Sister Corita Kent

ZACH FEUER GALLERY (LFL)
530 West 24th Street
October 23–December 5

Sister Corita Kent, i thirst, 1964, serigraph, 24 x 36".

In 1967, Newsweek’s David Shirey dubbed Sister Mary Corita Kent the “hippest of all” nuns. The next year, after three decades of service, she left the religious order but kept producing the radical serigraphs that helped earn that title. Zach Feuer Gallery now presents a minisurvey of Kent’s works from the 1950s through her death in 1986—including many that surround her transition from cloistered to secular life. Bright and shockingly brave, the silk-screen prints marry biblical allusions and advertising slogans with quotes from Walt Whitman, Martin Luther King Jr., and Albert Camus. Though devotional undertones are most pronounced in earlier works, it is clear that Kent’s brand of Pop proselytizing seeks converts, namely to the churches of tolerance, peace, justice, and love.

In the cry that will be heard, 1969, a black child wails from the cover of Life magazine. Kent replaces the publication’s iconic red logo with fluorescent pink, blazing against the grisaille image like the sign of a roadside tabernacle. Below, she adds text, typeset sideways in radiant blue, which reads WHY NOT GIVE A DAMN ABOUT YOUR FELLOW MAN, along with lyrics by the folk-rock band Spanky and Our Gang. In addition to these serigraphs, the exhibition provides a glimpse of Kent’s varied cultural contributions—books, her famous “love” postage stamp, and video documentation of Immaculate Heart College’s Mary Festival, which Kent transformed into a heavenly happening. The Good Word never looked so groovy.

— Cameron Shaw

Peter Sacks

PAUL RODGERS / 9W
529 West 20 Street 9th Floor
October 29–December 12

Peter Sacks, Necessity 7, 2007–2009, mixed media, 6' 4 3/4" x 12' 9 1/2".

Text spills across the surfaces of Peter Sacks’s paintings, wandering back and forth across mountains of paint, fabric, lace, and fishing net. In Necessity 12, 2008–2009, Sacks’s handwritten transcriptions of R. F. Scott’s Antarctic journal unspool like footprints in the snow or swim through cobalt depths in spiraling streams. In other paintings, language is more muscular, marching down the canvas in long, even rows of inky letters. Here, text bleeds into textile, as words are tattooed on cream linen undergarments that have been wheedled and scrunched through Sacks’s typewriter. Words stack into a pyramid of piled, folded language in Necessity 7, 2007–2009, calling to mind Robert Smithson but also looking past him to the archaic: to the ancient weight of papyrus that illuminates the forgotten origins of text as texture, as textile.

Sacks speaks of his “liminal figures stranded at threshold of visibility,” and it is these boundaries his paintings treat. Edges, whether sewn seams of clothing or the borders between triptychs, insinuate themselves as metaphors for the limits of thinking. They are “critical” Kantian paintings in this sense, although ones concerned less with cognitive bounds than with the multidimensional cartographies of consciousness that lie between, that is, with painting spinning thoughts and their unraveling. The Derridean thread metaphor seems apt for an artist who so self-consciously plays with the tissue of the canvas and the warp and weft of timeworn linens, trawling spare threads across paint like errant lines of drawing. Sacks’s textiles also suggest the gauze of bandages, the wounds of body and time, perhaps even shrouds or cerements. These paintings are not only mounds of paint and words but burial mounds, too. Such funerary themes come to eclipse Necessity 9, 2004–2008, a burial ground of a painting, beneath whose blue-black surface is lodged the Gettysburg Address.

— Leora Maltz-Leca

“Dress Codes”

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street
October 2–January 17

Kimsooja, Mumbai: A Laundry Field, 2007–2008, still from a four-channel video installation.

Art and fashion mergers seem so 2007—Takashi Murakami’s Louis Vuitton exhibition boutique would likely bomb in this economic climate. So it’s a relief to see a refreshingly sober and sometimes surreal view of fashion explored in the third ICP Triennial. The glittery thematic surface of “Dress Codes” quickly gives way to a bracing range of subjects—media manipulation and global economies chief among them. Only a few of the included thirty-four international artists directly employ the disco beat of haute couture: Cindy Sherman’s Paris Vogue–commissioned images take jabs at aging, Balenciaga-clad doyennes and slumming young fashionistas; the Claymation bodies of Nathalie Djurberg’s animated models are, befitting the artist’s output, creepily emaciated and infantilized; and Valérie Belin’s giant portraits emphasize the mannequin artificiality of comely models and amplify the wrinkle-free hegemony of glossy magazines.

The show’s conceptual cloak is, wisely, roomy enough to accommodate sartorial and sociopolitical ambiguity. Yto Barrada reveals the former’s cultural baggage with a series of almost evidentiary photographs of a Moroccan woman, dressed in a traditional djellaba. Sequentially shedding layers of fabric she intends to smuggle, the woman unveils a primary means of economic support. Meanwhile, Milagros de la Torre’s 2008 still lifes of bulletproof Prada-esque blouses for Central and South American boutiques point to another form of concealment. A heavy veil of narcissism hangs over Julika Rudelius’s Tagged, 2003, a multichannel video installation depicting young, label-conscious Turkish men, whose economically strapped families scrimp to coddle their sons in expensive jeans as expressions of aspiration.

The show’s most visually stunning iteration of global fashion is Kimsooja’s Mumbai: A Laundry Field, 2007–2008, a four-screen projected travelogue that makes its points with well-cut swaths of vibrantly colored fabrics—being worn, washed, and dried—as witnessed from moving vehicles, commuter trains, and the like. The sense of movement has the glamour of the fashion runway, without a shred of the pretense.

— Glen Helfand

Mercedes Matter

SIDNEY MISHKIN GALLERY, BARUCH COLLEGE
135 East 22 Street,
October 30–December 14

Mercedes Matter, Self Portrait, 1929, oil on canvas, 
16 x 12".

Viewing Mercedes Matter’s extensive body of work in this retrospective makes it difficult to resist the urge to read her oeuvre according to her biography. The extraordinary circumstances surrounding Matter’s life allowed her to befriend and work in proximity to some of this century’s most pivotal figures: She lived with her parents in Edward Steichen’s Parisian villa, for instance, and studied closely with Hans Hofmann in New York, two experiences that gave her full exposure to a time and place when modern art had become, in this city, both an artistic movement and a social milieu. She went on to found the city’s Studio School, an institution critical in the education of artists from its inception, in 1963, to today.

Beyond biography, this exhibition argues for the significance of Matter’s own studio practice, which is one that mirrors and builds on the evolution of postwar abstraction. While her earlier works, such as a self-portrait from 1929, evoke clear comparisons to iconic artists––namely, in this instance, Picasso––later pieces evince a clear and focused synthesis of her privileged avant-garde surroundings. Still-Life with Skulls, 1978–1998, one of several large charcoal drawings that Matter worked on extensively toward the end of her life, breaks with both the relative clarity and the nuances of influence visible in her earlier work, as shadowed forms meld into one another, producing an angular heap that becomes overwhelming in the force of its impact and the sparseness of its tone. Viewing the development of Matter’s output in this focused way allows for consideration of her own prolific career as being equally important to the canonical figures who surrounded her.

— Britany Salsbury

Susana Gaudêncio

ISE FOUNDATION
555 Broadway (between Prince & Spring)
October 23–November 20

Susana Gaudêncio, Houyhnhnm, 2009, still from a video animation, 2 minutes 37 seconds.

For her solo show last January at Lisbon’s Carlos Carvalho Gallery, the Portuguese, New York–based artist Susana Gaudêncio presented, among other pieces, Building Icons (Structures) (all works 2009), which is also on view in this exhibition, her New York debut. In that video animation, the artist blends pictures of laborers and of iconic modernist constructions, including Buckminster Fuller’s futuristic Montreal Biosphère of 1967. Merging the fields of design and production, Gaudêncio examines the Industrial Revolution’s division of labor—rooted in the separation of the intellectual and manual realms—and the social stratification it has generated in capitalist economies.

In Houyhnhnm, Gaudêncio continues to animate digitally manipulated, colorful renderings drawn from media photographs or found-video footage. This work’s title is inspired by the Houyhnhnms in Jonathan Swift’s classic novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a community that, favoring reason over emotion, is contrasted with the Yahoos, a group of savage, humanlike creatures. The Houyhnhnm society is a metaphor employed in Gaudêncio’s vision of the world, wherein utopia and dystopia are distorted mirror images of each other. Here, the artist renders propaganda slogans, political figures such as Margaret Thatcher, and demonstrations, while alluding to the passionate, convoluted history of radical thought.

Five additional works on view compose the series “Crowd Shape,” which complements the artist’s investigation of idealistic themes. Black-and-white, newspaper-style photographic prints of multitudes in public spaces are partially covered by facades of postmodern buildings. For example, in Crowd Shape #1, the artist overlays a gathering in a town square with various architectural structures in a manner that recalls Constructivist imagery. With a delicate treatment of aesthetic trends and elaborate references to politics, Gaudêncio smartly addresses progressive grand narratives through the lenses of mass psychology and cultural tradition.

— Miguel Amado

Marcel Broodthaers

PETER FREEMAN GALLERY
560 Broadway #602/603
November 5–December 23

Marcel Broodthaers, Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas dit—Le Perroquet, 1974, caged African gray parrot, two palm trees, a vitrine containing Broodthaers’s catalogue from 1966 exhibition at White Wide Space along with a reprint from 1974, and a recording of the artist reading the poem “Moi Je dis Je Moi Je dis Je . . .” Installation view.

Marcel Broodthaers conceived of the 1974 work Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas dit—Le Perroquet (Don’t Say I Didn’t Say So—The Parrot) as a setting for the presentation of the small book marking his solo exhibition at Antwerp’s Wide White Space Gallery. The 1974 booklet, Moules Oeufs Frites Pots Charbon Perroquets (Mussels Eggs Fries Pots Coal Parrots), was, in turn, a slightly altered reprint of the artist’s 1966 exhibition catalogue at the same gallery: Moules Oeufs Frites Pots Charbon. The addition of “Parrots” to the book’s title referred to the elements installed next to a table displaying both the 1966 and 1974 catalogues.

Between two palm trees, a live African gray parrot perches in a cage. Nearby, a recorded loop plays Broodthaers reciting one of his poems. The foregrounding of this poem, a version of which is also included in the catalogue, marked the artist’s interest during this period in (re)presenting his past, including his own work as a poet. Ne dites pas is among the most compact of the installations and retrospective exhibitions that occupied Broodthaers in his final years—called the Décors. These presented artworks as aspects of scenography, poetically undermining modernist autonomy and evoking the constraints of the retrospective as exhibition type.

The exhibition at Peter Freeman is the United States debut of this work, a subject of controversy following its proposed purchase by the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2001. At the time, animal rights activists weighed in with the popular press, and widespread misapprehension took hold that the museum would be spending its acquisitions budget to buy a bird that could live up to seventy years, as well as a repetitive recording with which to torture the animal. That Broodthaers installed the tape player at a fair distance from the bird, and that exhibitors borrow or rent an animal for the duration of the work’s display, did not abate a press maelstrom that helped scuttle the acquisition. As none of Broodthaers’s Décors are yet in American collections, one hopes the outcome in 2001 is not repeated here.

— Cathleen Chaffee

Emily Jacir

ALEXANDER AND BONIN
132 Tenth Avenue
October 28–November 28

Emily Jacir, Lydda Airport, 2007–2009, single-channel animation, 5 minutes 21 seconds. Installation view.

Famous aviatrixes stand you up, passenger planes mysteriously vanish midflight, and the elegant aerodrome is eventually stormed and conquered by hostile forces. Emily Jacir’s depiction of events in the former Lydda Airport of British-occupied Palestine, now Ben Gurion International in Israel, is significantly more baffling than contemporary travel conundrums, like why an unopened bottled water bought only five minutes ago must be confiscated. The missed connections, and the sense of preternatural coincidence Jacir captures, are due in large part to her use of an innovative technique of animating still photographs into digital film.

Jacir herself stars in the film as a wordless, patient black-clad figure bearing a bouquet of flowers, perhaps awaiting Amelia Earhart. Jacir’s vigil was partly inspired by a Jaffa transport-company employee who was told to greet the never-arrived pilot at the airport. The other star of the work is one Hannibal, a big (for the time) twenty-four-passenger four-engine biplane lost over the Gulf of Oman in 1940. In her widow’s weeds, Jacir stands before the scaffolding of the half-constructed airport in 1935, watching Hannibal’s maneuvers as it prepares for takeoff. An uncanny sense of sentience is breathed into scenes in which black-and-white archival photographs provide the sets. Compressing various scenarios into a nearly five-and-a-half-minute film, Jacir projects us into a past as lucid as a waking dream, the same quiet reverie that historians, in hard oak chairs in silent libraries, thumbing fusty papers drawn from “special collections,” have idled in.

— Eva Díaz

Robert Morris

HUNTER COLLEGE/TIMES SQUARE GALLERY
450 West 41st Street,
October 9–November 21

Robert Morris, Site, 1964/1993, still from a color film in 16 mm, 18 minutes 45 seconds.

Robert Morris’s Site, 1964, originated as a dance piece performed with Carolee Schneemann. Dressed in white workman’s clothes and a papier-mâché mask, Morris moved two eight-by-four-foot plywood sheets to reveal a tableau of Schneemann powdered white and posed as Manet’s Olympia, 1863. Morris then performed a sort of minuet with the plywood, flipping a sheet over his back and lofting it into the air, before again blocking Schneemann from view. Stan VanDerBeek later filmed Site and included it in Aspen’s 1967 double issue, on the same 8-mm reel as Hans Richter’s Constructivist animation Rhythm 21, 1921. The two are curiously alike. On film, the sheets seem to lack texture or depth; while Morris deftly tilts and shifts them, they resemble nothing so much as Richter’s floating rectangles.

I describe Site in such detail because it’s conspicuously missing from this engrossing and worthwhile survey of Robert Morris’s film and video. Its replacement, a recording by Babette Mangolte from a 1993 reenactment of Site, lacks the nuances that make the earlier film so compelling as a film. Any exhibition attempting to cover the arc of Morris’s career must reckon with his protean restlessness, either by sorting the diverse strains of his work—variously associated with Minimalism, Fluxus, and Conceptual art—or by identifying a common thread. For the latter attempt, Site may prove the absent cipher. On film, the plywood sheets appear as sheer optical presence, except when contact with Morris’s body reasserts their blunt materiality. In Mirror, Slow Motion, and Wisconsin, all 1969, Morris uses the camera to tease out this same play from other thin rectangular objects, like mirrors and glass doors. As different bodies manipulate and move them, these sheets read alternately as frames and as screens. That some of Morris’s subjects sport tan lines and Tom Selleck mustaches could be chalked up to the machismo with which he is sometimes charged, but it also underscores a fundamental tension: However austere it first seems, Morris’s work is intended for an emphatically fleshy here and now.

— Colby Chamberlain

Matthew Ritchie

ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY
525 West 24th Street
October 23–December 2

View of "Matthew Ritchie," 2009. From left: Augur, 2008; Line Shot, 2009; Itself Surprised, 2009.

In this exhibition, Matthew Ritchie gives new meaning to William Blake’s “eternity in an hour.” Line Shot, 2009, the show’s titular focus, is an animated opus that guides viewers on a dreamlike tour of space and time, meandering from creation to apocalypse, submicroscopic realms to infinite vastness (think Powers of Ten on acid)—in just more than sixty minutes.

Projected into the gallery’s corner, with the image split across two walls, the video is matched by an oscillating, out-of-sync score by Aaron and Bryce Dessner of the National (who performed live with Ritchie’s video work October 28–31 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). Evading consistent rhythms and aligned harmonies, the sound track also uses overdubbed voices that reference topics as disparate as ancient creation myths and twin-brother baseball players. Though the latter seems a non sequitur alone, the lilting delivery of all the ideas in succession sets a unified, stream-of-consciousness tone within an overall theme of broken symmetry.

Digitally compiled but based on actual drawings, the swirling imagery in Line Shot maintains just enough of the artist’s gesture to save it from slipping into too-slick territory. The sculptures on view, however—a sprawling modular piece titled The Dawn Line (Sun Dog Variant), 2009, part of a larger, structural music and film installation, The Morning Line, which was made with architects Aranda\Lasch and global engineering firm Arup AGU and premiered in Seville’s 2008 biennial; plus a ceiling-suspended bronze cast resembling a meteorite or the head of an astronaut lost in space—do not grasp any such handholds in this gallery setting and recall instead props from a sci-fi movie set.

A series of large paintings provide the sense of multidimensionality (formally and metaphorically) that the sculptures lack. These are composed of peculiar forms—huge gothic architectures of the future, perhaps, or curled, subatomic dimensions—where splattered swaths of bright paint stream like light beams. Brushstrokes are visible, and splatters clearly come from the flick of the artist’s wrist, revealing a dynamic human involvement in what could otherwise be construed as aloof, scientific speculation. Works such as these, which evince Ritchie’s aesthetic alongside his zeal for the more mind-boggling concepts of physics, elegantly bridge a rift in the art-science continuum.

— Emily Weiner

Siah Armajani

MAX PROTETCH
511 West 22nd Street
October 20–December 23

Siah Armajani, Murder in Tehran, 2009, laminated maple, glass, felt, cloth, cast body parts, meat cleaver, paint, 132 x 72 x 72".

Siah Armajani’s latest exhibition takes up the brutal but largely invisible violence that erupted in the wake of this year’s contested Iranian presidential election. Although the artist, who was born in Tehran and lives in Minneapolis, has built environments that interrogate the spatial contours of the “public sphere” for decades, his recent work underscores more explicitly the human cost of Middle Eastern politics. Fallujah, 2005, for example, combines large-scale neo-Minimalist volumes with domestic objects to illustrate a collapsed family home in the Iraqi city, using universal form to give specificity to the American siege.

His current project ups the ante. Murder in Tehran, 2009, a massive black vitrine, appears familiar at first glance, a sort of update on Ashley Bickerton or Damien Hirst. Closer inspection yields layers of solemnity and meaning as the piece works its elegiac spell. Dressed in the colors of the Iranian Revolution and veiled, like that regime, under a heavy shroud, the piece is a memorial for those lost in the state response to protests surrounding the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12. The international face of that crackdown was a young woman named Neda Agha-Soltan, who was shot dead, purportedly, by Iranian security forces. Armajani memorializes her here, both in a bloodied figure cascading from atop the piece and in the dismembered limbs scattered among the stones within––both based on Neda’s exact proportions.

Elements of the installation––pencil drawings that update Goya’s “Disasters of War,” 1810–20, and verse by poet Ahmad Shamlu––add detail but are, in the end, unnecessary. Armajani’s triumph here is his relentless economy of means, through which he brings a faraway conflict home and permits his audience a timely and unnerving chance to bear witness.

— Ian Bourland

Regina José Galindo

EXIT ART
475 Tenth Avenue
October 2–November 21

Regina José Galindo, Crisis: Cloth, 2009. Performance view, Exit Art, New York, October 2, 2009.

On the opening night of her ten-year survey and first solo exhibition in New York, Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo premiered a new performance for “Crisis,” a series she has been working on this year that draws attention to the transactional nature of personal relations in times of economic turmoil. After trading her hair and blood in previous installments of the project, on this occasion Galindo sold the clothing she was wearing, for five dollars apiece, to members of the audience, who took it from her. This intimate if no less emotionally resonant work suited the delicate atmosphere that characterizes the gallery, a darkened warehouse-style space marked by five video projections on floor screens along with several monitors that document Galindo’s output.

The first work in this sequence is Limpieza Social (Social Cleaning), 2006, in which the nude artist is beset with a high-pressure water hose, an image that recalls the dispersion of demonstrating multitudes by the police. Other works on view address the political context of her native country. Prompted by the presidential candidacy of a former dictator, in ¿Quien pude borrar las huellas? (Who Can Erase the Traces?), 2003, the artist walks between government buildings in Guatemala City with her feet soaked in blood, leaving behind a trail in memory of the victims of Guatemala’s scorched-earth campaigns of the 1980s.

The works that bring to mind the feminist, live art traditions of the 1970s also best represent Galindo’s radical practice. For example, in Confesion, 2007, the artist is water-tortured by an unknown man in a basementlike room; in Perra (Bitch), 2005, she carves the title into her left leg with a kitchen knife. Alluding to state violence, both in Guatemala and elsewhere, these excruciating gestures achieve a higher degree of criticality than is usually found in extreme, body-based actions. For Galindo, it’s not just a question of pushing the body to its physical limits but one of denouncing worldwide social inequality and injustice. A classical, monumental bust of the artist that greets visitors to this show (Busto, 2009) is a poetic yet ironic illustration of these protest and survival strategies, which Galindo maintains in order to actively resist oblivion.

— Miguel Amado