NEW.YORK
ART.CRIT

Critics still like to argue about who is saving or killing art. Is conceptual art submerging real experience, or is irony a healthy recognition of one’s limits? Is painting liberating or self-indulgent? I hate to name names right now, but it gets tiresome. Much of art stopped fitting the categories years ago.

More than a few shows in 2009 did not. They involved writing and drawing, and it got hard to tease out which was which. They played with sign systems, but an accounting ledger could easily morph into calligraphy or calligraphy into thread. If they anything in common at all, it was an accumulation of small gestures. If anything makes installations right now stultifying, it is money and the consequent need to make an impression. These shows settle happily for small impressions, and they are the subject of a longer review—in my latest upload.

One show even calls itself “By a Thread” and another “Paraphrase.” Each has threads without a fabric and alphabets without words. Lee Mingwei even makes others bring their own fabric, while he offers to mend it. Still other artists erase images of fabric or save the lint. One can call them all post-minimal in their ordinary materials, except that they have a way of filling a room.

The work of Paul Glabicki from a distance looks empty, but it combines Asian calligraphy with western accounting. At MOMA, Léon Ferrari and Mira Schendel define a path through Modernism that anticipates them all. It lies outside Europe all along, but also well within tradition.

This bit of housecleaning brings together several reviews that first appeared on this page in an earlier form. It also returns to several themes of this site, including the metaphor of art as text, the artist’s book, art as thread, science and art, and natural histories. These shows straddle so many alphabets, materials, and signs that it is easy to lose track. They go well together, in fact, mostly because of that. They seem like nothing so much as a repudiation of Modernism and Postmodernism alike. Did the first boast heroic gestures and pure painting? Did the second announce the death of both? No one seems to care.

Modernism has a history of systems and their destroyers, going back to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Think of such extremes as Lewitt and Alfred Jensen. Surrealism and automatic writing, too, have the appeal of a system that defies conscious systems. Cubism should look different now. Late Pollock—once derided as too figurative, too empty, and too personal—should look better.

Can a cartoon suffer an existential crisis? Could it witness one without laughing?

Olaf Breuning has trouble taking anything seriously, except maybe himself, but it scares him. At once glib, flippant, heavy-handed, and painfully sincere, he sees things literally in black and white. At first glance, at Metro Pictures through December 5, his show feels like a collection of tired jokes. By the time one leaves, it has actually become too ponderous. Along the way, though, it leaves room for the artist’s genuine uncertainty. Call it one-liners, but at least he has the timing right.

Naturally he works mostly in two dimensions. He thinks that way, too. Practically every item includes words, and they come in obvious pairs—yes/no, half full/half empty, brain/stomach, me/you. Not that opposites mean a life in balance. The word ME fills out a face in clumsy profile, with just a single acknowledgment of YOU. Is it my imagination, or has Breuning placed it where the ear should be, like a reminder to his own ego to start listening?

Anxiety starts to take over in three dimensions, where the surfeit of jokes functions more clearly as a defense mechanism. Rods poke in or out of an eye, and a chessboard seems to have undertaken regicide, but with the pieces reduced to near identity. Another opposition of life and death comes alongside a black wheel of fortune. In the largest wall drawing, a small boat rides on waves like a roller-coaster. In the sculptural centerpiece, a gallows faces the wrong way, so that the ladder leads safely down. Indecision holds out hope.

From the Simpsons to Chris Ware, American graphics tend to smirk or to cry easily, without taking themselves seriously. Breuning reflects a distinctly European sensibility, with roots in Neo-Expressionism, conceptual art, and theater. Like another Swiss artist desperate to make an impact, Urs Fischer, he appeared in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Like many a German artist, he has a fondness for black human silhouettes and impending doom. An American may find most interesting the remnants of a much earlier form of conceptual art, when words stood apart from a clear message, as with Roni Horn or Lawrence Weiner. Now if only the cartoons allowed a little more space for laughter or reflection.

As cheap jokes go, Phillip Toledano’s are funnier. “America the Gift Shop,” at Hous Projects through December 19, imagines souvenirs of the Bush era—like a Cheney sno-globe, Abu-Ghraib figurines, “Choc and Awe” candy bars, and “Regions Destabilized While U Wait” in neon. “I was rendered to a secret prison,” says another of our last president’s gifts that keep giving, “and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” The show shares space with a sophisticated Soho furniture showroom and fund-raising for Amnesty International. Both make me uncomfortable alongside the art, but it gains from the unintended irony. I had to laugh, but somewhere else conceptual art will keep the punch line and not the one-liners.

Burning Man has come a long way from a spontaneous gathering on a San Francisco beach in 1986. It has become a week-long “temporary community” of nearly fifty thousand people in the Nevada desert. They know because they sell tickets, at $360 a pop. Of course, attendance remains an estimate, since children under twelve get in free.

But what about adults behaving like children? As we saw last time, for Mike Kelley and Michael Smith that describes the entire festival. It may even describe America. Maybe not, but it definitely describes Baby IKKI. For two and one-half hours of video at SculptureCenter, Smith’s character wanders alone through Burning Man in his nipple and swaddling clothes. Baby IKKI may never grow up, but Kelley and Smith call it A Voyage of Growth and Self-Discovery.

They have traveled far from the art world, but they fit just fine at home. Just a few blocks from their installation, a Long Island City gallery, Dorsky, staged “The Horror Show” this past summer, with a cultural history more familiar to New Yorkers. Everywhere, though, bad boys have been acting up and trashing the galleries. The spare days of appropriation and conceptual art have grown into one big party. Think of it as the American cultural equivalent of London’s dead sharks, stained bedsheets, and piss Christ.

All this and more is the subject of a longer review—and my latest upload. This bit of housecleaning, with my usual apologies, brings together several reviews that first appeared on this page in an earlier form. It also returns to a theme of this Web site: a chastened, conceptual style of Postmodernism has given way to trashing the gallery. Everywhere, art seems to have a special penchant for the hip, overblown, macho, and theatrical. Boy toys range from video games to graffiti, and now comes bigger nightmares.

Sure, big money talks, but does it have to talk only about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll? For these artists, thankfully, the talk can get truly scary. Black Acid Co-op began in still another western desert. However, Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman converted Deitch Projects this past summer into entertainment gone horribly wrong. So what if it is also hyperactive and entertaining? Soho’s weekend crowds may wonder at their own self-indulgence.

Their installation parallels any number of extravagant displays these days, from Damien Hirst and the Young British Artists to Urs Fischer. And do not forget the hours of Matthew Barney video or Cai Guo-Qiang car crashes at the Guggenheim. While critics complain about critical theory, I might want conceptual art back almost as much as abstract meditations. Yet this work’s energy, accessibility, and humor make it more seductive than black or acid. I doubt that anyone leaves more shaken up than diverted. But do not be too sure.

Mike Kelley and Michael Smith talk of A Voyage of Growth and Self-Discovery, but it is also a voyage into a bad dream. It begins peaceably enough, through November 30, as Smith in the role of Baby IKKI meanders past trailers of the Burning Man festival in Nevada in broad sunlight, bouncing his beachball and mostly ignored by others, like an experiment in cognitive psychology. His play becomes more ominous back in his trailer, watching bad movies and playing with matches. As for the play of others, the six screens end in night and fire, to the sound of some five hundred drummers surrounding the effigy of a burning man. “This is it,” intones a female voice. “This is all there is.”

Few will mistake it all for a hyperactive celebration of the infantile, with its icky hero. They would have to miss the darkness and thunder the moment one enters SculptureCenter. They would have to miss the monstrous figure at the far end—a cross between the Burning Man effigy and Baby IKKI, but in thirty feet of scrap metal. They would have to miss the half-deflated beachball and carpet of crushed stuffed animals, at the base of a blanketed and less than ideal geodesic dome. They would have to miss the deserted monkey bars nearby. They would surely have to miss how more stuffed animals dangle from the bars like a bear and lion left for dead.

Few will miss, too, the irony of the work’s title—or its snide echo of self-help and the American dream. Burning Man calls itself “an annual experiment . . . dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance.” In time, the towering burning man and its charred remains grew bigger and bigger. In time, too, the gathering came to incorporate art and performance, including the invitation to transform one’s mobile home into part of a “theme camp.” It also added overarching themes, such as “Hell,” “Outer Space,” and “Vault of Heaven.” The year of “The Green Man,” Al Gore sent his thanks.

On the other hand, only the simple-minded will mistake the installation for a critique of capitalism. No, guys, this is not all there is, and neither is Burning Man. A festival that bans vending and depends on sharing makes a lousy image of consumer society anyway. Besides, Kelley and Smith have been playing art’s bad boys for years, and they have not suddenly outgrown their parts. Glib or acidic, Kelley’s endless sculptures of stuffed animals (now at Gagosian, through December 23, mixed with clowns and porn) and Smith’s infant are their art, with Baby IKKI goes to Burning Man just the latest in a series. Their installation parallels any number of extravagant boy toys these days, like Black Acid Co-Op this past summer at Deitch.

They do not mean viewers to stand above it all either. Perhaps all art is a form of play, but Kelley and Smith definitely do not aspire to critical distance. Call their work ugly, scary, or alluring, but at least call it enveloping. Oddly enough, Ken Johnson in The Times makes a point of debunking Baby IKKI’s naiveté. The critic with a taste for loosey-goosey art could well be excusing his own self-indulgence. He actually praises the work as “institutional critique,” only to deride the term as academic.

Kelley and Smith want it all. They want the thrill and the detachment, the self-discovery and the self-mockery, the vision of childhood and the overgrown child. They want the dome to allude to Buckminster Fuller, a playground, and a disaster area. They want a festival that few New Yorkers know, much less attend, to combine the extremes of Woodstock and Altamont. And they pretty much succeed. These bad boys make truly infantile art, but this time one lingers in the darkness.

When Urs Fischer took over the New Museum, he promised to shake the building to its foundations. He had already dug a huge pit in his gallery. When the show turned out unbearably stylish and tame, that shook things up, too. He had advanced awfully fast from a Whitney Biennial to a West Village dealer and now three entire floors of a museum founded as an alternative space. And when the New Museum announced the follow-up, it felt like a shakedown. It will devote its very next show to a collector who has invested in Fischer, curated by Jeff Koons.

It took months to attract attention, but it has become an embarrassment. Tyler Green and other bloggers screamed. Jerry Saltz defended the museum, at New York magazine and again more than once on Facebook. Ed Winkleman—the dealer, blogger, and now author—suggested a debate, and he was not kidding. A little public scrutiny of a museum’s mission, conflicts of interest, and connections is overdue. Then again, it might complete art’s transformation from high culture into a public spectacle.

The flare-up already reflects the transformation. Green writes as, well, a blogger—quickly and archly reacting to other news sources. Saltz is on the defensive personally, after lavish praise for the New Museum and one show after another. I do not play the game well (and you have my mission statements as a Web critic and pretend art historian). I had been saving my outrage until the Dakis Joannou collection opens, honest, and I have not even got around to posting my review of Fischer. But what, if anything, is wrong?

Plenty. A museum needs a darned good reason to display a private collection. It does not even claim a particular insight into contemporary art, as would a normal group show. Instead, it flatters one man’s taste, caters to wealth and ego, and represents a clear conflict of interest. It entangles a museum, a trustee, Fischer, Koons, and outsize reputations in a hungry market. So what if the New Museum has no permanent collection, while the Guggenheim begged the Nasher collection for sculpture? An exhibition like this still certifies private interests as museum quality, still fills the building, and still rewards a trustee’s contribution to its endowment.

It also testifies to the abysmal state of the New Museum. Since reopening on the Bowery with a rainbow Hell Yes out front (by Ugo Rondonine), it has fallen over itself to enter the mainstream. It has had vacuous group shows, themes (like “Unmonumental“) that echo Chelsea’s macho displays of boy toys and trashing the gallery, yet another display of emerging artists, midcareer bloat for Fischer, and now this. Frankly, I had never cared for Marcia Tucker’s judgment as the museum’s founder, and she might love the stridency of Black Panther posters this past summer. Still, Lisa Phillips has left a grassroots program far behind. As director, as at the Whitney, she is determined to play trend spotter in a trend-obsessed art world.

The tangle extends to the media. Not all that long ago, the New Museum struggled for press coverage. Try to name a show in its past homes, beyond maybe Andrea Zittel. All at once, in a costly new building, it has gained near universal praise, although the architecture’s dysfunction becomes more and more obvious. Saltz’s gushing looks sillier and sillier, too, given his complaints about the art scene as a “battle for Babylon” and a boy’s club. All this parallels the difficulties of sorting out hype from curatorial ambitions in phony attributions at the Met.

Museums should collaborate. They do so on traveling shows and in exchanging loans, just as (pace Green) dealers have every right to collaborate on art fairs. The Frick shone with its selections from the Norton Simon. When MOMA accepted work from Edward R. Broida, it did everyone a favor by putting it on display before integrating it with the collection—by its very openness and by a window onto the 1970s. And collectors from Albert C. Barnes and Solomon R. Guggenheim to Emily Fisher Landau are entitled to take their vision to the public as museums. But Tyler is right, and a museum betrays its trust.

Once again, Vermeer’s Milkmaid took me by surprise. Vermeer does that. He paints what look like sudden glimpses of life that have been there forever. That is what takes explaining. It has led people to imagine entire lives for his women—and yet to call him a modernist before his time, a pure painter.

Its size alone took me by surprise. It measures less than eighteen inches high, smaller than The Lacemaker by Nicolaes Maes across the room. Delft genre painting is like that, too, and the Met displays The Milkmaid along with its own Vermeers and other Dutch art. Add in the Frick, and New York City has quite a collection. An almost comical wall reproduces every known Vermeer, unframed and on precisely the same scale. (You decide whether a tricky attribution, Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, belongs.)

Sunlight sweeps across her chest and the wall. It isolates the poured milk as if its stream will never stop. Loaves on the table glisten with points of light. She is probably preparing the ingredients for a pudding, but everything here is an end in itself. Quite aside from her, the painting holds mountains. She is simply its highest peak.

The descent is easy, but the way back is slow. One crosses four distinct shades of blue—in the cloth, a ceramic pitcher, the bands on the maid’s sleeves, and her apron. Vermeer makes one blue richer than the next, with her waist the richest of all. Vermeer isolates her more as heroine than as serving girl. One can look, but one cannot touch. Yet he makes perception into sensual, tactile experience.

Does that leave her a sex object, and would she care? Teasing out Vermeer’s competing narratives is one point of the Met’s display, through November 29, and it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload. The curator, Walter Liedtke, definitely does not believe in pure painting—or in the milkmaid’s purity. The Dutch in their golden age loved allegories of abundance, pleasure, and the temptation to give into both. They especially liked to ascribe it to the servants, as in a genre scene at the Met. Milkmaids had pride of place in the mythology, perhaps because of the association of milk with breasts.

A show with exactly one loan sounds restrained. Yet for all the celebration surrounding its visit to New York, The Milkmaid surprises. It will not settle down to allegory or even ambiguity. Just when I want the maid poised between pure existence and pure painting, Vermeer makes a blemish on the wall into a pool of light. Earthiness and light may enhance one another or deconstruct each other. Either way, the woman has the last word.