach’s matrical compositions endow the grid—that quintessential signifier of flatness—with depth. This relief quality, coupled with the weave’s twofold directionality, recasts the canvas’s monochrome off-white as a flickering grayscale.

Auerbach’s deconstructive impulse extends to her sculpture Bent Onyx, here presented in an edition of two. Beginning with a block of the eponymous stone, the artist shaves a razor-thin slice, then scans and prints the original onto high-quality paper. The entire stone thus dissected, the pages are bound and their edges painted. Converting solid into surface and matter into digital reproduction, Bent Onyx achieves a trompe l’oeil effect: Stiff and hard-edged, its sheets of paper pass for slivers of stone. Yet, rather than the artist’s masterful hand, the printer’s mimetic skill maintains the ruse. The appeal of Bent Onyx, beyond its marbled luster, inheres in this confusion: our experience of seeing, but not quite being sure.

— Courtney Fiske

Lee Maida

ED. VARIE
208 E. 7th Street, West Storefront
May 3–May 27

Maida, Lee, Non-monogamy, 2012, reed, oil, acrylic, 46 x 31 x 20".

Something about Lee Maida’s six new works feels like they are trying to coax new tracks from the plethora of trails already trod—trying to find new ways of being with and within form, relationships, language. They move away from the walls and reach out to the viewer from a place of painstaking materiality: opening up rather than covering over the fact that each of their elements took much time to make. Here, shapes grow out of time-consuming, risky processes that do not guarantee the safety of objecthood as their end. Indeed, objecthood (and its requisite, form), they seem to say, does not come easily, and each piece hangs between the swaths of time it must have taken to make them and the fragility of existence they lay bare.

Whether this manifests in pulp accrued toward paper, the torque of an aluminum band, or the breathtaking manipulation of reeds poised just so to reach from the wall, Maida pushes toward finding paths that do not follow prescribed expectations. In Next Level Wedgie, 2012, a flat strand of aluminum curls and doubles back upon itself to bend into a three-dimensional puzzlelike pathway that delights in its refusal to unfold straight or tame. Non-monogamy, 2012, unfurls itself in a single, continuous ribbon of reed that reaches gently from the wall, curving in different directions on either side before intersecting at a point farthest away from where it is hung. Tracing this piece, one can see that the joining point becomes the place of return, where the reed’s ends intersect and then diverge, coming back to the joint only to diverge again, moving another time around the loop that relates them. “Profusive Technologies” offers up what it names: an abundance of inventions aimed to link and move between the ephemerality of existence and the passing through of forms.

— Litia Perta

Brice Marden

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY | 526 W. 22ND STREET
526 W. 22nd Street
April 21–June 23

Brice Marden, For Blinky, 2011, oil and graphite on marble, 29 3/4 x 11 5/8”.

“Timeless” is a clichéd adjective, particularly when applied to painting, but in the case of Brice Marden’s new works in his two solo exhibitions at Matthew Marks, it is especially apropos, referring less to the transcendent effect these marble paintings may have on a viewer than to the fact that they seem simultaneously anachronistic and contemporary. Formally, the fifteen paintings in the 526 gallery evoke Marden’s 1980s-era series of paint and graphite works on marble that are seen as transitional between his early monochromes and his later calligraphic paintings. Here, only minimal brushstrokes and pencil lines mark the surface of the marble, and the shape of the slab counts as much for the composition as the paint does. The tension between the material and the painterly surface of each work is key. Formal Marble, 2011, for example, as its title announces, is equally enamored with paint and with the object to which the paint is applied.

Ostensibly simple, these abstractions are also highly referential. The material recalls classical Greek sculpture, while the style, and even the titles at times, refers to classical Chinese landscape painting. The adjacent show in the 502 gallery exhibits one monochrome, Ru Ware Project, 2007–12, along with a blue-green shard of pottery from the Song dynasty, the color of which Marden mimics in the painting. If there were only historical references, the works might seem mannered or out of touch; two of the paintings, however, are homages to Marden’s peers Blinky Palermo and Sigmar Polke. Polke Letter, 2010–11, a trademark calligraphic abstraction on linen, continues Marden’s ongoing “Letters” series, whereas the marble painting For Blinky, 2011, which uses a similar palette to some of Palermo’s work, reminds the viewer that these works, which might otherwise feel withdrawn from the present, are responses to his contemporaries, making them not only meditations on the relationship between paint and surface but also dialogues between Marden and his generation.

This exhibition is also on view at Matthew Marks Gallery, 502 West 22nd Street, until June 23.

— Aaron Peck

Sheila Hicks

SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO.
530 West 22nd Street
April 20–May 25

Sheila Hicks, Oracle from Constantinople, 2008–2010, linen, 96 x 68 x 10”.

Sheila Hicks, whose venerable oeuvre has expanded the potential of thread and cloth as artistic material, is finally getting the attention she justly deserves in New York. On the heels of a traveling retrospective, this solo show is anchored by a selection of her wonderful “minimes” from the past fifty years—small textile studies that demonstrate Hicks’s creativity and openness to experimentation within her chosen medium.

The most conventional of these works, made using a variety of natural, synthetic, and metal fibers, reveal Hicks as a triumphant colorist. Others irreverently introduce nontraditional materials—crumpled pages from a comic book, handmade paper, porcupine quills—to challenge the rigidity and regularity of the weave’s grid and thicken the picture plane: In Ptera II, 2011, a shock of downy feathers bursts through the center of a tightly woven rectangle. Other pieces rely on monochromatic austerity to focus attention on materiality, surface, and structure: In Mozambique, 2006, for instance, linen and synthetic fibers are intertwined into a tuft of unruly shag resembling a Piero Manzoni “Achrome”; in Nuite Blanche, 1986, and 14 Fentes, 2006, tender slits recall Lucio Fontana’s slashes sans the macho violence; and in Loosely Speaking, 1988, the grid has been slackened so much that the weft is but a squiggly doodle. The latter’s title emphasizes Hicks’s understanding of weaving as a linguistic act, with threads replacing words; these “minimes,” each of them the size of a paperback page, feel like woven sonnets.

Hicks has also used fiber as sculptural material, constructing three-dimensional work from bundled strands, tightly wrapped in places into cords. While Oracle from Constantinople, 2008–10, a curtain of interlocked multicolored strands that resembles the knotted branches and roots of a banyan tree, retains an integral relationship to wall and frame, Menhir, 1998–2004, forgoes the wall, its gray bundles gathered to form a shaggy monolith that amusingly resembles an aging, overgrown Captain Caveman.

— Murtaza Vali

Lorraine O’Grady

ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES
508 West 26 Street #215
April 11–May 25

Lorraine O’Grady, Landscape (Western Hemisphere), 2011, still from a color video, 19 minutes.

The centerpiece of Lorraine O’Grady’s exhibition “New Worlds” is Landscape (Western Hemisphere), 2011, a video that leads the viewer to initially believe its nineteen minutes of black-and-white footage depict something akin to a thicket upswept by the wind. An ambient sound track features birdcalls and cicada songs, but it hints at a more developed land through the distant rumble of train tracks. In actuality, what we see is O’Grady’s own hair in extreme close-up, shaking and swaying between two fans. The intentionally misleading title is an extension of O’Grady’s long-standing examination of cultural identity, specifically the colonized female body. This beautiful, straightforward video instantly conjures Western culture’s numerous presumptions about women of color: the exoticness of natural hair, a bodily connection to the land, and the expectations of performance from such bodies.

Two photomontages from O’Grady’s earlier “Body/Ground” series further this comparison; The Fir-Palm, 1991/2012, literally connects a hybrid tree to the small of a black woman’s back. More obliquely, the diptych Body/Ground (The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me), 1991/2012, depicts on the left a white man and a black woman in a loving embrace floating among the clouds, and on the right a theatrical death, seemingly by the man’s own hand. O’Grady’s inclusion of herself in this lineup of history’s most notorious interracial couples demonstrates that even at present, she believes we remain beholden to the racist consequences of the New World.

— Lumi Tan

Martha Rosler

MITCHELL-INNES & NASH
534 West 26th Street
April 20–May 26

Martha Rosler, Plaza de Revolucion, Havana, 1981, black-and-white photograph, 11 x 16 1/4".

One of the more striking aspects of “Cuba, January 1981,” Martha Rosler’s exhibition of photographs that were taken decades ago from behind the Caribbean iron curtain and are now on display for the first time, is how, to paraphrase Matthew McConaughey’s famous line in Dazed and Confused, while the rest of the world has aged, Cuba more or less remained frozen in a continuous revolutionary moment. Taken only two months after Reagan’s election as president and three months after the culmination of the six-month-long Mariel boatlift, these photographs regard Havana’s military uniform stores, Brutalist architecture, and portraits of Che dispassionately, as so much context for the staging of Cuban public life.

Only months before the publication of her essay “In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography),” Rosler shot the series while on a tour organized by Ana Mendieta and Lucy Lippard, and the collection reflects her desire to break from the “moral idealism” she associated with documentary photography in that work, as well as from the dense political propaganda that, for Americans, all but obscured the island entirely. In addition to images of public transport that recall her snapshots of California from a decade earlier—in Il Congreso, Havana, for instance, passengers hang off an overcrowded bus as it drags through the Cuban capital—Rosler’s subjects drive midcentury American cars and perch at lunch counters; they sit in doorways and play Ping-Pong in front of blocky Soviet-style buildings. Shot in both black-and-white and color, many of the pictures—of nail technicians and waitresses; of working-class women staring into shopwindows and mannequins in bridal gowns—evoke the consumer themes that Rosler aggressively deconstructs in her seminal feminist photomontages. Seen more than thirty years on, the Cuba that emerges is foreign, yet strangely familiar: a portrait of one bygone era set within another.

— Jessica Loudis

Neil Goldberg

MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
1220 Fifth Avenue
March 2–June 19

Neil Goldberg, Ten Minutes with X02180-A, 2006, still from a color video, 10 minutes.

Neil Goldberg says that he aims to capture New York’s “neutral” moments in his videos and photographs: everyday events that are “blank,” “empty,” and consequently “available for projection.” His subjects vary from the closely cropped, despondent faces of workers visiting a typically insipid Salad Bar, 2006, during lunchtime in midtown, to the even more bewildered expressions of those Surfacing, 2010–11, from the subway. Remarkably emotive, the depictions of mostly banal and repetitive incidents in this show—the first exhibition of contemporary video at the Museum of the City of New York—invite us to examine where the stress falls. For instance, in 1993’s She’s a Talker, some eighty gay men employ the title phrase to tell us about their cats, each in two-second snapshots while grooming their friendly feline companions. It may seem like the most cheerful piece on view until one learns from a gallery handout that Goldberg made the work in response to the AIDS-related deaths of his friends.

Collapsing contrasts between the personal, political, private, and public, Goldberg’s varied output is a hymn to the people of New York, who perhaps understand the need for emptiness more than most. The neutral that he embraces at times recalls the one Roland Barthes described in a series of landmark lectures at the Collège de France in 1978––“twinklings” that unravel binary oppositions and can’t be categorized (to grossly summarize). It’s a lovely and fitting encapsulation of the effervescent yet tentative gestures of people in Coney Island Describing the Cyclone, 1998, as well as the flashes of nearly pained contentment on the faces of visitors to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, as they take a moment to whiff an especially charming lilac bush in Ten Minutes with X02180-A, 2006.

— Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Dan Flavin

THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
225 Madison Ave
February 17–July 1

Dan Flavin, eight "monuments" for V. Tatlin, 1968, ballpoint pen on paper, 8 1/2 x 11".

“Dan Flavin: Drawing,” the first museum retrospective of his rarely seen work on paper, includes numerous sketches the artist made en plein air, indicating a predilection to escape the cold fluorescent glow of his indoor electric lightbulb installations and experience fresh air and real sunshine. Several charcoal and pastel drawings of sailboats from the mid-1980s render masts and sails with an economy of means one would expect from a founding Minimalist, their angles evoking The Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantine Brancusi), 1963, Flavin’s breakthrough sculpture consisting of a yellow bulb mounted on a wall at forty-five degrees—but the chaotic splash of hull hitting water is arrestingly vibrant. Containing works ranging from his moody, expressionistic work of the late 1950s to swiftly scribbled outdoor scenes and portraits drawn from life on loose-leaf notebook pages from a small six-ring binder the artist always carried with him, this illuminating exhibition could have been titled “Dan Flavin: Unplugged.”

Several sections are dedicated to studies for early three-dimensional work, showing variations of the “icons,” 1961–64, and the “ ‘monument’ for V. Tatlin” series, 1964–90, and to plans for museums and gallery installations. Some drawings are scrawled notations done by Flavin himself, but others, like the stringent diagram on graph paper from 1984 that documents the arrangement of untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3, 1977, one of two light works in the exhibition, were outsourced to others.

As radical as Flavin’s sculpture is—European Union tax officials recently refused to acknowledge his ordinary fluorescent bulbs and fixtures as art—“Dan Flavin: Drawing” frames the artist as highly traditional, interested in exploring age-old matters of light and shadow, atmosphere and luminescence, color and line. Selections from his own collection of virtuoso drawings from the Hudson River School and nineteenth-century Japan, hung in a rear gallery, also help to deepen an understanding of Flavin’s avant-garde practice. For an artist who once stated in an interview that he felt it was important to not get his hands dirty, the exhibition touts him as an complex, energetic draftsman who probably washed charcoal and graphite from his fingers every day.

— Christopher Howard