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art reviews from around new york

What better way to welcome the new year than with my least favorite show of the past one? And it is not quite gone. Ring out the old as best you can.

Could KAWS be a serious collector? Your answer may depend on whether you accept him as a serious artist. I am not so sure, but the Drawing Center is counting on it, through January 19, with the KAWS collection.

To be sure, his work is an assault on the whole idea of seriousness, in or out of art. His cast of characters, from the Simpsons to the Michelin Man, is always smiling. He can hardly restrain a smile himself with his second museum appearance in barely three years. Yet he is a collector, of thousands of pieces in an eclectic mix of art-world regulars and the comics. If you cannot tell the difference, that could be the point, and mainstream critics are eating it up. The KAWS collection searches for art high and low, in more than one sense, but its heart is in the comics and the comedy.

Right on the way in, to both sides of the entrance, KAWS includes colorful evil creatures out of an epic battle and reserved faces bearing the subtitle Original. But then you know not to look at either evil or claims for originality without smiling. Postmodernists questioning the “originality of the avant-garde” and post-Siri-alists can only agree. The collection includes self-taught artists like Adolf Wölfli along with street artists like FUTURA 2000, but then no one, however naïve, is immune to convention. What counts as outsider art anyway? Inquiring minds want to know.

KAWS himself (in real life, whatever that means, Brian Donnelly) began with graffiti and graduated to commerce. The highlight of his Brooklyn retrospective may well have been the gift shop, and the show was an exercise in branding for the museum as much as him. Even now, passing his huge cartoon Companions in the museum lobby, in polished wood, I cannot eradicate the pit in my stomach. The Drawing Center has only a modest lobby gift shop (with its own merchandise, not his), but it has succumbed to commercialism all the same. That still, though, leaves the real question: can it keep you smiling and get you thinking?

The results are mixed. KAWS could make Banksy, with his own museum just two blocks away, a model of self-sacrifice and Jeff Koons a model of integrity. And the layout can keep one guessing or get one giving up. The collection fills the entire Drawing Center in no obvious order, by theme or anything else. Three sections identify artists and titles only on plastic cards, and even those take an effort to find. Who needs artists anyway?

Taken differently, though, they create their own context for art. Two of the three resemble the living rooms and study centers favored by museums today. Works there hang on the wall and occupy platforms much like furniture, including robotic sculpture. And artists do cross over into the mainstream, including Joyce Pensato, Lee Lozano, and Willem de Kooning. Each has the fierceness of the artist’s own battles between forces of darkness and light. They leave open what to call demonic, sophisticated, or funny.

Too much else does not. R. Crumb has his usual high anxiety, and Peter Saul gets to misspell KILL, but you know their routine cold. Is there still something special about popular culture, alienation, or art? Just wait for the next installment in the series. KAWS is smart enough and dedicated enough to keep them coming. And for goodness sake keep smiling.

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

Everything for Frank Walter was a throwaway—and everything a discovery of who and where he was. At his death in 2009, the black artist left thousands of paintings and drawings on top of hundreds of hours of tapes.

That is just for starters. His two thousand photographs run mostly to Polaroids, because what could come more quickly, with no chance for second thoughts? A stack of paper, a single manuscript, reaches easily to one’s waist. Who would dare to turn its pages even if one could touch? Who would dare, too, to call it a memoir, a fiction, or a lecture on art? And still he sought, as the show’s title puts it, “To Capture a Soul.”

To be sure, there is hardly a soul in sight at the Drawing Center, through September 15. An African woman in pencil may not count as a portrait, no more than a young Fidel Castro nearby on the wall. They are emblems of something more lasting than a lifetime, much like his carved wood after African sculpture. If they are also suspiciously generic, he could live with that. Like all of nature, they respond to him—and, together with a recent report on another freewheeling black artist, Della Wells, it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload. Does that make him an outsider artist, and what about Wells?

For so undisciplined an artist, Walter stuck to a task long after another would have moved on. He could well have been high-functioning autistic in his embrace of ritual, his refusal to hide anything, and his absence of confession. If there is a self-portrait anywhere in his work, apart from the body of work itself, it lies in an otherwise anonymous man up a tree. Yet he left his native Antigua in 1953, still in his twenties, to find the other half of his heritage, and he remained in Europe until 1961. Another artist might have spent those years in museums, to claim their tradition as his own, or immersed himself in white, African, and Caribbean communities for their humanity and culture. Walter headed for the library.

Or rather he headed for libraries, that marvel of English cities, because he could do nothing singly. And there he turned out one family tree after another. Naturally they are dense to the point of illegible, their words covering entire sheets. Who can say what sprang from library research, what from a remembered oral history, and what from an active imagination? They have a curious echo in drawings of actual trees, their leaves a splatter of red and black akin to an explosion. This artist’s god does and does not lie in the details.

Back home, he pursued the same uncanny mix of the obvious and unexpected. Maybe you know Antigua for sunlight and white sand. Walter sees rippling water in a dark wood, even as it emerges into the light. The sun rests on a mountain peak, like the product of a volcano. Animals are sketchier (and awfully cute), but they tend to one another when they are not looking at him. A cow jumps over a fence, if not the moon.

If they border on nursery rhymes, Walter wrote music, too, in typically sloppy but mostly accurate notation. Anything can go into the mix, and anything can as a ground for oil—including photocopies, disks of auto insulation, backs of unsold Polaroids, and boxes of film. The curator, Claire Gilman, arranges things roughly by subject, because she has no choice. Work from nearly sixty years is almost entirely undated. It may not be consistently great either, but he never have cared for greatness. He wanted only to see himself as part of a larger world.

If Walter leaves things a bit sketchy, Josh Smith embraces the charge. “This is how it is,” he writes—and it has to be, because it finds completion in what is yet to come. “It refers forward,” he claims of his work, but for once it also looks back, and he conceives his show in the Center’s back room as an homage to Walter, as “Life Drawing.” Is this real life? Since his debut in the 2009 New Museum “Generational,” Smith has become an art-world favorite for what another group show called “everyday abstraction.” Here, though, he tends to leaves, fish, birds, and palms as well.

If Walter makes art his fever dream and culture his library, Smith has appeared in a show of “The Feverish Library” as well, and he still piles it on. I have dismissed him more than once as slapdash, glib, and cheesy. There is no doubting, though, his facility and charm. Even the Grim Reaper looks anything but grim. Can he make Walters self-conscious childishness look downright grown-up? Maybe, he seems to say, there are limits to adulthood.

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