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art reviews from around new york

You may find yourself counting the seconds at the Whitney, but why bother? Mark Armijo McKnight counts them off as no impatient human ever could. Who knows what that will leave a gay artist or the viewer when it is done? McKnight’s film makes his gender as hard to pin down as his landscapes, but everything counts—and I work this together with a recent report on a show at Wave Hill of queering nature as a longer review and my latest upload.

Dark clouds loom over a full wall, as ominous accompaniment. Will it ever end, and will the darkness? And then at last, after a totally black screen, the shot comes to rest on an otherworldly landscape and a metronome. It is McKnight’s coming to be as a gay male and an American artist. It is also his “Decreation,” through January 5. He just happens to leave something temptingly incomplete along the way.

McKnight takes his title from Simone Weil, who began as an activist and ended as a mystic. As a mere child in a Jewish family, she spoke out against World War I. Through a lifetime of poor health, she stood up for trade unions and, like Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. In the end, though, she had a vision of the loss of self before a Christian god. It was as if her entire life had been shot out of the barrel of a gun, never to return. A photo from McKnight could well depict just that.

In reality, its puff of smoke belongs to clouds, wispy bright ones, as does a trail of smoke. It evokes Western skies in a great tradition of American art, of Ansel Adams in photography or paintings and drawings by Georgia O’Keeffe. A dreamer might say that it belongs, too, to the promise of an expanding nation—and an activist to its violence against Native Americans. McKnight could well identify with them all. The curators, Drew Sawyer with Nakai Falcón, surround the film with just half a dozen large photographs and two sculptures. They fall somewhere between a single installation, a premature retrospective, and the decreation of the artist’s dreams.

Titles speak of The Black Space, matter, sleep, and dreams, and McKnight writes of the “queer refusal of the disinterested gaze.” More than one photo shows naked bodies entwined and out of doors. They are all but indiscernible from strangely biomorphic hills—or an animal’s corpse in the dried grass and weeds. The photos stick to black and white, the film to sixteen millimeters, as if caught in an embodied world before the digital. Anti-Matter, also a photograph, looks all too material. Even the sculpture, concrete blocks with serious chips at their base, might be coming apart.

The film is in a tradition of lushness and austerity. It is going nowhere fast, like films by Michael Snow or the Empire State Building for Andy Warhol. The relentless ticking of a metronome recalls Minimalism in music and the refusal to make music at all in John Cage. McKnight says that he drew on György Ligeti, the Hungarian-Austrian composer of “micropolyphony.” While the film closes in on just one metronome, one can hear many more through speakers high on the facing wall. He swears that one could see them all if only the camera drew back.

Things happen when they happen and no more. The ticking continues, loudly, and comes to an end as abruptly as it began. Circles, incised in concrete and crossed by diagonals, could each belong to a clock face lacking numbers. Like the film, they gesture to passing moments but refuse to tell time. I cannot swear what “Decreation” has to say about mysticism, gender, the environment, or the United States. Still, it speaks loudly, and McKnight can claim the lushness and austerity as his own.

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

It was 1972, and environmentalists were desperate. At least Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison were, and they sought a “survivalist alternative” where you might never expect it, in a work of art—and I work this together with past reports on summery sculpture indoors and out in Harlem Sculpture Gardens and by Alexis Rockman and Tiril Hasselknippe as a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

Their Survival Piece (the fifth of seven) made its debut that year in the gallery at Cal State Fullerton. In its Portable Orchard, nature had an assist from recycled redwood and artificial light. Now the Whitney recreates it, through January 1, and one can hear their urgency. “To survive as a species,” they wrote, “we are going to have to learn how to grow our own food and take care of ourselves.” So why has it gone all but forgotten? And why does it look so calm, so composed, and so green?

The Harrisons were themselves survivors. Like the fruit of their “sustainable food system,” they lived to a ripe old age. They would be in their nineties were they alive today. Their indoor citrus grove includes all that one might wish, including lemons, limes, grapefruit, and naval and mandarin oranges, each carefully labeled. On the First of July, just days after the opening at the Whitney, young fruit had already begun to appear. As if to proclaim their eco-friendliness, they were all still green.

To appreciate it, though, you may have to get past the rhetoric. The enterprise sounds not just urgent, but downright bureaucratic. It speaks of not natural farming, which in any case takes more land to feed the millions, but natural farming practices—and they are not just obsolete, but “cannot be taken for granted.” You must get past the contradictions as well. This may be sustainable agriculture, but not for eating. If it makes you think of Rirkrit Tiravanija, “relational esthetics,” interactive art, free food, and sharing, forget it, and do not touch.

Perhaps the contradictions come with the territory, where fears mix with love. The Whole Earth Catalog appeared in 1972, Silent Spring was ten years old, and the Whitney has copies of both. Like the EPA, established in 1970, they attest to urgency, but also to hope. Artists may have felt a sense of desperation as well, as late modern art gave way to criticism and chaos. Besides, fears are easier to understand than ever in light of climate change. Yet artists like Maya Lin do not just conserve the environment, but transform it.

The orchard flourishes all the same. The Whitney has removed its eighth-floor partitions, leaving a wide-open room with planters in neat rows. They share their redwood hexagons with parallel light tubes directly above. As trees grow, their peaks extend into those upper hexagons as well. Other survival pieces included a hog pasture, a fishery, and an entire farm, all portable. Here a uniform design and strong colors carry the day.

It is tendentious all the same. This is not the future, sustainable or otherwise. It is art, and a true New York landmark shows what that might mean. Back from college in the 1970s, I was rediscovering the city, its neighborhoods and its architecture. The Ford Foundation on East 42nd Street offered a glorious respite from my minimum-wage job barely a block away. Like the Harrisons, it, too, took nature indoors and artifice into nature.

Finished in 1967, its twelve stories of offices surround a soaring atrium—a place for walking, sitting, and contemplation. Greenery blossoms out from the balconies and rises from the floor. A collaboration between Dan Kiley, the landscape architect (whose other landmarks include Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis), and Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo (who also designed the Met’s American wing), it brought a temperate environment and a seamless flow of plants, trees, pink stone, and rusted steel. It has its surfeit of good intentions, too, no doubt. It has after all, been the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice since restoration in 2019 (and I described it at greater length then). Still, by comparison, that citrus grove is a lemon.

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

One thing about parenting could drive anyone crazy, but children eat it up. Who as a child could not take comfort in Disney’s “It’s a Small World After All,” the song introduced at the 1964 World’s Fair, with its lilt, simplicity, and endless repetition? And who could not identify with something small as you but still an entire world?

Wanda Gág got the message long before, and her art was equally obsessive, in prints and children’s books alike. Now the Whitney sets aside a modest room off the permanent collection for “Gág’s World,” through December 2. ” It’s a small world after all and just maybe enough.

It is also a dark world—or at least a ghostly one. Her prints are not peopled but haunted, like that of Christmas Eve, where no child dares to enter, much less to peek. If Gág troubles with presents, a ghost has carried them away. In a reader, C is for crash, with what might be a wrecking ball, D is for dash, and E is for elsewhere. An enchanter carries off, as another title has it, millions of cats—like a pied piper who cannot be bothered with motley and cares too much for rats. And you know what they say about herding cats.

Perhaps I should have said that her ghosts are her gifts. I cannot swear that her prints count as modern art rather than, as the old put-down had it, illustration. She lends the simplest of scenes enormous detail—not in what she includes, but in how she renders it. Lithographs have the sharp edges of woodcuts, in black and white, but with a greater freedom, and the strokes encroach on one another as woodcuts never could. Her subjects, too, stick to what others might mistake for calendar art, like Winter Twilight. Prewar American Modernism’s social realism, Surrealism, and formal experiment are nowhere in sight.

Does her small-town America have more in common with Grant Wood than with Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton? The curators, Roxanne Smith and Scout Hutchinson, make the case for an artist after all. It has just those two spreads from her children’s book amid prints, also from the Whitney’s collection, and they share a small wall with Christmas Eve. Still, she did not become an artist all at once. Born in 1893 to immigrants from Bohemia, Gág left Minnesota in her thirties to study at the Art Student League, when it was a touch less conservative. She mingled and exhibited easily with her peers.

Like Beatrix Potter, with whom I pair this review and an earlier report on Walton Ford in my latest upload, she was also a student of nature, and she settled in the outer edge of suburbia, with an ingenious home at that—a balcony atop a porch as a cylindrical addition to a square home, both with gabled roofing. Like Potter, too, hers is a humanized nature, but without the cuddly, intelligent animals. Plants run wild only as dangerous companions. Plain wood homes cannot rise in straight lines either, and streets cannot afford escape or access. One can only imagine the strange life within. They are observed all the same, which makes the ghosts that much stranger.

Ghosts worthy of their name require a ghostly light, and Gág’s is neither plainly natural nor artificial. It bears down on a scene face on, leaving broad areas of light and white outlines. Does it makes her an illustrator at heart, taking care for her subject more than anything? No doubt, but her idea of community is both familiar and imagined. It might not so be bad for children after all. Besides, they get to carry with them from their reading Millions of Cats. Could there be worlds within worlds?

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