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art reviews from around new york

In threatening to demolish the Museum of American Folk Art, I asked, has MOMA lost sight of great architecture? Maybe even worse, has it forgotten its own role as a museum? What does it say that it is now using that alley between buildings for perhaps the ultimate descent of a great museum into Disneyland. (I mean the spectacle of Rain Room in a temporary shelter—and the more than three-hour lines leading up to it—and I shall tell you more about it soon.) Is art even a priority, and is architecture? What does it say that MOMA’s chairman, Jerry I. Speyer, is a real-estate developer?

Remarkably, even he feels the heat, and (thankfully) a recent post of mine is already obsolete. Under critical and public pressure, including petitions, MOMA blinked. Speyer announced in early May that it is reconsidering. That is not to say that MOMA will back down, and yet it may. For now, he calls the fate of the architecture by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien an “open question,” and at least the museum feels the burden of answering it. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which has also overseen the conversion renovation of the High Line into a popular park, will now formulate a justification for the westward expansion.

Barry Schwabsky in The Nation compared the Modern’s earlier rationales to trashing a Kandinsky that clashed with the office décor. Williams and Tsien pointed out that one floor in fact aligns perfectly across the two buildings. One could imagine a creative connection, just as Yale University has now connected its art galleries, with architecture from past centuries to the present. Nor need every museum expansion be an act of destruction. For Yale, the Drawing Center, or Maya Lin at the Museum of Chinese in America and SculptureCenter, architecture has proved modest to a fault. With ICA Boston by the waterfront, Diller Scofidio + Renfro have already made a brand new building an act of urban recovery.

It could serve as a model for midtown Manhattan as well. I am sorry to see good architects paid to find an answer that the museum board wants to hear. Still, one can expect a sophisticated response. They must know that the threatened building could be at the center of an exhibition of contemporary architecture—the kind that the Museum of Modern Art puts on every day. When its architecture department recently exhibited Henri Labrouste, who designed the great libraries of Paris, did it sense the irony? Did the museum’s director, Glenn D. Lowry?

At The Times, Michael Kimmelman has formulated his own protest, and I could not have put it better: “a museum dedicated to contemporary art and design wanted to destroy a distinctive work of contemporary design.” And, he lamented, it probably still wants to do so. New York’s paper of record may have come late to the game, where once its critic led the ill-fated fight to preserve Penn Station. Yet has come, and now the pressure is on. “The stakes go beyond the Modern to civic health.”

I have been rude to Kimmelman in the past, far too rude, but for him urban architecture has been about urban spaces all along, and now midtown is reconsidering two of its finest public spaces. As it happens, the pressure is also on Penn Station. At the time of its demolition and sorry reconstruction, it received only a limited permit to house Madison Square Garden above it. If that permit lapses, change is in the air. Now the City Planning Commission has recommended against an indefinite extension. I have no idea what will happen to Penn Station, and I have no fondness for the idea of moving its entrance a long block west to the post office—but public spaces are my spaces, too, and I want them back.

Kimmelman has also done the debate a favor by quoting a “forty-something friend”—who could easily be me: “I used to spend my days in the previous incarnation of MoMA after my father died. Back then MoMA was my chapel. I would make my way to my favorite Rothko, and the progression from the street to that gallery in the old building didn’t feel like you were moving through a shopping mall or a W Hotel. It’s just not a place for New Yorkers anymore.” Maybe one day it will be again.

“Abstraction talks her head off. She has a lot to say.” You might not have heard her right away, at BravinLee Programs through March 23, but Jennifer Wynne Reeves does (and I should have told you about it in time, but portions of this had first to appear in Artillery magazine). “I tune out or listen,” she adds, in the penciled text within a painting, “rattled by her noisy silence.”

She is also silently talking back. She could be abstracting away from reality, building life on abstraction, or discovering her inner child.

She sticks her text on three paintings, as if cut from a school notebook by a precocious learner. Each fragment shares a wooden frame with shards of acrylic or molding paste, but nothing within the frame, least of all abstraction. In due course, one may spot loose grids of soft colors, as for Paul Klee, but with more shards sticking out from the edges. They could pass for shattered porcelain from her morning coffee or the leavings of a brush wiped clean, on the way to painting something else. And mostly that something else is telling stories. Abstraction has the choice of tuning out or listening.

Maybe she has not really saved her notebook all these years (and her texts sometimes appear as Facebook posts as well, perhaps to rethink drawing as part of an ongoing virtual project). Still, a drawing on paper from age nine does greet visitors on the way in, in a glass case that the gallery often reserves for artist books. Reeves has hoarded it along with some, well, updates over the years—plus a few messy sculptures somewhere between figurines, abstraction, and child’s play. She calls the show The Worms in the Wall at Mondrian’s House, as if Piet Mondrian had grown up with her. And the same gallery has had echoes of outsider art and personal confessions from Amy Wilson. Yet Reeves is not half as innocent as she may appear.

Her gouache on paper has its share of realism, like the gray streaks of a damp sky or the scumbled vegetation of an open field. It also has room for somber dreams—or at least more ornery ones. A sailboat passes beneath a rainbow all but landing on its deck, and her characters are often literally at sea. A traveler crosses a bridge in low light, behind fencing not at all comforting in its whiteness. A prancing horse does not escape its tether, and a wolf howls at a star. A shotgun brings down a bird, although another bird flies above and a cardinal perches comfortably on a power line.

Actual wire, too, for her is part of abstraction’s sign language. She draws with it and puns on it, as with the tense coils of those utility poles. Maybe she exaggerates the coiling and its looseness, but electricity works that way, and so does the loneliness of power lines beside a road. The show can seem a little precious, starting with its title and the texts, but then there are those worms.

In the end, Reeves and abstraction claim to reach an accommodation—”a perfectly unexpected Boogie Woogie.” Still, these are first and foremost her stories, far from Mondrian’s Broadway.

When it comes to finding a dance partner in Modernism, plenty of artists feel a certain ambivalence—part of why I have gathered this together with earlier pieces on E. E. Smith and Anne Geoffroy as a longer review and my latest upload. Like Amy Sillman, Lia Halloran, Sara VanDerBeek, and so many others, they are looking for space between abstraction and realism. Rainer Gross, at Margaret Thatcher through March 23, bases his tantalizing compositions on product logos and Disney “toons,” but expanded, cropped, and reassembled. With Reeves, there is no such “abstracting away.” Even when it comes to abstraction, she is telling stories. Art’s third dimension makes it stick in your mind, but what you will remember is painting, talking its head off.

I just knew I had seen it all before. I had seen the layers clinging to a painting’s surface, the kind that have an artist reaching for a straight edge and a trowel. I had seen the freehand curves and skewed squares, never quite conforming to geometry. I had seen the drips and shadows, some of them even real. I had seen the long trails as if squeezed right out of the tube—and maybe a toothpaste tube at that. I had seen the semicircle, like the keel of a boat sailing across a comic vision of abstraction and out to sea.

It just did not quite register where I had seen it all—and, to wrap up this week together with other posts about abstract art, it is the subject of a longer review and my latest upload. Trudy Benson could be running through a brief history of abstraction, at Horton through June 2, as fast as humanly possible. She claims inspiration, though, less in other artists than in Windows Paint and an old Mac SE. Sure enough, her elements have a way of turning up in more than one painting, as if recombined with a mouse click. For the off-kilter squares, typically neutral tones, she might have hit Ctrl-N. She plainly enjoys starting with the most primitive software possible, and (as the dealer notes) she never does find the Undo.

Quite a few artists these days are having trouble with that Undo command. A wave of abstraction is everywhere, less as tribute than as compendium—cutting across media, across imagery, and into quotation. A group show takes up the “Pour,” mostly with real pours, and an older artist at Benson’s gallery, James Hyde, has pushed painting more and more into the third dimension, sometimes under glass. Her playfulness makes the most of that dimension, too, with the familiar toolbar of filled circles and freehand curves the mostly thickly painted. She is like Mary Heilmann or Jonathan Lasker with a tablet.

Surely a proper toolbar for abstraction should include rectangles, and a proper fill should include black. For Don Voisine, at McKenzie through June 9, make that several shades of black. He represents, along with Gary Petersen, a kind of Bushwick Neo-Neo-Geo, where that extra Neo- brings a genuine return from the conceptual to the visual. He still frames a thick black X with colored borders that bring out the color buried within any black. More than ever before, he also allows the overlaps and indentations to create the illusion of mass. If Tony Smith, who began as a painter, had brought his late sculpture to canvas, it might have had this depth of black.

Others, too, are clicking on the recent past. Greg Goldberg at Stephan Stoyanov, through May 31, approaches stained canvas with thin layers of color, while Holton Rower at The Hole, through June 20, goes for actual pours, sometimes dried on a curved or vibrating surface. Where one artist turns to washes for elegance and economy, the other has in mind excess.

Indeed, the gallery calls its larger show “Xstraction,” with the accent on extra. Its thirty-nine artists include such performers as Mark Flood and Cory Arcangel, and this is art for an age of market excess. The gallery’s director played the same role before for Deitch Projects, and if Jeffrey Deitch turned his usual blind eye to abstraction, it would look like this.

Benson escapes the blindness, but for her, too, the fun comes with a combination of surfeit and familiarity. Her paintings run to maybe four feet on a side. Yet a single panel packs in acrylic, enamel, spray paint, and oil. She recalls another time when abstraction was chafing against its limits, in what Barbara Rose briefly heralded as “abstract illusionism.” Rose was writing in 1967 about such formalists as Frank Stella and Jules Olitski, but the term caught on in the 1970s with James Harvard, Michael B. Gallagher, and others now mostly fallen by the wayside. Benson has their painted drips and shadows, 3D doodles, and the illusion of thick tubes created from parallel brushstrokes and alternating highlights. She may be reaching too hard for meaning with supposed references to venus pudica, the classical female figure, but she is hardly alone in wanting to squeeze art history into the computer age.

Go ahead: pour it on.

The nine artists in “Pour,” at Asya Geisberg and Lesley Heller through May 24, do that and more. They also work with lines and traces, like Ingrid Calame in colored pencil as intricate and obsessive as laboratory studies. They work with collage and transfer, like Jackie Saccoccio blending mica into oil or Kris Chatterson with patterns receding into murky perspective. They work with media resistant to stain at all, like Calame or Carrie Yamaoka on reflective Mylar. They leave their mark or its illusion, like thumbprints for Carrie Moyer or the brush itself for David Reed as the subject of his art. And then they fix those marks in place as pouring never could, like Yamaoka in lacquered slabs.

They do not even look that much like the classic drips and pours of Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler, and they hardly exhaust the possibilities. Right on opening night in Chelsea, Sofia Maldonaldo elsewhere, at Magnan Metz through June 1, was spilling so much paint that it landed in the corners of the room as well as on canvas.

In “Pour” alone, Angelina Gualdoni recalls the ragged edges of Pollock’s black enamel, but in acrylic, and Carolanna Parlato recalls Frankenthaler’s fluid primaries. Roland Flexner, though, works in a medium that postwar Americans never knew existed unless maybe they worked as locksmiths, liquid graphite. Moyer even speaks of turning to pours in order to leave painting’s history behind. If she ends up associated with precisely the last generation for which a painter’s gesture mattered, enjoy the overflow.

To continue my theme for this week, they mark a revival of abstraction, the kind that led to at least half a dozen coordinated summer group shows in 2011, although not simply a return to the past. Flexner appeared in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Gualdoni in a 2006 group show called “The Trace of a Trace of a Trace.” I have singled out eight of nine before, including two solo shows each for Ingrid Calame and Carrie Moyer. (I guess great minds think alike.) Reed’s early oil and alkyd at Max Protech, on a high floor in Soho, was one of those gallery shows that changed everything for me—and I can hardly see the picture of a single brushstroke from James Nares, Mark Sheinkman, or (in video) Anthony McCall without him. And yet, for all that (and I have borrowed the two images here from past reviews), I never thought of these artists together.

Elisabeth Condon and Carol Prusa did, enough to curate the exhibition in a slightly different form for the Schmidt Center Gallery of Florida Atlantic University. (See, if you cannot find a museum in New York, you may yet find the resources, although in smaller spaces three miles apart.) And the artists look so obvious together, to the point that one can have trouble telling them apart. But alike in what? To ask is to raise the question of what has changed since the 1950s. This is not your parents’ (or Clement Greenberg’s) color-field painting.

For one thing, it represents the shift to other media, starting with thinned acrylic in the 1960s but also with Minimalism’s industrial materials. It also points to the breakdown between media. As with Sam Moyer, Scott Lyall, or Jacob Kassay, abstraction draws on photography. Almost all prefer the acid colors of a negative, and Flexner’s graphite black looks obviously out of a darkroom. (Carbon is an impressive molecule, even apart from buckyballs.) They can revisit the sincerity of poured paint, but only through the appropriation of the “Pictures generation.”

They also move easily between abstraction and representation, as with Calame’s organic structures, but also in representing brushwork with or without a brush. Frankenthaler did begin with landscape, as with the breakthrough poured paint of Mountains and Sea, but Flexner’s earth is on the scale of geologic time. They also push all-over painting hard enough to squeeze out almost all of Pollock’s or Frankenthaler’s bare canvas, although Gualdoni uses gaps and concentric black circles to suggest a bursting through.

Most of all, though, this is a revisiting of the pour. For these artists, pour it on becomes as much metaphor as medium. It is that eternal dance between presence and absence and then some—that trace of a trace of a trace.

Canan Talon falls just short of familiar—several times over. One could even mistake her for the German master of effacing the familiar, Gerhard Richter, only which version? Similar questions will dog this page all this week, when I shall focus on new approaches to abstract art.

Richter has pulled off abstraction, but with a squeegee, and photorealism, but blurred to the very edge of legibility, and one hardly knows which to call more emotionally laden or detached. Talon manages to combine the two tacks in a single painting. She feasts on streaks of black and near monochrome, at Von Lintel through May 25, but there is no avoiding the subject matter. That just leaves the puzzle of what it is and how it got there.

Talon’s industrial landscapes look like silkscreens, although she paints them the hard way. The very repetition of oil tanks and tiered towers, with little or no sign of life, suggests mass production. They even fall roughly into grids, like water towers for Bernd and Hilla Becher. Talon’s education has in fact taken her to Germany along with Turkey, London, and Berkeley. Is her urban scene personal or political, and is it lush or bleak? Maybe ask again after seeing it over and over and over.

Scott Treleaven has so much background that I cannot keep track of it all—or, for that matter, see it in his work. Still, he is an obsessive reader and draftsman, and it shows. He also has a predigital medium in mind, with “All-Nite Cinema,” at Invisible-Exports through June 2. A typical painting, on two or three sheets of paper or cardboard, looks like a contact print hastily marked in color for what he has to save, except that the image within the black has already slipped away. Titles allude to subcultures, discoveries, and failures in modern literature and film. Maybe a human body or two went missing along the way.

Someone may have gone missing, too, for Don Gummer, at Allegra LaViola through June 1. His collages look like jigsaw puzzles, but step back and the puzzle may snap into focus, as a plaza or building—including the Parthenon and a Frank Lloyd Wright dwelling with no one at home. If the torn and cut paper also looks like tiling, this is after all architecture. If it could function as sculptural maquettes, Gummer makes sculpture as well, large and small, with ties to David Smith. And if, in the end, interwoven shades of gray start with Analytic Cubism, one work depicts a guitar. When it comes to Modernism, abstraction is still playing along.

For Bob Zoell and Wyatt Kahn, at Rachel Uffner through June 2, painting functions even more like a jigsaw puzzle, and the puzzle may be visual or physical, but never verbal. Zoell bases his compositions on graphic design, effacing the text. The earliest, around 1997, sticks to black and white, with the raw asymmetry of censored documents. When the series mostly ends four years later, it has become clean black bars centered on fields of color. The paint on aluminum no longer looks torn out of the headlines, like censorship in art for David Wojnarowicz and Jenny Holzer. It has gained, however, in both brightness and detachment, like prison bars for Peter Halley or Alex Olson. It is also that much more of a puzzle.

Kahn suppresses the color almost entirely, by binding it like a hit man after a kill. He cuts a wood panel into pieces, covers each piece in colored canvas, and stretches additional white canvas over that. When he puts the pieces back together, never quite snugly, the unseen colors become visible shades of white. Who knew how easy it is to make shaped canvas, and who knew how easy it is for light to penetrate? The edge of one piece may extend to the next, intimating networks cutting across the whole, while the borders of the larger rectangle have taken on gentle curves. It could be the ultimate in white on white, like Minimalism for Robert Ryman. Somehow abstraction is still an enigma wrapped in an enigma.

“NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” hopes to celebrate a time when art had urgency and direction. With Andrea Fraser’s audio tour and signage, it recalls when Whitney Biennials still had curators like Thelma Golden, Lisa Phillips, and Elisabeth Sussman, with the power to scandalize or to shock. It is also the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload.

Think of it as “1993″ in quotes, as indeed exhibition titles require, with Sonic Youth on hand to supply the subtitle. With Lina Bertucci’s photographs, it recalls when artists were conscious of their glamor but not necessarily breaking even. It shows artists yearning to live in quotes and yet to live forever in the present. It is a side of 1993 that The New Museum has every right to remember, through May 26, since it was among the players that helped to create it. It was then an alternative space in Soho, as was Exit Art—and their founders were both alive.

Just to say so points to something that art has lost. Twenty years later, a new New Museum fills five floors of its oversize boxes on the trendy Lower East Side. It also goes about a museum’s business of popularizing, while boasting of the time as uncommercial. Can just twenty years now turn the past into history?

Here everyone is ironic, everyone is naked, everyone is angry, and (as one bit of text art insists) this is what you want. Well, maybe not what you or I want, but it is “NYC 1993.” Frustrating, politically correct, and insufferably trendy, much of it has proved all too easy to forget—and then it refuses to die, like cockroaches back then on Broadway. It is just one side of 1993 all the same.

How one-sided? If sex and death are not your thing, your only thing, this is not for you. It leads to trivia, as when Kathe Burkhart obsesses over Liz Taylor and Lutz Bacher over William Kennedy Smith. (Remember him? I thought not, but his rape confession included “I did have my penis.”) It tends to piety, like Kiki Smith with a standing Virgin Mary—and it is almost bereft of humor, even when Rudolf Stingel carpets the fourth floor or Andrea Zittel supplies rugs for the cafeteria.

It also gets awfully self-involved. Sean Landers fills hundreds of sheets with his impression of “tits,” “shit,” and how he exposed himself. (“Am I too hard on myself?”) Sadie Benning turns her toy camera on others, but “I wanted to feel sorry for myself.” Above all, there is a single dimension to their protests, as when Marlene McCarty responds to the first Gulf war solely by remembering a soldier as a gay victim of hate crimes. Rirkrit Tiravanija was already handing out food, a performance he has restaged again and again and again.

Like it or not, though, all this was a dimension of 1993, and it has not gone away. People really were dying of AIDS (although Hannah Wilke was actually dying that January of lymphoma), and sexuality is still on the agenda. The prison of Neo-Geo had taken hold of museums, like the prison bars from Robert Gober. Neoclassical self-portrait busts by Janine Antoni, licked and washed in soap and chocolate, would fit just fine with show after show of Dieter Roth now. Maybe the most deplorable side of 1993 has had the most lasting impact. Matthew Barney, Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhodes, Charles Ray, and a simulated crime scene by Pepón Osorio all anticipate twenty years of overblown installations. Gabriel Orozco had begun categorizing and collecting, while Nari Ward packed a space with beat-up strollers.

They were doing it before trash art became synonymous with wealth. Something has changed in twenty years, and the curators do a good job of documenting it. In a pretend TV guide, Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Jenny Moore, and Margot Norton supply a chronology of political and media events. Wall labels often note the original venue, and dealers, too, have grown wealthier in twenty years. David Zwirner then could still tackle “sexually x-plicit art by women,” Gavin Brown could work out of a room in the Chelsea Hotel, and one had to ask for the key. No, not everyone was doing it, but one has to wonder for those doing it on the cheap ever since.