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art reviews from around new york

This could be the most difficult review that I shall ever write—not because the art is all that hard to explain, but because it is so painful to try. To describe a performance by Carlos Martiel is to relive the terror, disgust, and shame that he hopes to produce. I can only imagine the pain for him, at El Museo del Barrio.

Not that he is present in performance at a survey of twenty years of work apart from photographs, occasional video on small screens, and titles that are painful enough in themselves through September 1. It is still his “Cuerpo,” or body. Is it good or bad if he causes you to turn away?

Martiel is, somehow, still going in a line of performance art that includes Chris Burden, who dragged himself across broken glass, and Pope.L, who crawled the twenty-two miles of Broadway in New York. Not for nothing did ExitArt, the former nonprofit, call a group show “Endurance.” Still, their work can come across as a stunt, and Martiel is all the more vulnerable at thirty-five in remaining stock still. In that he is an heir to Yoko Ono, with Cut Piece, but the scissors that cut away her clothing never touch her for all their threat. He may be closer yet to Marina Abramovic, impassive and unmoving on a gallery shelf. Her work, though, is one long ego trip, while he harps on, let us say, serious matters.

Born in Havana, Martiel may come closest of all to another Cuban artist, Juan Francisco Elso—and I work this together with my earlier report on him as a longer review and my latest upload. A retrospective of Elso at the museum last year gave pride of place to Por América, a man in wood pierced by arrowheads many times over, like Saint Sebastian. And still the sculpture, modeled after José Martí, the Cuban revolutionary, wields a machete. His near namesake, too, fights back, but with his body on the line. Martiel has no time for epic heroes, the first Christian martyr, or fine art. He is a gay Cuban American in the real world, now.

I have put off saying more as long as I could. This is his body and his show, although Por América could make a fine alternative title. In its very first work, not arrows but a flagpole pierces his skin, leaving the Stars and Stripes to drape from his chest. He has become a human flagpole, the very symbol of America, but an America that will never acknowledge him. Another flag hangs from above, with the red and blue turned to black and the white stained with blood. Let the blood be on your hands.

At the very least, it is all over his feet. They appear coarse and discolored in another performance. Blood is fresher still in another photo, where he holds a creature to his chest like a child or a pet. He might comforting it or taking comfort from it, but the seeming animal is only a loose collection of vital organs. It could make anyone who stares too long a vegetarian. What, though, does it say about gender, America, or him?

That can be a problem. Martiel can seem a one-note artist, and the note can ring all too clearly or hardly at all. He can also turn you away.That can be a strength, too, and critics must have brought the same complaints to Burden long ago. Martiel addresses Cuba’s repressive state honestly as well. He pins three of its medals directly to his chest—medals awarded to his father before him.

Still, it can fail. At his best, performance engages the viewer, daring one to turn away. He stands on a block in the Guggenheim’s rotunda, hands cuffed behind his back, like a slave at auction. He asks only for recognition, as a step toward freedom. In the show’s title work, he relies on others to save his life, with his neck in a noose as in a lynching waiting for him to fall. It is safe to say that enough people came through.

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

As a quiet summer nears its end, allow me a review that I somehow never got to post. If you remember Joyce Kozloff as a founder of what came to be known as “Pattern and Decoration,” you may wonder what she is doing with a show entirely of maps. They are contemporary maps at that, of regions torn apart by aggression and war.

They are recognizably hers all the same, with overlaid patterns that might themselves have been torn away, but from vintage wallpaper. They just happen to land at the site of unilaterally or mutually assured destruction. For once, the decorative arts land like a bomb. What might once have served as the comforts of art and home is now just one more part of the show’s “Collateral Damage,” at D. C. Moore through this past February 3.

It may still leave you wondering. Like Miriam Schapiro and Valerie Jaudon, Kozloff came to the movement with a dedication to painting and a smile, not the anger of a world at war. Surely the decorative arts have a different time frame from the latest news in mind, whether the frivolity of fashion or timeless craft. While critics could easily dismiss such art as, well, feminine, Kozloff embraced the label. She appeared in “WACK” at MoMA PS1, then still P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, as part of a “feminist revolution.” More than anyone might have guessed, she also anticipated patterning in art today, with its tributes to “women’s work” as serious business. Entering her eighties, she may be struggling to keep up with the headlines, but she is also making them.

Kozloff has been interested in maps since the 1990s, and her sources range from U.S. government surveys to ancient Rome. Her maps appear, too, exactly as her sources would have it—with the West Bank and Gaza as, pointedly in one case, “status undetermined.” They also reinforce her play between found imagery and the artist’s hand. A pattern landing on Israel takes the form of targets, but as single brushstrokes like spirals, and one can feel the bombs or the paint landing. Other patterns echo a region’s native culture. She is bringing her concerns up to date, big time, but with an eye to the past.

Maps have their own claim to the rigor of abstract painting and the flourish of patterns as well. Like both, they adhere to what critics used to praise as “flatness.” How else to render a 3D world on paper? With due respect to a certain columnist for The New York Times, the earth is definitely not flat. (A flat earth makes a lousy metaphor for globalization anyway.) A reproduction is itself collateral damage, and so is a work of art.

Most maps here have the simplest kind of projection, with outlines that do their best to reproduce political borders. They approach the view from above like a child’s drawing. As decoration, their tart colors put overt patterning to shame. The work based on the Roman empire, “Spheres of Influence” from 2001, addresses the problem directly. It adopts a mathematical projection that leaves its twelve panels in the shape of canoes, but flatter. Its care with geographical texturing is all the more striking for that—and closer to art.

Like it or not, Kozloff is still smiling in the face of disaster. Her art never spells out the damage, and that only helps it as political art. It runs from Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa to regions under Chinese control. Do not, though, come expecting ruined cities and refugees. Do come for the collision of subjective color and objective fact. Or should I say the subjectivity of fact in the arenas of art and conflict?

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

Is there something queer about nature? I might not have said so, but Wave Hill’s Glyndor Gallery thinks otherwise, with “Perfect Trouble: Queering Natureculture,” through August 11. My walks around New York City have been rich again this summer, so allow me one last review on just that (and apologies for a late report, but I was unable to make it to this show until its closing week.)

Wave Hill could be the ultimate hybrid of nature and culture—with its stately galleries, lush grass, meticulously tended botanic gardens, and gorgeous views of the Palisades across the Hudson. Even a fine exhibition is at most an excuse to return in summer. The eight artists themselves seem happy enough to settle for nature’s richness and a bit of art. They cannot define gender or untangle its meanings. They do not even try to disentangle the natural and cultural aspects of landscape. They show just enough of themselves to make things queer and strange.

Wave Hill is more likely to warn of climate change or to celebrate nature than to unsettle its terms. Yet in truth nature in art has always been gendered—and that gender, more often than not, has been female. It contrasts with civilization as men define it and know it. Any number of female nudes have found themselves lying outdoors for the likes of Titian—or falling for its temptations with an apple and a snake. In one tale, Danaë’s father did his best to shield her from a lustful Zeus by confining her indoors. Do not be surprised if the god comes in through the window as a golden shower.

This time out, artists need gender just to tell them who they are. Culture plays a still larger role for Katherine Sepúlveda and Roger Ferney-Cortés, in separate shows in the sunroom. Theirs is the immigrant experience, the latter a Colombian’s with street carts for popsicles. Sepúlveda fills her Halloween House with a chaos of Catholic collectibles. She just has a little trouble deciding whether to exclude visitors, which she does, or, as wall text has it, to invite them in. But then the galleries will be long closed by Thanksgiving.

“Perfect Trouble” is more welcoming, because who can escape desire? Last year at the New Museum, Pepón Osorio pushed an installation like Sepúlveda’s to the edge of a crime scene and the scale of a community. Here the markers are less obvious, but the focus is on sex. That dual impulse, to gender and reticence, helps rescue from the tendentious a motley collection of art. Christopher Udemezue offers hints of people and landscape in close up, in photos and in spooky reds. Others, though, play down a stereotypically gay esthetic.

Sofia Moreno goes so far as to make fun of it. Her self-portrait in colored pencil shares a pink room with grinning demons, and all seem to be having an equally good time. She also adds clay to fabric, for what might be clothing or what it cannot hide. The gendered body may or may not appear for Diana Sofia Lozano, in the thick paint of her Blueberry Dreams, while Erin Johnson takes her video to Huntington Gardens in Pasadena and its scholarly pursuits. One learns only later of Rachel Carson’s letters to her female lover. Like Carson herself, they evoke the wonders of nature all the same.

Rachel Youn takes a step back from nature and the human alike, leaving wide open just what to desire. Artificial plants bob rhythmically up and down, and one may remember their loud, mechanical rhythms as much as their orchid purple. Other artists do rely on bare flesh for a touch of nature. Young Joon Kwak speaks of the Aggregate Body, in a wall of fragmentary photos. Seba Calfuqueo unites nature and culture with a Liquid Being, face down in sunlit grass and water. In a photo, she has lost her head but taken in its place a misty mountain peak and clouds.

Who needs earthly desires anyway when you can have goddesses and gods? Two in Indian jewelry share a swing for Pyaari Azaadi, not quite innocent and not quite making love. The artist, born in Bombay, describes herself as BIPOC, or bisexual and a person of color. The others may not be so blatantly hyphenated, but they might wish they were. They are, after all, hyphenating gender, nature, and culture. As Ruben Natal-San Miguel puts it, in portrait photos of the Bronx community up at Wave Hill House, Nature Finds a Way.

For at least six months, Harlem becomes a garden. At the very least it welcomes one, only not with flowers.

With Harlem Sculpture Gardens, from May through October, its parks become one long sculpture garden, with echoes all across the west side. The West Harlem Art Fund, NY Artist Equity, and community curators invite nineteen artists into three strips of playgrounds and greenery. And you can see them as a garden, from the lake and willow trees at its south to denser woods on every side. Sculpture will soon be gone, but Harlem may never look the same again.

Or so they hope, for change comes slowly, and even now the visitor in search of art may feel like a pioneer. The show feels thrown together on the cheap, with neither maps, photos, nor closing dates on its Web site and signs fallen away. If you cannot find the half of it, and I did not, you can still get better acquainted with the neighborhood. Just to see kids ascending a red, free-form jungle gym would be worth a trip to Morningside Park. To recognize the dignity and diversity of the community should be a requirement for all New Yorkers. If the art is largely detached and disappointing, that has its lessons as well.

When you think of Harlem, a garden may not come to mind. You may think first of a cultural history that did not end with the Harlem Renaissance and the stateliness of Strivers Row, concrete and crime, family histories, or racism and neglect. New York summer sculpture has come before to Marcus Garvey Park across town—featuring Simone Leigh, Maren Hassinger, and “InHarlem,” a home for local artists curated by the Studio Museum in Harlem. Those with long memories will take pride in the protests that blocked Columbia University from appropriating Morningside Park on behalf of a gym. They could not rescue the park from what were to be New York’s darkest decades. Yet the greenery is there.

That park, St. Nicholas Park, and Jackie Robinson Park add up to add up to practically a single landscape running a block wide and forty-five blocks long. Each rests on a cliff or terrace with a single long path below, making it a bit easier to find the art. Morningside Park, by far the lushest, accounts for the name of Columbia’s neighborhood, Morningside Heights. It has never looked half so open. A rec center easily upstages Jackie Robinson Park, which comes to a dead end in a rail overpass and stairs that you may hesitate to climb. Still, you can appreciate the art all the more should you find it.

Harlem Sculpture Gardens treats long-term sculpture outside the park, at City College and in plazas, as just part of the show. Three alone suggest the problems and potential of public art. Gabriel Koren and Algernon Miller serve up a monument to Frederick Douglass at the northwest corner of Central Park, outshone by triangular slabs for benches and a star chart caved into a black wall. A mile or so north, Alison Saar animates a statue of Harriet Tubman with an easy stride, a train of bronze behind her, and hands, feet, and symbols etched in her clothing and base. Richard Hunt, always at his best outdoors, has his usual elegance just west on 125th Street. Do not blame him if his claim to a uniquely black abstraction looks an awful lot like a bunker.

Public sculpture will always have a slightly defensive posture. If things loosen up with emerging artists in the parks, they still seem obliged to learn from the past. They are good students. Intersecting red steel loops by Miguel Otero Fuentes could have come from any of a dozen artists fifty years ago. Weathered steel from Michael Poast brings the rough edges of the city to David Smith. Steel for Iliana Emilia Garcia extends vertically, and it may take a moment to realize that it forms literal high chairs.

Each is adapting late modern sculpture to experience. For Carole Eisner, that means turning Smith’s welded planes into a mother and child, in bright yellow. For Zura Bushurishvili, it means lending a tall, gaunt man out of Alberto Giacometti the specificity of a village elder. What they cannot do is reach out to politics or community. If your image of Harlem is bullet-ridden, Margaret Roleke has a colorful screen of shotgun shells, Felipe Jacome and Svetlana Onipko a ballerina of bullet casings. Mine, I hope, is not. Still, the work looks good, and Roleke’s could pass for early interactive art by Daniel Rozin that flipped its shafts to mirror the viewer’s shadow.

When they do reach out, it is to their immediate surroundings. This is not site-specific art, but it takes much of its materials and imagery from the parks. That includes tree stumps and twigs from Jaleeca Yancy, a single curve of branches connecting aluminum on polished wood from Dianne Smith as Echoes of the Path, and a deer with branches instead of antlers by ByeongDon Moon. I Dream of Being a Tree, its title goes, and all in a way are dreamers. I am sorry that I cannot mention more of them. With luck, the gardens will return next year, with more professionalism and adventure.

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

On a quiet summer day, allow me to catch up with a review that somehow I never managed to post. John Houck has taken up painting. He has been turning more and more to oil on linen, a seeming contrast with the clarity of his photography. Yet he has brought elements of painting to his work longer still.

One series incorporates fine variations that make a single color layered, textured, and bright. He also folds the paper across more or less the middle, both vertically and horizontally, and the pleats suggest fields of color even in monochrome. Other prints have elements of still life, including drafting tools, but also touches of paint.

Painting has long haunted the medium. Photography had to prove itself an art for those who worry about such things, like the Victorian staged portraits of its early years, and the AIPAD art fair still bends over backward to assure collectors that it is arty enough. When it comes down to it, the “decisive moment” for Henri Cartier-Bresson, of a figure poised in midair or the perfect Paris street, is also an artful one. Houck’s still life, in turn, recalls Synthetic Cubism in its layers of paper defining the picture plane, while the Met has struggled to claim Cubism for the “trompe l’oeil tradition” in Baroque painting. Never mind that Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were conspiring to throw paint and tradition to the winds. Only now, though, does Houck devote a show to painting and nothing else, at Candice Madey through March 2.

If paintings still come as a surprise, it is because he retains his old medium’s clarity without the precision. He has given up the self-referential signs of studio practice for landscape, and what strange landscapes these are. To be sure, while he appeared in “Public, Private, Secret” at the International Center of Photography back in 2017, he keeps nothing secret. These are perilous landscapes indeed, with sharp drop-offs from the curved edge of foreground cliffs. Volcanos tower above, both dormant and wildly erupting, filling the air with near vertical clouds of ash. Just as obvious is the thick white cloud taking over a painting.

Still, the clearer he becomes, the less he promises to make sense. In no way could these elements share a landscape, and he relishes it. Leaps into depth defy human perspective as well. Railroad tracks taper and curve unnaturally as they extend into depth. Colors are no more reasonable, from the purple cliffs to a flat, red sky. It could be no more than a curtained backdrop, and other elements cast their shadows on earth and sky.

Those objects descending from chains are, it turns out, family heirlooms. (Maybe Houck has his family secrets after all.) They are bells, although their edges, like the top edge of a royal crown, surely cut too close for them to ring out all that loudly. The entire landscape seems strangely quiet in the midst of eruptions, and the tracks do not hold an onrushing train. He adopts relatively mute colors as well and, as in his photos, a disdain for high drama. The show is, after all, “Perfect Temperature Lava.”

If James Welling in Tribeca makes photography look like brushwork, give or take the pixels, Houck likes painting for its refusal to stay put in the physical present. (At the gallery’s other space across the street, Yi Xin Tong insists on his media’s presence with acrylic, clay, cuts, and glue.) He builds landscapes the old-fashioned way, from shaded drawing or underpainting, but they owe more to the imagination than to observation. Paradoxically, the bells are real and observed. The lack of drama can leave me wondering, and I may recoil at a landscape’s mysteries. Yet he is still puzzling out the remembered and the seen.

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

Everything from Adam Pendleton seems to fly by faster than even he can comprehend it, including race. Everything, too, asks you to slow down long enough to ask what you are missing. But then what could oblige you to stop and to think more than abstract art? And I work this in with other recent reviews of the challenges facing abstraction as a longer review and my latest upload.

Pendleton is always politically aware, but never in a way that you might expect. He made his name with text paintings, quoting prominent black Americans or simply the word BLACK, like a history of America in graffiti and spray paint. Naturally he covered every inch of the lobby of the New Museum for a show of “Art and Mourning in America,” and naturally it was all but illegible. Could that make him the natural candidate for a full-bodied abstract art? For MoMA, the graffiti was gone, leaving only a video and a tenement fire escape running the height of the atrium. For the 2022 Whitney Biennial, text and a recognizable image alike vanished.

Pendleton is still thinking aloud, with “An Abstraction,” at Pace through just the other day, August 16. The smears remain, but as ghostly compositions. Colors echo the electric tone of black enamel. Diagonal partitions convert a prominent Chelsea gallery into a maze, with repeated warnings not to step too close. The work is coming right at you all the same, stepping into and out of time. Time itself may have tricks up its sleeve when it comes to racism. Pendleton at MoMA also captured the statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond and its fall—and now a Virginia community is returning the names of Confederate leaders to its streets.

Another artist at age forty stakes his career and his sanity on black abstraction as well. And he, too, plays with proximity, distance, and the material reality of paint. Chris Watts may add wood slats to his work, suggesting if only for a moment a view of the stretcher from behind. Other works have dark wood frames and their echoes in brushwork. He adds enough layers of resin that the entirety seems under wraps. Five tall paintings fold into nearly a circle, but with an opening.

Even if you do not or cannot enter, their sheen might have enclosed you this sprig, at Galerie Lelong this spring through May 5. And that sheen is more than half the point. One series incorporates lapis lazuli for its brilliance. Another seems to paint the sky. Watts describes the work as in religious tones, with the precious stone an emblem of the spiritual. Maybe so, but it is painterly and physical.

These days anything can go into a painting, but not everyone is comfortable with “anything goes.” A painter and teacher whom I trust dismissed the show as “student work.” It comes down to a dilemma that I face in review after review here. My heart is still in abstraction, but I still struggle to know what of it is any good. Yet I also argue for proper criticism as about more than judging. Who cares about the “originality of the avant garde” anyway?

The dilemma takes on special urgency for abstract art, which necessarily turns questions of form into questions of value. If a show borrows from past art, is it merely “derivative“? If it does not, how can it foreground the elements of its art? A white artist, Suzanne McClelland has been asking touch questions for years and rewarding them with brushwork and beauty. Her latest, just recently at Marianne Boesky through June 8, made me think of Lee Krasner, with black structuring her colors into something close to tiling. How else could the rich repertory of painting contribute more than a formula or a mess?

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