haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

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.

To wrap up from last time, nothing matters more to the 2024 Whitney Biennial than globalism and gender. Well, that and not AI but multimedia. Not that politics is anything new to a biennial, and neither is controversy.

The 2000 Biennial targeted Rudy Giuliani, who took his usual potshots at art in return. Artists walked out of the 2019 Biennial over a board member’s role in the arms industry and protested the 2017 Whitney Biennial over a rendering of the death of Emmett Till. Politics is news, by definition, but can diversity still make the headlines? Can it take a stand on the fluid and permeable without sinking? If so, does that make it “same old, same old” after all?

Some have thought so, while others have found the biennial’s quality at odds with its message. I can sympathize. Many works do hector, like a screed on colonialism from Demian DinéYazhi’ in neon. Others may refuse to hector, but wall text does not. There the work takes a back seat to its supposed origins in the issues of the day. That can make art needlessly obscure, but it makes all the clearer how much art conveys issues of the heart.

Artists, then, can still win out. The biennial can take credit, too, for extending diversity in American art from blacks and women to LGBT+ and other nations. That expansion is at its best in video that refuses to lecture, like Julien’s. Clarissa Tossin connects Mayan artifacts to life in Guatemala today, while Seba Calfuqueo sees Chile’s heartland as if for the first time. They may come down to little more than travel ads, but have a nice trip. Dora Budor lends New York’s most exclusive and abhorrent real estate deal, the Hudson Yards, a spooky appeal.

Others are shriller and less coherent. Sharon Hayes tapes classroom discussions (about gender), but they look more like episodes of The View. Lewis listens to church bells in Italy and hears only the dominance of Western civilization. I can feel the puzzlement and pain as Diane Severin Nguyen grapples with war crimes, but only if I get past her ham acting. Still, the impact of video points to what could be the biennial’s greatest achievement. It takes light, sound, multimedia, and collaboration seriously.

JJJJJerome Ellis has a lot of J’s and an open invitation to respond to the entire biennial in sound, while Andrews already fills the stairs with choral music somewhere between speech and song. Nikita Gale lends a piano without strings her lively Tempo Rubato (Stolen Time). She adopts a literal translation of the musical term for loose, expressive rhythm, but then in this life time is always short. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich honors a Caribbean philosopher of “Négritude” with nothing more than slowly brightening and dimming light. When she calls it Too Bright to See, she could be speaking of race, philosophy, or the cycle of day and night. Like James Turrell with natural and artificial light, she is teaching herself and others to look.

Too much else is business as usual or, worse, a loaded agenda. Too much, too, is out of the picture. Diversity is important, but it is not everything. The last few years of controversy, classics, and creative hanging are looking better all the time. Still, there may never be a balanced biennial, and there never should be. For now, there is more than enough light to see.

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

To pick up from last time, most of the seventy-one contributors to the 2024 Whitney Biennial have a room to themselves. It gives them space like a solo exhibition, yet it also turns almost everything into an installation.

Rooms to the side for new media punctuate the flow. Isaac Julien begins his with a wall of mirrors, before a quiet narrative set on several screens. It tracks a silent conversation between past and present African American sculpture and an intellectual founder of the Harlem Renaissance. One might have wandered into a maze, where the only way out is to sit still.

Speaking of permeability, they also bleed into one another. Each floor of the 2022 Biennial had its own character. This one has instead a continuous flow. One can step from Suzanne Jackson, whose layered paint and gel become their own armature, to a different kind of hanging, by ektor garcia in cotton and lace. It is only a step from there to tatami mats and film stained with color by Lotus L. Kang, like Mark Rothko set free from the walls. Karyn Olivier leaves more clothing in a circle on the floor, as a pile of trash or a place of rest.

One might turn from testimonies to abortion by Carmen Winant, more than twenty-five hundred of them, to pregnancy and motherhood for Julia Phillips. You may remember her ceramic hips when you come to body casts from Jes Fan or a bronze liver from K. R. M. Mooney. Nor is it far from Westin’s smoked glass to a Lakota tent from Cannupa Hanska Luger—it, too, inverted and suspended overhead. It is Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure, because her entire “world is upside down.” Draped pillars from Dala Nasser in Lebanon stand beside four Daughters from Rose B. Simpson in New Mexico. They could be a single cross-cultural installation.

Out on a terrace, Torkwase Dyson arranges massive geometry in black as a “playground.” Tony Smith and Minimalism meet African American art now. A floor above, Kiyan Williams fashions a reproduction of the White House from black soil. It tilts badly, just as Luger’s tipi is inverted. A wall of amber from Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio stands just inside. I mistook them for work of the same artist.

Old media like painting and drawing are rare but worth regarding. Mary Lucier marks a calendar with the many deaths of colleagues and friends. Phillips recovers memory from “conception drawings” in vegetable oil and oil pastel. Mavis Pusey in 1970 took her active geometry from an ever-changing New York, but it looks more like prewar abstraction. Mary Lovelace O’Neal may have been thinking of blackness, but she rides a blue whale in wave upon wave of paint. Jackson is still very much a painter.

If you forget that, you have bought into a stunning but heavy-handed biennial. It has older artists, like Lucier, Jackson, and Harmony Hammond, all born in 1944, and Lovelace O’Neal, born in 1942, although a generation or two goes largely missing along the way. Hammond, too, works between weaving and abstraction, like Minimalism brought to feminist life. Pusey, like Jackson a black artist, died in 2018. You might not know it, though, in a show that wants desperately to be current. Oh, and did I mention politics, for next time I focus on that and and its reliance on light, sound, and video?

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