Yigal Ozeri

MIKE WEISS GALLERY
520 West 24th Street
September 10–October 24

Yigal Ozeri, Untitled; Jana and Jessica in the Field, 2009, oil on paper, 42 x 60".

Taking a page from Carl Jung’s theories on the feminine “anima,” Yigal Ozeri approaches realism as a means to project his own thoughts into the interior lives of several young women. In a recent interview, he stated that he befriended the women depicted in his works because they live off the grid, and his fascination with the substance of their lives enticed him to portray a “new generation.” As problematic as Ozeri’s psychological transposition into the minds of his subjects may seem, the technical prowess in his intricate paintings occasionally mitigates the overt conceptual faults of his project. Still, from a distance, Ozeri’s works on paper appear too familiar. They mimic the look of soft-core porn images of female nudes gallivanting through nature, as well as Justine Kurland’s earnest photographs of young girls as bathers, first seen in the 1999 group show “Another Girl, Another Planet.” While Kurland’s images posit a slightly Arcadian freedom from the travails of maturing from girlhood to womanhood, Ozeri’s paintings feel closer to the model-as-muse paradigm, where obsession with a young, albeit atypical, female is portrayed for consumption.

If one is able to temporarily forgive the failures of Ozeri’s subject, close examination of his paintings reveal sensitive and sometimes beautiful renderings of light effects and physical surfaces. Still, the Andrew Wyeth–like references, as well as the digital sources Ozeri manipulates to create his art, ultimately undercut the sense of knowing these women. The artist’s attachment to a photographic notion of “reality” does not make his subjects more particular, just more anonymous.

— Matthew Bourbon

Alex Bag

ELIZABETH DEE GALLERY
545 West 20th Street
September 17–October 24

Alex Bag, Reality Tunnel Vision (Medieval Grillin’ A’Field, version 1), 2009, still from a color video, 15 minutes 40 seconds.

What an Alex Bag show lacks in sense, it makes up for in dedication. Earlier this year, the New York–based artist converted the Whitney Museum’s lobby gallery into a psychedelic rumpus room. In her latest exhibition, the maven of make-believe continues her satiric, lo-fi assault by tackling the goliath of brain decay—reality television. She has created a rambling installation that features the requisite performance video but also wispy drawings and a shoddily installed, woodsy photomural. With a hefty dose of dead foliage, the effect is equal parts enchanted forest and chintzy pandemonium; a bewildering mix of real, unreal, and surreal, which is Bag at her best.

The five drawings on view reference screen grabs from reality-competition programs including Charm School and Rock of Love 2. At the corner of one work, Bag has scrawled the description CUNT DESCENDING A STAIRCASE, recalling Duchamp’s famous Nude and its trajectory from scandal to cultural standard. For the video, the artist poses as the goofy necromancer-cum-host of an imagined medieval cooking program. With predictable zeal and astonishing facial dexterity, she giddily dispenses ludicrous recipes, occult histories, and psychobabble. The parody takes a turn for the meta when she eats a magic concoction, which alters her appearance and sends her into a drug-addled haze (and a Blockbuster Video store). For an instant, Bag, who ultimately dictates the terms of her self-transformations, seems to unwittingly morph before the viewer’s eyes. The moment undermines the conditions of production—offering a flash of clarity on the constructions of reality.

— Cameron Shaw

Nicolai Howalt

BRUCE SILVERSTEIN
535 West 24th Street
September 9–October 24

Nicolai Howalt, Car Crash Studies, Untitled #1, 2009, color photograph, 71 x 86 1/2".

Nicolai Howalt’s 2009 photographic series “Car Crash Studies” is shockingly vivid and startlingly poetic. His images of cars wrecked in severe accidents, many presumably fatal, examine the horror of high-speed collision from a variety of perspectives. Close-ups of dented and scratched sheet metal are initially disorienting—the photographs’ large formats and tight crops make it impossible to identify which part of the car is on display. Jagged scratches, shiny reflections, and crude crumples rhythmically punctuate saturated metallic hues in these unnervingly aestheticized abstractions.

Other works in the series take another step back from the wreckage and revel in the details—some gruesome, others poignant—of crash aftermath. Numerous smashed windshields, mostly shot from the viewpoint of the ill-fated driver, are sobering yet seductively voyeuristic. Although the cars are (thankfully) unpeopled, Howalt tactfully points to telltale remnants of those who suffered each crash. In Car Crash Studies, Interior #1, 2009, a bloodied clump of long brown hair dangles from the epicenter of the windshield’s cobweb of cracks. Other chilling, though less grisly, remains include a pack of cigarettes stashed next to the steering wheel, a set of keys still hanging in the ignition, a Christmas-tree-shaped air freshener, and a single black hiking boot. Howalt’s photographs of airbags, presented as a graphic grid of twelve exploded white billows, is perhaps a nod to Warhol’s multiples (not to mention his famous “Death and Disaster” series, 1962–63).

In their great diversity of presentation and perspective, Howalt’s images are at once morbidly exhilarating and astonishingly beautiful. The multiple vantage points included in “Car Crash Studies” inform one another and underscore the myriad ways in which violent acts, particularly car crashes, are undeniably fascinating. As the saying goes, you just can’t look away.

— Mara Hoberman

Chris Ofili

DAVID ZWIRNER
525 West 19th Street
September 10–October 24

Chris Ofili, Afro Margin Eight, 2007, pencil on paper, 40 x 26".

British painter Chris Ofili is known for his chromatically bold and texturally dense pictures of lovers, spirits, and monkeys, which are usually supported by spheres of elephant dung. Ofili’s recent works, however, have moved beyond his familiar pop-cultural pastiche and base materiality. “Afro Margin,” a suite of eight pencil drawings made between 2004 and 2007, marks this transition and reveals an unexpected delicacy and rigor in his process.

Ofili began each drawing with the same bounding principle, an organic yet rigid colonnade of the “Afro heads” that appear as aboriginal constellations in his earlier paintings. The towers are bounded by the vertical dimensions of the paper but starkly delimit the surfaces of the works. Each of the drawings is a study of the shapes and textures that can be iterated, in lateral form, from the stacked heads.

If this sounds systematic, it is, but to great effect. Afro Margin One, 2004, feels tentative, its vascular array of lines revealing marine forms and topographic perspective but halting halfway across the page. In contrast, the inky expansion of the heads themselves in Afro Margin Eight, 2007, nearly blots out the page with its repetitions. Which is to say, the series finds Ofili at his most studied, working through the formal possibilities of a loaded cultural signifier.

The pictures, which are overwhelmed by the massive exhibition space, convey a feeling of intimacy and precision, like field notes by a nineteenth-century naturalist. This small scale and diaristic quality is at once ghostly and elegant, and the exhibition shows a different side of the artist who shocked at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.

— Ian Bourland

Julião Sarmento

SEAN KELLY GALLERY
528 West 29th Street
September 18–October 24

Julião Sarmento’s Brunelleschi’s Doubt, 2009, polyvinyl acetate, pigments, acrylic gesso, graphite, water-based enamel, and silk-screen print on cotton canvas, 77 1/2 x 86 5/8 x 2 3/8".

Faces, 1976, one of the first works on view in Julião Sarmento’s latest exhibition, consists of a voyeuristic close-up of two girls kissing. This early video highlights a motif that has defined the artist’s oeuvre since the 1970s: the representation of the female body as an expression of the physical and psychological dimensions of desire. In the main gallery, the painting Heavy Load, 2009, portrays one of Sarmento’s trademark headless figures that convey fragmented themes culled from his personal life and popular culture (particularly film and literature). With her arms intertwined behind her back, the character emerges from a signature-style white background. Below are silk-screened images of the cover of James Salter’s 1968 book A Sport and a Pastime, a novel that evokes eroticism and idealism––two topics that often inspire Sarmento.

A similar method is apparent in other works, such as Brunelleschi’s Doubt, 2009. Here, two uncanny characters face each other on the right side of the work, as if engaged in a silent conversation. On the left, the iconic album art of Sonic Youth’s 1988 Daydream Nation (featuring Gerhard Richter’s Kerze, 1982) is replicated three times, each with enigmatically less and less detail. The reference to Brunelleschi, a famous Italian Renaissance architect, connects these paintings to the set of mixed-media works on paper presented in an adjacent small room. In Woman, House, Bordeaux and White, 2009, Sarmento includes an architectural element—the facade of a house—with the typical iconographic elements found throughout his paintings. As on previous occasions, Sarmento’s new output offers glimpses of imaginary stories; however, by allowing emotion to take center stage, in this exhibition he further develops an exceptional fusion of conceptualism and romanticism.

— Miguel Amado

“Expanding the Walls 2009”

STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM
144 West 125th Street
July 16–October 25

Rakeisha Mulligan, House Nigger, 2009, black-and-white photograph, 11 x 14".

Pairing photographs by twelve young (very young!) photographers with celebrated images from the James VanDerZee archive, this show breaks down barriers both institutional and generational. At the same time, it preserves the recording of African-American culture by its own agents and subjects––something of which VanDerZee stood as a talented practitioner.

Each artist has shot a suite of four photographs, using a print by VanDerZee as his or her point of departure. Some of the resulting resonances are more strictly formal; others expressly take up a topical thread. Next to VanDerZee’s undated West End Tavern, Brandon Venable’s series of crumbling stoops and building facades appears as a principally thematic continuation. But the titles of his prints (I’m Getting Wiser and Wiser and I’m Still a Brownstown, both 2009) suggest that his subjects form something of a displaced self-portrait. Next to one of VanDerZee’s more benign portraits, Rakeisha Mulligan’s depictions of rituals of grooming and beauty offer more mordant meditations on the bodies of African-American woman. House Nigger, 2009, and Jim Crow Cream, 2009, reflect on the lengths to which women go to adapt their hair and bodies to prescribed social norms. Take the Body, Take the Mind, 2009, suggests that it is a slavishness more than corporeal: The photograph depicts two cropped, huddled knees in a bathtub, flanked by a stout bottle of bleach.

Courtney Howell’s four photographs arrest one’s attention, taking it away even from VanDerZee’s striking Portrait of a Man Wearing a Coat, 1932. Her portraits of the male body excise any individual identification. Faces are cropped, and body parts viewed from unlikely angles. The strength of Howell’s Peerless is surpassed perhaps only by Perpendicular, both 2009: a study of a young man’s arms crossed at an angle. These instances in which the show’s protagonists have transcended VanDerZee’s lessons, even as they learn from him, are exciting. Moreover, the exhibition engenders a sense of the community taking part of the museum––not simply as an inert archive but as a living facet of Harlem’s history and art history.

— Ara H. Merjian

Rachel Foullon

NICELLE BEAUCHENE GALLERY
163 Eldridge Street
September 9–October 25

View of “Rachel Foullon,” 2009.

“Grab a Root and Growl,” Rachel Foullon’s solo debut, features various oversize garments sewn from dyed canvases and hung from enormous nails stuck in stained wooden moldings attached to the walls with bolts. A floor-length blue neckerchief drops down from a slanting orange bar in Independence (Everything They Needed) (all works 2009); in The Wrong Place, the Wrong Time, in a Sort of Rapture, a rolled-up red apron is pulled between two gray uprights; knotted sleeves in Only 4 Degrees More than the Temperature Outside suspend a huge pale green shirt from a Y-shaped blue structure. The arrangement of the constructions on the walls faintly recalls the framing of wooden barns, while the utilitarian character of those few articles of clothing we can identify also points to a nostalgic evocation of the good farmer folk of yesteryear. Add to that the bleached and faded look of the dyed fabric (although equally reminiscent of acid-washed denim), and titles such as Great Plains, Gold Dust, for a cruciform configuration sporting an elaborate if unrecognizable, similarly hued piece of apparel, and it becomes clear that the artist wants to invoke the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, an apt parallel, perhaps, for our own time of economic crisis.

Yet Foullon’s installation does not summon the ghosts of hard times and bygone agrarian lifestyles so much as it conjures an appreciation of formal decisions and sculptural finesse. The wooden moldings, impeccably milled from cedar, fit the dimensions of the gallery walls perfectly. A rack hanging from the ceiling, titled We Were All Participants, holds stacks of tinted lumber, as if more colored scaffolds for airing out the laundry could be constructed at will. The tints themselves are lovely, muted, carefully calibrated, and coordinated, one with another. Despite the air of Oldenburgian Pop lent by the scale of the sewn pieces, not to mention the nails, the overall effect remains far more abstract than representational, far more playful than social realist, far more Richard Tuttle than Dorothea Lange. The strange juxtaposition of those two names may be Foullon’s sculptures’ greatest coup and provocation.

— Joseph R. Wolin

T. V. Santhosh

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY
513 West 20th Street
October 14–November 14

T. V. Santhosh, Bitter Lessons II, 2009, oil on canvas, 48 x 72".

Jean Baudrillard wrote three articles between January and March of 1991, arguing that the first Gulf War “did not take place.” He noted that the new era of war fighting—its prosecution and our perceptions of it—was so entangled with information and communication technology that our fight was in many respects virtual, one in which images rather than events became the “real.” In the subsequent two decades, we began to see more and more conflicts around the globe (from Rwanda to Afghanistan) beamed into our homes, omnipresent but diluted in their sanitized persistence. In his current exhibition, “Blood and Spit,” Indian artist T. V. Santhosh manages to smartly and hauntingly détourne much of our twenty-first-century violence.

The show, collaboratively organized with Mumbai-based gallery the Guild, presents a cross section of Santhosh’s recent output. It features a series of indigo-gray watercolors, including depictions of an African man holding a skull, and Pakistani general Pervez Musharraf rendered with graphic-novel sensibility, as well as a fiberglass coffin of bones mounted with an LED ticker. But these moments of harrowing bluntness are overshadowed by the works in the main gallery, wherein one encounters a sampling of Santhosh’s vibrantly hued oil paintings. These works, all painted in a limited palette, offer documentary evidence—a withered woman in a headscarf, heavily armed South Asian soldiers—of the current world order, rendered in night-vision green and aerial-bombardment orange. Rather than flattening the images like a CNN feed, the paintings elevate their subjects to a hallucinatory viscerality, Santhosh’s fallen soldiers and political icons haloed and effaced by bullet-streaked cruciforms, and their features cut in sharp relief. It’s more real than real, to be sure.

— Ian Bourland

Mariah Robertson

MARVELLI GALLERY
526 West 26th Street, 2nd Floor
October 15–November 14

Mariah Robertson, Untitled (9), 2009, color photograph, 27 x 27".

While most young photographers plunge into theory, politics, or portraiture to develop their themes, Mariah Robertson can’t get out of the darkroom. Her aim is to explore the process of making pictures, rather than making meaning, and she uses all the technological tools at her disposal—color separation, oversaturated hues, photograms, chemical drips, and so on—to disrupt the form’s conventions.

Cut haphazardly from large rolls of photographic paper and allowed to curl and buckle within their frames (making them sculptures as much as photographs), the seventeen images in this show mix the aesthetics of early computer graphics, futurist dynamism, and LA noir. One image depicts a planet ringed in gold emerging from behind the vanishing point of an array of grids. (Think Tron.) In the foreground, colored blocks tumble off the edge of the grid, like water from a cliff. (Unsurprisingly, Robertson’s work—blurred sequences of lights that resemble something out of Close Encounters—has been included in Discover magazine.) Another includes the blanched spines and covers of books such as Develop Your Psychic Skills, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), and Vibrations and Waves—all hints, perhaps, at Robertson’s interest in thinking beyond the medium’s norms and producing a fresh logic. In fact, she resembles a kind of Richard Tuttle of photography, utilizing all the mundane tools of film developing—the chemicals and processes—to erase the line between representation and abstraction and to make, in Tuttle’s words, “something that looks like itself.”

— Nicole Rudick

Bryan Zanisnik

SUNDAY
237 Eldridge Street, South Storefront
October 16–November 15

Bryan Zanisnik, To Hell and Back (Nothing), 2008, color photograph, 30 x 40".

The five photographs in Bryan Zanisnik’s exhibition, “Dry Bones Can Harm No Man,” picture suggestively odd arrangements of objects in shallow spaces. Against flowered wallpaper sutured with red and green tape in What Are the Roots That Clutch, 2008, a crocheted afghan and the starry field of an American flag flank a small decorative suit of armor that supports a plywood shelf filled with milk-white glass vases. A straw hat and a length of chain complete the ensemble. To Hell and Back (Nothing), 2008, includes, among other things, a row of pulp westerns, a coffee mug emblazoned BILL, a snapshot of the artist as a baby with his father, and a framed, stained image of a sculptural green hand that recalls that of the Incredible Hulk—all against a green papered background patched with silver duct tape. In these constructed still lifes, the enigmatic juxtaposition of the flotsam of attics and thrift stores seems to allude to domestic narratives or character studies, but definitive stories or personae never emerge. Instead, articles such as the flag, armor, dime-store cowboy novels, and disembodied limb—along with a football, sailing ships, and condoms in other works—slyly hint at the taxonomy of a particularly American masculinity.

Preserve, 2009, a two-channel video, features a pleasant bald man in a coat and tie (the artist’s father) ostensibly acting as a docent in a small-town museum of natural history by calmly explaining a multitude of moth-eaten taxidermied animals for the camera. Other shots find him doing exactly the same for the items conserved in his suburban home. He spins yarns in either locale—most of the animals seem to have been shot by former presidents of the United States—and staccato edits move from gallery to basement storage almost seamlessly, montaging broken phrases such as “legend has it that this coyote” with “pineapple chunks, some soda.” Intercut scenes show the artist’s mother vacuuming while complaining shrilly, tearing open gift wrap to reveal her husband prone on the floor, and waltzing with him in their home office. In this cacophonous family romance, Zanisnik’s sire and stand-in negotiates equally the epistemological and the psychological with bemused forbearance and grace.

— Joseph R. Wolin

Susana Gaudêncio

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

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

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

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

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

— Miguel Amado

Robert Morris

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

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

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

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

— Colby Chamberlain

Regina José Galindo

EXIT ART
475 Tenth Avenue
October 2–November 21

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

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

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

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

— Miguel Amado

Emily Jacir

ALEXANDER AND BONIN
132 Tenth Avenue
October 28–November 28

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

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

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

— Eva Díaz

Matthew Ritchie

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Emily Weiner

Sister Corita Kent

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

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

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

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

— Cameron Shaw

Peter Sacks

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

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

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

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

— Leora Maltz-Leca

Mercedes Matter

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

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

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

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

— Britany Salsbury

Siah Armajani

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

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

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

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

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

— Ian Bourland

Marcel Broodthaers

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

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

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

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

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

— Cathleen Chaffee

“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