“Evidence of the Paranormal”

KLAUS VON NICHTSSAGEND GALLERY
438 Union Avenue at Metropolitan
November 20–January 10

View of “Evidence of the Paranormal,” 2009. From left: Per Martensson, Versions (untitled #93), 2009, Versions (untitled #91), 2009, and Versions (untitled #92), 2009; Luca Trevisani, The Weaving Constellation, 2005–; Marianne Vierø, Room No 18, 2007; and Becky Beasley, A Storage Space (LBG/Eccentric Spaces), 2009.

Charles and Ray Eames aren’t often associated with the otherworldly; rather, the influential designers are customarily linked to practical—if inspired—rationalism. In curator Chris Sharp’s elegant, teasing group show, however, the famous couple find themselves in unprecedented dialogue with the occult. The Eames’s short film Blacktop, a Story of the Washing of a School Play Yard, 1952, a poetic, formal observation of the flow of soapy water over dark asphalt, is here lent a spooky vibe, swirling bubbles now suggesting the spectral goop of ectoplasm. Similarly, Per Martensson’s small, precise paintings of vacant gallery interiors are recontextualized as images of the invisible, of earthly spaces colonized by ethereal spirits. But as Sharp does not hesitate to remind us, his is an exhibition of “questionable import, doubtful veracity, and possibly misleading intentions.” What he presents may be less, more, or even—strangest of all—exactly what meets the eye.

That the show features work by artists of such wildly diverse backgrounds provides one clue to what might really be happening here. In suggesting that Becky Beasley’s mute wedge of wood and glass has something in common with Luca Trevisani’s diagrammatic balloon cluster or Goran Petercol’s linear sculptural intervention, Sharp aims not to out their makers as secret ghost-busters, but rather to underscore that meaning itself is a quarry—one just as captivating, and just as elusive, as the supernatural. As Marianne Vierø’s photographs of rearranged hotel furniture and Will Yackulic’s painted, collaged, and typewritten vortex on paper also demonstrate, formal experiment can be stranger than anything consigned to the X-Files.

— Michael Wilson

“Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture”

THE KITCHEN
512 West 19th Street
November 13–January 16

View of “Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture,” 2009. Background from left: Patricia Treib, Untitled (Pages), 2009; Alex Hubbard, How to Smoke on a Plane (RF7), 2009; Jessica Dickinson, Here, 2008–2009. Foreground: Polly Apfelbaum, Bones, 2009.

“Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture” makes an important proposition. It goes like this: Arguably the two key artistic inventions of the twentieth century are abstraction and the readymade. Abstraction was by turns utopian and expressive, purporting to withdraw from painting the burdens of history or to channel a pure emotional charge. The readymade smuggled the everyday into art, a stealth move that illuminated and unsettled its linguistic, legal, and institutional supports. The two inventions have on occasion converged—see: Johns, Jasper—but like oil and water remained distinct. In the twenty-first century, however, artists have begun to treat the history of abstraction itself as a catalogue of styles open to appropriation. In short, the readymade devoured abstraction whole.

This argument commands attention given the many compelling artists whom curator Debra Singer corrals into it—Jutta Koether, Seth Price, Cheyney Thompson, and R. H. Quaytman, to name a few—but it also invites ambivalence. Thus merged, abstraction and the readymade risk canceling out each other’s legacies. The secondhand status of a readymade sunders abstraction from its aspirational and emotive content, whereas the uninflected appearance of an abstract painting curbs the readymade’s penchant for mischief. (To this day, nothing accommodates the definition of “art” so comfortably as stretched canvas.) Hung together in this context, the works dangle precipitously over a conveyor belt of art as art as art—the endless concatenation of an emptied category. Singer raises the stakes by forgoing wall texts for the individual works, leaving the conceptual maneuvers that differentiate them up to the viewer’s astute deduction or prior knowledge.

The participating artists’ larger bodies of work complicate this account, but the exhibition nevertheless demands reckoning. Either it restricts to a disheartening extent what painting today can say and how it can function or it bolsters confidence in a still defensible belief: that artists are at their most canny and resourceful when backed—or painted—into a corner.

— Colby Chamberlain

“Dress Codes”

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

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

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

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

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

— Glen Helfand

Agnes Denes

LESLIE TONKONOW ARTWORKS + PROJECTS
535 West 22nd Street
October 29–January 23

Agnes Denes, Human Dust, 1969, black-and-white photograph, 8 x 10".

Agnes Denes’s photographs are independently evocative, elegant compositions, yet they also serve to document a complex series of philosophical inquiries. The rigorous spiritual underpinnings of her projects are collected in the artist’s 2008 book, The Human Argument. In the project “Study of Dust (An Investigation Involving the Philosophy of Change),” Denes reads man through his bones, as a set of statistics, and from the viewpoint of the universe, all connected by the binding force of dust. Accordingly, her Human Dust photographs from 1969 portray stark, textured piles of calcified human remains arranged in pyramids, crisp images that formally evoke the scatter art of Robert Morris, Richard Serra, and other contemporaries. An accompanying text stands alongside a composite of twenty-eight of these haunting, sepia-toned, pseudo-scientific photographs, suggesting statistics’ incapacity to measure a life. In addition to the photographs, this exhibition includes intricate geometric diagrams that are at once earnest explorations of the human condition and parodies of logic’s inability to codify the human experience.

Denes collapses spiritual impulses and ecological concerns in Rice/Tree/Burial, first enacted in 1968 and staged more elaborately in 1977, wherein she performs and documents the symbolic acts of burying writing, chaining trees, and planting rice at a deliberately chosen site. The earlier series consists of eight small photographs, alternating images of the artist and the nature with which she interacts. Unlike the first iteration of the project, the 1977 series offers discrete groupings of dispersed acts: close-ups, landscapes, and other images of Denes and her assistants performing the piece’s rituals.

The most colorful photographs in the exhibition, Wheatfield—A Confrontation, offer documentation from a Public Art Fund project wherein Denes planted two acres that resulted in a harvest of over one thousand pounds of wheat in the Battery Park Landfill (now Battery Park City) in 1982. These are bright, saturated images, containing blue skies, green grass, and golden wheat. The aerial view of the piece distills the power of Denes’s cinematic eye, offering a colorful, textured set of appealing abstract shapes that are only freighted with meaning when contextualized within Denes’s philosophy and practice.

— Lori Cole

Alighiero e Boetti

GLADSTONE GALLERY
515 West 24 Street, 530 West 21 Street
November 7–January 23

Alighiero e Boetti, Mappa, 1990, embroidery on cotton, 48 x 86 1/4".

When critic and curator Germano Celant chose “nomadism” as a conceptual linchpin that united the sensibilities of disparate Arte Povera figures, he must have had Alighiero e Boetti’s maps in mind. For in addition to rendering the world at large for many decades, the maps—handmade by Afghan craftswomen—hail from a world far beyond the galleries of Milan or Turin. In creating the first retrospective dedicated exclusively to Boetti’s maps, Gladstone Gallery reunites a great number of the works for which the artist is best known.

That reputation is based not on Boetti’s own manual execution, but rather on the conceptual and material framework under which the works were executed. Beginning in 1971, the artist commissioned women in Afghanistan to embroider the works according to his specifications. His relationship with the women developed over decades, even when these individuals became refugees in Pakistan after 1979. The maps, which range in size but not scale, render each country with its respective flag cropped into the shape of its topographical boundaries, thereby playing with signifying systems through a traditional medium. Some of the characteristics that obliquely inform Arte Povera and its related practices—process, seriality, and a use of unlikely materials, for example—appear in the grouping of the maps, extended over time.

Considering the consistent serial nature of the cartographies, subtle variations emerge only after sustained scrutiny and comparisons. A larger, more recent map reveals not the Soviet hammer and sickle but the tricolor of the Russian flag. Aside from the varying shades of their oceans—from light blues to navy, purple, and pink—the most patent differences among the maps are their respective border texts, which alternate between Italian and Dari script. The border of each map contains not only Boetti’s enigmatic aphorisms but also local men’s decrees about jihad and the status of Afghan refugees. What in all probability seemed to the artist a far-flung project in an unlikely setting has proved a timely, if oblique, prism for geopolitics—first, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (which shifted the maps’ production to Pakistan) and, more recently, in light of the military activities that continue to choke the region.

— Ara H. Merjian

“Frottage”

MIGUEL ABREU GALLERY
36 Orchard Street,
November 22–January 23

Sam Lewitt, Natural History, 2009, collage, 23 x 35”.

Leave it to Max Ernst to exploit the dual meanings of the word frottage by coupling artistic production and illicit sex: On holiday in 1925, Ernst was attracted to the worn floorboards of his pension. He remembered how, in his youth, shadows on a wooden panel near his bed triggered fantastic conjectures—mysterious creatures a sleepless child might imagine in the dim light of half sleep. Ernst made a rubbing of the boards and was struck by the ambiguous forms friction produced. “Images superimposed,” he recalled, “with the persistence and rapidity characteristic of amorous memories.”

Revisiting Ernst’s epiphany, in this exhibition curator Alex Kitnick has brought together a folio of thirty-four prints of Ernst’s frottages, rubbings by the midcentury French poet Henri Michaux, and works that play with frottage techniques by contemporary artists including John Kelsey, Richard Hawkins, Melanie Gilligan, and Sam Lewitt.

Ernst excelled at frottage by combining seemingly random denotative traces with abstract patterns that invite figurative associations, often achieved through carefully adulterated drawings. Lewitt sidesteps the precedent of Ernst’s draftsmanship by faking frottage. In Natural History, 2009, Lewitt creates a mock newspaper layout, complete with taped-up jewelry ads in acetate film, a manipulated text about Iceland’s tourism and its recent financial crisis, and illustrations of “Ancient Chinese Coinage.” Adjacent to this doctored ad is a series of Lewitt’s own drawings of previous frottages of coins dating from 700 BCE. Both the Iceland ad and the replica frottages are not what they appear to be. For Ernst and Lewitt, frottage is a record of an absent object, a cipher in which the presumed authenticity of the index has ambiguous effects.

— Eva Díaz

Maximilian Toth

FREDERICKS & FREISER GALLERY
536 West 24th Street
December 10–January 30

Maximilian Toth, Red Rover, 2009, graphite, grease pencil, oil paint, and charcoal on canvas, 90 x 89 1/2".

The large-scale works of Maximilian Toth seem inspired by Larry Clark; like the iconic filmmaker and photographer, Toth focuses on ambiguous interactions among suburban boys who hover on the brink of adolescence and adulthood. Toth depicts these figures in the midst of the simultaneously awkward, provisional, and masculine activities characteristic of their age, from sports to house parties. Each work is executed in a sketchy technique evocative of transience and uncertainty, which results in a sense of generalization, as it becomes increasingly difficult—and decreasingly necessary—to discern individuality among the boys. As they blur into one another and into the actions in which they engage, the teenagers are defined not by who they are but rather according to that of which they are a part.

Red Rover, 2009, for instance, shows a group engaged in a conflict that appears as much like a concert mosh pit as the classically violent playground game. Individual figures are rendered in white outlines against a stark black background, contributing a sense of impermanence. Beyond one boy with a pained facial expression, the group forms a largely indiscernible mass as bodies intertwine until only gestures and details, such as the logos on their shoes and shirts, are identifiable. This ambiguously collective portrayal illuminates the transience of adolescence and alludes to the universality of both the aggression and the malaise that inevitably define these years.

— Britany Salsbury

Marie Lorenz

JACK HANLEY GALLERY
136 Watts
January 2–January 31

Marie Lorenz, Capsize, 2009, still from a color video, 7 minutes.

The mythic narratives pullulating from Marie Lorenz’s ongoing project The Tide and Current Taxi are chillingly evinced in Capsize, 2009, a video at the heart of her first solo exhibition in New York. Lorenz launched the “taxi” in 2005, ferrying passengers around New York City’s waterways in a small, homemade plywood boat. During its fabled first voyage, the vessel sank in the East River, leaving the artist and her passenger to swim to shore. Her latest video, made while Lorenz was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, begins in media res, with the artist already in the water after a boat has capsized. Impressively, she recorded the event while holding a camera in her mouth for a riveting seven minutes. It’s hard to discern whether she’s navigating toward or away from the boat––but that point seems moot anyway, as incandescent washes of blue and green produce entrancing, lithe abstractions, diluting her heavy panting.

The remains of that vessel (a few broken slabs of wood) are rendered in a large rubbing and are accompanied by several other works on paper that recall the dizzying effect of the video. A few graphic rubbings of whirlpools were created on wood Lorenz later used to construct another boat that is installed, perhaps too obviously, in the middle of the gallery, while four collographs made with flattened toy boats suggest tropes of entropy and reduction. That Lorenz’s deeply romantic project embraces failure and risk, and acknowledges these as essential components of romanticism itself, is reason enough to follow her wherever the waters might take her.

— Lauren O’Neill-Butler

“Ecstatic Resistance”

X INITIATIVE
548 W 22nd Street
November 21–February 1

Sharon Hayes, Yard (Sign) after Allan Kaprow, 2009, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

In the mid-1970s, theorists such as Laura Mulvey and artists including Mary Kelly argued that visual pleasure had to be promptly dismantled. However, in some contemporary art practices informed by feminism—particularly those aligned with queer politics—the concept operates as a liberatory force. Curated by Emily Roysdon, this group exhibition foregrounds works that motivate desire and transgression as strategies to engender radical forms of identification and collective action.

Videos by Jeanine Oleson and Rosa Barba and photographs collaged by A. L. Steiner subvert the age-old alignment of the female body with nature by investing this mythologized relationship with highly contentious issues of national identity. In Yael Bartana’s video, Mary Koszmary, 2007, leftist author and politician Slawomir Sierakowski, speaking in an abandoned Warsaw stadium, calls for the return of Polish Jews to Poland. Within the American context, Sharon Hayes’s Yard (Sign) after Allan Kaprow, 2009, is a field of (what seem to be) stolen front-lawn campaign and protest signs, which assert the demands of their missing speakers. Here, the implied individual body is inextricable from a collectivity that is often uneven and internally contested.

The exhibition poses fearless questions—succinctly, trenchantly, even elegantly—about the limits and possibilities of a politics of representation. It asks: Does art serve as one of the last forms in which political demands can be acknowledged? If so, at what point might we inadvertently put too much pressure on the artwork to do the “impossible” (as Roysdon suggests), to do the work otherwise done in the street and in positions of power?

— Jordan Troeller

Mark Dion

TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY
521 West 21st Street
January 9–February 6

Mark Dion, Travels of William Bartram Reconsidered (alligator cabinet), 2008, found alligators in various media, painted wood and glass cabinet, framed William Bartram reproduction, 73 x 13 x 39 1/2".

The largest reptile in North America, the male alligator, can grow to nearly eighteen feet and exceed one thousand pounds. In his latest exhibition, the Pennsylvania-based artist Mark Dion presents a diminutive, denatured image of the swamp king—as a grinning ceramic thermometer or glittering plastic key chain. Dion’s congregation of gator kitsch is part of an impressive trove of curios made and gathered during an extended adventure through the South. With his incisive archaeological approach, the artist obscures the lines between amateur, expert, and imposter, examining accepted principles of collecting, organizing, and displaying information.

Using original drawings and journals, Dion approximated the pioneering expedition of William Bartram, a Quaker naturalist who famously studied the region’s flora, fauna, and Native American populations in the 1770s. The artist catalogues examples of the first two with watercolor postcards, pressed plants on tea-stained papers, and plentiful jars of seedpods and critters. The native populations also haunt the exhibition via a selection of unopened packages, mailed along with the other objects to Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, where the project debuted. Given Dion’s long-standing interest in the aesthetics of intolerance, the boxes—stamped HATE ARCHIVE and DO NOT OPEN—likely contain artifacts of bigotry and abuse. Less than sixty years after Bartram’s travels, many of the area’s Native Americans were forcibly removed; this is not to speak of the sordid history of slavery and racism in the region. In “reconsidering” the route more than two centuries later, Dion maps the persistence of nature and culture, but it’s his performative sense of discovery that takes viewers along for the journey.

— Cameron Shaw

Skyler Brickley

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

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

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

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

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

— Ara H. Merjian

Marlo Pascual

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

View of “Marlo Pascual,” 2010.

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

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

— Naomi Fry

Cornelia Parker

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

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

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

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

— Cameron Shaw

“Vertically Integrated Manufacturing”

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

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

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

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

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

— Jordan Troeller

Markus Schinwald

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

View of “Markus Schinwald,” 2010.

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

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

— Britany Salsbury

Daniel Bozhkov

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

View of “Daniel Bozhkov,” 2009.

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

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

— Jess Wilcox

PROW

ART IN GENERAL
79 Walker Street
January 22–March 20

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

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

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

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

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

— Eva Díaz

Pablo Bronstein

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

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

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

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

— Brian Droitcour