Ad board

Francisco Matto at BLANTON MUSEUM OF ART

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 09:58:07 GMT

“The Modern and the Mythic: Francisco Matto” shows one of Joaquín Torres-Garcia’s most commercially successful students to also be one of the most resonant, though curator Gabriel Perez-Barreiro goes out of his way to disprove the existence of a causal relationship between the former and the latter. Matto’s economical use of forms and strokes, which remained constant from the 1940s to the ’90s, refreshingly obfuscates any narrative of stylistic development. To illustrate the cohesiveness of Matto’s oeuvre, the show wends through several clusters of galleries—some exhibiting vertical two-dimensional paintings, others with long platforms installed to support Matto’s rough, totemic, uncannily human-scale wooden sculptures. The result is a topography in step with the spiritual utopia that many of his works evoke.

The notion of provincialism is also challenged; photographs of Matto working in his native Montevideo are installed around the corner from the artist’s electrifying paintings of the city. Oils on cardboard—and perfectly preserved ones at that—like Geniol, 1956, and Perspectivo, 1957, turn sleepy port landscapes into proto-hard-edge abstraction. The pitch-perfect treasures of this show, however, are Matto’s pen-and-ink and watercolor works: succinct pieces, most smaller than a sheet of notebook paper, that reveal the more everyday tics of Matto’s practice. His painted grids, crammed with primary-colored lines and pictograms, will be familiar to devotees of Torres-Garcia’s workshop milieu, but the collection of lesser-known objects forms a gentle, insistent bas-relief whole that rings quietly long after the viewer absorbs their context.

Просмотреть увеличенную карту

Boston Shepard Fairey at THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Moriss — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 09:33:23 GMT

That the work of Shepard Fairey suddenly finds itself in a storm of publicity––from GQ to the New York Times––seems not only preordained but a bit tautological. For Fairey’s work began as a germ of ubiquitous, “viral” publicity, in the legendary form of small stickers depicting the mug of Andre the Giant, a former pro-wrestling phenomenon. ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE, announced these enigmatic decals, plastered in the most unlikely of places by a seemingly anonymous army in the early 1990s. (When someone offered one to me fifteen years ago, I duly placed it on my notebook. There was a strange thrill––mixed with misgiving––at being part of a nameless posse headed by a melancholic giant.) But suspicions that this phenomenon entailed more Big Brother than brotherly love have been dispelled. Fairey’s anonymity has crystallized into a multifaceted enterprise––including a clothing line and graphic-design company––recently punctuated on an even grander scale by the artist’s poster featuring (presidential candidate) Barack Obama. Fairey and his company, Obey Giant, are now embroiled in a lawsuit over the artist’s use of an Associated Press photograph as the basis for his poster.

His batiklike collages most often reveal newsprint barely poking through their figures’ creamy skin. Aside from the history of political posters, Fairey’s work finds its most obvious affinities with Haring and Basquiat, on the one hand, and Murakami, Lichtenstein, and Warhol (of whose “Marilyn” series Fairey has duly printed a “Giant” version) on the other. His use of bold black outlines, large scale, and increasingly Pop-ish composition also conjures Gilbert and George, though to more expressly ideological ends. The prankish aphorisms that pepper his imagery have gained poignancy in light of the economic crisis. His series “Two Sides of Capitalism,” 2007, plays on the iconography of American money; the tags OBEDIENCE IS THE MOST VALUABLE CURRENCY and RANSOM NOTE replace the usual pecuniary axioms found on bills. But these latter works are owned and sold by the Jonathan Levine Gallery––hardly a bastion of anticapitalist radicalism. Fairey was recently hired by Saks Fifth Avenue to design bags and advertisements in a pastiche of Russian Constructivist style, raising further questions about the blend of earnestness and irony in his work. In that vein, a few (clearly faux and sanitized) plastic newspaper racks sit in the lobby of the ICA, perhaps seeking to stir up the urban grittiness inevitably drained when Fairey is museumified. This gambit only calls further attention, although perhaps not in the way anticipated, to the important meta-questions that the show raises about commodification and activism, institutional critique and critical success.

Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon at ARMORY CENTER FOR THE ARTS

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:51:05 GMT

The centerpiece of Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon’s exhibition mines the mythic history of Los Angeles’s cultural past. Flanked on both sides by individual works by each artist, Hipnostasis, 2009, is a jointly produced six-channel video installation that provides an intimate glimpse into the interior lives of six anonymous beach bums as they silently consume steaks on the rocks of Venice Beach at daybreak. Pettibon and Okon’s practices merge here for the first time to form a quiet document of a bygone era of the Venice Beach vanguard. The portraits that make up Hipnostasis focus on individual hippies who have formed communities and have remained in the area despite its transformation into an upscale neighborhood and popular tourist destination. Persisting as a remnant of the city’s unofficial history, the decaying bohemian icon enters into Pettibon and Okon’s project as the subcultural ideal, as the anachronistic embodiment of political nonconformity to the point of primitivism. Interspersed around the six flat-screen monitors, Pettibon’s scrawled textual fragments refer further to the characters and histories that have shaped the myth of the itinerant artist as the sordid alternative to the city’s lighter and sunnier past. Names and places like SWAMI X and SYNANON emerge from the hurried writing to form an unofficial history of the currents that flow along the region’s underside. Individual and collective figures of the revolutionary and the exotic other have separately occupied the attention of Pettibon and Okon throughout much of their careers, and their collaborative project represents the manifestation of these archetypes in the form of the Venice Beach hippie as a pervasive marker of cultural and historical disruption.

“Your Bright Future: Twelve Contemporary Artists from Korea”

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 11:10:08 GMT

Verging on the sociological, exhibitions organized around national or ethnic identities often reduce complex issues of difference and affiliation to easily consumed, nonthreatening snapshots of foreign cultures. While “Your Bright Future” seems cast in this mold, it cleverly avoids that pitfall by addressing the tensions and contradictions that vex the concept of national identity in an increasingly transnational world.

To begin with, eleven of the twelve artists either reside or were educated outside Korea, and many of the works explore a sense of transience and displacement. Haegue Yang’s installation of her artworks in shipping crates literally embodies this idea, while Do Ho Suh’s ghostly resin sculpture, Home Within Home, 2009, embeds a traditional Korean-style structure within a Victorian apartment building. Also with an eye on the domestic, Kim Beom fabricates trompe l’oeil household items out of food products, leaves them outside to disintegrate into the dirt, and records the process in a time-lapse video.

By framing such disparate works as “Korean,” the show invites a broader interpretation of national identity that embraces not only the diaspora but a pervasive sense of mutability. At the same time, it smartly eschews borderless internationalism, offering pointed critiques of political and economic imperialism that bespeak Korea’s recent history as a divided, postcolonial country. For example, Gimhongsok’s life-size stuffed animals look like tired Pop art, until you read the accompanying texts about Mexican and North Korean migrants paid a pittance to stand motionless inside them. More subtle but no less affecting is Bahc Yiso’s Wide World Wide, 2003, a disorienting world map in which the land masses are formed by rows of Korean text overlaid with English labels. Yet instead of the usual cities, states, and countries, the map denotes only the names of obscure locales, quietly defying both the viewer’s expectations and the imperial powers that carved the world into nation-states in the first place.

Július Koller and Jiří Kovanda at LUDLOW 38

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:51:35 GMT

The only witness to Jiří Kovanda’s 1977 act of scooping debris into a pile and scattering it again was his friend Pavel Tuc, whose photograph of a moment in the process is a trace of this private and eccentric performance. Kovanda’s labels for such documents describe the contents of his actions, and place the photographs in brief, droll narratives. Those displayed at Ludlow 38 include I carry some water from the river in my cupped hands and release it a few meters downriver . . ., 1977, and I arrange to meet with several of my friends . . . Suddenly I started to run, 1978. The exhibition also includes works by Július Koller made in Bratislava around the same time. A cutout from a photograph of a landscape is shaped like a flying saucer and tilts menacingly, while diagrammatic drawings on postcards variously expand on the acronym UFO with words like UTOPIAN, UNIVERSAL, OBSERVATION, and FUTURIST. Koller and Kovanda are split between two rooms, but—in a curatorial flourish resonant with the artists’ works—a stray piece by each hangs out of bounds. The juxtaposition of the two encourages a comparison between disturbances in two types of environments, urban and verbal. Koller’s use of the flying saucer as the embodiment of the non sequitur accentuates Kovanda’s choice to be an alien in his own city.

Amid the selection of photographs and documents, an assemblage of two wooden boards roped together and inserted between two corners of the front gallery is the only work with heft. Kovanda made it for Ludlow 38. It demonstrates that his interventions extend beyond performative actions, as do two concurrent solo shows in Chelsea on view until August 14. Andrew Kreps is showing his drawings and collages from the 1970s and ’90s, so slight they are little more than traces of the artist’s touch on the paper, while a new installation at Wallspace measures the gallery’s perimeter with a rope strung along the wall. The endurance and consistency of Kovanda’s art suppresses the temptation to read his or Koller’s work as a politicized chafing against Czechoslovakia’s socialist bureaucracy. Like other contemporaneous Conceptual artists, Kovanda and Koller confronted prescribed patterns of living and thinking to explore other ways of being.

“Structured Simplicity” at D.U.M.B.O. ARTS CENTER

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:52:00 GMT

This gallery’s glowering, barnlike space presents its visiting curators with a stiff formal challenge, but Felicity Hogan has grabbed the bull by the horns in assembling a richly tactile five-person group exhibition on the broad theme of extropy, or the gradual distillation of chaos and complexity into fundamental essence. Hogan’s selected artists—all women—employ a catholic range of media and formats but stick resolutely and productively to the abstract in probing the innumerable possibilities of visual and material systems. Emerging from a sea of summer shows teetering on conceptual premises doomed by either willful obscurity or ham-fisted obviousness, “Structured Simplicity” distinguishes itself with a bracing concentration on shape, color, texture, and—in the case of Amy Yoes’s hypnotic video loop Modification and Collapse, 2009—movement and sound.

Mai Braun’s Pile II, 2009—a mass of shredded copies of the New York Times bound up with string—is the most direct embodiment of the show’s premise, but her Tower—Fragile to Clorox, 2006, a stack of cardboard boxes cut and remodeled into crystalline facets, is ultimately a more satisfying transformation. Hilary Harnischfeger makes use of real crystals, integrating chunks of quartz and zeolite into multilayered constructions that look more unearthed than assembled, while Elana Herzog’s Untitled #1 (chainlink drapery study), 2004, a cotton-chenille bedspread stapled to the wall then partially ripped away, also seems to inhabit a hinterland between the organic and the artificial. Last—and best—the eccentric biomorphism shared by Fabienne Lasserre’s half dozen combinations of felt, ceramics, linen, and pigment, as well as acrylic polymer and paint, finally flips the whole interior from enclosure to environment.

“The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women” CHEIM & READ

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 11:06:21 GMT

The publication of Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” launched innumerable theoretical discussions and artistic interrogations with its assertion that female characters in films of the 1950s and ’60s exist primarily for the scopophilic enjoyment of male viewers. In particular, Mary Ann Doane’s “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator” posited that the reaction of female viewers to such cultural artifacts is typically either masochistic or narcissistic due to the act of self-identification. Although it seems plausible that the ensuing scholarship has exhausted the gaze as a theoretical device, this exhibition offers a comprehensive exploration of its less considered use: the way it functions between women. Given the heavily misogynist overtones implicit to the gaze posited by such discourse, the images in this survey demonstrate transformation and subversion, and each contributes to an understanding not only of the female gaze as concept but additionally of major themes in art history and feminism from the past century.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s vintage photograph May Prinsep (Head of St. John), 1866, for instance, might initially seem connected to Lisa Yuskavage’s Heart, 1996–97, only in that both depict women. The first image is a portrait of a young female relative of the artist whose direct gaze meets that of the viewer while her hair flows loosely in a gesture that would have been considered suggestive at the time. The latter offers a bright pink background and a curvaceous, nude woman facing the viewer while she masturbates on her knees. Together, the works evoke a sense of continuity in the evolution of cultural attitudes toward gender and sexuality in their portrayal of sensuality without objectification. Although Yuskavage’s painting doubtlessly lacks the subtlety of Cameron’s earlier picture, each piece eschews the male gaze through an implicit sense of empathy with women.

Basil Wolverton at GLADSTONE GALLERY

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:52:44 GMT

What do Miss Bedney Flunt, Miss Fludney Bent, Miss Flentney Bunt, and Miss Blentney Funt have in common? Unreasonably odd proboscises and the hilarious misfortune of being drawn by Basil Wolverton. An artist and writer of sci-fi and humor comics from the 1930s through the ’70s and an alum of Mad magazine in subsequent decades, Wolverton showed a consistent partiality for screwball portraiture, and the nearly 150 works in this exhibition constitute “a ghastly gang of goops” (to borrow a phrase from the artist himself). His mid-’60s sketches of illogically deformed heads for Topps chewing-gum cards (one could plan a show simply around the who’s who of cartoonists—including Art Spiegelman, Kim Deitch, Drew Freidman, and Bill Griffith—who have created art for Topps) rank among the show’s most outlandishly gruesome pieces. In fact, Wolverton’s intricate, often dense hatch work and nutty caricatures anticipate much of the cracked subversion of ’60s underground comix, Crumb’s textured satires in particular.

A thin line exists between Wolverton’s jokey grotesqueries and the horrors of disfigurement and mutilation that appear in his postwar illustrations of the Book of Revelations (recently published in The Wolverton Bible). The carbuncle-covered figures in Plague of Darkness with Boils, ca. 1950, for instance, bear resemblance to a host of heinously rendered Mad readers drawn four years later. Wolverton’s unsparing depictions of nightmarish prophecies are relentlessly grim but absorbingly so. There are hints of Goya’s crazed, melancholic Saturn and predictions of Charles Burns’s brooding mutant teens. In most of the biblical drawings on view, men and women are, if not the immediate focal point, very much the purpose. Such humanity is everywhere in Wolverton’s art—as much in the laughably goony portraits as in the fire-and-brimstone ferocity.

New York Behind the Music

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:55:54 GMT

THESE SOUNDS ARE MADE by Curtis Rhodes’s granular application, which was modeled after the way I patched the Buchla Box.” “To get the ‘pingy-y’ tones, I frequency-modulated the pitch of the oscillator from zero to maximum.” If Morton Subotnick’s explanations of his innovations in computer-generated sound occasionally resembled a geeky version of Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnell’s immortal claim, “These go to eleven,” his Friday-night performance at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room confirmed him as an altogether more serious artist than his mock-rock counterpart. That said, the cherubic seventy-six-year-old composer was far from po-faced, and he clearly relished the opportunity to reinterpret some vintage material for a younger crowd.

Subotnick’s slot was the last in Issue Project Room’s Floating Points Festival, an annual monthlong series designed around its custom-made fifteen-channel hemispherical speaker system (other performers included Hisham Bharoocha, Stephen Vitiello, harpist to the stars Zeena Parkins, and the omnipresent Tony Conrad). Manipulating (“what they nowadays call ‘remixing’”) his 1967 debut recording, Silver Apples of the Moon, and 1978’s A Sky of Cloudless Sulfur, Subotnick also made sure to provide exhaustive context for the newbies. Recalling at length his first encounter with the boss of Nonesuch Records (“I threw him out. I thought he was making fun of me!”), and the incongruous commercial success of his 1969 quadraphonic disc Touch (“It sold a lot because there was nothing else to play on that system at the time”), he radiated an amused awareness of the unpredictability of a career defined by journeys into uncharted waters.

“This is my third attempt at this,” Subotnick revealed, introducing Silver Apples. “I have a year to figure it out before I take it on tour. You’re the guinea pigs.” But after fifteen minutes of beguiling music that snaked around the room, continually splintering and reforming as its maker tweaked some sounds and interjected others, we felt like more than mere test subjects. “I sort of understand why people were writing me letters saying they saw little green men coming into their houses after hearing that,” the composer chuckled. A Sky, to these ears, was better yet, a symphony of drips, rustles, clonks, and tweets that built to a steady pulse before trailing away to enthusiastic applause. For a man once dismissed by Time magazine as “a tone-deaf mute,” it was a quiet triumph.
Such are the pleasures of the art-world off-season: One night you’re at an intimate gathering of fifty-odd cognoscenti, the next you’re among a reported 71,500 souls packed into All Points West. And at the three-day rock binge, which reached its midway point at New Jersey’s Liberty State Park the following evening, hearing damage was a real possibility. But the danger didn’t end there. Trudging through the mire toward the main arena, my companion and I were nearly mowed down by a van containing a deadpan Adrian Grenier, then a couple of minutes later found ourselves in the path of Courtney Love, leaping from a trailer in the direction of a nearby taco stand. Once equipped with the requisite rainbow of plastic wristbands, we followed My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields self-consciously onto the stage, the guitarist joining his bandmates front and center for a characteristically immersive set as we secreted ourselves in the wings. And even with the benefit of earplugs, it was clear that they really could play “one louder” than ten.

New York Dancers and the Dance

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:56:07 GMT

Merce Cunningham, Event, 2009. Performance views, Rockefeller Park, New York. Presented by River to River Festival and Joyce Theater. August 1–2, 2009. Dylan Crossman, Daniel Madoff, Andrea Weber, Silas Riener, and Brandon Collwes. (All photos: Ryan McNamara)

ON AUGUST 1 AND 2, less than a week after Merce Cunningham’s death, members of his company gathered in Lower Manhattan to perform their first scheduled piece since his passing: the last, presumably, of the legendary site-specific Events to have been overseen by the choreographer. Over the course of those two days, in a small wedge of park between the gleaming postmillennium luxury condominiums (with names like the Solaire, the Riverhouse, and—perhaps appropriately—Tribeca Pointe) and the glistening waters of the Hudson, more than a thousand people sat in the grass around two small stages—one farther northeast, the other closer to the river—to partake in what had become, by default, an impromptu Cunningham memorial.

A number of former Cunningham disciples—many now major choreographers in their own right—were present for Saturday evening’s performance, given under an appropriately estival clear blue sky. Yvonne Rainer had staked out a space in the grass between the two stages, while Steve Paxton sat a bit north. Karole Armitage was there, as was the artist Charles Atlas, who got his start as Cunningham’s videographer. Younger choreographers, such as Sarah Michelson, Jack Ferver, and Jonah Bokaer (also a former Cunningham dancer, and the founder of the dance space Chez Bushwick), came to pay homage over the course of the two nights (a third performance in between the two had to be canceled due to the rain), as did art dealers Carol Greene and Janice Guy, artists Vera Lutter and Matthew Buckingham, and the art historian Douglas Crimp.
The dancers performed on both platforms, moving in between the two via a long path cordoned off in the grass. It was impossible to see everything; the split stages (with the northeast devoted more to solos and the southwest largely to ensembles) thwarted scopophilia, just as the multidirectional dancing destabilized any illusions of omniscient viewing. If dance is already an ephemeral medium, the dismantling of traditional sight lines makes it infinitely more so. “The Cunningham challenge,” as Lutter sagely put it.

The Event rose to the occasion; could it have been any other way? “Indescribable,” Paxton accurately described it. The characteristic Cunningham tics—if such a relentless innovator could be said to have any—were prevalent: the isolated, often incongruous choreography for different bodies (or even different parts of the same body); the unexpected shifts in style and tempo, executed according to a logic known only to the dancers; the swift, stage-consuming lateral movements. There’s a great deal of running—or an approximation of running, quick and utilitarian, often with arms slightly raised but parallel to the body (sometimes, to me, evoking action figures). There are frequent moments in relevé, and though the dancers are always extraordinarily composed and purposeful, strain is never obscured. Cunningham’s style influenced everyone, but here was evidence that the style itself remains inimitable. (Much of this may have to do with his dancers; he left behind an incredible company—perhaps the best in the world.)
Because of the fleetingness of it all, I found myself clinging to certain phrases harder than usual. (A favorite, which I remembered from the final Beacon Event in May, featured Andrea Weber in demi-pointe, with one hand extended above and one below; she held it for an excruciating amount of time, until Brandon Collwes, the tattooed perfectionist, arrived at her side to relieve her, beginning their own intimate partnering.) Sitting up close, just a few feet from the stages, it was impossible not to fall under the sway of individual dancers; everyone’s a soloist, each one impossibly gifted. When Weber isn’t smiling it looks as though she is, and when she is she’s practically beaming; the chiseled Silas Riener often has a stoic, faraway look, and at least once Weber patted him as she left the stage, as if to console him.

Roughly two-thirds of the way through the Event, the dancers paused to perform the three “still” movements of 4'33", which Cunningham planned as a memorial to John Cage but which became an uncanny tribute to Cunningham as well. The choreography was indeterminate, which meant the dancers could choose any pose they liked—Riener said that he had known only that he simply wanted to “face the water”—and at the end of the final movement, as dancers took to the warm-up area adjacent to the stage, many were crying.
According to Calvin Tomkins’s 1968 New Yorker profile on Cunningham, Alice B. Toklas had approached the choreographer after a 1949 recital and told him she liked his dancing “because it’s so pagan.” This comment came to mind while watching the movement on the westernmost stage, which at times did seem to exude a peculiar jocularity, featuring numerous ritualistic and presentational gestures. Near the end of the performance, on that same stage, Weber, Emma Desjardins, and Marcie Munnerlyn performed a mesmerizing adagio trio, which was followed by three male dancers—Riener, Collwes, and the new Dylan Crossman (one of two fresh-faced but exceptional dancers who joined the company a mere two weeks ago)—who leaped around variously like mantises, their arms curving inward, or exuberant cranes, arms extended. The dance ended, as Crimp noted, with the same, climactic sequence that marked the conclusion to the fourth Beacon Event, with all eleven dancers—eight on one stage, three on the other—dancing in unison. (“A finale worthy of Petipa or Balanchine,” he wrote last year.)

On Sunday, the loss seemed doubly painful; there would never be another new Cunningham Event. Seated on a platform to the east, next to Cunningham’s longtime archivist David Vaughan, was Alastair Macaulay, the Times’s chief dance critic, in tears. “Bravo,” he mouthed. Bravo. The dancers filed solemnly out of the park, and the crowd dispersed in the gloaming.