At the beginning of her career, Eva Kot’átková’s practice seemed inextricable from the past, both personal and artistic, that fed it. Born in 1982 in Prague, the artist spent her early childhood behind the Iron Curtain. Her striking installations and collages, featuring the body under institutional constraint, evoke the aesthetics of Eastern European Dada and Surrealism. Today, Kot’átková’s work, which has focused on the inmates of prisons and asylums, is more suited to the critical lens of disability studies via psychoanalysis than to art-historical connect-the-dots. (Not coincidentally, the artist herself has completed a PhD on the topic of self-taught art.)
Kot’átková’s first solo at this gallery, “a mouse’s home is the snake’s body,” springs from workshops that the artist conducted with children under psychiatric care in Prague. The title alone, which is shared by a piece that consists of looping metal script installed along the base of several walls (all works 2016), suggests the way language can naturalize deeply disturbing phenomena. Collages, installed in several salon-style configurations, combine vintage images of kids, animals, and folk art. On many of these images, the artist has scrawled blindfolds, gags, boundaries, and diagrammatic arrows. The sculptures on view, mostly made of metal, are naive configurations based on typewritten statements by the young patients. These entries, which catalog fears, ailments, and strange perceptions, verge on romanticizing emotional disturbance (a common complaint about outsider art). And yet, in some instances, their words evince wisdom. In Animals I’m Scared of: . . . (Collection of Anxieties), Kot’átková arrays sculptures and photographs on a low plinth, illustrating a list compiled by a twelve-year-old named V. These feared creatures include hedgehogs, snakes, spiders, and a terrifying species familiar to most of us: “my mother because she has hands that punish me / myself because sometimes I can’t recognise myself.”
The mixed-media work in Harmony Hammond’s new show has a rare presence, evoking the sides of barges, stucco walls, and flesh. She uses oil paint, layered strips of canvas, and hardware to imbue her irregular reworkings of fraught modernist forms—monochrome painting, the grid—with luminous, repaired, weathered, and weather-proofed qualities. Here, grommets function as both marks and portals to the blank wall behind, punched into her canvases and arranged in rows. In the grand, off-white Witness, 2014, an elegant fold in the canvas suggests a horizon line or a shirt seam. In the upstairs gallery, fiery grommet-grid variations, one in yellow and one in red (Naples Grid and Red Stack, both 2015), are dramatic exceptions to the show’s subdued palate.
In this latest installment of the artist’s lifelong undertaking to recuperate and subvert the gendered associations of her materials and processes, the sturdy paintings find a delicate foil in a series of text-based “Ledger Drawings,” 2015. As in grammar-school blackboard punishments, words repeat in neat rows on graph paper. In tireless script, Hammond has written loaded terms that attach to the late-career woman artist. One drawing reads “diva” again and again; another accuses or dismisses with “your generation.” Hammond, an influential figure of the 1970s feminist art movement, notes in the press release that she executes these colored-ink drawings at night, reiterating the put-downs to “render them powerless.” Repetition transforms them for the viewer, too: One easily un-recognizes the words and lets them become curlicued forms, blurring into stripes. Intimate and forceful, the drawings stand as spells against not just sexist disregard but also—in the spirit of Hammond’s feminist formalist oeuvre—the false opposition of abstraction and personal/political content.
Duane Michals thrives when pitted against an unfamiliar medium. And having waited over four decades to approach filmmaking, he does so now with the wide-eyed sincerity and innocence of a first-timer. A theater within the gallery looks like a seedy Times Square peep show from another era. A flashy electric arrow guides you toward an entrance with a red velvet curtain. Right outside is a small handwritten note, listing all twelve of the short videos made by the artist over the last two years. Michals describes these pieces as “mini-movies,” and they are as thoughtful and as cosmic as his photos, though these works give him an expanded set of parameters for storytelling.
In the main exhibition space is a miniretrospective of Michals’s most significant photo sequences of the 1960s and ’70s. Gelatin silver print series such as “Things Are Queer,” 1973, and “Something Strange Is Happening,” 1975, remain timeless meditations on the slipperiness of reality. There are also twelve individual stills from the new movies, scribbled on like souvenir Hollywood posters, in Michals’s distinctive hand. For Tickets to Heaven, 2016, Michals is shown selling salvation on the streets for five bucks a pop (plus tax). Written in squiggly caps on the top-right corner of this photo is “NO SINNERS WERE INJURED IN THE MAKING OF THIS FILM.”
More than half of the shorts star Michals as a wisecracking old man, ad-libbing with slapstick humor and cheap puns. The films are clean and digital, but the production value’s rather high-school drama class. The artist blissfully embraces the campiness of his movies, balancing their tongue-in-cheek tenor with a deep poignancy in such pieces as Are You Still a Faggot? and A Last Walk in the Woods (both 2016). Grappling with familiar themes of sexuality, aging, and loss, Michals translates the qualities of his photographs into dynamic motion pictures that will linger long after you’ve left the gallery.
In her New York gallery debut, Alicja Kwade presents a fun house of cerebral sculptures that play with and challenge perceptions of space. The artist displayed a similar sleight of hand with her recent commission for Public Art Fund, Against the Run, 2015, a street clock with a backward-revolving face that disorients passersby yet, nevertheless, gives the correct time. Here, Kwade makes efficient use of sculpted and ready-made materials to construct a series of works that portray objects at an impasse, oscillating between various states of being and meaning.
Three central sculptures—whose titles combine to form the exhibition’s title, “I Rise Again, Changed But the Same”—are arranged like room dividers in a tight cluster. Their steel frames operate as pathways, windows, and mirrors through which a dizzying labyrinth of views is created. In Changed (Fig. II) (all works 2015–16), a double-sided mirror reflects a stone on one side and its twin, cast in aluminum, on the other; from certain angles it appears as a single object divided neatly between two materials. In Incident (Trait Transference), Kwade performs a similar alchemical shift with four sculptures that pair up equal-size panels of mirror and Corten steel. Transmitted like a virus or fungus, the weathered steel’s rusted coating spreads over the mirror’s surface, supplanting the reflected image with a corroding double.
Kwade’s subjects are objects in crisis, divorced from their traditional functions or contexts. Time Machine is a scattering of fallen leaves, out of place in an otherwise pristine installation. The found set of keys in Wo oben zum Unten (Where Top to Bottom) is affixed to the ceiling, defying gravity and flipping our perspective. These two inconspicuous pieces go virtually unnoticed unless you’re really looking, which Kwade compels you to do, again and again.
Yorgo Alexopoulos, The Way to the Sea, 2015–16, digital animation on HD translucent LCD display, Thassos marble, gypsum 3-D print, aluminum, steel, glass, C-print on brushed aluminum, mixed-media diorama, LEDs, polished stainless steel, custom electronics, 10-minute infinite loop, 31 1/2 x 47 x 9''.
The most striking piece in Yorgo Alexopoulos’s latest show is Act of Nature: In Eight Chapters, 2015–16. Ten minutes of footage loops infinitely across eight synchronized LCD screens positioned at right angles to one another along the gallery’s back wall. Time-lapse photographs of landscapes merge with images both still and filmed; a blue triangle meets its translucent counterpart as a waterfall fades in and out of a densely populated forest.
Water undulates on seven screens in the similarly hypnotic Split Swell, 2016. Here, we experience an ocean rendered digitally, and we watch it at eye level, as if through portals on a ship. Time is the element in question here, unfolding against a changing sky whose hues shift from bright, citrusy colors to cold blues. The final destination on this perceptually fragmentary and time-collapsing journey? Totally unknown. But it’s nice to think that one needn’t embark on such a trip when it can be experienced through a mesmerizing simulated reality.
The Way to the Sea, 2015–16, a modular work that incorporates a looped digital animation, has dimensionality as its focal point. A 3-D gypsum print of a lush, mountainous tableau connected to a piece of robotically carved marble that juts out the parameters of the work’s tidy frame seems to explore the boundaries between our pastoral past and a technologically mediated future. There is an implicit irony in the way Alexopoulos moderates the natural world via the screen, trying to capture its essence and preserve a sense of idealism as might be done in an advertisement.
Sunglasses, ice-cream cones, nudes, bolt cutters, and, of course, layer cakes are just a few of our favorite things depicted in this airy, career-spanning sampling of Wayne Thiebaud’s work. The sophisticated whimsy of the painter’s realism is reflected not just in his choice of charming subjects but also in his meticulous renderings of them. Via his multicolored outlining technique, which the artist refers to as “halation,” the works are imbued with a subtle Kodachrome radiance. And up close, one finds a fanciful mini-sunset at the edge of each object. In the magnificent and never-before-exhibited painting Five Chocolate Cookies, 1989—which is not much bigger than a sheet of loose leaf paper—Thiebaud defines a row of dark glossy disks (Thin Mints?) with confetti-like marks of crimson, tangerine, and turquoise. White paint, meant to suggest a pristine plate or a Formica countertop, arcs around the cookies and moves in velvety horizontal strokes, like an infinite plane of vanilla buttercream.
While the artist is best known for his perfect takes on the post–World War II American quotidian, he frequently branches out. In the surreal Up Street, 1993, multiple lanes of traffic take a sharp vertical detour, as if on a roller-coaster track, and a funny palm tree teeters at the top in the distance. Mound and Cloud, 1972, is an otherworldly landscape in which a meringue-like puff floats in a bright blue sky above a snow-topped mountain with a cliff face of what looks like rainbow-flecked ganache. An adroit and subtly trailblazing literalizer of the frosting/oil paint parallel, Thiebaud, as the range of this lovely exhibition proves, can apply his signature unfussy delicacy to anything at all.
Certain artworks can’t help but hint at the affect of the bodily actions that shaped them. Many of the iconic process-based sculptures of the 1960s—those shredded webs, tangled filaments, and crisscrossed threads of “Eccentric Abstraction,” for example—suggest a touch of psychic or manual frenzy. Such knotted fibers make an appearance in N. Dash’s current solo exhibition, but only in a twice-removed, two-dimensional form, in paintings silk-screened with images of cloth scraps that the artist rubs to the point of disintegration between her fingers, a daily practice that has occupied her since childhood. While Dash literally worries her diminutive textile sculptures to pieces, the majority of these works (all Untitled, 2016)—composed primarily of stacked or beveled arrangements of jute-stretched canvases, quantities of gessoed or hand-painted fabric, and lengths of twine embedded in or hanging from troweled-on adobe grounds—feature tactile surfaces manipulated by the sure hand of composure.
Underscoring the work’s poise may imply that it’s a bit too well-behaved, too withholding, but in fact any perceived surfeit of restraint gives way, on closer inspection, to a distinctly physical avidity: A strip of pink Styrofoam wedged between shaded areas of graphite and a blush-tipped wooden dowel lying within a flap of black canvas evoke intimate flesh secreted within dark cavities; the fields of New Mexican clay are marked by dermal wrinkles and puckers; and expanses of monochrome paint are rippled by broken adhesion, as if two clinging skins have been pulled reluctantly apart. (It’s hard to resist the urge to run a finger across these planes to test the feel of that cool earth, those viscid oils.) Against the grain of so much hyperarticulate, studied art, Dash’s resolute materiality gently disdains academic prudishness or defensive cleverness. It stays mute, understanding that so much can be said with the mouth firmly shut.
The scene is set in what looks like a futuristic cemetery, only it’s today—we encounter 3-D-printed and CNC-carved bodies, based on real people, in see-through plastic bags. Of the four on display, one’s a bookkeeper; another, a humble entrepreneur (Productivity Gains [Brandon/Accountant]; By Close of Business [Maura/Small-Business Owner], all works 2016). They lie on the floor, shriveled in fetal positions. Expressions of loss—or is it peace?—appear on their synthetic faces, and their attire’s tidy and wrinkle free. In Josh Kline’s world, obsolescence is the law of the land, and humans are a passé fad . . . or just literal garbage. It’s an entirely sinister and familiar display, and one that doesn’t require much reading between the lines. Its grave humor is explicit—it’s the death of the middle class, a wide swath of the country, rendered as expendable creatures ready for the discard pile.
Nearby is Universal Early Retirement, a fictional three-minute commercial for a federally subsidized income. Its spirit seems to ricochet off the many political campaign ads that have been assaulting our retinas of late. The tone is jovial, the music uplifting, and the American flag is blowing in the wind. People from different ethnic backgrounds laud a new kind of New Deal that would give them enough free time to pursue their true passions. This promise of a utopian kind of social reform is, alas, vaguely believable.
Since consumerism is the cornerstone of any capitalist economy, naturally, elimination is necessary for keeping such a system alive. The future belongs to those who can monetize expendability. And if you think otherwise, Kline’s dark poetry suggests, the heap still awaits.
In the youth of the Soviet Union, Constructivism gave form to the new society’s most utopian ideas about style, labor, and family—a science fiction of everyday life. Little as this endeared the movement to Stalin, not even he could disappear the spiraling geometries of filmmaker Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita (1924) or the Shabolovka Radio Tower. “Diálogos constructivistas en la vanguardia Cubana” (Constructivist Dialogues in the Cuban Vanguard) reveals how these satellites were received on the other side of the planet. Amelia Peláez was born shortly before the end of Spanish rule, and the thick black lines embroidering her paintings annex domestic scenes to the surrounding colonial architecture. Naturaleza muerta en un interior/Las Puertas de la Habana (Still Life in an Interior/The Doors of Havana), 1948, feels like a stained-glass window for a church not yet founded. Light spills across the canvas in delirious crystals.
Loló Soldevilla’s geometric sculptures seem to restrain themselves to the spare palette of a chessboard, their squares and circles paused mid-motion, like the vertiginous obstacles in a 3-D Super Mario level. Her oil painting Carta celeste: Noches en el cosmos (Celestial Letter: Nights in the Cosmos), 1958, is a partially striated circle with two smaller orbs floating within. For Zilia Sánchez, still active at ninety years old, her lunar imagery is a portal to more terrestrial bodies. She stretches canvases over wooden armatures until they pant soft colors. Shapes undulate against one another. I thought of that TV screen bulging outward in Videodrome (1983), a throb loosed from flesh. The first Constructivists dreamed of building to distant planets; after seeing Sánchez’s art, you may fantasize about caressing one.
“26,” the title of Richard Tuttle’s solo exhibition here (which refers to the number of previous one-man shows the artist has had in New York since 1965) gives us a deep view into a fully substantiated system with a coherent internal logic—fifty years of artistic hits that have subtly bent and shaped art history. These works, though profound in effect, are humble in facture. For instance, in Red Dots, Deep Maroon over Green, 1986, the hot glue doesn’t hide its job as binding. The work’s materials, such as stickers, masking tape, and Styrofoam, don’t fuss with pretenses—they are what they are. And in 10th Wire Piece, 1972, the artist feels virtually absent, but in the best way: The torqued wire delineates space simply and directly while quietly revealing some ineffable truth. At times, however, his configurations feel more distinctly wrought, particularly in the sprawling Systems, IX, 2012—one senses that Tuttle steadily kneaded this piece from concept to object.
The show’s strongest works, such as the aforementioned wire piece or Fiction Fish I, 1,1992—a graphite line leading to baby-blue modeling paste and a hot-pink rectangle, hung just above the gallery’s floorboards—materialize with an almost supernatural elegance. The curved, green-painted paper intersecting with a dribbling brown splotch painted onto the wall in Titel 3, 1978, snaps the background plane into focus while simultaneously confusing figure and ground. Knottier still is the sense that these grounded abstractions are numinously harnessed manifestations: nonlinear, contingent realities of what’s right here and yet to be.
Any clear distinction between the human and the natural in Alwar Balasubramaniam’s refined sculptures has become increasingly blurred since he abandoned Bengaluru, India, for his ancestral village in Tamil Nadu. His latest exhibition features a series of textured monochromes, the surfaces of which uncannily resemble geological formations shaped over millennia. A trio of cast fiberglass panels—two unique but similar works, both titled Rain in the midnight, 2015–16, as well as Under current, 2015—re-create rippled beds carved by water flowing over earth and stone. Graphite gives the surface of the former works their inky sheen, while the latter, smaller in size, approximates the patina of oxidized copper or bronze.
Privileging sedimentation over erosion, the craggy surfaces of a different group of panels—a diptych titled Dunes, 2012; and three more cast fiberglass pieces titled Wind Waves, 2012; Wings of the wind, 2014–16; and Burst, 2015—are built up through the slow, careful addition of acrylic (and occasionally pigment, soot, and glue) subjected to the artist’s artificial air currents carefully orchestrated in the studio. The colors—synthetic-looking red, blue, and white—are the sole overt indications of his hand. These objects quietly introduce a sense of nature’s longue durée into the process of artistic creation, making the cumulative effects of imperceptible forces visible.
Other works return to familiar Balasubramaniam territory: the existential relationship between self and corporeality, which the artist has previously interrogated through works in various media that usually begin from a cast of his body. Body as shell, 2011–15, presents a figure as a deflated sheath crumpled on the floor, carved from sandstone. Shell as body, 2015–16, a large, broken, cowrie-shaped terra-cotta pot, reinforces the idea of body as vessel. Neither work, however, dictates what exactly they might hold.
Amie Siegel’s latest works probe the pathos of preterit things. Shot in crystalline HD, Fetish, 2016, documents the annual cleaning of Freud’s London home, preserved since the early 1980s as a museum. Bronze sibyls, ceramic sphinxes, and ivory Buddhas line bookshelves and Biedermeier cabinets like patients awaiting analysis. Two conservators, outfitted in Freud Museum fleeces (the only confirmation of context), methodically remove, dust, and return each figure to its site. Yet the true protagonists are the objects themselves, which Siegel images from their best angle, straight on and centered in the frame. Close-ups silhouette Freud’s artifacts against shallow fields, while parallel tracking shots cultivate distance, enclosing each specimen in a solipsistic world. In these hermetic, eclipsed spaces, the viewer can only trespass.
Freud conceived the fetish as an undecided object: a substitute for the absent phallus, at once mnemonic of and protective against its loss. Siegel’s artwork dilates the “both-and” quality of its namesake, treating the museum’s miscellany as sachlich things and animate actors. Displaced from its perch, a metal porcupine seems less threatening than forlorn: a pocket-size Pierrot. Moments earlier, Siegel’s camera scans an emptied shelf, recording its punctuated topology of sediment. The work closes with a long shot of Freud’s infamous couch. Conservators successively strip and restore its carpet overlay in a choreography by turns tender and mundane. Disused and sagging, the settee makes a musty odalisque. Similar care is taken by the preservationists seen in Double Negative, 2015. Their headquarters in Canberra, Australia, occupy a black replica of Le Corbusier’s modernist icon, the Villa Savoye. The doubled building tropes the doubled nature of object existence that Siegel’s camera discloses. Her pieces tempt us to slip into the histories of things—to imagine the analysands supine on Freud’s sofa or the faithful who fondled his sphinx—yet hold us indefinitely at the surface.
In Cindy Sherman’s eagerly awaited new show, older women—played by the artist, as always—appear in photographs reminiscent of 1920s Hollywood glamour shots or movie posters. Costumed and posed as younger women might be, these bobbed, finger-waving, and stylishly hatted women with precision-painted eyebrows—think Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks, or Lillian Gish—seem to be reliving their heydays, in color. Or, maybe, this evocative psychological premise is simply a fortuitous byproduct of Sherman’s age. She’s sixty-two now and continues to work as she has for decades: alone and as a master of all trades, her own model, makeup artist, art director, and stylist.
Shot before a green screen, the photos feature Photoshopped backgrounds, such as hazy skyscrapers, suggestions of wisteria, a length of creased pastel brocade, foreboding skies, digital abstractions, and possibly Athens. These manipulated “sets” throw the artist’s hyperdetailed, brazenly unretouched, and unforgivingly lit form into relief. Impasto foundation collects in her fine lines, plows over her real, intact eyebrows, and is not blended past her décolletage. Also, her hands don’t look young. This wonderful combination of self-assured “age inappropriateness” and classical Hollywood themes produces moments of campy, ramshackle eroticism, with bluish raccoon eye shadow and red cupid's-bow lips, in tresses ŕ la Mary Pickford with a headband and a sexy loose tunic, perched before a storybook tree (Untitled, 2016). But such images are more stately, poignant, or contemplative than funny. One wants to add that Sherman looks great, which she does, but that’s never been the point. As she proceeds to use herself as a convenient mannequin for conceptual endeavors, or, alternately, exploit her exceptional gift of chameleonic dexterity, she further illuminates the cultural conditions of the so-called blank slate. In ignoring the unspoken edict to age out of her self-defined project, her work becomes mysterious and confrontational all over again.
Jocelyn Hobbie’s variations on boredom could make a viewer lie awake at night. Her painted depictions of women frozen in their tedium offer no reference for this absence of joie de vivre, and each flawless beauty appears slightly displaced among her eclectic, patterned wallpaper and vibrant linens, her perfectly made-up face, her icy gaze. This gaze never seeks contact outside of the canvas and it is always vacant. It makes one insane, attempting to rationalize the origin of each woman’s ennui.
Hobbie’s technical prowess in the fourteen oil paintings on display mesmerizes. Her ability to combine scintillating, clashing designs—draping them together into backgrounds, pillows, and skirts—is enviable, and aids in shielding these elegantly aloof figures against our desire to better know them. The artist crystallizes the kind of dissatisfaction that tends to linger and then lift during mundane routines . . . like, perhaps, living. Her beautiful girls reveal a contemporary condition that is felt all too often, a twenty-first-century limbo that no amount of overstimulation could break. (Never has a dense, sweet slice of something that looks like cinnamon raisin bread, tenderly held by a freckled Lolita in a stripy boat-neck top and gingham tie [Untitled, 2014], appeared so simultaneously delicious and dull.)
Stare at the canvases long enough and it’s easy to imagine the scaffolding of supersaturated ornamentation that keeps them together utterly falling apart. Stream, 2015, calls to mind John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, 1851–52, where Millais’s tragic heroine floats vacantly, helplessly down a stream. Hobbie’s paralyzed sylph, despite her seeming emptiness, or perhaps because of it, makes one want to curl up near her limp arms and grow mad together.
“Stop Playing in My Face!”—the title of both Rashaad Newsome’s show and its mesmerizing queer Afrofuturist video centerpiece—is taken from a rebuke/mantra invented by Samantha James Revlon: black trans woman, YouTube luminary, and camera-phone diarist. In Newsome’s four-minute loop, Revlon’s vivid vernacular becomes a springboard and framework for theoretical discussion. Set to an eerie dance beat, the cut-up voices of feminist cultural critics, such as bell hooks and Janet Mock, debate the practical and philosophical potentials (or pitfalls) of sexual self-commodification. Meanwhile, the nearly floor-to-ceiling projection shows a dancer in red stiletto boots and a black turtleneck leotard, voguing solo in a blankly grand virtual setting (somewhere like the Parthenon, or a mall at night). Strangely paced animated camera movements heighten the video-game feel and eventually dramatically zoom out to reveal the dancer as one of many moving parts in a cosmic entity of rotating architecture, diamonds, pearls, and giant glossy-red talking lips.
The digital collage aesthetic of this glam deity is reflected in the works on paper in the front gallery, but these pieces are constructed the old-fashioned cut-and-paste way. The artist cleverly cobbles together cyborgian figures from appropriated images of opulence—jewel-encrusted surfaces, custom rims, made-up mouths, models’ limbs, flames, and gold-domed buildings. Playing with layers and modes of realness, Newsome pairs these condensed photographic representations of fabulous excess and gendered artifice with veritable luxury materials. In YAAAAAAAS! (all works cited, 2016), a portrait of a glittering humanoid occupies an ornate octagonal frame made from black leather and automotive paint. In this sharp and effervescent show, tropes of conspicuous consumption mingle with reflections from trans and feminist voices on what it’s like to be conspicuously consumed; and Revlon’s nuanced, boundary-setting, space-making edict resonates with both interpersonal and intergalactic import.
Like George Condo portraits stripped of specificity and affect, the Albanian-born, New York–based painter Lui Shtini’s whimsical, bulbous abstractions are centrally positioned against monochromatic backgrounds. While meticulously labored, Shtini’s works are refreshingly spare. They are also explicitly spiritual—an attempt to make manifest the aura of the supernatural jinni beings who, according to Arabic mythos, influence the fates of those in our own realm.
Shtini’s works are best when they explicitly evoke the corporeal “skins” of these supernatural creatures. His careful etchings and concise palette marks in color fields of wet oil evoke body hair and feathers. Despite their physicality, these paintings, weirdly, are somehow unphotographable. Their vivid textures dissolve under most lenses, and flatten them into Pop iconography, making them lose their psychic verve. Up close, the brushy buildup of paint that forms the inverted crescent of Skin I, 2016, for instance, suggests a mustache ŕ la Nick Offerman, bristling below a symmetrical black, vaguely facial form.
Shtini’s works demonstrate a sculptural consideration of his oil medium—with hatched carvings into dense areas to reveal the layers beneath and knifed impressions to produce the illusion of scales. These paintings operate like Rorschach inkblots, revealing facial features, torsos, molars, bare bottoms, or genitalia—indicating the jinn’s shapeshifting powers, or the viewer’s preoccupations and interests. Choose your own adventure.
Created by Dor Guez in 2009, “The Christian Palestinian Archive” invites the titular community to scan their family photographs, in an attempt to trace their histories and journeys. As part of this project, fourteen black-and-white photos tell the family story of Samira Monayer, the artist’s grandmother. These images, from a series titled “Scanogram #1,” 2010, were scanned multiple times and reassembled using a variety of digital programs to accentuate the original photos’ rips and tears. Guez, the inventor of the scanogram technique, seeks to emphasize the creases of time and convey the natural decay of these pictures as objects. In doing so, he deconstructs the images and therefore the past.
Nearby are five large scanograms of broken and vandalized Christian Palestinian graves from a cemetery in Israel (40 Days, 2012). The photos, shot by Guez’s grandfather, have been affected by time and humidity, and in the process have become colorful abstractions full of ghostlike forms, as if to indicate the instability of this dispersed populace.
In the back of the gallery is Sabir, 2010, a twenty-minute video about Samira’s life and journey. Raised in Jaffa, Samira and her family fled their home in 1948 and moved to al-Lydd, known today as Lod. Samira reveals her fascinating story in Arabic and Hebrew, generating a document of what today is considered a “controversial” history. In the video (Sa)Mira, 2009, Guez’s young cousin, named after their grandmother, shares how her Israeli boss asked her to change her Arabic name to the more common Israeli name Mira. By repeating this story over and over again, Samira gradually realizes the racist reality she lives in, and how it feels to be an Arab in Israel today.
“Life is not a dream / Beware! Beware! Beware!” So wrote Federico García Lorca after a night of fitful walking through Manhattan. But life is a dream, especially for Chicago-based photographer Kenneth Josephson, and a lovely one at that.
Multiple exposures, collages, time lapses, and doctored colors: Since he began working in the late 1950s–early ’60s, Josephson has used just about every available technique to question our accepted notions of reality. Which is to say that in his best work—much of which is on display at this greatest hits–style exhibition—formal experiments are really metaphysical provocations.
In Chicago, 1960, for example, pedestrians walk down a sun-drenched sidewalk, followed by a tangle of eerie, diaphanous humanoid shapes. Josephson exposed the photograph more than once, certainly, and somewhere along the line, shifted the frame. What we’re actually seeing, then, is the same group of people in different places. In another artist’s hands, this could be a pedantic effect. But by combining it with an exquisite gossamer texture, and conjuring a mood of ethereal solitude, Josephson persuades us that spirits are floating past the street. Similar otherworldly beings appear throughout his work.
Josephson often includes photographs within his photographs. Held in a free hand, lying in the grass, tacked on the frame as in a montage—their self-reflexive presence unsettles us like an LSD revelation. A revelation of what? Of the fact that our world, so intimate and heavy, might well be little more than a greater someone’s photo album.
In her landmark essay on the grid, Rosalind Krauss outlined the form’s reductive modernist ontology, and its exemplary capacity to align the work of art with its material support. In several diaries presented in Nasreen Mohamedi’s inaugural exhibition here, some of the artist’s supports are commercial notebooks, whose ready-made matrices she used to create linear inked compositions sometimes interwoven with strings of words that read like poetry.
The strong showing of Mohamedi’s signature drawings, which have been steadily gaining international attention, however, departs from Krauss’s reading. In these works, created with architectural drawing instruments that delicately distributed ink or graphite in millimeter-thin lines, the grid is deployed repeatedly, but in ways that resolutely resist the flatness of the picture plane. Instead, gridded lines tilt inward or are interrupted by geometric voids. The resulting optical effect is not one of illusionistic volume, exactly—it is more an intimation of unbounded space that the grid, in its strictest iterations, does not provide.
The survey also includes photographs in which, again, the line roams free of its supporting context: The separation of the beach and the ocean seem to be of gestural intention (Untitled, ca. 1960), while the markings on pavement appear to relieve the ground of its horizontality (Untitled, ca. 1970).
The curatorial narrative emphasizes Mohamedi’s suffering from the debilitating shakes of Huntington’s disease to mark a division between her landscape-based freehand abstractions of the 1960s and the rigorously precise works of the 1980s. Wall didactics and the show’s catalogue also note influences from Islamic, Sufi, and Bhakti traditions’ of geometric nonrepresentation and notions of emptiness. These contextual determinants are important for considering Mohamedi apart from other Minimalists with whom she is often cursorily lumped in. Each work’s obstinate space for attentive reflection simultaneously causes such cadres to recede toward an indeterminate horizon.
Hilton Als’s “One Man Show: Holly, Candy, Bobbie, and the Rest” is strung together loosely, just like the celebrated New Yorker critic’s personal essays. Voice is structure; memory comes in vivid rushes; friendship is a seismic force. This, the first phase of the artist’s six-month season at the Artist’s Institute (also the inaugural project of the Institute’s new UES address), is a dreamy paean to, as the artist writes, “various personages who lived in a pre-Transparent, pre-Caitlyn, pre-anything world.” Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling, the figures named in Als’s title, were trans Warhol Superstars; but Bobbie, we learn, was not famous—just a luminous friend, represented here by a small image in a corner of this elegantly makeshift installation. In Bobbie, 2016, an old-fashioned projector shows vintage slides of an angelic blond, a gender-indeterminate young person. In one picture, they are standing in the sun on the street, almost smiling, gazing at a point slightly above an unknown photographer.
The gallery is kept dim, lit by all manner of budget mood lighting. In one room, colored bulbs with messy, exposed cords accent Judy Linn’s striking black-and-white portraits of drag legend Ethyl Eichelberger from 1990, while a loop of louche art films plays on an adjacent wall, as a disco mix made by Als pumps from little computer speakers. Elsewhere, a handful of flickering liquid tea lights sit on the floor, not too far from the piece Stormé, Bobbie and the Rest, 2016, in which a classroom overhead projector throws a faint image of Bobbie onto the wall—and onto Diane Arbus’s 1961 portrait of butch dreamboat and Stonewall hero Stormé DeLarverie.
This is not a photography show, though photos anchor it; and it’s not a group show, though many artists haunt it. This is curating as artistic practice, as shrine-making—a “one-man” exhibition that engenders so much more.
In the photographic diptych How to Look at Mexican Art, 1995, Silvia Gruner displays a punctured molcajete, or Mexican grinding mortar, atop bright-red plastic. Her hand grips the object from above in the first image and playfully penetrates it from below in the second. Not only does she juxtapose something typically associated with indigenous Mexican culture with a strictly contemporary material, but Gruner also inserts her body into her work to challenge assumptions about her artistic heritage. Similarly, in the adjacent film Centinela (Sentinel), 2007, the artist, her head shaved due to her recent cancer treatment, stares into the churning waters of a modernist fountain designed by Mathias Goeritz, Ricardo Legorreta, and Isamu Noguchi, a set of male modernist masters that the artist is confronting as much as she faces the imposing abyss.
Her early film pieces also centralize her body, poised between stasis and movement. In Arena (Sand), 1986, Gruner, naked, covers herself with a mixture of mud and pigment and repeatedly climbs up and tumbles down a dune on Cape Cod, in a Sisyphean loop that marks the surface of the sand. Cyclical repetition is also made visible in Re-Start, 2014, a brief stop-motion animation of the artist’s hands threading a knitting needle, yielding a kinetic set of tangled lines while subtly alluding to women’s association with craft. This more abstract engagement with feminist concerns is manifest in the show’s centerpiece, the two-channel video Hemisferios (Hemispheres), 2014, whose title conflates the artist’s psychic and physical spaces. Here we see Gruner’s assistant undoing two sets of yarn labyrinths that the artist set up in the front and back gardens of her home. One consists of a neat grid, laid out in thickly knitted red lines, while the other is a tangle of the same wool wrapped messily around tree limbs and stray objects. We watch as the two sets of fibers are respooled in real time, staging the tension between material permanence and ephemerality that permeates Gruner’s work, suggesting that artistic labor is always a process of doing and undoing.
With only twenty-two paintings produced over six decades, this Robert Ryman exhibition is a summa of the artist’s process, via the reduction and synthesis of the fundamental elements of painting. Different mediums, textures, and supports—canvas, paper, aluminum, fiberglass, Plexiglas—are used to investigate the luminous frequency of white in all its possible gradations. The artist has chosen to exhibit the paintings under natural light, and he is right to do so. I viewed the show when the sky was clear, then when it was cloudy, and then under artificial light. The last condition was decisively the worst, since it imbued the works with a very disturbing pinkish tone. Under natural light, however, the gradations of white appear in all their shimmering, pulsating richness, with vibrations of gray, blue, or black, on surfaces that are highly tactile or smooth, absorbent or polished.
Ryman has been investigating methods and structures of painting since the 1960s. Carrying out an operation of progressive subtraction, he eliminates the stretcher frame and instead attaches sheets of paper or canvases directly to the wall or subverts the axis of vision by propping works, supported on the floor with metal rods, against the wall. He also experiments with the potential of industrial materials by contrasting shiny aluminum surfaces with matte white paint or by using steel bolts on the paintings’ surfaces. And the abatement of tones to the minimum degree of whiteness provides Ryman with a limitless field of freedom. Varying the paint’s density and methods of its application, he regulates the absorbency or the refraction of light, sometimes applying a variety of colors beneath the white to instill the deceptively monochrome surfaces with warmth or acidity. The result is an articulate and complex symphony of minimal tones, much like Brian Eno’s compositions of ambient music. This show, a place of reflection and expansion, uses essential examples to describe Ryman’s research. With a kind of magic and rigor that few can match, Ryman catalyzes perceptual processes, remaining attuned to the objective properties of materials and to the pure evidence of paint and light.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.