Greg Parma Smith

BALICE HERTLING & LEWIS
Film Center Building, 630 Ninth Avenue Suite 403
January 6–February 25

View of “Life Drawings, Poseurs, and ‘thirteen oil paintings on canvas,’ ” 2012.

If paintings produce painters, how might one understand this painting subject correctly? Certainly correctness is relative to its milieu, so in what sense can painting’s social proprieties be sullied, and, more important, to what reasonable ends? With this in mind, let’s consider Greg Parma Smith’s current exhibition, “Life Drawings, Poseurs, and ‘thirteen oil paintings on canvas.’ ” In the eleven works on view, this conceptual trio of figurative themes are put to work with wildly disparate results. Painted from nude models, the “Poseurs” offer a United Colors of Benetton–esque collection of bodies rendered on decoratively embossed gesso grounds. The works collected under the heading “Life Drawings” appropriate cells from indie comics in brightly colored compositions that disorient their emphatically autobiographical narrative to artful disarray. Complementing this appropriative line is “thirteen oil paintings on canvas,” which binds together unstretched paintings of thuggish cartoons into an artist’s book that seems to teasingly adapt that quintessential subcultural form, the zine, for the symbolic economy of canvas and oil paint. Throughout, an exacting technical method is present, where musculature is rendered with the same machinic passion as an area of flat color.

Through his own investment in the dedifferentiated technical mark, Parma Smith’s conceptual mobilization of the figurative canvas seems part and parcel to a larger project that seeks to critically antagonize the role that identificatory interests culled from subcultural markets serve to inhibit artistic practices from articulating something of an ethical statement—like a teenager who refuses to leave the cultural hub of his or her bedroom. The dissonances and disorientations between the acculturated bodies figured in these variegated canvases are a barbed offering to a practice whose latest principle of sufficient reason is an idea prompted by David Joselit that, given the post-Fordist economies that circulate its mean(ing)s, painting is beside itself. In Parma Smith’s case, painting is recalcitrantly within itself to the point of bodily discomfort.

— Sam Pulitzer

Ridley Howard

LEO KOENIG INC. | 545 WEST 23RD
545 West 23rd Street
January 19–February 25

Ridley Howard, Nudes, 2011, oil on linen, 24 x 30”.

“Young girls? I don’t give a damn. I like small feet, I like my fabulous house with cool stuff in it.” This was John Currin’s impression, from a 2001 interview, of the staunchly antimodern painter Balthus. Currin enlists Balthus on behalf of his own postmodernist gambit, yet it’s Ridley Howard in his second exhibition at this gallery who brings Balthus’s earnestly sensed joy full circle after modernity’s linear exhaustion.

In “Slows,” Howard’s twenty paintings jubilate through thrumming color planes and a slight drafting curvature that owes as much to Botticelli as it does to Adrian Tomine. Howard’s predilections are emphasized by art-historical cross-referencing, but also by slyly referencing his own work. For instance, Nudes (all works 2011), depicting a tryst that becomes a structured arrangement of interlocked bodies (evinced by a constellation of moles on a man’s back), is clearly indebted to the kindred films of Michaelangelo Antonioni. To its right, Mint Green, a lambent abstraction punctuated by an archipelago of black dots on a cream ground, shows Howard mining color theorist Joseph Albers (particularly his little-known album covers). Not coincidentally, Antonioni’s 1964 classic Red Desert owed much to Albers and his Color Field disciples. The comparable moles and black dots show Howard employing both representation and abstraction in an effort to further digest––as well as convey––his penchants.

Despite the humility of these images, “Slows” offers a range of esoteric associations. Liquors, for example, is a cluster of grayed geometries fronted by the painting’s titular store sign that evokes Ralston Crawford’s deserted scenes of industrialization. Howard deftly allocates his appreciable influences, but quotation is hardly the point; his adroitness is as much a component of his style as is his line or color sense. All these elements are on display in this richly innovative show, which profoundly accents the beauty of everyday life.

— Ryan Steadman

Doug Wheeler

DAVID ZWIRNER
519 West 19th Street
January 17–February 25

Doug Wheeler, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12, 1975/2012, reinforced fiberglass, LED lights, high intensity fluorescent lights, UV fluorescent lights, quartz halogen lights, DMX control, architecturally modified space, composed of two parts, 47 x 58 1/2'. 

For the first time in New York, Doug Wheeler has created a pristine, white architectural environment, its curved walls suggesting a limitless interiority that allows the viewer to focus on its tangible atmosphere. Wheeler’s art has been preoccupied with such ethereal-seeming phenomena since the 1960s, when he began exploring “Light and Space” along with Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and James Turrell in Southern California. The current installation is lit with a mixture of purple and white LEDs, fluorescent, UV fluorescent, and quartz halogen lights, positioned in plain view above and beside the work’s wide entrance. Set to a thirty-two-minute cycle that mimics changing light conditions between day and night, its luminosity morphs slowly and nearly imperceptibly, managing an almost foglike density in the stark space. The clarity of vision when focusing on a hand, companion, or entryway seems practically photographic in its precision when set against the spatial indeterminacy of the room and its light cycle.

SA MI 75 DZ NY 12, 1975/2012, the fourth in a group of room-scaled “Infinity Environments” begun by the artist in 1975, encourages experiential slowness. Initially this manifests as a cautiousness of physical acclimation. Entering the installation, shod in white slippers provided for the experience, I carefully shuffled along the floor, arms slightly extended, grasping after the parameters of my surroundings. This measured advance—my attempt to answer bodily the question, “Where am I?”—gradually gave way to a second, lengthier, experience of deliberate observation. Here the act of looking was itself cast into relief by the paradoxical, almost granular materiality of the space.

Wheeler’s installation offers differing infinities: While the architecture only appears to continue indefinitely, the lighting really is cyclically infinite. This intersection amplifies both, creating a site of perceptual experience so intense that its effects linger powerfully with the viewer beyond the room itself.

— Edward Vazquez

“Campaign”

C24 GALLERY
514 West 24th Street
January 12–February 25

Jill Magid, From a Distance You Don't Look Anything like a Friend, 2011, letterpress, neon, dimensions variable. Installation view.

In the neon pink zine-catalogue produced for this group show, curator Amy Smith-Stewart describes a heightened cultural hostility to women’s bodies fostered by contemporary mass media that traffic in “unattainable avatars” of femininity. Celebrity culture, reality television, and social networking are her particular culprits, and with “Campaign” she rallies against their imagemaking monopoly. But if the artists don’t present an alternative propaganda front, as the exhibition’s tongue-in-cheek title suggests they might, their disunited, often humorous challenges to “our prevailing depictions of women” still add up to an exciting chaos of dissent. Beyond the works’ common strategies (largely appropriation and collage) and recurring themes (fashion, porn, tabloid stars, and the nude), they reveal other surprising threads of camaraderie.

Kathe Burkhart’s Liz Taylor paintings are a perverse homage to misogynist projection. In Beaver: From the Liz Taylor Series (publicity shot) (all works cited, 2011), a deck of strip-poker playing cards silhouette the flatly painted Hollywood icon, and a shaggy length of fake fur, affixed as Taylor’s stole, underscores the obscenity of the red text that bisects the canvas like a protest sign: BEAVER. Burkhart’s painting shares a corner with a like-mindedly antivirtuosic, but quieter, piece by Amy Wilson. Reminiscent of a strange school project, Fashion for Co-Joined Twins is an expository text about the confluence of fashion and fascism beginning with the Nazi occupation of Paris, penciled on a series of brown kraft paper pages and illustrated with embroidered figures clothed in surreal designs for the conjoined. These works shine as stylistic oddities even among this very diverse gathering of work.

Jill Magid’s From a Distance You Don’t Look Anything like a Friend also sticks out—as a nonfigurative installation piece (a passage of appropriated text is impressed into the gallery’s drywall alongside an inverted neon arc), but also as a more oblique contribution to Smith-Stewart’s activist aims regarding “this world of interchangeable, digitally manipulated homogenous girls.” Magid takes her text from Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s influential 2009 book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Online controversies surrounding law enforcement protocol, combat-based video games, and post-traumatic stress disorder populate the Internet rabbit hole of further research on Grossman’s ideas about desensitization and conditioned killing—perhaps an appropriate, if disturbing, maze to find oneself in when considering this show’s ultimate concern with the exposure and disruption of dehumanization in our particular moment of new media immersion.

— Johanna Fateman

Paul Heyer and Virginia Poundstone

RACHEL UFFNER GALLERY
47 Orchard Street
January 15–February 26

View of “I know that I am awake,” 2012. Foreground: Virginia Poundstone, Miss Margaret Legge, 2012. Background: Paul Heyer, Wine, 2011.

Painting and sculpture make peaceful bedfellows in this exhibition by two artists whose works, while formally dissimilar, mirror a taste for bucolic and understated beauty. The show’s title, “I know that I am awake,” is lifted from author and Zen Buddhist Peter Matthiessen, who in his 1978 memoir Snow Leopard climbs the Himalayas in search of the elusive titular beast, but finds exquisiteness in the pedestrian sights along the way. Following suit, Paul Heyer and Virginia Poundstone evoke a sense of the existential via more modest matter.

Heyer’s subtle marks on canvas (stippled strokes, calligraphic lines, flashes of underpainting) and diverse subjects (doughnutlike wreaths, sprigs of leaves, a lamppost) showcase slippery symbols amid abstract smears and flecks. Here, the historical weight of the medium rolls off, and depth occurs instead in the painting’s visual encounter. An effortlessly wrought but particularly juicy painting, Burrow, 2011, for example, is velvety red and layered with leopard spots in black and bright blue. A shadowy slit sketched at its center conjures a feeling of being engulfed by the painting’s heart of darkness.

Meanwhile, Poundstone’s sculptures merge the floral and the industrial in striking balancing acts. Her recent works feature freestanding pedestals made of ceramic tile or solid concrete. Strips of steel—digitally printed with photographs of purple rhododendron—loop and twist around these bases. Ikenobo Yuki, 2012, a waist-high assemblage (named after a foremost female practitioner of ikebana flower arranging), resembles an elaborately considered present topped with ribbon curlicues; another, titled (after the late British “society florist”) Constance Spry, 2012, sports a fan of brass rods, peacocklike and proud. Like the master florists she references—and Heyer too—Poundstone takes the materials at hand, strips away both burden and banality, and re-presents a rather enlightened arrangement.

— Emily Weiner

“Images Rendered Bare. Vacant. Recognizable.”

STADIUM
548 West 28th Street, Suite 636
January 20–March 3

View of “Images Rendered Bare. Vacant. Recognizable.,” 2012.

As Facebook feeds and Tumblr streams send digital images further from their indexical referents with every passing “Post,” the only image whose integrity cannot be eroded is the image that never laid claim to any: the stock photo. And while the strategic appropriation of stock images has become something of a generic plug-in itself, curator Karen Archey keeps the conversation critical with “Images Rendered Bare. Vacant. Recognizable.” The title’s punctuated rhythm echoes Rachel Reupke’s 10 Seconds or Greater, 2009, a fifteen-minute montage of staged, stilted interactions, all intentionally infomercial-ready. Her delightfully multicultural cast trade toothpaste-commercial smiles over vegetable-laden chopping blocks or wipe their brows as if after a hearty but sweat-free workout. For the adjacent projection, Frieze Stock Footage, 2011, Oliver Laric took a slow-motion camera around the Frieze Art Fair, erasing the specific context of the fair with footage of overtly generic events such as “energy drink poured into cup,” “cigarette falling,” or “urinal,” which features liquid shimmering like confetti over the porcelain surface. Yngve Holen splashes his neuro-themed mood boards with digital renderings of water, a substance fundamentally not able to be scanned.

If these artists nod to the semantic disjuncture inherent in the digital image, Sean Raspet gives form to that frustration. Starting with photographs of police reports stuffed in manila envelopes, Raspet folds in neutral scenes, like the tiled floors of fast food restaurants. The resulting visual accumulations are printed on vinyl banners that hang in imperfect overlap, suggesting browser windows on a desktop screen. Selected excerpts reappear as icons on coffee mugs, ordered online through a photo-personalization service and then stacked on the floor in a pyramid of packaging material. Installation shots of these arrangements are then inserted back into the piece, in what Archey terms “a self-cannibalizing archive.” This archive ultimately leaves no access; at its root, the documents remain sealed. The images of information are made as “happily vacant” as the staged stock photography of the surrounding works.

— Kate Sutton

George Ortman

ALGUS GREENSPON
71 Morton Street
January 14–March 3

George Ortman, Journey of a Young Man, 1957, oil on canvas mounted on wood, plaster, collage, 40 x 110”.

George Ortman’s math doesn’t always add up. His colorful geometric relief paintings, while seemingly well behaved, are anything but. Diamonds, octagons, arrows, and the occasional obtuse angle—all made of canvas, wood, and plaster—nearly align in these surprisingly relaxed constructions of less than fastidious manufacture. Ortman’s inclusion in Donald Judd’s 1965 Minimalist sermon “Specific Objects” promised a legacy that never quite materialized, perhaps due to Ortman’s ambivalence in a moment that asked artists to abandon both painting and sculpture. Yet Ortman’s independent aesthetic has given his equivocal oeuvre “something new,” as Judd noted in a review from 1963.

Journey of a Young Man, 1957, reveals Ortman’s bumpy transition away from youthful Surrealist influences through a symmetrical tableau that recalls the seven stages of life as the Bard outlined them in As You Like It. A Lee Krasner–esque swath of pink paint seeps down onto seven horizontally arranged panels, each perforated by a structural opening that contains symbolic objects (the first and last are, pleasantly, eggs), quite unlike the soul-sucking voids featured in the oft-compared reliefs of Lee Bontecou. A particular midcentury American vernacular permeates the exhibition: an offbeat abstraction reminiscent of works by contemporaries Paul Brach, I. Rice Pereira, and Alfred Jensen. A key work from that milieu, the coyly titled Blue Diamond, 1961, is particularly arresting, with its interlocked symbols and shapes and its conflation of a formal vocabulary with a sauvage handmade quality that muddies any possible ties to Minimalist gestalt tendencies. To further illustrate Ortman’s unique position, Algus Greenspon has adroitly included studies on paper of Paolo Uccello’s masterwork Battle of San Romano, ca. 1438–40, a work whose play of form and perspective resonates with Ortman’s own. In the back gallery, recent works from 1997 to 2011 complete Ortman’s latest turn. His bravura gestures of illusionism have been neatly refined, resulting in intricate reliefs as winsomely curious as their mystic progenitors.

— Beau Rutland

Lee Mingwei

MUSEUM OF CHINESE IN AMERICA
215 Centre Street
October 20–March 7

Lee Mingwei, The Quartet Project, 2005, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Lee Mingwei, who emigrated from Taiwan to the United States in his adolescence, presents a pair of installations as a contemporary coda to this museum’s permanent exhibition on 150 years of Chinese-American history. The Quartet Project, 2005, comprises four computers, each showing a video that features one member of a string ensemble in an otherwise dark gallery. The musicians play Antonín Dvořák’s 1893 American Quartet, which the Czech composer wrote in Iowa and which, like his New World Symphony, pays a debt to American folk music, not least African-American and Native American sources. The monitors are hidden behind L-shaped baffles and facing the wall, so that all you can see is a hazy light from the musical source. One’s impulse may be to peek around the partitions—but that trips a motion detector, cutting both sound and image with a hideous click. To hear the full piece, especially its aching second movement, you’ll have to stay put in the center of the space. There might be beauty in the story of migration, but try to get to the level of the individual and it’s access denied. (Lee is also presenting a participatory installation in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum, on view until January 22.)

For The Travelers, 2010–11, the artist sent one hundred empty notebooks to friends and art-world acquaintances, as well as to strangers, whom he asked to “write a personal story of leaving home.” (“I still see myself as a Midwesterner, not a true New Yorker,” writes Maya Lin—who also confesses that “it took years to get a New York driver’s license.”) These correspondents then sent the books onward to their own relatives or friends; some have since returned to MoCA, and some are probably lost. Part chain letter, part exquisite corpse, the books have bounced from Vancouver and London to Beijing and Guangzhou, and one went as far as the arctic Svalbard archipelago. Visitors have to wear protective gloves to handle them, which freights the at times stunningly personal stories with an added fragility—as if, in this new Chinese century as much as the lapsed American one, the individual character of our lives and movements risks crumbling in our hands.

— Jason Farago

John Miller

METRO PICTURES
519 West 24th Street
January 19–March 10

John Miller, Suburban Past Time (detail), 2012, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

John Miller’s revered output finds inspiration in the writings of Henri Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin, the drawings of Douglas Huebler, and the indisputable hospitality of the Midwest. His latest site-specific installation, Suburban Past Time, 2012, a work in three “sites,” seems to expand the scenes depicted by Miller’s ongoing series “Middle of the Day,” 1994–, in three-dimensional space and scale by presenting familiar landscapes whose jarring mundanity disarms viewers.

A behemoth concrete and foam board rock, a synthetic sugar maple tree, and decorative wallpaper depicting an apartment block in Berlin establish the first site as an unlikely commons, one that articulates the paradox of a privatized public space such as city parks, or even, the gallery space itself. Alienation, work, and time––three tropes rampant throughout the exhibition and Miller’s oeuvre––further complicate the second site, where two performers (seemingly college students gaining an hourly wage) mostly read while sitting, either on chairs or on a plinth. Miller insists on paying for your pleasure, and you, in turn, must pay as well (albeit with an awkward intrusion). In the same site, Miller pairs gray plinths with metallic Staples filing cabinets. The objects’ proportions are similar, this visual simile rendering equitable, by extension, the matte finish of Robert Morris’s Slab (cloud), 1973, and the glittery luster of DeWain Valentine’s Triple Disk Red Metal Flake––Black Edge, 1966. Both Morris and Valentine tirelessly insist upon phenomenological surface; Miller directs their argument to the tedious maintenance work of archiving.

The third and final site presents Look 49, 2012, an animated video projection created with Takuji Kogo. Wall-size picture-postcard settings (London’s Big Ben; a romantic, deserted byway) are spliced with shots of parking lots and close-ups of white plastic chairs. Texts taken from personals ads—seeking generic sexual encounters and wealth opportunities—are superimposed on the images and vocalized by a computer voice. Miller’s predecessor and late collaborator Mike Kelley demarcated the territory of the spectacular underbelly of Americana; in retort, Miller resuscitates middlebrow culture, locating in it an unspectacularly rich theoretical paradox where the everyday subsumes individual reference and experience. Here, alienation begets community.

— Piper Marshall

“A Postcard from Afar: North Korea from a Distance”

APEXART
291 Church Street
January 11–March 10

Jung Lee, Bordering North Korea # 15, 2007, color photograph.

For all its coordinated means and forcible ends, North Korea’s official footage relaying the nation’s demonstrative mourning of Kim Jong Il may have let other woes escape into view. Coat-swaddled, sob-buckled—bare fists beating pavement—this suddenly visible public seemed possessed by still older grievances, vaster grief, deepened in Kim’s lifetime, irredeemable by his death. Or so observers outside “the hermit kingdom” might be tempted to glean, forced to parse through the country’s tethered tourism and constricted traffic of abductions and defections. The eight artists in this show roam just that moral-epistemological murk, evading expedient genres like exposé, lampoon, or Manichaean sci-fi for subtler sightlines of desire and identification.

Soni Kum’s lyrical documentary memoir Foreign Sky, 2005, ponders her melancholic attachment to the North by sifting the century-old history of Japan-born North Koreans like herself—a refugee underclass ineligible for Japanese citizenship—alongside US vets’ and reparations activists’ rueful retrospections on America’s “forgotten war.” Karl Tuikkanen’s video installation Untilted, 2011, revisits the artist’s preteen participation in an anti-American march in 1980s Pyongyang, when accompanying his Swedish socialist parents on a solidarity delegation. These works address eclipsed affiliations that summon further contexts, from the Non-Aligned Movement to East Asian postcoloniality and racialism, including the ethnic nationalism fueling some Korean reunification campaigns.

Kim Jong Il’s own storied avidities—for Hollywood and Harleys—inspire works here by Tony Garifalakis, Magnus Bärtås, and Jim Finn, whose loving, absurdist collage-film parable The Juche Idea, 2008, rummages stillborn socialism for what the political imagination might learn there. Yet the desire to feel along with and on behalf of those afar turns uneasy in Jung Lee’s C-print series “Bordering North Korea,” 2005, where pithy text like “Let us live our own way” floats voicelike amid the DPRK’s misty borderlands—the obscuring beauty of it all inviting belief.

— Chinnie Ding

Garrett Pruter

CHARLES BANK GALLERY
196 Bowery
February 9–March 11

Garrett Pruter, Flesh (Mixed Signals), 2011, cut-up vintage Playboy and Penthouse magazines on paper, 30 x 40”.

Grounded in found photographs gleaned from various sources, Garrett Pruter’s recent body of work lends new visual life to images threatened with obsolescence. For June Gloom (all works 2011), Pruter has inflated a print to sprawling dimensions and then scraped away at the raw, wetted photographic emulsion with a dull blade, leaving a somewhat spectral scene scored with evenly paced yellow notches. In Washed Out, abstract patterns from a scrimlike layer have been cut out and placed over a blown-up image. See also Ship Wrecked, where pieces of the photographic print itself have been excised, resulting in a pocked and perforated surface. By contrast, Mixed Signals is additive, with cutout shapes from a found poster placed below an enlarged, anonymous portrait of two individuals. In each instance, the relationship of the pattern—either subtracted, abstracted, or superimposed—to the original imagery is quirky; all seem arbitrary and interrogative, evocative and suggestive rather than tendentious.

Three collage pieces—respectively titled Los Angeles, Blackout, and Flesh—feature repurposed magazine images, cut into squares and layered in abstract patterns. Flesh fittingly derives from vintage editions of Playboy and Penthouse. Abstracted into a field of pinkish (and seemingly pixilated) geometries, it bears only a metonymic relationship to more carnal origins. Similarly, Los Angeles, taken from aerial photographs of the eponymous city, plays on layers of removal from its original urban source, slicing up photographs into a series of formal facets.

The exhibition’s most striking piece is an installation incorporating various 35-mm slides—again culled from random sources—projected onto a curved mold, covered with tessellated mirror fragments. Cast onto the wall in intervals, the resultant images appear distorted and distended though still discernible in their basic dimensions, whether as landscape or portrait. Pruter seems to be hitting his stride in terms of a play between photographic removal and objective presence—a cocktail that he is bound to take in compelling directions.

— Ara H. Merjian

Alec Soth

SEAN KELLY GALLERY
528 West 29th Street
February 3–March 11

Alec Soth, 2008_08zl0215, 2008, color photograph, dimensions variable.

Alec Soth’s first show at Sean Kelly following his departure last year from Gagosian presents about half of the fifty photographs that make up “Broken Manual,” 2006–10, a series that originated in Soth’s preoccupation with the idea of escape. It is, as he puts it, “about the desire to run away and the knowledge that you can’t.” The “Manual” of the series’ title, a volume supposedly penned by Soth’s alter ego and available as a limited edition catalogue, is a homemade-looking primer on how to disappear and includes instructions ranging from disguise techniques (long hair is preferred) to how to scavenge for food (Dumpsters are freshest early in the week). The photographs, which both illustrate the text and circulate independently, present a collection of enigmatic subjects captured in the high-detail prints of Soth’s large-format camera. Portraits such as the verdant S., Alabama, 2007, in which a heavily bearded subject stands partly camouflaged by a vegetable garden, convey Soth’s respect for both the man’s anonymity and his system of self-sustenance. Meanwhile, in 2008_08zl0215, 2008, the focus on an otherwise mundane clothes rod inside a whitewashed cave dwelling suggests Soth’s fascination with the resourcefulness of the recluse lifestyle. A wall-length installation presents stacks of the manual itself, which, together with a tattered collection of notes and clippings, translates the possible imaginings of these lone men—found via the Internet or simply by chance along the road—into material form. The manual is broken, Soth explains, because of its failure; none of his subjects had fully escaped and all remained connected in some way to a social world. But in the end, broken or whole isn’t actually the point. His pictures, which he once described as “little melancholy poems,” touch on the questions of how to organize a life, the choices we make, and the consequences of those choices.

— Margaret Ewing

Noriyuki Haraguchi

MCCAFFREY FINE ART
23 East 67th Street
January 6–March 17

Noriyuki Haraguchi, Air Pipe C, 1969, acrylic on canvas mounted on plywood, 53 1/2 x 61 x 9 7/8".

On the heels of the Guggenheim’s recent retrospective of Lee Ufan, this exhibition offers New Yorkers a reintroduction to another of the central figures of the Japanese postwar avant-garde. Noriyuki Haraguchi, born in 1946, works in a rougher and altogether more industrial idiom than the other artists grouped under the designation Mono-ha, and his sculptures and works on paper often veer away from a purely Minimal vocabulary to wrestle with questions of the environment, modernization, and war. Air Pipe B and Air Pipe C, two wall reliefs from 1969, are each painted a brilliant white and bulge from a flat ground into a cylindrical protrusion to the side. They call to mind the factories associated with Japan’s breakneck industrialization of the 1960s––or, more trenchantly, the exhaust of a jet engine on the sort of military aircraft the United States still stations there.

The forms of the airplane, sometimes mimetic and sometimes more abstract, recur throughout Haraguchi’s career. During the student riots in Tokyo of the late 1960s, he created a plywood reproduction of an American jet bound for Vietnam, which police finally destroyed when the university barricades came down. A-7 E Corsair II, 2011, recalls that lost work: It’s a one-to-one replica of the tail of an American fighter jet, though this one is fashioned out of canvas and aluminum and fits into the gallery so narrowly that the viewer has to shuffle past its wing. The sculpture is personal as much as political, though: Yokosuka, the port south of Tokyo from which the US deployed its Vietnam-era forces, is also the artist’s birthplace. The forms of militarism and industry that Haraguchi repurposes may be the signs of Japanese modernity and America’s often brutal contribution to it, but they’re also, just as significantly, the look of home.

— Jason Farago

Ryan Sullivan

MACCARONE INC.
630 Greenwich Street
February 10–March 17

Ryan Sullivan, Untitled, 2012, oil, enamel, latex, and acrylic on paper, 22 x 30”.

Two distended oval depressions hollow out the surface of an untitled 2011 painting by Ryan Sullivan. Purple and abscessed, riddled with dusty black and yellow ridges, they look like a set of lungs ravaged by carcinogens. This is one of sixteen recent paintings, all untitled, in Sullivan’s expansive solo debut. Each one fixes a trajectory of fast and beautiful ruin: Sullivan pours oil, enamel, and latex paints on a canvas, waits for the toxic pool to form a skin, like a pudding, and then tilts the frame to let the substances slide, gather, and crease. His chaotic process grafts the cosmic to the cosmetic. The paint-skin forms lunar landscapes as it hardens and cracks. In addition to the canvases, the exhibition includes eight paintings that are, by convention, called works on paper, even though these are more like paper in work. The paper’s pulp has broken and dissolved into fibrous particles trapped in a slab of hardened paint, a host subsumed by its parasite. At a time when human bodies grapple with chemical preservatives, plastic surgery, and hazardous pollutants, Sullivan treats masses of paint like wild creatures, letting them grow and roam before making handsome taxidermy of them.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery has published a slim book of Sullivan’s snapshots. White paint clings to a hairy forearm; droplets condense on a gallon jug; light catches in the dents of a damaged van; filthy snow clings to the back of a trailer truck. The photos record moments when the distinction between organic and inorganic gets confused. Everything reacts to wind, water, and time, and in each image, Sullivan guides the viewer’s gaze toward the strange results. Outside, the paint peeling from the garages off Greenwich Street looks livelier and more vivid than before.

— Brian Droitcour

Zak Prekop

HARRIS LIEBERMAN
508 West 26th Street, Ground floor
February 18–March 17

Zak Prekop, Untitled Collage (with Black Ground), 2012, oil and paper on canvas, 60 x 42”.

The sixteen paintings in Zak Prekop’s current show offer a fresh perspective on the well-worn modernist dramas of surface and support, planarity and depth, expression and containment. Each consists of a series of reactive layers, the form of the first prescribing those of the layers that follow. The precise order of these strata refuses to resolve, yielding images whose flatness opens into interior space, only to collapse again into two dimensions. In the eleven oversize works on view, vivid, vaguely geographic forms at once over- and underlie freehand mappings of the canvas: impressions of its stretcher bars, grids rotated forty-five degrees, and sets of parallel lines, created in relation to the canvas’s own dimensions. Prekop’s palette is limited, reduced in most cases to a spectrum of whites, blacks, and blues. Brushstrokes, too, are largely absent, as the artist constructs his allover abstractions with a palette knife and stencils.

The show’s standouts are animated by simple conceits. Four Colors (all works 2012) consists of a black, Rorschachlike blot, spread across the back of the canvas, which has since been flipped over and restretched. Thus reversed, the shape appears as an erasure or stain, the result of paint’s haphazard bleeding through raw fabric. Splayed across the painting’s front, this uncomposed form delimits a series of evenly spaced horizontal lines, rendered by hand in two shades of pastel blue. In a variant work, Untitled Collage (with Black Ground), spare geometries of cut paper protrude from behind the canvas, covered in a similarly produced black absorption. Achieving an embossed effect, Prekop’s use of paper recalls the wax-covered newsprint of Jasper Johns’s flags and targets. Textuality, however, is here absent, the work a meditation on what painting can accomplish within its own formal parameters, rather than a relay to art’s outsides. The viewer’s attention returns constantly to the canvas itself: at once textural, two-sided object and unsettled surface, poised between compression and expansion.

— Courtney Fiske

Benjamin Cottam

KLEMENS GASSER & TANJA GRUNERT
524 West 19th Street
February 16–March 17

Benjamin Cottam, Blue Sky 1, 2012, oil on aluminum, 4 x 6”.

Benjamin Cottam’s new paintings walk a fine, elegant line between optical pleasure and cerebral provocation. Composed on small, thin rectangular slices of aluminum, the gossamer whimsy of his “Blue Skies” series, 2011–12, evinces a freewheeling serenity. Set against a slate-blue background, white wisps and clots conjure up, at first sight, John Constable’s cloud studies, which were famously painted in direct observation of nature’s fleeting contingencies. The parabolas of white paint smeared across these surfaces, however, are derived from a reality that is anything but organic. Based on photographs of tear gas fired by police at demonstrators, Cottam’s images conceal an unspoken and more chilling etiology. The gestural freedom entailed in these works’ creation––each composed in one sitting––stands at ironic odds with the liberation of perception, invoking instead a violent assault on the body and its senses.

More vivid in their throbbing, cherry-red monochrome, and composed of oil on copper, Cottam’s “Red Paintings,” 2012, harbor their own secrets, less conceptual than visual. Each work contains a portrait, barely visible on––or in––its glossy, burnished surface. These frontal likenesses––featuring the artist himself as well as individuals close to him––court associations from holograms to the Shroud of Turin. But rather than being gimmicky, they come off somewhere between playful and haunting. Photographic reproduction of these works––online and elsewhere––fails to capture their subtly limned physiognomies, requiring a certain perceptive patience, similar to that required by an Ad Reinhardt canvas from the late 1950s or ’60s. Set in the arresting, cavernous space of Gasser and Grunert’s elegant concrete gallery, the paintings repay the close attention they humbly expect.

— Ara H. Merjian

“You never look at me from the place from which I see you”

SCULPTURE CENTER
44-19 Purves Street
January 15–March 19

Yve Laris Cohen, Coda, 2012. Performance view.

Curated by Kristen Chappa, this group exhibition presents work by the eleven artists currently participating in SculptureCenter’s “In Practice” program. A formal/conceptual duality characterizes most of the pieces on view, with the sculptures’ material presence frequently relying on an equally significant conceptual base. The difficulty here is translating this duality into a simultaneity, and understanding how we see what we see.

Yve Laris Cohen’s Coda, 2012, exemplifies this exercise. Accompanying his six performances is a sprung floor, a soft platform used in dance to absorb shock. Installed in a narrow basement corridor, the deck is complemented by a stunning nearly seventy-five-foot expanse of black marley (a material used for dance floors), which juts out with a Donald Judd–like authority on an adjacent wall. Cohen is only partially interested in the object’s visual lure. The materials listed on the wall label––sprung floor, dancing transsexual––hint at a subject/object blur that extends into his performance. Bookended by two small audiences on either side of the passageway, the dance that ensues is both mesmerizing and banal. Cohen removes his white T-shirt and uses it to wash the entirety of the marley, with uniform strokes going up and down each vertical stretch. He reaches the end, re-dresses, and pirouettes swiftly back to his beginning post. As he repeats this series, his breath becomes audible, and small gestures, like the preparatory stance before spinning, become consecutive markers in the score.

In a nearby room is A. K. Burns’s “touch parade,” 2011, an enthralling series of five reperformed fetish videos from YouTube. Each video reveals some part of Burns’s body performing various acts: hands putting on several pairs of rubber gloves in touch parade (glove love), or, my favorite, touch parade (pedal pump), where bare feet are filmed stopping and accelerating a moving vehicle. Both Burns and Cohen, in particular, underscore the significance of desire (and lack) in the process of seeing. Here seeing is an unscripted experience where subject and object remain undefined.

— Samara Davis

Mary Kelly

POSTMASTERS
459 West 19th Street
February 18–March 24

View of “Mary Kelly,” 2012, Postmasters, New York. From left: MIMUS: Act I-III, 2012, compressed lint, 83 1/2 x 61 x 2"; Mary Kelly and Ray Barrie, HABITUS: Type I, 2010, laser-cut acrylic, mirror, wood, 48 x 96 x 96".

Mary Kelly’s seminal works operate as much as intellectual inquiries as material exercises, consistently probing the liminal bond between the subjective and the collective. Over the past decade, she has assembled large framed works composed of multiple lint sections, each one produced in her dryer’s filter screen. During repeated loads of white and black garments, vinyl letters (which are subsequently removed after the cycle is finished) in each screen are surrounded by millions of tiny felted fabric particles, resulting in a feminized cryptogram that––rather than engaging in the futile capture of a subject’s unconscious, as automatic writing purports to do––serves to provide unintentional materiality for shared histories.

Hundreds of loads and hours also produced Kelly’s latest series, titled “Mimus,” 2012. Taking the form of large documents—that merge the objectivizing vernacular of the legal file with the narrative conventions of the stage direction—these three lint pieces are based on the House Un-American Activities Committee’s questioning of three activists from Women Strike for Peace—Blanche Posner, Ruth Meyers, and Dagmar Wilson—in 1962. Crude interrogation is met here with elusive answers. When asked if she belongs to the organization, for example, Meyers responds: “Women Strike for Peace has no members.” Kelly reanimates this phrase in Mimus II, 2012. Beyond its sardonic wit, the statement attests to the group’s nonhierarchical structure, thus providing an illuminating feminist precedent for contemporary protest movements.

Habitus: Type I, 2010, a piece made in collaboration with sculptor Ray Barrie, emulates a mass-produced British bomb shelter from World War II. Incised into the metal surface are inverted texts, stories of war that only become legible when read in the mirrored base of the semicircular structure. These are not typical war sagas, but memories in which familiar grand narratives are obscured by the entanglement of interpersonal relationships. The act of reflected reading provides a phenomenological experience of history that is doubly filtered—through the desires of a contemporary audience as well as through the recollections of those who lived to tell us the tale. Fittingly, in this mirrored encounter, the half-circle of the shelter appears whole, creating a projected cover in which our bodies cannot properly dwell.

— Sarah Lookofsky

Haegue Yang

GREENE NAFTALI GALLERY
508 West 26th Street, 8th Floor
February 23–March 24

Haegue Yang, Towel Light Sculpture––Organic Hygienic, 2012, clothing rack, light bulbs, cable, towel, yarn, bells, wicker hamster tunnel, sushi mat, dog training dummy, pet toys, bamboo roots, grommets, glue press, 79 1/8 x 45 x 45".

Haegue Yang’s fixation with absence and displacement—the increasing erasure of localized communities and dislodgment of the individual by transient lifestyles—persists in “Multi Faith Room,” her solo debut at Greene Naftali. Three new venetian blind installations hang from the ceiling and cast a slated pattern of light and shadow over the gallery floor, fracturing perception with streaks of light and conjuring that sacred environment so signature to Yang’s work. That said, an almost jubilant self-possession—not the melancholic sense of loss that has come to be associated with her artistic practice—characterizes these pieces on view. This vibrant quality seems triggered by the liminal space the exhibition predicates itself on: an airport prayer room.

Consider her jangly compositions comprising sundry of domestic and natural items—from power cords to hamster tunnels to pine cones and bamboo mats—all fastidiously draped over rolling clothing racks, creating dazzling totemlike sculptures. Towel Light Sculpture—Organic Hygienic, 2012, with its frosted light bulbs, bright white towels, knots of wicker, and bundles of silver bells, brings a collection of bric-a-brac into meticulous symmetry: The silver bells glitter in the glowing yellow light, their twinkly coloring accented by the soft white fabric. As in an airport, where perpetual transience functions to unify a mass strangers, here, the eclectic mix of materials breeds a chaotic concord; signally that in moments where homogeneity is lost, “otherness,” is given space to flourish. As formalistically scrupulous as the materials are erratic, Yang’s elegant meditations seem to indicate that, today, dissolution might be a prerequisite for harmony.

— Allese Thomson Baker

Sarah Sze

ASIA SOCIETY
725 Park Avenue at 70th Street
December 15–March 25

Sarah Sze, Checks and Balances (detail), 2011, stone, string, and ink on archival paper, 75 x 18 x 2".

Occupying adjacent galleries on the Asia Society’s second floor, eight new installations by Sarah Sze, all from 2011, meet with a selection of her works on paper from the past fifteen years. The juxtaposition of Sze’s installations with her prints, drawings, paper cuttings, and collages flaunts the artist’s fluidity working in both two and three dimensions and highlights the consistency of her peculiar aesthetic despite significant shifts in scale and means of production. In the installations and on paper, Sze’s spiraling vertical landscapes swarm with imagery (representational and invented) set within vertiginous and intricately latticed geographies. Any impression of chaos signaled by Sze’s whirling multiperspectival depictions of fantastic worlds, however, is calmed by the artist’s intense control and precision.

Several installations stretch from ceiling to floor, engaging the walls, corners, and, in certain cases, windows of the museum. In Random Walk Drawing (Eye Chart), 2011, a roll of delicately cut paper cascades down from the ceiling, echoing the elongated format Sze often uses to accommodate multiple perspectives on paper (a style that recalls traditional Chinese scroll painting). The artist’s consistent cadre of materials reinforces the visual coherence of her topographies, whether flat or three-dimensional. Razor blades, blue painter’s tape, string, and tape measures appear throughout both bodies of work and draw attention to the creative process. By incorporating tools and supports into her final artworks, Sze exposes how she conceives landscapes physically and metaphorically.

Moving between Sze’s works on paper and her installations affords the viewer a greater appreciation for both. The installations bring Sze’s involute drawings and intricate paper cuttings to life, offering viewers a chance to experience her otherworldly landscape on a human scale. The artist’s two-dimensional architectural imaginings, in turn, appear more viable when seen in conjunction with actual physical constructions.

— Mara Hoberman

Sanja Iveković

MOMA - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
11 West 53rd Street
December 18–March 26

Sanja Iveković, Mihaela, 2002, ink-jet print, 55 1/8 x 39 3/8".

“Is this crumpled cockamamie on the floor supposed to be art?” Sneeringly uttered by a woman at Sanja Iveković’s retrospective, these words could not be more pertinent. The cockamamie is in fact the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, endorsed by 187 nations, with the exemption of a select few, among them Iran, Sudan, and the United States (which signed but did not ratify the document). Literalizing this sanctioned disregard, the artist has strewed throughout the exhibition crushed copies of the agreement, which yield a subtle sound track of scrapes and crunches as visitors amble about, stepping on and kicking the scattered documents.

The exhibition, “Sweet Violence”—which features the artist’s videos, installations, and photomontages from the 1970s on—is perhaps best elucidated by a series of posters in which advertisements for women’s sunglasses are overlaid with quotes from women in European shelters. These accounts, which touch on topics ranging from familial neglect to marital battery, complicate simplistic narratives of male culpability. Iveković’s work always casts individuals and families as units inscribed in systems not of their own making, and indeed, several of the pieces here describe the intensification of brutality that occurred when husbands returned from war in the artist’s native Yugoslavia during the 1990s.

Works in the show critically engage representation of women in both communist and capitalist Yugoslavia, reminding us that patriarchy is one of the most rigid social structures, capable of outlasting even revolutionary turning points. Towering in the museum’s atrium is the artist’s controversial monument to Rosa Luxemburg, the Marxist theorist and activist who famously uttered: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” Iveković has similarly devoted herself to examining the insidiousness of power, which is why violence, here, is not a Hollywood bloodbath but a poster for sunglasses. When we give the exhibition the attentiveness it deserves, those shades necessarily read as cover-ups for a violence that is as private as it is public, and as brutal as it is benign.

— Sarah Lookofsky

“Big Reality”

319 SCHOLES
319 Scholes St
March 15–March 29

Oregon Painting Society, Floor Game, 2012, synthesizer, lasers, mirrors, wooden planks, rocks, sand, plants, shells, dimensions variable. Installation view

Curated by Brian Droitcour, this group show of twenty-six artists examines the reach of fantasy role-playing games in everyday life, carefully balancing geeky fandom with a critical stance. The negotiation of identity in RPGs is one of the central themes of the show, and, as Droitcour explains in the catalogue, this personal exploration within a structured system often extends to other platforms––such as social media sites. Hence, in a nod to Joseph Beuys’s well-known maxim, Droitcour declares: “Everyone is a gamer.”

Shana Moulton’s deformed 1980s-era dress Hemorrhoid Pillow Dress with Assorted Props, 2002–12, which she wears while performing in her video series “Whispering Pines,” hangs on a mannequin next to David Wightman’s comically exaggerated medieval suit Fortress of Amplitude Costume, 2008–12, a garment he uses for his fantasy-inspired heavy metal project Fortress of Amplitude. Kitschy and nostalgic, the costumes reveal how masks help become an important site for distinguishing one’s identity in a world caught up in fantasy. Nearby is Oregon Painting Society’s interactive installation Floor Game, 2012, where palette-shaped wooden planks obscure analog synthesizers that ring and buzz according to the movement of handheld conch shells. The installation comes alive during the collective’s performances: Each member dons a surreal outfit and participates in bizarre rituals. Floor Game signals the sense of magic that emerges when the real and the constructed commingle.

The portal is an element in many of the works, and as a space of traversal between the real and game worlds it attests to the close bind between fantasy and reality. Daniel Leyva’s Save Point, 2012, projects scenes from Final Fantasy and other long-playing games onto a white children’s bed. The bed is a reference to the “save point” in many games: A player can pause progress through the game by putting their avatar in bed. No longer an icon but a veritable “save point,” the bed is an entrance to the dream and game space, which are one and the same.

— Ceci Moss

Jesús Soto

GREY ART GALLERY
New York University, 100 Washington Square East
January 10–March 31

Jesús Soto, Sans titre (Étude pour une série) (Untitled [Study for a Series]), 1952–53, paint and paper on wood, 40 1/4 x 40 1/4 x 2 3/8".

A focused show featuring forty-seven works from the two-decade period after the Venezuelan artist Jesús Soto moved to Paris, this exhibition tracks Soto’s experiments with abstract painting as a lively, embodied act of perception. Soto relied on ordered matrices of Schönberg's twelve-tone system as a point of departure for early work like Sans titre (Étude pour un série) (Untitled [Study for a Series]), 1952–53, a grid of colorful indentations on wood. Playing with the surface and depth of his paintings during this period led Soto to his singular innovation: augmenting his surfaces using Plexiglas overlays, as in Luz plateada (Silver Light), 1955–56. Here the Plexiglas at once extends the painting into the space of the viewer and destabilizes the act of looking, causing the geometry of both the background and the foreground to dissolve into a dizzying array of colors and lines.

In 1957 Soto abandoned Plexiglas overlays to produce his “Vibraciones” (Vibrations) series, covering his mechanically painted lines with an improvisatory tangle of wires. At the same time Soto began the “Escrituras” (Writings) series, inscribing his painted surfaces with thin bits of metal, wire, and rods. Experimenting with the sculptural possibilities of painting, Soto added putty, wire, and wood to his pictures; or, in the case of the large-scale Mural, 1961, he covered a large black wooden surface with pipes, brooms, and other detritus salvaged from the streets of Caracas. While his Plexiglas and sculptural paintings anticipate innovations in Op art and kinetic art, pieces like El tambor (The Drum), 1963, suggest the possibilities of participatory art. Throughout the twenty years covered here, Soto was in conversation with Duchamp, Yves Klein, and Group Zero, and although he never aligned with a single group or movement, this exhibition argues for his centrality to postwar Paris.

— Lori Cole

Molly Smith

KATE WERBLE GALLERY
83 Vandam Street
March 3–April 14

Molly Smith, Sure, 2012, Hydrocal, pigment, weight, rocks, wood, 75 x 4 x 6”.

When Franz Roh coined the term magic realism in 1925, it was to herald a return to the obsessive replication of objects in Golden Age Dutch painting, particularly still lifes. It is amusing that nearly a century later, during the isolating reign of computer interface, many artists are finding solace in Roh’s desire for a sincere materiality, but through the actual objects instead of their two-dimensional likenesses.

Helen Mirra’s Minimalist displays of blankets and wooden pallets are one example of this, as is Molly Smith’s current exhibition, “Tidal,” her second at this gallery. Smith’s seven new sculptures and two works on paper (as well as an ever-changing window display of small watercolors and photographs) make up an exhibition that is dominated by raw materials. Rocks, wood, dye, muslin, metal, paper, and plaster imbue the show with a subtle, earthy palette. Tenuous arrangements and aberrant combinations provoke a range of emotive qualities for the viewer. In Sure (all works 2012), a six-foot shard from a tree that was downed during a tornado is propped upright with a Hydrocal cylinder, as if in an attempt to reimagine the wood as still living. The precariousness of this piece ignites both an anxious tension and a genuine sense of awe. Dawn is merely a taut wire strung over a gallery wall, draped with colored handmade papers and punctuated with a rock at either end. Yet the result is a wistful string of pennants that shift through lovely shades of white, red, green, and gray.

More often than not, these works reference natural phenomena, with their use of hurricane salvage and tornado debris. Smith doesn’t begin and end her practice with her own hand; instead she extends it to the realm of the elements. From the Dutch painters to the Fluxus group, artists have searched for beauty in the fleeting realm of reality, and Smith’s latest show extends this tradition with exceptional tenderness and grace.

— Ryan Steadman

Anne Truitt

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY | 523 W. 24TH STREET
523 W. 24th Street
February 4–April 14

Anne Truitt, Untitled, 1986, acrylic on paper, 30 1/4 x 23”.

“Anne Truitt: Drawings” has little to do with Anne Truitt’s sculpture, which couldn’t be better for both media. The elegantly installed retrospective of Truitt’s works on paper spotlights her career-long formal investigations, laid flat in two dimensions instead of the standard vertical three, and to dramatic effect. Made between the 1960s and ’90s, the drawings range from slight pencil lines to intense prismatic swaths of paint, the latter of which convey acts of ecstatic defilement and reveal an alter ego whose impulses Truitt never dared indulge in the presence of her august columns. 28 Dec ’62, for instance, bears visible brushstrokes, oscillating hues, and jagged lines from hurriedly deracinated tape. In these works, the occasional preciosity of Truitt’s iconic pillars takes a backseat to roving curiosity.

Three domestically inclined pencil and white acrylic drawings from 1965–66 present a link to the surprisingly figurative beginning of Truitt’s large-scale sculpture practice, First, 1961, a section of ersatz white picket fencing perhaps plucked from her suburban neighborhood in Washington, DC. A highlight within this group, 21 Nov ’62, a barely there outline of a mid-Atlantic gable, flickers into perception, bringing along with it self-assured identification and a decidedly (if understated) feminist ethos. More recent drawings, such as Untitled, 1986, with its acrid clashing of lemon and tangerine and severe composition, amplify Truitt’s prioritization of color, with form coming in a close second. Affinities and influences appear from time to time in modified forms, including Barnett Newman’s zips or Agnes Martin’s fey grids, though such gestures serve to reinforce the artist’s heightened individual sense of pleasure and disregard for the fashionable. By focusing on the lesser seen, the exhibition provides a fuller view of Truitt’s oeuvre and leaves one longing for more.

— Beau Rutland

Jimmie Durham

SWISS INSTITUTE
18 Wooster Street
March 7–April 15

View of “Maquette for a Museum of Switzerland,” 2012.

In 1984, Jimmie Durham described himself as “a Cherokee artist who strives to make Cherokee art that is considered just as universal and without limits as the art of any white man.” This challenge—to make work that reads as both personal and universal—has long been familiar to artists who’ve watched themselves or their work get marginalized. In his current show, Durham has found yet another sly, inspired solution to that very conundrum he pinpointed nearly twenty years ago and has continued to address ever since.

“Maquette for a Museum of Switzerland” takes a playful look at the nation that gave us the Red Cross and the cuckoo clock. Two squat vitrines showcase an array of Swiss cultural artifacts real and fake, from children’s-book illustrations and imitation Rolex watches to a giant, fatty sausage link. On the wall across the room, forty black-and-white images show traditional Swiss masks: an absorbing and grotesque mix of aquiline noses, lions’ manes, forehead wrinkles, and rictuses with ragged tombstones for teeth.

This show could have been a mere turning of tables—a recasting of a dominant culture as quaint and foreign—had Durham’s subject been a bigger European country that’s perhaps left a weightier mark on the course of world history, or at least our evolving but ever-excluding notions of “high art.” But Durham focuses on Switzerland: a relatively tiny, neutral nation, and one that seems to enjoy playing up its own folk traditions, judging from (if nothing else) Bruno Bischofberger’s ads on the back covers of Artforum. Is Durham’s fascination ironic? It seems not; if anything, viewers can’t help but notice the personal nature of his interest in the alpine country and specifically the folklorization of its pre-Christian art. The show’s handwritten exhibition didactics often veer into hilariously subjective prose. And the preponderance of masks seems more the result of a curator’s individualistic passion than any attempt at the broad, impartial survey one might expect from a “Museum of Switzerland.” Therein lies Durham’s art, Cherokee and universal: To the extent that he’s exhibiting himself as a curator—his interests, biases, and delight at finding common ground in foreign lands—he’s revealing a person who seems like someone we all know well.

— Dawn Chan

Pamela Rosenkranz

MIGUEL ABREU GALLERY
36 Orchard Street,
February 26–April 15

View of “Because They Try to Bore Holes,” 2012.

Pamela Rosenkranz’s New York solo debut, “Because They Try to Bore Holes,” features four freestanding hand-molded acrylic glass panels that are hardly visible, save for the subtle optical ripples they effect in the barely furnished exhibition space. Titled “As One” (all works 2012), the series at once occupies and activates the threshold between commercially available supplies and artisanal goods. Similarly courting near disappearance, the works of the show’s titular series, presented in thick white frames on the walls, offer little more for aesthetic consideration than dabs of adhesive mount on Ilford photo paper.

Two sculptures, Ultra Smooth Content (Nigerian Peony White) and (Avalanche White), consist of packaged pieces of IKEA furniture coated in Ralph Lauren house paint, serving up a modernist off-white palette that thoughtfully complements the beige tiles in the gallery space. In these works, the corporatized signature of a brand name supplants the authorial autonomy of the monochrome canvas, as made emblematic by artists such as Yves Klein. Indeed, Klein and his International Klein Blue have inspired much of Rosenkranz’s recent production. But rather than making claims for art’s transcendental qualities, Ultra Smooth Content instead equates artistic agency with a consumerist impulse. Klein once referred to his Large Blue Anthropophagy (Homage to Tennessee Williams), 1960—a canvas for which his assistants’ bodies acted as brushes with IKB paint—as irrefutable proof that flesh can survive in the realm of the immaterial. Firmly grounding this transubstantiation ritual in the context of a global market, which has liquefied distinctions between individuals and products, Rosenkranz’s recent work reminds us that human bodies, in this phase of dematerialized capital, amount to little more than traces, tenuous ripples in the austere abstractions on which they are inscribed.

— Mathieu Malouf

Bill Jenkins

LAUREL GITLEN
261 Broome Street
February 26–April 15

Bill Jenkins, Pass, 2012, vent cover, rocks, 23 1/2 x 15 1/2 x 2".

Our knowledge of the past is founded, quite directly, upon the trash heaps of history. And while archaeologists are content to dig for the cast-offs of bygone epochs to better comprehend man’s past, there are those, artist Bill Jenkins among them, who find revelation in the refuse of more contemporary origin. Though the maxim about one man’s trash may seem clichéd, the spoils of Jenkins’s first New York solo exhibition are nothing short of treasure.

In Long Ending, 2011—a piece that shares its title with the exhibition—a discarded air filter transforms a density of captured air pollutants imbedded within into an ombré wash of sooty grays; particulates of smog—far from the biblical mustard seed—here become a synecdochic representation of civilization. Meanwhile, in Pass, 2012, a disused vent cover, partially blocked by rocks, underlines the artist’s fascination with the dichotomies of rigidity and malleablity, porosity and obstruction. Elsewhere, Untitled, 2012, a rectangular hole cleaved into the gallery wall à la Gordon Matta-Clark, finds Jenkins literally cutting away at the facade of the exhibition space. In exposing the otherwise unseen physical surface beneath, Jenkins underlines the dynamic relationship between perceived and hidden realities, a tension mirrored in the interplay between the pliant strands of string and ribbons of iron used to fill the excised drywall.

Importantly, utility becomes both source and terminus for the artist’s forays, with Jenkins offering up objects that are simultaneously remnants and germinations. An exposed wire bed frame criss-crossed by snaking segments of rope, Bed with Rope and Fence, 2012, resembles from a distance the nautical stick maps of Polynesian mariners. Paradoxically, what Jenkins presents the viewer with in his reappropriations of dross are guides that, like any good seafaring map of lore, lead their beholders to rare and untold riches.

— Joseph Akel

Brody Condon

ON STELLAR RAYS
133 Orchard Street
March 4–April 15

Brody Condon, Future Gestalt, 2012, still from a color video in HD, 38 minutes 30 seconds.

“You are you, and I am I,” Fritz Perls wrote in 1969, in what became known as the Gestalt prayer, “and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.” Brody Condon is less willing to leave things to chance, having recently built performances around historical group therapy techniques at the Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In his current show, both works appear as videos. The first, Future Gestalt, 2012, makes use of Perls’s Gestalt therapy, as its exercises are inflicted on a group of five performers appearing to dwell under Tony Smith’s monumental 1967 sculpture Smoke at LACMA. Condon’s own voice is amplified, warped, and twisted as he addresses the performers, such that Smith’s sculpture appears to be part God, part therapist. (Also part artificial intelligence, and, well, part artist.) The scene recalls Condon’s Twentyfivefold Manifestation, 2008, wherein as many as eighty live-action role-players lived for three days at a time in the Sonsbeek sculpture park in the Netherlands, worshipping novel deities synthesized around the large public sculptures, often startling visitors in the process.

The second video documents LevelFive, 2010, an inspired piece of borderline madness that had thirty participants remain in character for two days in order to reenact a large-group awareness training seminar from the 1970s. Now infamous for their often deleterious effects on participants, these seminars are revisited here in pursuit of history, certainly, but Condon also asks after the limits of character, personality, and performance; can you actualize a constructed self? What happens when two people, performing as two other people, attempt to break each other down in the name of therapy? It’s never entirely clear what is going on when Condon’s performers encounter one another, but one thing is certain—it’s beautiful.

— Stephen Squibb

Frances Stark

GAVIN BROWN'S ENTERPRISE
620 Greenwich Street
March 3–April 21

Frances Stark, Nothing is enough, 2012, single-channel digital video, 14 minutes. Installation view.

MMM I DIDN’T THINK I HAD IT IN ME TO DO THIS. Frances Stark’s camsex epiphany also reflects her decision to continue exhibiting her ongoing risqué virtual fixation. “Osservate, leggete con me” (Observe, Read Along with Me), the latest exhibition in which she takes herself to task, is more of a continued self-evaluation than a sequel to her engrossing 2011 video My Best Thing, which incisively documents Stark’s online hedonistic proclivities with two Italian men. The two videos on view are relatively pared down in terms of composition, yet they more fully elaborate the underlying concerns in Stark’s oeuvre: language, the everyday, and the self.

Osservate, leggete con me, 2012, a series of nine white-on-black vignettes (think Woody Allen title cards), squarely presents the artist’s equal-parts libidinous and comic transcripts, peppered by doubt and concern. Flashing from wall to wall, the choreographed conversations flutter to a sound track of Don Giovanni’s “Catalogue Aria,” while Stark divulges her own tragicomic activities. The score ably ties together topics both flip and grave; musings on the eurozone crisis fade out with comedic timing to the antepenultimate note, then, U WANT SEE MY COCK? Another stroke of the bow: NOT VERY BIG. In the dim second gallery, Stark reconnects with one of her interlocutors from My Best Thing in Nothing is enough, 2012, the exhibition’s pinnacle of self-reflexivity. This awareness often presents itself through a variant, market-reflexivity (A MUSEUM IN LA JUST CONFIRMED THE SALE), yet slides by under the video’s overall diaristic construct.

Despite lacking physical imagery, Stark’s videos are uncomfortably veristic in unsavory detail and brevity. A sober thought regarding the problematics of diverging real and virtual lives points toward productive inquiry––PEOPLE COULD REALLY LIVE THIS WAY . . . MAYBE IT’S THE ONLY SOLUTION LEFT––and finds its terminus in an unexpected glitch: STUPID ROUTER. Disembodied cyberspace may not be as liberating as we once thought; at least Frances Stark is willing to admit it.

— Beau Rutland

Joe Brainard

TIBOR DE NAGY GALLERY
724 Fifth Avenue
March 15–April 21

Joe Brainard, ZZZZ . . . , 1977, paper, gouache, 6 x 4”.

Much like I Remember (1970), his now classic and deceptively simple book of succinct, isolated memories, Joe Brainard’s paintings and collages from the late 1960s and mid-’70s are instantly familiar and expansive. One work in “Painting the Way I Wish I Could Talk” features a string of pale green Zs rising, each bigger than the last, above La Siesta Motel. In another collage, the key in a sardine tin has been rolled back to reveal a male torso. Yet another offers two conjoined guest checks, one bearing a green-stemmed rose, the other a pink heart, creating an unexpected but suddenly obvious romance.

“Spirit” is something Brainard prized about Pop art, along with joy, though if he belonged to one particular movement, it was the New York School of poets. For all the comic book and commodity influence—from Nancy cartoons to Tareyton cigarettes—Brainard’s images are more giddy than ironic, more impromptu than polished. This year the Library of America published his collected writings; a copy is included in a vitrine here, along with scrapbooks, journals, and index cards. Brainard’s artwork bears many of the hallmarks of his writing—it is deadpan, whimsical, off-the-cuff, sincere, unpretentious, queer, funny.

“Painting is a big place,” he wrote on a sheet of green paper on view. Brainard, who died in 1994 of AIDS-related pneumonia, frequently worked on a small, intimate scale, and most of the twenty-two works on display are the size of a postcard. In one case, he has even drawn a “Mini-Art Exhibition,” featuring a tiny glove, a tattooed arm, a mug of coffee, and a comb with a broken tooth. But the spirit of the entire show is certainly large—that is to say, generous.

— Liz Brown

Jackie Saccoccio

ELEVEN RIVINGTON
11 Rivington Street
March 22–April 22

Jackie Saccoccio, Portrait (Reverse), 2012, oil and mica on linen, 84 x 72".

Jackie Saccoccio’s latest solo show is flush with color. Aquamarines and dirty browns; pale purples and rusty yellows; neon greens and ruddy reds; petal pinks and mandarin oranges are swept over enormous linen canvases, creating panoramas of zestful abstraction. In each of her six works on view, it seems that up to fifteen, even twenty different hues coexist on one plane—the paints are poured in puddles and spread in light washes, drizzled and dashed in often overlapping brushstrokes, some curvaceous and swooping, others brief, at times bone thin. Saccoccio calls each work a portrait, but figuration is nowhere to be found. Instead, her spills of pigment favor the imageless image, spotlighting color over form.

This is not to say that her paintings are nonobjective, mere decorative surfaces; rather, her willful resistance to representation—created through layers upon layers of sloppy pours—allows a dialogue to emerge among the gamut of hues, as if colors were cast as characters. In Portrait, (Rapture), 2011, azure and cerulean are set off by bubblegum pinks, lemonade yellows, and dabs of orange the shade of Crush soda; each hue pops next to the lunch-bag brown that is smeared over the greater left side of the canvas. Or take Portrait, (Hermetic), 2012: Wedges of bright white paint appear almost acerbic next to the hot lime green, a shade that seems especially racy aside dusty browns—the pigments are soaked over each other, fighting for attention. The juxtaposition of color gives rise not to portraits from which an individual countenance might appear, but to emotional environments, which become objects in themselves.

— Allese Thomson Baker

Tom Burr

BORTOLAMI
520 West 20th Street
March 7–April 26

Tom Burr, An Orange Echo, 2012, plywood, mirrored Plexiglas, used theater seats, 72 x 42.5 x 36”.

Suspended between the hard, corporate geometries of Robert Morris and Donald Judd and the pilled, worn textures of personal objects, Tom Burr’s “deep wood drive” extends the artist’s three-decade-long archaeology of Minimalist form. The show centers on his ongoing series of “Cloud Paintings,” 2011–, six-by-six-foot plywood panels cloaked in wool blankets, variously laid flat, scrunched, and distended. At once stretched across and wrapped around their supports and secured with upholstery tacks, arrayed in a drooping grid, the blankets carry obvious connotations of comfort and safety that abut impersonal iteration. In five of the “Clouds,” the plywood is stained black and the blankets, in shades of charcoal and navy, are industrially factured: tactile and tufted, yes, but also stiff and anonymous, their weave recapitulating the grid’s rigid coordinates. The sixth, however—Untitled Pink Piece, 2011—features bare plywood and a plush, pink blanket seemingly pilfered from a child’s bedroom. Like so much of Burr’s art, the work opens into a series of unresolvable tensions, the violence of tacking contravening the wool’s promise of warmth and protection.

The remaining seven works riff on forms that Burr has previously explored: Abandoned articles of clothing, an overturned chair, and vintage magazines all make appearances, each evoking human presence through its absence. Themes of blockage and obstruction are prominent, as in the floor-bound sculpture Rectangled Restraint, 2012, which consists of six closed window shutters, their surfaces garbled and obsidian in hue, piled atop a plywood base. Refusing transparent signification, Burr layers his art with unsettled characters and narratives, as if to literalize Minimalism’s concern with the spectator’s positionality (and, hence, the body) in relation to the art object. In An Orange Echo, 2012, the artist encases two sets of three used movie theater seats in a plywood shell lined with mirrored Plexiglas. Here, as in the show at large, Burr’s critique is trenchant: Minimalist aesthetics empty into a spectacle of discipline, its structures offering not a window onto the world but an endless repetition of their own image.

— Courtney Fiske

Frank Heath

SIMONE SUBAL
131 Bowery, 2nd floor
March 30–April 26

Frank Heath, Former Structure / Distribution Case (City Hall Post Office, Broadway and Park Row, New York, NY 10038), 2012, wood, paint, postage, 39 x 39 x 10”.

At the core of Derrida’s The Post Card (1980) is this key insight: Contrary to Lacan’s famous claim, a letter can always not arrive at its destination, and it’s this chance for drift that allows change—history itself—to occur. Frank Heath’s solo exhibition is a series of posts without return. First, Reruns (all works 2012), five diptychs that juxtapose clippings from the same newspaper published on the same date, only decades apart; in each pair, the precise wording of one classified appears twice, the result of Heath’s placing the advertisements anew this past February and March. Lost bags, missed connections, calls for railway mail clerks: These announcements appear doubled in old and new clippings, open inquiries untethered from time. Second, three sculptures, titled Former Structures, each bearing evidence of a sharp straight cut—the sort of rough edge that, in the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, hinted at an object’s extraction from an architectural site. In this case, each structure was sliced in two, with its missing half sent in the mail to the defunct address of a vanished institution: the New York World, the Capitol Theatre, the City Hall Post Office. With the gallery listed as their return address, the pieces are in transit, suspended between the exhibition and an anachronism, whereabouts unknown. Third, the fifty-one-minute Graffiti Report Form, which takes its cue from a line in the NYC Parks and Recreation Department’s official paperwork welcoming citizens to upload or mail in video or photography of found vandalism. The video starts plausibly enough, with Heath speaking over his POV camerawork at the entrance of Morningside Park, promising to lead his civil-servant audience to the site of fresh graffiti. Quickly, though, it strays, diverted by the park’s numerous indications of neglect; threads of amateur anthropology, historical investigation, and literary allusion intertwine. The video was submitted to the Parks Department this past January, and it’s hard to imagine how the city might process a document of such poetic excess.

Graffiti Report Form ends with a passage from Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), and Samuel Beckett’s mood of mute desolation seems fitting. There’s something unbearably lonely about these works. They call out for response but comport themselves as dead letters. Yet in their despondency, there’s drift; in normally closed systems of circulation and officialdom, spaces of possibility push open.

— Colby Chamberlain

Stan Douglas

DAVID ZWIRNER | 525 & 533 WEST 19TH STREET
525 & 533 West 19th Street
March 22–April 28

Stan Douglas, Exodus, 1975, 2012, color photograph mounted on aluminum, 71 x 101 1/2".

“I feel the same way about disco,” Hunter S. Thompson once quipped, “as I do about herpes.” Indeed, the decade of jive is often relegated to a less than Periclean position within our cultural history. However, time, as the maxim goes, is what you make of it, and for artist Stan Douglas’s latest show, “Disco Angola,” the halcyon age of disco proves to be golden.

The suite of meticulous tableaux vivants that make up this exhibition—eight large-scale color photographs in all—invite parallels with his Vancouver School cohort Jeff Wall. As with his 2011 exhibition, “Midcentury Studio,” Douglas here assumes the persona of a fictional photojournalist. This time, however, his lens is cast on the apparently disparate eras of disco mania and Angolan liberation, juxtaposing the dance floor revolution with a more incendiary one. An image showing a mélange of hedonistic revelers, Club Versailles, 1974, 2012, hangs opposite a photograph of fleeing Portuguese émigrés, Exodus, 1975, 2012: the former crowd flocking to a scene of cultural liberation, the latter fleeing from one. Elsewhere, a couple’s indifference to surrounding nightlife, seen in Two Friends, 1975, 2012, is mirrored in A Luta Continua, 1974, 2012, where the insouciant pose of a young Angolan woman stands in contrast to the stenciled call for uprising on the wall behind her.

Appropriating the photo-reportage aesthetic, Douglas’s “Disco Angola” invokes many of the criticisms leveled against photography—especially critiques lodged of the form’s claims to truthfulness via indexicality. Yet a chronicler’s proximity has never been a guarantee of verity, and distance has never disqualified efforts to record: Herodotus, the father of history, wrote of Attic endeavors at which he was not present. Profoundly, Douglas, far from rewriting history, is instead, through his images, expanding the parameters by which we perceive it. Can you dig it?

— Joseph Akel

Ron Gorchov

CHEIM & READ
547 West 25th Street
March 29–April 28

View of "Ron Gorchov," 2012.

Bowed like shields or saddles, Ron Gorchov’s canvases arrest the eye as much for the anomaly of their format as the forms they host. In every instance, the curved canvases house at their center a pair of long, rounded shapes, set off against a white, cream, or pinkish field. Some elongated and others stout, these couples conjure up everything from footprints, to beans, to microorganisms suspended in some fluid, though their flatness resists any hint of corpulence. The streaked, watery blue surface of Noli Me Tangere, 2011, recalls the staining techniques of Morris Louis, or perhaps even the late painting of Arshile Gorky, an abiding influence upon Gorchov. To be sure, the latter’s work remains more conservative in its organic allusions. The paired, vaguely biomorphic forms at the center of these paintings remain within discreet, linear boundaries. Even the consistently literary titles of Gorchov’s works—Chase Street Lounge, 2011, Artemesia, 2011, and Adonis (Spring), 2012—belie their tight-lipped, cautious distillations.

Dissimilar in size and shape, the paired red-and-dark-blue shapes in La Piva, 2012, are more striking than their white surface, and generate a formal dialogue reminiscent of Kasimir Malevich’s spare, Black Square and Red Square, 1915. By contrast, Thersites (Chastened), 2012, makes the coarse, painterly surface and concave support striking elements in their own right. If they borrow something from sculpture, Gorchov’s canvases tend to conjure optical—rather than physical—phenomena, textures, and effects (that resistance to tactility is perhaps slyly evoked in the title, Noli Me Tangere). Two exceptions here are Pegasi and Tau Seti (both 2012), each comprised of six of Gorchov’s concave surfaces, mounted to the wall such that each one overlaps the one above it, as if a row of dominos had fallen skyward. The individual canvases, alternating in color, reveal thin borders of unpainted linen at their tops (and, in the bottom-most canvas, at its base). Each of these two pieces demands attention to its parts as much as to the scalloped whole. These works point further to Gorchov’s sensitivity to painting as an object in space—one that nevertheless insists upon its status as a flattened surface, even when it curves and juts away from the wall.

— Ara H. Merjian

Valerie Hegarty

MARLBOROUGH CHELSEA
545 West 25th Street
April 5–May 5

Valerie Hegarty, Ghost Ship (Small clipper ship) with Chinese wallpaper (Flood Damage), 2012, canvas, stretcher bars, acrylic paint, foam, glue, paper, sand, dimensions variable.

Valerie Hegarty’s “Altered States” is a faux-historic collection of Ameri-ephemera that has been flooded, degraded, and more or less loved to death. The foam core replicas of replicas on view send a very clear message: What may at first seem like heavy-handed irony is in fact a humorous and tender gathering of deeply familiar objects and experiences. Take, for instance, the decapitated Washington portrait melting into his surroundings in Headless George Washington with Table (Lansdowne Portrait) (all works 2012). Tracing the co-opted contour of Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 original is at once a gleeful and vulnerable experience; in many ways, Hegarty’s pseudosacrilegious portrait is more approachable and endearing than the original.

The show’s standout, however, is startling for the amount of care infused into each barnacle that be-studs its sandy frame: Shipwrecked Armoire with Barnacles is an emaciated wardrobe standing tall in front of floor-to-ceiling windows. The view from behind the installation affords viewers a fittingly fractured glimpse of the pieces in the gallery, such as the fragmented Rug with Grass, a beautiful replica of an old-fashioned rug, shredded and studded with fake turf and imitation dirt. Flanking the rug on either side are two installations, both sections of domestic views: Ghost Ship (Small clipper ship) with Chinese wallpaper (Flood Damage) and Americana Wallpaper (Fire Damage) with Table. Here, layers of kitschy wallpaper and simulated linoleum or parquet flooring appear as citizens of a culture that has utterly lost its glamour and yet somehow retained its glory.

— Chloé Rossetti

Harry Dodge

WALLSPACE
619 West 27th Street
March 31–May 5

Harry Dodge, Identity Amplitude or Separately Investigable Problems, 2011, concrete, stump, tarp, urethane resin, paint, 17 x 9 x 9".

UrbanDictionary.com defines frowntown as a “fictional place were [sic] nobody is happy and nothing is pleasant.” A neologism that makes an affect into a location, frowntown is also a childish rhyme, a singsongy absurdity that seems to undercut its grim meaning. Harry Dodge’s “Frowntown” pushes this adolescent mix of humor and sadness to the breaking point by exploiting gaps between the sound of words and their (invented) meaning in a selection of drawings and sculptures bookended by two excellent films.

The first film, Unkillable (all works cited, 2011), is an approximately twenty-minute monologue performed by Dodge wearing a lumpy gray mask and a cube that seems to have lodged in his skull like a meteorite. Assuming the role of aspiring film director, the masked figure sits on a cheap couch and describes, shot by shot and in gory physical and visual detail, a film about adultery and revenge. A cinematic version of Paul McCarthy’s Painter, 1995, Dodge’s director deflates the auteur by asking us to access our own inner visions of erotic destruction, leaving us to fill in the particulars of sexual preference and gender identity that are usually inscribed in filmmaking and viewing.

The overflowing selection of drawings likewise exercises a masterful control over multiplicity as cartoons meet classified ads meet monochrome abstractions. In contrast, his sculptures direct their polymorphous semiotics through painterly assemblages of household items with erotic, sinister, and organic overtones. Identity Amplitude or Separately Investigable Problems is a cylinder with a domed top standing seventeen inches high, painted lipstick red on one side and mustard gold on the other: an oversize dildo-hammer-mushroom. This mash-up of masculine signifiers and regressive desires acquires greater dimension in the second film, Fred Can Never Be Called Bald, a nearly forty-minute montage that intercuts grainy YouTube videos of Jackass-style pranks and science experiments with poetic intertitles of dictionary definitions of words like conversion and continuum. What kinds of connections, Dodge seems to ask, would you like to make?

— Megan Heuer

Brian Ulrich

JULIE SAUL GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, Sixth Floor
March 22–May 5

Brian Ulrich, Circuit City, 2010, color photograph, 24 x 20”.

Brian Ulrich’s latest exhibition runs Pop backward through its sausage machine. The ten photographs on view dismantle chunks of advertising—from the fluorescent words that announce discounts to the typologies of chain retailers’ buildings—and reinsert them back into their (often bleak) physical geographies. This juxtaposition highlights the hard times for which there is no suitable expression in ad jargon, wrestling the graphics away from the imperative of sales and back into the entropy of all matter.

The photographs’ irony is perhaps oversold by the show’s title, “Is This Place Great or What: Artifacts and Photographs,” but mostly it arises from, rather than foregrounding, the places in the pictures. In Powerhouse Gym, 2008, for instance, a window is painted with a huge underlined YES. But behind its hot tangerine affirmation and immediacy, one glimpses only an empty room. Ulrich also presents several works from his “Dark Stores” series, 2008–11: here, branches of Circuit City that have been replaced by scrappier businesses or abandoned altogether. (One new occupant, “Big Thrift,” looks like a hermit crab only recently installed in his found shell.)

Circuit City’s electrical plug–shaped facade is a version of what Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown labeled “duck” architecture—the American compression of advertising and roadside structure of which a duck-shaped stand hawking duck eggs is the classic example. Thanks to the uniform design of national franchises, this model of building became deaf to its own physicality. The peculiar fragility of the depopulated concrete mammoths in Ulrich’s photographs suggests that symbols or appliqués are not (despite how inured we may have become to them) as disposable as their abstract marketing campaigns. They do not always lapse with the trademarks they promote. The “merely” decorative quality of commercial surfaces cannot be completely separated from its material embodiment. No matter how hermetically sealed the sign, given time, birds will nest.

— Zachary Sachs

Mira Schor

MARVELLI GALLERY
526 West 26th Street, Second Floor
March 29–May 5

View of “Voice and Speech,” 2012.

Since the late 1970s, Mira Schor has integrated text into works that interrogate the formal and theoretical concerns of artistic production. Her current show could be a summation of this long-term project, as the paintings and drawings on view metaphorically depict transitions from thought to action, and from process to product. In many of the works, figures are seen reclining in space as if caught in reverie. Often the figure holds a book, which underscores the scholarly, meditative nature of the moment captured. Rendered in loosely drawn layers of lines, these barely-there surrogates for the artist are situated between words—such as VOICE and SPEECH, as well as THE SELF, THE WORK, and THE WORLD—in interconnected shapes suggesting the thought process.

The feminist concerns that so critically inform Schor’s output manifest most clearly in a small group of paintings that transfer the exhibition’s overarching theme of interiority to a broader social space and reinforce a connection between the personal and the political. The Dreams of All of Us (all works cited, 2012) shows a sleeping figure surrounded by the words of the title. In this instance, a fusion of individual and community implies the possibility of enacting social transformation, and this bond reinforces the importance of collectivity and empowerment within Schor’s practice. The work is hung alongside three others of identical size and similar composition; these four pieces, taken together, can be seen as a sequential progression into and out of darkness that culminates with the final yellow work, This Is the Future. In this work, the shapes that held words in the first painting have become incandescent and illuminate the awakened figure who now reads a book while assuming the reclining position featured in other paintings. The sequence resembles a summation of the political concerns in Schor’s oeuvre, namely the individual as an ideal site for the germination of resistance.

— Britany Salsbury

Virginia Overton

THE KITCHEN
512 West 19th Street
March 21–May 6

Virginia Overton, Untitled (pedestals), 2012, wood, paint, 56 x 144 x 33".

Given free reign of the Kitchen for her solo exhibition, Virginia Overton presents a suite of pithy post-Minimalist sculptural installations that deftly repurpose various salvaged building materials found on-site. Monumental yet tentative, Overton’s understated constructions pulse with tension between careful design and random accident; they are site-specific without being limited to or by it.

Held in place by a bracket at each end, a black steel pipe diagonally bisects a wall in Untitled (schedule 40) (all works cited, 2012). While the subtitle refers to a thickness standard for pipes and not a tax form, the work reads as an erased or censored Dan Flavin, whose use of fluorescent tube fixtures Overton has referenced in past work. Untitled (light) consists of a bare lightbulb affixed to the underside of one end of a long, perfectly horizontal plank dangling about four feet off the floor, as if a sliver of ceiling had just fallen. The plank hangs from a steel wire attached off-center, and the resulting imbalance is offset by some strategically placed wood, yielding a gritty but charming DIY Alexander Calder. In Untitled (pedestals), eight pedestals of varying heights, tightly wedged in a row between gallery walls, levitate, objects usually used to elevate cheekily elevated themselves. Nearby, in Untitled (2x4 floor), salvaged two-by-fours, some black, others splashed with red, are carefully laid out in rows to form an uneven and unevenly patterned wooden floor.

Undeniably elegant, Overton’s arrangements have a literalness that deflects attention away from structure and form and onto her humble materials, emphasizing their prior use-value as well as the traces of time and history registered on their well-worn surfaces. This effect is somewhat amplified by her most subtle but effective maneuver: a series of powerful floodlights in a perimeter space between the gallery walls and the surrounding architecture. Aimed at the ceiling, the lights reveal a dense unruly crisscross of pipes, ducts, cables, and lighting rigs normally hidden from view, thus recasting the gallery as another stage, a constructed space where performances, albeit with objects and images, are orchestrated. Foregrounding the messy technological, architectural, material, and historical specificities of the performance venue, Overton’s gesture challenges the ideology of the pristine white cube as neutral and timeless.

— Murtaza Vali

Anne Collier

ANTON KERN GALLERY
532 West 20th Street
April 5–May 12

Anne Collier, Veterans Day (Nudes, 1972 Appointment Calendar, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Edward Weston), 2011, color photograph, 50 3/4 x 64 5/8”.

Anne Collier’s photographs traffic in calculated obsolescence, their subtle deconstructions steeped in 1970s hues. Her latest show comprises nineteen pictures of pictures in print ephemera—magazines, books, album covers, and postcards—all level against a nondescript, off-white ground and shot with forensic cool. Her austere, self-evident technique counters the worn, vintage quality of the found objects she so deliberately curates: artifacts from an age when photographs were still tethered to paper.

As is frequently the case with Collier’s work, representations of women and the gaze are foremost in this show. In Woman with Cameras #1 and #2, both 2012, Collier photographs double-page spreads for now-defunct Asahi Optical cameras, culled from a 1980s-era magazine. The ads feature a naked woman, all torso and legs, her body strategically overlaid with cameras: One hovers just below her nipple; another abuts the shadowed V of her sex. Reminiscent of Richard Hamilton’s $he, 1958–61, the conflation of fetish, commodity, and female body is here explicit, the model’s organic contours echoing the camera’s mechanical curves. The copy belabors these grotesque conjunctions (women-object, camera-phallus) to the point of absurdity, proclaiming CONTAX RTS SPELLS SEX and PENTAX K2: A SHARP NEW BAYONET. Hedged by multiple frames—the faded magazine, the neutral backdrop, and the glass pane—Collier’s restaging achieves an emphatic, and necessary, distance.

The aesthetic pleasure of looking at flesh subtends many of Collier’s works, unsettling us through the ease of our complicity with the camera’s gaze. Veterans Day (Nudes, 1972 Appointment Calendar, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Edward Weston), 2011, captures a MoMA appointment calendar decorated with the smooth, flawless torso of a 1926 Edward Weston nude, a photograph famously claimed by Sherrie Levine in her Untitled (After Edward Weston), 1981. Rephotographing a rephotograph, here distributed in the most banal of forms, Collier raises questions about the readymade image, then leaves her work open to a multiplicity of answers.

— Courtney Fiske

Darren Bader

MOMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue
January 29–May 14

View of “Images,” 2012.

One of the cats hid under the couch. But the sweet black-and-white one cuddled and played. They were up for adoption from the SaveKitty Foundation of Queens, New York, and they were sculptures by Darren Bader. “Each cat-adopter will get an artwork,” reads his text on the wall. “If you don’t want your cat to be an artwork, I won’t force it on you!” Throughout his show, “Images,” the metabolic processes of eating, digestion, growth, and death—vividly present in the animals and plants on display—nourish Conceptualist gestures of naming and framing. (The title of one cat is given as “orangutan flesh and Vitamin Water”; the other is a “reincarnation of Ronald Reagan.”) Organic matter has appeared in other artists’ work in the form of the performing body, or as the subject of a parascientific experiment. But those are exceptional cases; in making life art, they distance viewers from that life. Bader just shows us the ravenous inclusivity of art’s ecology of signs—arguably, he even expands it—while giving a shrug that makes it seem both ordinary and excitingly, reachably ripe.

A few doors down from the cats, an iguana named Buddy lounges in a big heated cage. “Green iguanas like this guy here need specific environmental conditions to be healthy,” reads another of Bader’s texts. The guileless generalizing of encyclopedia prose stumbles on familiar references to this one beast. Buddy illustrates an idea and is the singular cause for its communication—an image of an iguana that is also an iguana. A label announces another gallery’s contents as “chicken burrito / beef burrito,” but you’re met instead by sunlight and music. The instrumental intro to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” loops in a jangly carousel, wanting to spin out into the full song. The room feels full of possibility. The burritos are in the corner, slouched on the windowsill. They look almost good enough to eat.

— Brian Droitcour

Mary Ellen Carroll

THIRD STREAMING
10 Greene Street, 2nd Floor
March 23–May 19

Mary Ellen Carroll, Federal (detail), 2003, twenty-four color photographs, each 20 x 24”.

It is unclear what constitutes the public sphere in the United States—and even more so in Los Angeles. Apparently engaged in investigating this question, Mary Ellen Carroll’s current solo show presents Kruder and Dorfmeister, 1999–2000, Polaroids of every public library (at the time) in LA. The pictures are small, not always sharp, and black-and-white, thereby creating a formal conversation with the buildings themselves, which are also slight, forlorn, and generally rather unremarkable. Thus these structures are at pains to represent ideas of the public good out of which they were ostensibly cast.

Also on view is Federal, 2003, twenty-four photographs drawn from an eponymous film that was recently screened at the Museum of the Moving Image. The work takes as its subject the Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard, a hulking mass that houses multiple government offices, including the FBI. Carroll filmed the structure from both the front and the back during a twenty-four-hour period. A paper trail of documents and letters also on display underlines the difficulty of capturing such an edifice in the aftermath of 9/11.

Kruder and Dorfmeister is undoubtedly in dialogue with Ed Ruscha’s serialized LA projects, such as Twentysix Gas Stations, 1962, and Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966. Ruscha’s work suggests that such spaces—where strangers momentarily coexist on private ground—constitute a particularly American take on the public sphere. Given that many of the libraries Carroll documented probably existed during the 1960s, the series comes to function like a more properly public addendum to those iconic enumerations that have since become synonymous with space in Los Angeles. Similarly, Federal seems an interpretive remake of Andy Warhol’s Empire, 1964. But instead of focusing on a famed tourist attraction, Carroll’s film and photographs image an unexceptional structure—an actual concretion of state power erected in 1969, empire at its most banal. At a time when public financing is being drained from public services but funding for government security operations remains flush, it is worth pondering what “public” means in the US today. Perhaps an answer is to be found in the nexus proposed by this exhibition: somewhere between the library and the FBI office.

— Sarah Lookofsky

Hunter Reynolds

P.P.O.W
535 West 22nd Street, Third Floor
April 19–May 19

View of “Butur,” 2012.

For nearly three decades, Hunter Reynolds has explored issues of survival, death, and mourning in his work, taking special interest in rituals that address mortality and transformative rejuvenation. Recently he has performed shamanistic fire ceremonies on a sacred Mohawk site in upstate New York. Among felled trees adorned with glitter, beads, and bangles, talismanic offerings are ritualistically burned during these events. The charred pieces that survive have been assembled for Reynolds’s current exhibition, “Butur,” as totems, readorned with glitter, and some carved in a frantic motion, before being shellacked and anthropomorphically stacked.

Butur, Mongolian for “cocoon,” is the title of the central totem, which is surrounded by three smaller totems (all 2011). A 2012 video titled Fire Glitter Totem reveals their joyous and ecstatic creation. In the transfixing eighteen-minute video, the community standing around the bonfire is digitally doubled and multiplied by a mirroring effect, appearing expansive and at times integrated into the conflagration. Ash taken from the smoldering pits is used as a foundation for “masks,” which are made from folding and doubling paint-encrusted glitter like a Rorschach blot. Each mask is named for the constellation under which the ash was burned. Staking a history on the fragility of the body, Reynolds explores mortality in an exultant way, nurturing a congregation around the fire and then transporting that energy into the gallery, where the rich colors of vibrant totemic forms populate a new assembly.

— Kathleen Madden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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