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art reviews from around new york

A wall lay in ruins, and Ilit Azoulay salvaged what she could. It must have been a tough choice of what to save and what to let go.

For Azoulay, trash can itself be precious, for it tells of the people who left it behind. And anything, no matter how revered and how precious, could one day soon end up in the trash. As the Jewish Museum has it, they are “Mere Things,” through January 5—and I work this together wish a past report on still life with thoughts of death by Rachael Catharine Anderson as a longer review and my latest upload.

Those ruins from Tel Aviv form the basis of Tree for Too One, as in (almost) “two for one” and “Tea for Two.” You can forgive Azoulay an easy pun and the old soft shoe. She puts things through a process very much like punning, which is to say art. It takes a full museum wall to display them all, some on shelves and others transformed again by photographing them, before displaying the photos as well. This is both physical collage and photocollage, and it leans a magnifying class on one its pieces—to aid in looking or to put under scrutiny what she sees. Earth tones help unify the work and preserve its real warmth.

Just how precious, though, is it? Azoulay is not saying, but a gasket can look like a wedding ring, and a tree (or whatever is left of it) grows right there, in a flower pot—falling to its right toward death. More objects rest in a display case a few feet away. That strangely human wish for meaning does the transforming, but so do snapshots salvaged from the site. They look all the more poignant for their bright smiles and clumsy prints, set amid a sophisticated work of photography. People, too, can become objects and images, but as testimony to lives.

This is not NIMBY—not a protest against construction in the country’s most cosmopolitan city. A pressing need for housing dates back even before the international accord that promised a state of Israel and a Palestinian state. Refugees to Israel knew all about displacement, much like art. Builders were so desperate, the museum explains, that they built walls from whatever lay at hand. And yes, that was another way of valuing and preserving trash. Azoulay need only reveal what walls once hid.

Museums go through a similar process of deciding what to value every day. No surprise then, if the rest of work since 2010 responds to museum collections. None is exactly site specific, because it is also continuing its transformations. Again and again, she seeks parallels among disparate objects, like a piper and a stone saint. A photocollage makes objects from the Jewish Museum itself take flight, as Unity Totem. Azoulay produced her most massive work while in residence at a museum in Berlin, where she lives. As the title has it, there are Shifting Degrees of Certainty.

Two more works start with photographs of objects in the Israel Museum and the Museum for Islamic Art, both in Jerusalem. No surprise there, too—not when Israel still seeks safety and Palestine its due recognition. No surprise as well if the first includes HVAC units and other museum infrastructure. That work includes a collage of human cutouts and stone, while fragments of Arab art become a magician’s robe. Once again people are the most precious object of all. As the work after the Israel Museum has it, No Thing Dies.

The curator, Shira Backer, stresses how much the artist relies on digital magic. “A pebble becomes a boulder, the handle of a ewer the scepter of a queen.” I was struck instead by the weight of images—not just the emotional weight, but the physical weight of museum objects. The eighty-five photos from Berlin have distinct shapes and separate frames, nesting together like a single precious structure. Born in Israel in 1972, she keeps returning to both her origins and Berlin. The work provides a tour of physical space as well.

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

Ask an artist about what went into a work, and you may hear quite a story about myths and memories. You will have your own stories at that—of what you have experienced, seen in the art you love, heard from your parents, and read. And curators attuned to matters of gender and culture eat it up.

Ask again, though, about what the artist had in mind, and you may hear something far more modest. I just want to make art, some might say, to see its color and the light. The seven artists in “Overflow, Afterglow” get to have it both ways, the stories and the light, and the Jewish Museum wants it all. It sees, as the show’s subtitle has it, “Chromatic Figuration,” through September 15, and it sees a trend. With two artists in their mid-twenties and just one much past forty, it hopes to lead the way to the future. But will the afterglow fade all too quickly, and is the overflow a bit much?

Chromatic figuration may sound more like color charts and color wheels than an afterglow. It may not, in fact, sound much like figuration. Yet the wall between abstraction and representation has been crumbling for years now, as geometry has given way to excess. With “Overflow, Afterglow,” regular shapes are nowhere in sight, but everything else is, and the break with Minimalism’s white cube begins with the installation. Each artist gets a bay of angled walls, each at a different angle and painted a different color. Together, they fill a single room, with sightlines from one to next.

Figuration, too, can be elusive, although Rosha Yaghmai insists that sheer color is figurative. Portraits by Sasha Gordon look conventional enough, but notably short of joy or affection. Others may tell stories, but the stories are hard to hear. Sara Issakharian includes hands, snakes, charioteers, and an eastern goddess in mortal combat, but who knows who is winning this war? Austin Martin White throws in a “hypothetical” African sculpture, but his heart is in chaos. Sula Bermúdez-Silverman promises a take on colonialism, but it never extends beyond work with actual rubber and sugar.

Color itself enters in different ways. It comes brushed on wildly, layered on beeswax, and squeezed through a nylon mesh. It can have what the museum calls “supernatural color” or the paleness of skin tones. It comes shining from resin and uranium glass. It all but bleeds out of a silicon trans figure by Chella Man, with the scars of multiple operations in its crotch. It lies nude on its back, ready for more.

The artists do share strategies. Ilana Savdie imagines narratives of hunters and their prey, while Gordon’s women train their rifles on a bird, the only thing separating or connecting them. Issakharian has her scenes of combat and celebration, White his Bacchanalia. Rosha Yaghmai paints on cotton and organza, creating moiré patterns, much like White’s nylon mesh. These are Yaghmai’s “afterimages,” and they appear and vanish before one’s eyes. The curators, Liz Munsell and Leon Levy, see “uncanny luminescence” everywhere, and at last they get it.

Not all the artists are Jewish, and those that are come with hyphens, like Issakharian, an Iranian Jewish immigrant, and Man, Jewish Chinese. For Bermúdez-Silverman, a hyphenated name and her dollhouse alike speak of home. They suit a time of pride in shifting identities. They are also new to New York museums (although one has showed with an upscale dealer and museum veteran, Jeffrey Deitch), but are they the future? They occupy the same exhibition space as “New York: 1962–1964” in 2022, which looked back to a time when the Jewish Museum introduced an entire generation, from Pop Art to formalism. Can it happen again?

The artists, the museum argues, “take on and take in the oversaturation of our contemporary moment,” but do they merely succumb to it? When “color is flexible and amorphous,” can it stand for anything at all? To think back to 1962, more than one critic looked at the dizzying designs of Bridget Riley and saw a movement. It must have seemed the next big thing, where in retrospect it was the field of play for little more than a singular talent. Could “chromatic figuration,” with all its failed narratives and optical activity, be the Op Art of today? It could be just as passing and a lot tackier.

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

Cannot get up the energy to go to a museum? Frederick Kiesler would understand.

He wanted his work to respond to body movements, posture, and sheer fatigue. He saw his architecture and design as creating and breaching “fields of energy exchange,” even when you cannot. With his Mobile Home Library, you need not so much as reach for a book to read sitting down. The book would come to you—and I work this together with a recent report on another modern experiment in living, by Sonia Delaunay, as a longer review and my latest upload.

Its bare white shelves at the Jewish Museum do not look all that relaxing. Museum-goers cannot enter their half closed circle, for fear of damage, even as they wheel around the room or in place, through July 28. Still, Kiesler was an idealist, and he took seriously the idea of Modernism as a science—a search for truth in service to humanity. If he seems largely forgotten, that may show how much that dream has faded, but do not be too sure. As postmodern critics loved to ask, has Modernism failed? Perhaps, but this modernist outlasted many a movement.

At a given moment, Kiesler can seem merely quaint or way ahead of his time. Born in 1890 in the Ukraine, he seems just right for a world at war now. He headed off as fast as he could nonetheless—first to Germany, where he could see home design as both artifice and household necessity, and then to the Netherlands. He had success with stage sets, just as he later worked with performers at the Julliard. He did not join the Bauhaus, with its dream of art for the many, but he did accept an invitation from de Stijl, the movement with Piet Mondrian, before leaving for New York. He can seem the Forrest Gump of modern art, present at everyone else’s creation, but he was more than a walk-on and never unwitting.

Where an artist as commercial as Andy Warhol saw his early work in fashion as a step toward something more, Kiesler anticipates today’s growing interest in design as art. Nothing was above or beneath him. He undertook displays for Saks Fifth Avenue and a gallery for Peggy Guggenheim, Art of This Century in 1942. He worked with Film Guild Cinema starting in 1929. Does its name evoke both avant-garde film of the past and a revival house in the present? He taught for years at Columbia University, where he showed his students short films on everything from “radioactive rays” and “tiny water animals” seen under a microscope to “the world of paper.”

He aspired, then, to art as a science, but also art of the everyday, and he could not separate the two. It led him to found the Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia in 1938. Mobile Home Library recalls prefabricated, affordable housing, but it incorporates mobility and vision as well. Architecture for him had to be light on its fight and had to design with light, well before lighting as art for James Turrell and Dan Flavin. Naturally his culminating projects were Vision Machines. Naturally, too, they drew on the science behind “how we see” in order to stimulate hallucinations and dreams.

That science seems all but incomprehensible today, although a typescript spells it out in brutal detail. It turns, though, on the interaction between a machine and a human subject, much like AI art now. It gives new meaning to design correlation, as correlation between the mechanical and human, and it issued in a Correalism Manifesto. Rather than a mirror or window onto nature as a passive subject, Kiesler saw his work as “activating the active object.” He divided his design for Peggy Guggenheim into spaces for abstract, surrealist, daylight, and kinetic art. He thought of film itself as “photographs in motion.”

Interactive art has high aspirations even now, as with Rirkrit Tiravanija and relational esthetics. Yet it is almost impossible to replicate in a museum. What a show once called “theanyspacewhatever” may be nowhere at all. The curator, Mark Wasiuta, is left with display after display of the sketchiest of plans and sketches. He gets off to a strong start with the mobile bookshelves, live and in person, and a modest screen for films. Yet the library still bars visitors as it twists ever so slowly in the wind.

Just two more rooms follow, as if to rub in Kiesler’s broken dreams for contemporary living. His biomorphic Endless House never began—or at least never got past a 1958 model, seven years before his death. He called picture frames “deadening,” in contrast to the active object, but they do offer something to contemplate. Most good art is very much the active object, but it can also slow time and take time to come to life. His own art is well worth rediscovering, but it may not take all that long. Better grab a book.

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