haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

Joan Jonas speaks of wanting to capture “the shape, the scent, the feel of things.” If that suggests a raw immediacy, she works fast.

The Drawing Center fills all three of its galleries with some three hundred works, chosen from more than two thousand. Is even that a mere preface to her retrospective at MoMA? It is a challenge to Jonas herself to keep up with the pace of things. These are not simply things observed or the things in themselves, but things for both her senses and as they appear to themselves. They ask what drawing can still mean to an artist known not for so-called fine art, but for video, installation, and performance.

Drawings for Jonas sure look immediate, like the wild shape of things. Her line may seem barely to hold together, and so might a recognizable living creature. She calls her show “Animal Vegetable Mineral,” through June 2, and animals by far win out. What could that have to do with new media? What about an artist who has lived in Soho for fifty years, just up the street from the Drawing Center today? “I know,” she insists, “what is around me”—which may sound more like boutiques, warehouses, and cobblestones than nature.

Still, performance for Jonas has always meant experiencing her surroundings, going back to Wind in 1968. And the Drawing Center brings a more recent video of two women, one of them the artist, walking by the sea. Their paths cross as they hold out a paper cone, like a makeshift megaphone or telescope, but without a sign of communication or recognition. One can see what she means by an art of “incurable solitude.” It is also art with a sense of humor and experiment. Whatever it takes to see or fail to see.

She has summered in Nova Scotia, collecting rocks from the Canadian wilds, and a table holds its share. (She began as a sculptor, and one might hope for hints to her early work, but good luck with that.) She keeps looking, too, with the same ambiguity as to whether she is looking for nature or herself. Her drawings turn to butterflies and bees, seen up close, rendered in ink on paper folded in half. It brings out their symmetry, but also her love of accident. The back of a bee could just as well be an animal’s spine or its gaping black maw.

The curators, Laura Hoptman with Rebecca DiGiovanna, take things not chronologically but in series. They can hardly help it, not with a series of thirty-seven dogs or forty-seven birds. It is a human creation all the same. Dogs are domestic animals, and the rest could belong to the artist’s backyard or her imagination. She has drawn fish “as they are in the sea,” but how would she know without imagination? She has sketched snowflakes, but they have already melted away.

They have a life of themselves all the same. A series for Jonas is not so much variations on a theme as a focus of attention. It also has its impetus in her media. What begins as wild freehand may not stay that way, and what looks immediate may be anything but. It may run to a single intricate loop in response to traditional Irish patterning—what a video calls Mystic Knots. It may also run to chance.

She has her Rorschach tests, in folded paper or melting ice. She has worked with a twig dipped in ink and made puppets from photocopies. Like David Hammons or Yves Klein, she has made art from the traces of a human body, her own or another woman’s—on paper and in performance. It can be hard to know one subject, human or animal, from another. The show opens with faces in profile, with more dips and turns than needed for just a nose and a mouth. Who, though, can say in advance the shape of things?

Did I say that The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things is also the title of a video? I turn soon, I promise, to her MoMA retrospective.

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

Diedrick Brackens calls his two-gallery show “Blood Compass,” and, yes, there will be blood. It may not flow again before your eyes, but you can feel it coming and see fresh evidence of bloodshed.

A man raises his arms above his head, about to bring them down on the pig at his feet—a wild one, but not wild enough to know when to escape. Others carry a deer hung from a pole, on its way to or from slaughter. Another man stands tall, facing front, the dead center of a work seemingly stained in blood. Elsewhere the sun has turned to crimson, for the most chilling of sunsets, unless it is a blood moon.

“The sun will turn into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” Brackens might be quoting the Book of Joel, but if not his work still has biblical and human resonance. The man set against the red also stands before arches to either side, as if presiding over a cathedral and its rituals. The architecture frames nothing but black, the shadows of a greater depth, but then another circle is itself black, and presiding compass circles are implicit elsewhere as well. The man facing front also spreads his arms and legs in the pose of a well-known drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. The extremities of his Vitruvian Man, arms and legs doubled, define a circle.

Leonardo was describing ideal proportions, but also what it is to be human. Brackens, too, is concerned for iconicity and reality, but for him either one can mark a descent into animal nature. He, too, is also looking to the past for models, but not to ancient Rome. He is black and still in his thirties, and his figures are black silhouettes, with telling exceptions. Black and white silhouettes crawl together on the ground, and it is not clear who has conquered whom. America here has a messy but brutal history.

He looks back with his medium as well, at Jack Shainman through June 1. Weaving is everywhere today, to the point of cliché and multiple points of reference. It can quote folk art in New England and the deep South, Native American art, European art, or the art of Africa—and Brackens can happily embrace them all, in search of a specifically African American history. Mostly it appears these days as a statement of pride, but he cares about the dark side of that history as well. He retains the tasseled fringes of his tapestry, except where he has ripped them away.

He opens in Chelsea with standing silhouettes, male and female, and he interrupts their broader design for short loops of colored thread, much like Anni Albers. Albers, of course, was rescuing art and craft for Modernism, formalism, women, and the people, and Brackens, too, is asserting an eclectic heritage and essential dignity. Still, things are about to descend into indignity and violence. What is that couple holding anyway, and is it a weapon? Come to think of it, the weapon in the hands of the man about to slay a pig looks awfully feeble for the task. Still, there will be blood.

Nature gets its revenge soon enough, in the gallery’s Tribeca space. Men do crawl on the ground, and a dog has chased another man up a tree. It may, though, have done him a favor by bringing him closer to the sky. So does the space itself, a marbled hall that could easily upstage art, but instead complements it. If nothing else, it encourages one to linger, which does any art a favor. It also allows for still larger work—one topped with yellow butterflies that could almost float freely in the space of the room above one’s head, like a shining escape from bloodshed.

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

Is it Memorial Day at last, a time to embrace summer in the city and to put spring arts behind us? Allow me to do so as best I can in the rain, with a parting look back at the madness. But wait: could I have missed it?

After so many years and so many vows, I finally got up the courage: I skipped the New York art fairs. Well, not quite, but I did skip the massive, classy May leaders, Frieze and TEFAF. I felt the relief from the pressure to see it all, to record it all, and to pick winners. That is not what I think good criticism can and should do. Can I bring myself to skip the Armory Show and the mad rush in September?

We shall see, but for now I stuck to the alternative fairs, so forgive me a correspondingly brief report. As usual, a small fair for African and African America artists, I-54 (now in the Starrett-Lehigh building west of Chelsea galleries), provides a touch of diversity and invention. As usual, too, the Independent in Tribeca brings a much-needed quality and energy. It also comes a week later than the rest, as if to say that you missed nothing. That leaves what might, generously, be called the strivers. Are these really the alternatives in art now? Maybe not, but a new fair, Esther, heads across town to a nineteenth-century townhouse that welcomes and clashes happily with the art.

As ever, Salon Zürcher claims the title of a fair for a group show of eleven women. It includes rubbings by Margaret Cogswell that seem to dive into the wreck, a tight grid of holographic tape by Marietta Hoferer, collage abstraction with an emphasis on color by Phillis Ideal, and faces barely hiding their identity and anxiety by Judith Henry. They show the advantages of a curator’s choices, and a self-curated fair like Clio or Superfine can only drive that home. Not everyone without a gallery is too adventurous for the system, and tightly hung clusters of work barely rescues it from the trash. Still, the strivers within the system do drive the action, not least the members of the New Art Dealers Alliance. Whether as NADA House on Governors Island or again in the former Dia:Chelsea, where the Independent, too, got its start, it is a place for young old favorites.

NADA’s fair has expanded to a truly international gathering, including nonmembers, most with stripped-down versions of their current shows. Still, it may work better as a supporting network than a fair. So does the Future fair, despite some inviting selections of abstract art with Kathryn Markel by the entrance. Booths had me wishing after all for the game changers and market leaders at Frieze in the Shed. Still, as Maynard Morrow (with GAVLAK) has it in a text painting, The Future Tis Not Ours to Ruin. Morrow, though, appears in another fair entirely with a real future, the Independent.

For its fifteenth anniversary, its alternative fair takes three rooms for fifteen galleries and artists from past years. They make a delightful noise—in wild and wooly takes on figurative art in 3D. Better, though, are the uncrowded booths for enduring but still adventurous galleries, media, and genres. Abstraction appears as a dialogue, as Alan Uglow and Jane Swavely (with Magenta Plains) trade horizontals and verticals as bases for its space—and as Kate Spencer Stewart (with Bureau) shows just how far brushwork and color can go within near-monochrome darkness. Andrew Brischler (also with GAVLAK) constructs portraits in close-up, but with a moving psychological reserve. Their hand-painted dots belong to neither Pop Art and commerce nor the digital and AI, but rather to a vivid sense of the present.

And then there is Esther, like the sound of your mother calling and unseen voices answering back. Margot Samel, a small dealer with an Estonian heritage, met up with an Estonia dealer, Olga Temnikova, and invited friends. They set out a welcome mat reading Esther at the entrance to Estonian House, normally a private club. Samel herself places a ceramic flower pot as if it had always been there, among works by Kris Lemsala, Bertha Leonard, and August Krogan-Roley. Facing it, a blue robe from Lewis Miller and Jesse Wine (with the Modern Institute in Glasgow) hovers beneath the wood molding like a ghost. If you feel out of place climbing the stairs, you may sense the ghosts.

Claims aside, Esther has only modest emphasis on Eastern Europe. You may not even know for sure just what is from where, as the display relies on a map rather than labels—so forgive me if I fell prey myself to mistaken identity. Diagonal partitions confuse things that much further, although they enliven wildly cut panels by Ernesto Burgos with Simone Subal. Yet the surroundings do matter. Another Tribeca gallery, Andrew Kreps, sets out a painting of eyes, in work from Camille Blatrix and Hadi Falapishi, as if watching you and the artists alike. They look skeptical, but they are just part of the show.

A visit could be a tour for prospective members or a game of Clue. It even has a pool room, where Talia Chetrit and Skuja Bradner (with Kaufmann Repetto) set their ceramics on the pool table. Nearby, Tom Forkin (with Someday) removes the pool table from a noted painting by Vincent van Gogh, dragging his brush across versions in monochrome and color. On the piano of all places rests a monitor, like the ultimate collision of old and new media. On video, Bony Ramirez and Oliver Herring (with BANK in Shanghai) invite artists in China to take their moves to a construction site seemingly in ruins, where they seem less to dance than to roll in mud and white dust. From art fairs to nations, the future will not come easily or all at once.

There is nothing savage about the art of Richmond Barthé—and, if there were, he would be the first to tame it. If you have any doubts, head right for Feral Benga, in a gallery retrospective of a thoroughly sophisticated artist, at Michael Rosenfeld through July 26.

What may sound feral is a 1935 sculpture, with the skilled modeling of the School of Paris brought to New York. And what may sound like the sculptor’s considered judgment, harsh or appreciative, of a wild man is the stage name of a cabaret dancer. He may seem to be raising a savage weapon, perhaps a machete, above his head, but it is a performer’s graceful step on a Paris stage and in Barthé’s art. Its pedestal size makes it easy to admire the handling of bronze and the preternatural slimness better suited to a cabaret act than to a state of nature. Benga must have chosen his feral handle to reflect stereotypes of the black male, catering to them and playing against them, but there is little trace of African art or the “primitivism” that haunted Pablo Picasso. When it comes to Barthé, Modernism yes, irony no.

He looks rather sophisticated himself. Photos open the show with him and Alain Locke, a leading intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance, or actors playing the parts, dapper and dressed to the nines. They look much the same in archival footage of an exhibition opening packed with sophisticates. Isaac Julien, who co-curated the new exhibition, came upon it while preparing for Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die), his video in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Julien is claiming an ancestor for his own artistry and intellect and for African American art. He is also claiming an image of blackness that does not exclude gays like Barthé, Langston Hughes, Carl Van Vechten, and himself.

He can easily find one in the sculptor’s standing males like Benga. They are often sexualized and always in debt to European tradition, like Black Narcissus from 1929. You may remember Narcissus in myth as so in love with his image reflected in water that he drowns. Here he, too, is lithe and attractive, but also vulnerable. He could be pleading for love, like Julien’s or yours. He holds what might be a cucumber or a penis.

Barthé wants his figures to be at once mythic and particular, in the present. Others include laborers, and the dualism continues in portrait heads. They extend his art to women, with enormous sympathy and with a Black Madonna as well. They may still border on precious, without the edge and complexity of greater artists or blackness in America. Sculpture in general can feel like a footnote to the Met’s survey of the Harlem Renaissance, after paintings and photographs—and to Harlem’s vitality in literature and music. For Julien, though, statues never die.

Locke contemplates them in his video at the Whitney, in an idealized setting—perhaps the Barnes Foundation, in dialogue with Albert C. Barnes. So, in entering the darkness, will you, only the sculpture may be hard to see. You may not even notice it beside Locke’s firm but gentle gaze. Then, too, the new show opens not with sculpture, but rather those photos. Julien’s version of history is fluid enough to limit its own impressive claims for the past. He calls the show “A New Day Is Coming,” which speaks instead of the future.

That optimism infused the Harlem Renaissance. For Barthé, sculptures were studies in heroism, almost to his death in 1989. He called one work The Negro Looks Ahead. Still, he looked first and foremost not to the future, but to past and present. He tempts one to run one’s hands over a head like a phrenologist or lover, to imagine a mind in full. It will not be the savage mind.

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

To wrap up on the theme of new media from the last two posts, this past summer I offered a partial report on “Signals” then at MOMA. I did not have time to ask more pointedly what it said about new media—and what that left unsaid. Now that we have time, consider now what it was not. It was not interactive, although you may spot yourself on a monitor now and then.

It was not a record of performance as for Nam June Paik and Richard Serra, an immersive experience as for Bill Viola, a blunt political message as for Martha Rosler, sound art and historical memory as for Susan Philipsz, self-examination as for Lynn Hershman Leeson, or a philosophical meditation as for Gary Hill. It was not a step toward augmented reality, virtual reality, and AI. You may have seen several of these on the way out, in works from the permanent collection, displayed on nine monitors set in six formidable black boxes. But what do all those nots leave for a decent history or a show?

MoMA sees video art as political—not just a tool for protest, as for Rosler, but political in itself. The show’s very title points to both. And that means a constant tension between its use on behalf of power and its ability to push back. With Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, Paik himself plays on both. Still not convinced? Me neither, but that is where artist voices take over. They put 1984, the year many people started on the Web, behind them.

This being a trendy affair, here politics is identity politics. It can come from collectives, like the Black Audio Film Collective, with John Akomfrah, and American Artist, a black collective that also appears in “Refigured.” It can be an individual assertion as well, like that of Carlos Motta on gender identity or Emily Jacir between Ramallah and New York. Tony Cokes calls for a “black celebration,” but it will have to settle for plain text on a black screen. More often, though, identity is caught up in a mass movement of people between worlds. And that is where revolution enters the picture.

Nil Yalta speaks for Turkish refugees in Paris, Chto Delat for Crimeans in danger from Russia. Harun Farocki and Andre Ujica have their Videograms of Revolution, Artur Zmijewski his twenty channels’ worth of uprising, as Democracies. This being trendy, too, much here is pro forma, a revolution in spirit but not in the medium or in art. It picks up on the very weakness of the Internet, TV, and their voices. Syms also recites her one hundred and eighty Lessons on blackness, but who needs another lesson? Cacophony really can drown things out.

Yet the medium itself pushes back, starting with so many monitors in the show’s first room. Here images become installations. Yalta’s stack is another Tower of Babel. Ming Wong’s Windows on the World could be a control room, for a television studio or a space station. Motta leans in the opposite direction. His installation all but outgrows its roots in video, with pink triangles for his gayness and striped carpet on the floor.

Some artists leave installations to their own devices, in more ways than one. Dara Birnbaum views revolution and repression in Tiananmen Square through an entire wall of devices, from phones to TVs. Amar Kanwar sets nineteen channels and the torn pages from books and magazines, into wide-open metal frames. Frances Stark uses custom frames creatively, too, for his “mix tapes” of U.S. Greatest Hits (meaning wars), while Information America for Julia Scher spreads out above an ordinary desktop. Stan VanDerBeek invites one into a Movie-Drome. More than anyone else, even Paik, he also takes one back to the real question, the roots of new media.

Those black boxes out front are merely a postscript, but also the most impressive installation of all. Each is a “viewing station,” with a narrow black shelf coming out from the box for seating. Their mass and repetition look back not just to new media, but also to Minimalism—in the same galleries that, three years ago, held Donald Judd. Do they also offer a more honest history of video art? A more traditional history has the last word after all. It has also been televised, and next time it will be on the Web.

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