3.27.24 — Past the Gates

SculptureCenter misses the old neighborhood, and it should know. It has made its home in Long Island City long enough to have seen everything change.

Founded in 1928, it moved to a dead end just off the main drag in 2001, early enough to have driven change itself. Can it, though, truly miss the days of empty storefronts, abandoned buildings, and nowhere to live or to eat? R. I. P. Germain shares the ambivalence, even as he brings his own graffiti and shuttered gates, as Avangarda. It may have been be a bit corporate for street smarts or an avant-garde, but he and Claudia Pagès in the back room found an antidote to dryness in something very much like SculptureCenter all the same, through March 25.

It took a long time for gentrification to reach the neighborhood. You can now find a decent bookstore and a noodle joint right across Jackson Avenue from SculptureCenter, although real growth lies closer to the East River, amid artist studios, craft breweries, and a waterfront park with a gorgeous public library. Still, change in New York comes with conflicting claims and a welter of graffiti. Developers demolished a building across from MoMA PS1, just a short walk from SculptureCenter, angering those who miss its paint job as a genuine expression of neighborhood spirit. The developers, in turn, tried to cash in on its street name by adopting it for apartments. Are Germain and SculptureCenter already late for the party?

The Berlin artist may not know his way around the hood, but he does mourn a loss of community. As his name has it, R.I.P. He describes storefronts everywhere as places to go and to meet. At the same time, he sees them and the gates that cover them as obstacles, designed to keep people out. And Germain sets out four gated storefronts, one after another, like a series of obstacles. You can walk past the first, but will you pass them all?

Not that they go all that far toward filling the impressive main hall at SculptureCenter. That can only reinforced the impression of abandonment. It can also restore faith in the trolley repair shop that Maya Lin left largely intact while putting it to the use of art. Each of Germain’s gates has its own graffiti, but not with the naiveté and egotism of tags. They come teasingly close to text but impossible to read. All that you may remember is the image of a silvery robot, on a rampage or on guard.

Their backs offer a slightly different picture. One has a glass door. A small assemblage on the floor behind each one includes a pot, a potted plant, and a magazine with its own dark stories to tell. Germain may be leaving open the possibility of life or closing it off for good. The entirety looks confused and slightly pathetic, not to mention out of touch with Long Island City today. But then welcome to the search for affordable housing and community in New York.

So what's NEW!Pagès payed a different kind of tribute to SculptureCenter and its basement tunnels, through February 19. Not that she would admit it, but her video could well be exploring them. Downstairs, the institution displays “world cinema” from a recent biannual in Taipei. Together, their fifteen works take a serious commitment, but dipping in may be enough. It accords with the themes of incompleteness back upstairs. I caught some shifting patterns, disaster areas, and zombie creatures, but nothing like the basement’s own layered history.

Pagès can match that history and then some. Her explorations take her to a cistern in Spain, where her camera’s restless motion may remind you of your own. Moorish invaders remade the ancient roman caverns as their own, before Christians used the structure for a church and moderns for a fancy hotel. If her wanderings seem to lack direction, the video does not—abruptly flooding the tunnels and leaving her waist deep. Did you think that an institution called SculptureCenter would be showing sculpture? Gentrification itself may leave you high and dry.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

3.25.24 — My Own Mark

To wrap up from last time on folk art, the American Folk Art Museum is out to add color to American art and history, people of color. With “Unnamed Figures,” through March 24, it asks how folk art drew on African Americans as artists and subjects while refusing to name names.

It shows how their absence testifies to unseen presences, while its presences testify to exclusions. In fact, it does that so well that one can almost forget what it leaves out. The show passes over conflict, the slave states, life after the Civil War, and a specifically African American art. MutualArtThey appear nonetheless right next door, if only in part, with “Marvels of My Own Inventiveness“—and I bring them together with an earlier report on outsider artists as a longer review and my latest upload.

Each of its five artists has only a handful of works, but enough to leave a mark and a name. One can see their determination with the oldest of the five, Mary T. Smith, born in 1905. Working in the 1980s, she applies black in broad strokes, for big outlines, big egos, and big hair. Her figures face front, like the familiar icons of black power, but with colorful, casual compositions that take nothing for granted. The people themselves could just as well be nameless. They do not so much confront the theme of black invisibility as rebel against it.

By the time one reaches the youngest, Claude Lawrence, colliding colors are more than half the point. As a title puts it, Why So Blue? Born in 1944, Lawrence packs them in, not so much layered or intermixed as fighting for space. Faces appear, but an explicit politics is gone. Certainty must have given out anyway after the election of Ronald Reagan, even for Smith. That still leaves presences, if only one could pin them down.

The modest show comes as a postscript to the larger one, but also a counterpoint. The very hallmarks of the older folk art are gone, from its stiff, firm outlines to its narratives. Black artists today have often drawn on the flatness and patterning of African American art in the South or African art itself, Claude Lawrence's Ronald & Donald, the Oldest (American Folk Art Museum, 2004)but not here. Smith’s scrawls suggest street art and defacement, not unlike those of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Yet they avoid his deliberate clichés and aggressive juxtapositions. They leave open just what is left of outsider art other than the outsider.

The show’s awkward title adapts a line from Hortense Spillers, a literary critic who has sought an “African American grammar.” Echoes of William Butler Yeats, with art as “monuments of its own magnificence,” may be deliberate as well. The combination points to identity politics, but also shifting perspectives. J. B. Murray has a reputation as an Abstract Expressionist, which accounts for his freely detailed brush, but not much more. The tiny marks could be figures in half a dozen history paintings at once. One could almost treat its divisions as panels in a graphic novel.

Purvis Young is fond of busy marks and crude divisions, too. Wood slats overlay his paintings, like stretchers that have moved to the front or frames that refuse to close. There is a riot going on. It may or may not be race riot, and Leonard Daley depicts both blacks and whites amid a painting’s discarded materials. If a white figure looks to a livelier black figure for help, its whiteness has faded to a bright, pure, ghostly white. If the black figure is a tempter, painting has its temptations, too.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

3.22.24 — The Presence of Race

Edward Hicks has become an exemplar of American folk art for his visionary landscapes filled with life. His earthy realism is far more sophisticated than his status would suggest. Warm colors and well-rounded figures all but pop out of the canvas, even as faces remain emblematic and the construction in depth more than a little awkward. It is still the country you only wish you knew.

Peaceable Kingdom, his most popular painting, embodies that wish, and more than sixty versions survive. Well-dressed Americans, adults and children, share the scene with wide-eyed animals, with equal claims to nature, culture, and an emerging nation. Still another painting extends its harmony to black and white America as well, but prospects were hardly peaceable, and the Civil War was only fourteen years away. The American Folk Art Museum gives it pride of place in “Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North,” through March 24. Edward Hicks's The Residence of David Twining, 1785 (American Folk Art Museum, 1846)The museum also brings the story up to date with five recent and contemporary African Americans, as “Marvels of My Own Inventiveness.” Drawing on its enormous collection, it aims to make presences and absences alike difficult to overlook.

Hicks aimed for much the same. He lived among Quakers and others opposed to slavery, and his painting describes a community in which blacks work the land as autonomous beings. This kingdom was in truth a republic and not a distant utopia, but within reach. Now that outsider art is finding an audience, in galleries and collections, it helps to remember that it had one all along. Folk art always belonged to the community—and quilting or glazing to those who knew and admired craft. For Hicks, that community could still return.

Not that Hicks was naïve about the future or, for that matter, about art. His community had developed its own rifts, and more than one version of Peaceable Kingdom shows a majestic tree riven as well, as a warning. The Folk Art Museum, too, intends a warning. Slaves and free blacks alike are a presence in American history that many would just as soon overlook, while legal and other restrictions enforced their absence. The same story applies today. Still, “Unnamed Figures” paints a pretty upbeat picture.

It includes black faces, like a fully realized couple by William Matthew Prior in 1843. It includes black presences in landscape. Can you spot them, and just what are they doing? For whom are they doing it at that? Longer, narrower landscapes once hung high above furniture or a door. They served their purpose in the home, but they make anyone, black or white, that much harder to spot.

It includes black artists, like Joshua Johnson, a successful portrait painter. Did you notice that he has white sitters almost every time? His one black sitter was family, painted not for the market, but for their sake and his own. Ammi Phillips is another rarity, a woman in early American art with a white, middle-class following. Did you notice that two of her portraits include a strip of cotton and (lord help us) a watermelon? n each case, you have to supply what is absent and why.

Still, this is not a game of “Where’s African American Waldo?” Blackness itself becomes visible. Another black artist, Moses Williams, renders it in profile silhouettes. Early photos turn to blacks as well, and the museum throws in more recent photos of the descendants of slaves as well. They breach the show’s limits, but they reinforce that presences still matter. The museum also recovers a well-worn headstone, its name crying out to be read.

The museum makes room for well over a hundred works, on top of the room for “Marvels.” (It does not feel crowded.) It has other media as well, such as a powder horn and embroidery. If women could find a voice in textiles, like the Gee’s Bend weavers in the Deep South, why not blacks? It has minstrel shows in works on paper and a diorama as surreal as a Joseph Cornell box. But then where would racial tensions be without embarrassing stereotypes?

The show makes a point of the ubiquity of those tensions, by skipping right past the South. It sticks to New England and the mid-Atlantic states, including Joseph Shoemaker Russell with a black storekeeper in Philadelphia and Francis Guy in a Brooklyn winter. It benefits from folk art’s near indifference to traditional distinctions like landscape and genre painting. A view of a house by Rufus Hathaway in 1795 opens onto an active port in Massachusetts. Just what is folk art anyway? You never know these days, but this once it speaks for true outsiders in the peaceable kingdom.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

3.20.24 — The Human Animal

“The only body part that does not elicit disgust is tears.” It is a sad and lovely thought. It is also just one line in a not at all mournful video by Mary Helena Clark, at Bridget Donahue through March 23.

Lovely or sad, it could even be true, if not for all or for all time. It may leave you wondering whether to turn away in disgust or to cry. Clark sees disgust as a refusal of one’s animal nature, but also its epitome. Mary Helena Clark's Neighboring Animals (Bridget Donahue gallery, 2024)She tracks the wish to transcend and to embrace the body, human or animal, starting with teeth. She leaves it to others to sort out the contradictions, if they dare. She leaves it to you, too, to decide what she herself believes and to shed a tear.

Words appear on a side wall, as the left half of a two-channel video, and more than halfway down, like subtitles. They change in response to the images at right, but never comment directly. They unfold silently, again like subtitles, but also like words without an author or a voice. They could be turning away from humankind itself, along with, as the work’s title has it, Neighboring Animals. The images, too, do not tell an obvious story. They could be chance impressions or a natural history of raw flesh and teeth.

They give due weight to natural history, including clinical studies of animal anatomy and appetites. They linger, too, over a reliquary for, supposedly, a tooth from Mary Magdalene. Piety, it appears, does not turn away from dentistry after all. Not that conflicting desires can ever go away. Footage lingers over the ornate jar but never its contents. Does science itself identify with its animal subjects or see scientists as superior?

You may not care, not as actual apes appear on camera, suitably charming. Humans appear, too, but in Medieval depictions as well-dressed monkeys, with their own appetites and charm. If the body elicits disgust, it also elicits desire. If Freud is right, disgust may itself fuel desire and desire disgust. Does it all come down to piety or basic instinct? Who knows?

An opening room takes you to the zoo, where people get to enjoy themselves, whether animals do or no. Human laughter emerges from windowless steel doors. One can imagine passing through the narrow space between them while the doors press in, like rusted steel from Richard Serra or nude bodies from Marina Abramovic. Do not even attempt it. The gallery forbids it, and it would leave you all too human.

Small sculpture putters along on the floor—deadbolts that slide back and forth or move awkwardly ahead. They are not going to lock you in. Photos could pass for shots of the room itself, sterile and framed. They actually show a hatchery, yet another scientific nurturing of the animal. Clark never lets on to her own degree of desire and disgust. Yet she tempts others to confess theirs.

3.18.24 — A Handful of Dust

Gabriel Orozco will show you art in a handful of dust. It is a rebuke to traditional art forms all the same, with a little help from Jacob Samuel.

Dust is a space, but not a landscape. Orozco makes that clear on the opening page of a series of prints. So what if it, too, is a work of art? Samuel, a printmaker in Santa Monica, has worked with some sixty leading artists over more than thirty years. Many of them would otherwise have refused to enter any space that reeks of fine art. That includes the space of “Jacob Samuel and Contemporary Etching,” at MoMA through March 23. James Welling's Untitled (Quadrilaterals) (Museum of Modern Art, 2008)

What kind of print is right for modern and contemporary art? It could be lithographs for their relative ease of making—and for a poster style going back to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. It could be silkscreens, for the world after Andy Warhol, or monoprints, where anything goes. For Max Beckmann and German Expressionism, it could be woodcuts, with thick, jagged outlines that speak of a crude past and a still harsher modern world. But no, for Samuel favors a medium as disciplined as etching. He took it up in the late 1980s in the studio of Sam Francis, the abstract painter, and has been seeking collaborators ever since.

In etching, the artist makes incisions, akin to freehand drawing, in a protective layer over a metal plate. An acid batch then penetrates the incisions, leaving its cuts in the plate. Wipe away the protective layer, brush ink over the plate, wash away all but what has found its way into the cuts, press the plate against paper, run them through a printing press, and (voilà) you have an etching. Each of Samuel’s collaborations led to an entire series of prints, and many have entered the museum’s collection. It has been a learning experience for everyone, and he likes it that way, even if the artist gets the credit. It takes both parties out of their comfort zone.

The curators, Esther Adler and Margarita Lizcano Hernandez, open a modest show with a display case for portfolios, with elegant, intriguing covers tailored to the artist. They close with two walls for sample prints from many more. In between, they focus on series from a single artist—with the added interest that prints, however ephemeral, can come in multiples, as series of series. That includes series of series of dust. Samuel favors series in a single tone, and several artists favor limited tones within a single work as well. For John McElheny, that means an elusive white on white.

A video shows instruction from Francis himself, who pronounces himself indifferent to whether the work will sell. He wants only to try things—like his big splashes of primary colors. That must have been a daunting message for an aspiring printer with a career in mind, but if Samuel had reservations, he keeps them to himself. It certainly prepares him for some difficult artists. I never could decipher McElheny’s white text or decide whether his minimal forms represent champagne flutes. I am still searching for signs of a notorious social butterfly, Harry Crosby, in prints by Charline von Heyl, such as slippers and a silk scarf.

The artists had to learn something beside printing technique. Christopher Wool, known for his word paintings, says that it helped him find his way to drawing again. James Welling, known as a photographer, instead assembles quadrilaterals into larger shapes, starting with paper scraps and software. Samuel had to learn far more. How was he to transform dust into incisions with Gabriel Orozco—or, with Mona Hatoum and Matthew Monahan, masking tape and human hair? Jannis Kounellis keeps piling on the challenges, with molten lead, smashed glass, coffee grounds, and more.

They enlarged his view of prints as well, beyond etchings. They took him to aquatints with Dave Muller and to drypoint with Barry McGee (while Kounellis used both). They had professional needs, like dance notation for Meredith Monk,and personal ones, like Marina Abramovic making (she hopes) love potions, Chris Burden in the wilds with knives, and Muller sharing home turf with bears and dragonflies. They all had to learn new questions for art. How much line, how much texture, and how much text? The contemporary etching wants to know.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

3.15.24 — A War with Many Sides

An-My Lê could be a citizen of the world if she did not have so many memories. Her retrospective opens with a photograph of a schoolgirl. Could it be her?

I doubt it, but with Lê you never know. What looks later like ground action in the Vietnam War is only a recreation in North Carolina or Virginia—or a training exercise in California for wars closer to today. Wall text speaks only of her return to Vietnam in 1994, nineteen years after the fall of Saigon, and what she set out to see. Still, she is not saying, and she herself had barely entered her teens when she left for America. But then she is never saying, in photos that speak for all sides, apart perhaps from her own. An-My Lê's 29 Palms: Night Operations IV (Museum of Modern Art, 2003–2004)She is forever “Between Two Rivers,” at MoMA through March 16—and I work this together with recent reports on photography from Lagos and from Tracey Rose in South Africa as a longer review and my latest upload.

That serious schoolgirl says little as well. She takes care with everything, right down to a proper hat, and her glance gives nothing away. Nor does that first series in Vietnam. Boys playing soccer dissolve in a blur, while adults mill about. A tiger cage and a vast interior with a single desk are devoid of life. Yet Lê is determined to see it all and to listen.

She is caught up in it all as well. That first series took her to the former South Vietnam, where she had lived, and to the north, which held childhood memories as well, but of her mother’s childhood. It also includes shots of Louisiana, where she had fled. The Vietnam War reenactment did not just allow her to participate, but demanded it in exchange for letting her observe. Naturally she fought on both sides. And could that be her playing pool with sailors?

Lê gives the show’s title in English, Vietnamese, and French, not just because Vietnam was once a French colony, but also because she spent much of her childhood in Paris. The two rivers are primarily the Mekong and the Mississippi, but also the Seine, the Rio Grande were she traveled to observe the border, and the Hudson, where she taught upriver from New York City. She also finds affinities. The Mekong and the Mississippi both have storied deltas and storied poverty, and the bayou has a parallel in Vietnam;s tall grass, swampy pools, and flat, parched land. It, too, might make a miserable place for a war. It also helps drive a lifelong conviction that landscape means as much as people.

How much do they mean? They are still not letting on. One might never know one side from the other in the reenactments without a photo’s title. Maybe that is what was so wrong with the war. For ever so many, as another title has it, it was Someone Else’s War at that. Events Ashore shows the U.S. Navy engaged in scientific research, earthquake relief, and flood prevention, but Lê knows that all these, a navy included, may descend on countries like a show of force.

Her latest series, a shift to color, takes her across the United States, looking for clues to its controversies and turmoil, and she herself may wonder whether she finds them. Students protest against guns, but half the time in the background. Migrant labor blends easily into a cattle drive, and the White House briefing room is breaking down or still setting up. Here Confederate statues are neither going up nor coming down. Her very artlessness can seem an evasion. The closest her reenactors come to war’s drama and fear is lightning descending on night ops.

The curators, Roxana Marcoci with Caitlin Ryan, take one series at a time. Think of them less as finished work than as personal projects, to which Lê can devote herself completely. She does arrange one series in an open circle, like an old-fashioned diorama. Its fourteen landscapes cover a lot of ground. Does that add up to common ground or telling contrasts? Once again, she is not saying.

Lê’s photos can seem all but artless, and well-meaning critics may praise her more for her history than for her art. The Navy removes unexploded ordinance, but with none of the poignancy of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, for whom Vietnam’s past is a minefield, or of boat people for Danh Vo. That diorama might be more immersive if its components meant more. Still, silence speaks to her own sense of helplessness or displacement. When she returned to her last childhood home, “I felt that I didn’t recognize anything,” but she kept looking. For her, a refusal to take sides is taking sides, but in a different war than either side ever knew.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

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