NEW.YORK
ART.CRIT

For thirty years now, Joel Shapiro has felt as familiar as one’s very own childhood. Sure, even now, so long after Jeff Koons, Minimalism is the official language of public sculpture and public memorials. And sure, for a while Minimalism banished sculpture’s not-so-secret weapon from Michelangelo to Giacometti, the human form. Yet Shapiro brought them together. Who now could tear them apart?

He starts with thick beams of metal and wood. They hold together with solder, bolts, chains, and little else, especially not gravity. Their tottering geometries are already part of a city’s industrial history, especially when they land in sculpture gardens and summer parks. They also look like stick figures, but as an awkward grownup might imagine them. Dancing or falling, they hang in there all the same. They could be someone you know or yourself—only, like David after all, slightly larger than life.

For all that, the native New Yorker started small. At Paula Cooper (the annex across the street) through February 13, Shapiro’s early sculpture is tiny and devoid of life but as personal as the past. A cast-iron chair from 1977 rises all of three inches off the floor, which might as well extend forever. Bronze houses or barns run not much larger. Their stiff edges, hard materials, closed shapes, and scale keep them at a distance. They seem to reside not in a gallery, but in memory. For many critics these days, they belong to anything but Minimalism.

Perhaps, and perhaps the show begins as a rebuke to Minimalism. From 1969 to 1971, Shapiro works in wood rather than industrial materials. A wooden coffin or the carved-out shell of a boat sure looks representational. A tiny mannequin, the kind from an art-supply store, has broken into bits. Where Carl Andre uses regularity and repetition, they fall where they may. If, as Michael Fried complained long ago, Minimalism turns the gallery into a theater, these remain objects, only somewhere apart.

Of course, memory is a tricky thing. Critics like to think that they have put late Modernism behind them by now. Yet with his turn to cast metal, Shapiro also embraced Minimalism. At the very least, he made it his own. Already in wood, the randomness and shattered elements got along just fine with entropy, a favorite idea of Robert Smithson. And then for Shapiro factory and sculptural materials took over the joint.

They have abstraction’s regular geometries, including a trapezoidal prism—or indeed the very first hint of a stick figure on so small a scale. A house on a short pedestal connects to the iron plane below it. Another house sticks out from the wall at eye level, with a door and windows, and one wall piece consists of merely a plane and a square hole, leading to hollow metal sticking down. Their dialogue of open and closed, empty and full, explores the formal vocabulary of sculpture, and art this small makes one aware of oneself and the room quite as much as Andre or Carl Flavin does. Work so rigorous and haunting can never fully belong to Minimalism, any more than to the childhood on a farm Shapiro or I never had. After Soho and Chelsea, art is not in Kansas anymore.

To wrap up from last time, Lin’s success has its share of paradoxes. A women in a sadly male profession, Maya Lin she has worked steadily as an architect. A Chinese American, like Isamu Noguchi in his reopened garden museum, she alludes to both Modernism and Asian settings, but without insisting on either as her style or theme. Like Noguchi, too, she has worked in sculpture, design, and landscape as well. She seems content with not uniting them into a distinctive style.

She achieved recognition even as a student, when she transformed public memories of the Vietnam War. A literally groundbreaking work, it made Minimalism all but the official language of memorials, but her transformations as an architect seem more modest. Her buildings have often had previous lives, and it is hard to know for sure where she left her mark. In her work on museums, the building’s history and the curator’s choices both enter strongly into the design. One might call her an architect and a star, but not a celebrity architect.

Two exhibitions and a museum opening in 2009 offer a chance to put the pieces together. I have therefore expanded on the last review with more on her recent work as a longer article—and my latest upload. It includes a review of her recent sculpture that first appeared in this space in a different form in early fall as well.

These all involve the reticence that makes her work both challenging and comforting. The Museum of Chinese in America takes one underground as a step into urban and cultural history. Her sculpture, in turn, recalls earthworks, but also earth in the face of climate change. Together, they suggest a common ground for her work in connecting landscape, architecture, and community.

While I should not wish to interrupt the longer review for it, the temporary exhibition for December, the museum’s second since it opened and the second in a series of three, was a tame affair. Even Ming Fay’s colorful wax garden riffs on too many familiar installations. Zhang Hongtu evokes the influence of Chinese art on painters after Impressionism with great poise, but brightening and simplifying both. Shiyi Sheng’s photos of Chinese American couples look like too many Sunday magazine spreads. Long-Bin Chen saves his old-fashioned busts of Asian gods alongside Franklin and Lincoln from the obvious by crafting them of phone books. Yet only his library in the form of an infinity sign snaking down from the ceiling escapes from the literal into the literate.

A good restorer knows when to leave well enough alone. In stripping away old varnish from a possible Velázquez portrait, the Met’s conservator resisted filling in the gaps. Colors and brushwork have come alive, but much else will remain forever unknown.

Maya Lin does something similar with a museum. For SculptureCenter, she gave the trolley repair shop in Queens a thorough cleaning, right down to gaps in the old brick. As with the Spanish portrait, only your imagination can complete it. Lin’s restraint immerses viewer in the space all the more, especially in the basement tunnels. It may also explain why her architecture works best, like Alice through the looking glass, as adventures underground. With the Vietnam War Memorial or her recent landscaping at Storm King, one must accept immersion in order to rise.

The Museum of Chinese in America invites one underground, too. With the stairs to the rest rooms and education center, Lin has preserved the two-story atrium and its dark trapezoidal skylight. They look back to a Chinese central courtyard and to nearby Chinatown, but flowers rest on the clean modern steps, and images flicker on monitors set into the crumbling red brick. The space is haunted, but the ghosts know to keep their distance. MOCA opened in its new location in September, and it is still defining a community’s relationship to its past and present.

Back upstairs, under director Alice Mong, the small galleries engage visitors by a more conventional means, museum displays. The rooms immediately ahead begin a history of east and west, from the first trade in spices and opium. Then come immigrant labor on the railroads, the birth of Chinatowns and their “elite slummers,” and growing assimilation. Its stages include Chinese laundries, the fad for chop suey, stereotypes like Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, and professional success—all of which drew white America into the Chinese community as well. These rooms circle back at the left, while a room to the right exhibits contemporary art. One can think of the three choices on entering as past, present, and future (although the future that I caught looked rather tame).

They rely little on showy objects, beyond a dragon’s head from the celebration of Chinese New Year. A Dual 1227 turntable, like an old box TV, belong to stages in my own desiring as much to Chinese in America. For more shades of Alice, the section on laundry workers has a flatiron labeled “Lift Me” (and, yes, it is heavy). Maps on the floor connect to a further history in objects suspended from above. More often, though, the museum relies on images and text, including light boxes set into the walls. These supply brief profiles of past and present role models, including Lin herself.

The down side of Lin’s restraint is her reticence. To her credit, MOCA stands at almost opposite poles from celebrity architecture at the New Museum, barely half a mile away. Yet little distinguishes the exterior from the garage next door or the upscale liquor store just up the block, and little distinguishes the lobby from a well-appointed gift shop. Only a fire escape outside preserves the past, and it takes time within to feel haunted. Nothing equals the descent to the basement, which leads away from the galleries. It is worth the trip all the same.

Nam June Paik may have invented his own art form, but he loved collaboration. He thrived in a circle of art, dance, music, and performance. Amy Greenfield, for one, remembers.

She has every right to dedicate her 1994 MUSEic of the BODy to Paik. He asked Greenfield to work with him on a tribute to another favorite collaborator, Charlotte Moorman. (You may know her as the soloist in Paik’s Concerto for TV Cello.) Although they worked separately, the monitor atop a quaint electric piano could almost pass for his, in its combination of television and sculpture. He would love the on-screen anarchy as well. Suzanne Gregoire, naked but for a long string of pearls, lolls against that very keyboard—accompanied by fragments of her own “interactive performance” on monitors on-screen behind her.

Greenfield, however, handled the choreography and video, and the recreation and the memories now very much belong to her. At the opening, at Dam, Stuhltrager, she was still draping more of those pearls across the keys. Paik, who died in 2006, may be synonymous with new media, but one always thinks of his busted spare parts and period TVs. She updates that, too, for a work that has taken on a life of its own, with a spiffy flat-panel monitor. These days, new media might suggest a different kind of interactivity—the invitation to alter the digital events by playing along. You do not get to choose the black keys, but she still arranged the gallery’s seating in parallel, like a piano bench.

That monitor is not the only sign of Best Buy in “Untitled Nude,” through February 12. The curator, Lynn del Sol of {CTS} Creative Thriftshop, has given the artist and filmmaker a small retrospective. In Tides from 1982 and Element from 1973, other women cavort in close up. One splashes in water, the other in mud. They show her career not just over time, but also in its themes. She fragments the body and dismembers visual narrative, along with the rules of prime time TV. She also links the nude to the identity of both women and art.

The nude has been a battleground for art at least since Edouard Manet and Olympia, but especially since feminism. Some feminists might see the naked body as the mark of a woman’s energy and autonomy, others as object of the male gaze. Greenfield comes down pretty clearly for the first, right down to the unity of opposites like earth and water. She quotes Paul Valéry, that “the nude is for the artist what love is for the poet.” Maybe, but that underestimates her own madness. There is comedy as well as magic in the slog through mud.

Speaking of video comedy and magic from ten or twenty years ago, “Nothing up my Sleeve” presents Stuart Sherman as both comedian and magician. His gold costume even lies empty on the floor, just in case he needs to return from the dead to reclaim it. Jonathan Berger curated the tribute, which closed December 20—including scripts, memorabilia, guest performances, and video. On four small monitors on pedestals, Sherman shuffles props around a table and around his body. The acts could pass for card tricks, street vending, improv, or masturbation. I may not quite get it, but Participant, Inc., has a real dedication to art over the edge, and the artist, who died in 2001, would relate.

Once upon a time, a young artist came from a backwater to an urban center, drawn by cutting-edge painting. He brought with him sentimental habits, a volatile personality, and the potential to transform European painting. I mean Pablo Picasso, but through February 27 the Onassis Cultural Center in midtown tells the very same story about the Renaissance. “The Origins of El Greco: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete” tries to place a great artist within developments back home. Crete nestled between Greece and Byzantine art, but increasingly within the sphere of Italian city-states and Venice’s sea trade. The show claims Crete as a meeting point of all those influences, with El Greco as the product of their collision.

The very first works, like a Madonna and Child from before 1400, have the frontal poses of an eastern religious icon, outlined in gold and a single color against gold leaf. Even so, they have a surprisingly large scale and freedom of movement in the child’s regal gesture. Renaissance Florence in 1420 would have loved the theme of Saint George slaying the dragon, with his sharp diagonal thrust, or a tiny marzipan city nearby. Another Saint George already mixes gold leaf, Tuscan tempera, and Venetian color, but alongside a favorite Cretan saint named Merkourios—and together they tread on a villain in Ottoman dress. A Nativity retains the Gothic tradition of a cave rather than a manger, but fantastic figures spill over the cave mouth. By 1500, the full-bodied Renaissance quarter turn known as contrapposto is second nature, but with Gothic shadows and almond eyes.

Venetian color takes over the first consistently three-dimensional vista, highlighted by the foreground figures and their starkly black and white robes. Yet gold leaf will not go away without a fight. In fact, compositions grow more rigidly symmetrical than ever, with massed actors on two different scales. Crowding at the Crucifixion and exaggerated death throes may look back to Gothic models—or they may import new influences from the Northern Renaissance. Still, one artist copies the art of Giovanni Bellini in Venice right down to the Madonna’s free turn to embrace Saint John. A favorite subject, Saint Francis, drops in from the Italian mainland, too.

Mannerism intrudes with the sixteenth-century, but even its heightened emotions build on Gothic models. In a small altarpiece for private devotion, sharp contrasts of black and color sort out the preposterous detail and cramped tiers at the Last Judgment. A magi’s awe is indistinguishable from fear, and it relegates the birth of Jesus to a sidebar. A rearing horse shows the fullness of life and his owner’s courtly command, but also the horse’s cartoon smile. Michael Damaskenos, one of the few Cretan artists remembered by name, contributes a Last Supper. Its round table carries the eye gently past its center, in place of the usual drama of recoil and betrayal.

With El Greco at last, every century comes into play. The heightened bulk and drama of a man’s back leans across a small, geometric tomb that Giotto might have painted way back at the birth of the Renaissance. Yet the diagonal action carries one’s eye rapidly into the landscape, past tuft-like trees right out of Bellini and Titian. In the artist’s very first surviving work, the Death of the Virgin Mary, only a circle of funeral candles breaks the rigid and retro verticals. Eight years later, the electric blue light of El Greco the visionary fills the sky and unites intense subplots, with figures in rapt attention. By 1605, the cloak of God and Jesus sweeps up angels and Mary toward the Holy Spirit, with a clarity and unity that parallels the first years of Baroque.

The show defies tidy narratives about origins. Art often does. Even that last composition floats above an unknown ground and cuts off everyone’s feet. Besides, with his first known work, from 1562, El Greco has already left Crete for Italy, on his way to painting in Toledo, Spain. (Okay, the Onassis Center has to cheat just a little, but take what you can get.) Innovation takes both outsiders and traditions.

Critics and defenders of abstraction can agree on one thing. Painting has narrowly escaped death, with conceptual art the murder weapon. Only one problem with this story: if painting has come alive, it has done so while borrowing happily from conceptual art. Reality, what a concept!

It had to happen, given abstraction’s past claims to theoretical rigor, coupled with dead sharks and trashy installations all but devoid of ideas. It had to happen, too, given the sheer diversity of conceptual arts. Color-field painters can take on traces of figuration, like Seth Price and his enigmatic silhouettes. They can use the materials of process art and photography, like the silvery stage sets of Jacqueline Humphries or the silver halide tarnish of Jacob Kassay. They can incorporate and obliterate both gesture and text, like Jutta Koether. They can use splatter and geometry alike ironically, like Kelley Walker and Wade Guyton—who have turned an entire gallery into a cross between a studio and a billboard.

“Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture,” which ran through January 16 at The Kitchen, argues for all that—and with every one of those artists. So, in fact, have I often enough, and the links just now will take you to many gorgeous examples not in the show as well. How, then, can a show this impure and capacious look so cool and opaque? Price in the past has taken on political overtones, Guyton and Walker have set out tacky furniture, Humphries has made silvery reflections into almost an extension of the human body, and Kassay’s organic geometries can darken before one’s eyes. Here they look resolutely conceptual and abstract, as if to bring out the worst fears of either side. The show’s very title speaks of ambivalence and incomplete grammars.

Soft tones dominate, but not as mysticism or magic. Like Polly Apfelbaum’s carpet rolls on the floor, they could stand for an art that has turned inward. Not even Alex Hubbard’s cross between paint-spattered work pants and Mark Rothko, Cheryl Donegan’s colorful emblems of painting, Nate Lowman’s stenciled logos, and Blake Rayne’s skewed geometries break the uniformity. Debra Singer, the curator, does go lightly on extensions and simulations of abstraction in new media and photography. Still, the very next show (opening tomorrow) features Amy Granat. For now, a tribute to painting and conceptual art leaves one wondering about the possibility of making art or making meaning after all.

There is joy in mudville. More often than not, Chelsea gets a little too gleeful, where reality is awfully muddy. The Kitchen in fact deserves some credit for putting a damper on just that. Despite the cutting-edge theme, it may even be deliberately backward looking. It prefers the term “ready-made” to “appropriation,” as if to set aside neo-geo, critical theory, and politics. “The Pictures Generation,” it seems to say, has outlived its usefulness.

For all their virtues, however, the twenty-two artists leave one hungry for more—much more. Some may look this month to Gagosian, through February 20, for Philip Taaffe’s decorative orientalism or to Exit Art, through February 6, for seven other lackluster painters. Some may look to Luhring Augustine through February 6, for Will Daniels’s still-life photorealism. He hopes to make abstraction flame out like, literally, shining from shook foil. Some may look to Les Rogers at Leo Koenig, through February 20, for an often delicious cross between Clyfford Still and Henri Matisse. Some may look instead to Mitchell-Innes & Nash through February 20, for Jack Tworkov from 1960 to 1975, as he slowly contracts Abstract Expressionism to fine gray brushstrokes.

Skyler Brickley may come closer than any to the rigors of abstraction and conceptual art. In his ghostly near monochrome, at Marvelli through February 13, he could be turning a hospital scan on them both. The repeated elements do more than suggest digital traces. Brickley indeed created them digitally, blew them up, and applied them to canvas with a roller. At the same time, their refusal of imagery echo a formalist’s identification of painting with the wall. He even calls them Wall to Wall.

However, their eerie colors, irregular marks, and mural scale also imply a human presence behind the roller. Their scale also makes them into a kind of empty stage set, with the entire gallery the theater. And that may be their most conceptual turn after all. Brickley adjusts each piece to the wall by composing them of multiple canvases, each the dimensions of a movie screen turned on its side. That places the gallery-goer in the audience for a projection rather than on stage. Still, one will have to keep looking hard and wide for the giddy impurity of art in a digital age.