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art reviews from around new york

Is it time to give up on the Whitney Biennial? Some demanded it, right as it set to open, but guess what? In a very real sense, the 2012 Whitney Biennial already has—and it is the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload. For added insight, I wrap into it a post about those demands and the “Brucennial” that first appeared in this space in an earlier form.

Oh, sure, the exhibition (this year’s through May 27) is not going away any time soon, and neither is the attention that drives it. On a Saturday around noon, the line out front snaked around the corner on Madison Avenue, and the basement restaurant, Untitled, drew a crowd as well. Can the Whitney still get people talking quite the same way, though? Is it out and out refusing to try? Rather than define the state of American art, it seems content to stir things up around the edges, with the sparest and, often as not, most cryptic selection ever. And not a bad thing, too—but first and last a word about those demands and a Biennial’s place in the scene.

People always come to a Biennial with questions. What is the state of American art, and is this it? Who will make the cut, and who will be left out? These questions get people upset, because they frame inclusions and exclusions in terms of institutional power, and Biennials can assert that power in one of two ways. They can claim to have it all, or they can stake a point of view. One of this year’s curators, the Whitney’s Elisabeth Sussman, sure had one in 1993, a stridently political Biennial that angered pretty much everyone.

Well, surprise. The 2012 Biennial is themeless, but she and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator, pick just fifty-one artists, many of them young. And that includes films by Charles Atlas, Frederick Wiseman, and the late Mike Kelley (to name just three) that a day’s visitor might never see. It includes surrendering most of the fourth floor to performances that may take weeks to change. It includes a performance up in the fifth-floor mezzanine by Georgia Sagri, consisting often as not of her refusal to show up at all, amid a virtual studio of pillows, doors, empty clothes, and museum reproductions. Red Krayola, a rock band from the 1960s that I somehow overlooked, show up mostly by Skype in front of an immense guest book, while Andrea Fraser contributes only an essay—in a display copy of the catalog that the guard must chide someone every minute or two for attempting to read.

This is maddening, but it is not altogether mad. Globalization is real, and Biennials have recognized it for ten years now. So is the recession, adding to the backlash against huge Biennials and a gradual downsizing in the last three, and so is the interest in performance. Together, they suggest a Biennial nurturing the edges of New York art, and often enough it delivers. For the first time in memory, one can leave provoked rather than overwhelmed. The show may lack a theme, but it does have a point of view, the kind that gets one thinking and arguing back—and you will just have to read the longer review to hear more about it.

When Joanna Malinowski hangs around with her dog or builds a bottle track out of fake bison tusks, is she really turning Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp into Native American rituals? Maybe not, and more power to her—and to a bare-bones Biennial. From Madison Avenue to the Lower East Side, one can start to see the children of modernity, and some of them may have a sense of craft and a sense of humor left. As it happens, the political themes of the 1993 Biennial look sillier than ever in retrospect, but its choice of artists looks a lot better. Several, like Atlas and Robert Gober, turn up this time, too. Could the same dynamic be happening again?

If most people know anything about Rembrandt, it is this. He was a true artist, the kind that expressed his genius in countless self-portraits—and who certified his genius in the patina of dark, heavy brushstrokes that makes him an old master. What, then, should one make of a self-portrait on loan at the Met, through May 20, from Kenwood House in London? Around 1664, nearing sixty, he seems to have done everything to lay himself on the line. He painted large, and he painted bright, from the light that floods his face and for once pierces every shadow on the wall behind him. He painted honestly, from his unsmiling face and baggy clothing to the tools of his trade in his spare hand, ready for use.

He almost fills the self-portrait, with elbows cocked to either side and his palette extending past him to his left. He needs a haircut, and he could stand to shave. His hair, his shirt, his ill-fitting cap, the tips of each brush, and a speck of light on his bulbous nose compete for the brightest shade of white even beyond the plain white wall. And there behind him, to his left, he inscribes the most obvious echo of his familiar brown backgrounds. He does it with an uncharacteristic geometry designed to reinforce and to regularize his bulky form. He has traced a large, perfect circle.

By this point you should be tallying up what I have got right and wrong, only they may blend together like shadows. The “age of Rembrandt” notwithstanding, others did not share his output of self-portraits, about a dozen a decade. Nor did they submerge their subject, a game of hide and seek he began early, as one can see in a small (and disappointing) concurrent show pairing him and Edgar Degas. Early Rembrandt self-portraits have a more uniform brightness and tighter brushstrokes, but also a clever, confident habit of peering back from within a blur. When brushwork did grow heavy, he also happened to fall from favor until the nineteenth century, when artists started to see mass and form as a matter of construction rather than mere drawing—from Romanticism to Impressionism and culminating in Paul Cézanne. The Frick told that story of changing tastes only recently, with a focus on perhaps the greatest Rembrandt self-portrait of all, from its permanent collection.

Nor is simply laying on the brown or the white a sign of genius. The Frick made that clear, in bringing out workshop portraits with way too much cheating. When a scholarly committee (wrongly, I think) challenges the attribution of The Polish Rider, also in the Frick, it points to a poorly drawn or positioned horse’s leg and to unclear perspective in the dark rocks. As for a sudden clarity, the loan to the Met shares much of its frankness with a 1660 self-portrait, hanging right beside it. One sees the same lighting from the left, isolating the beard stubble and increasingly wrinkled forehead. Someone looking for murk and foam should take comfort in that Kenwood entered England’s public heritage via the Guinness family.

After its brief visit to New York, the portrait will join other paintings on tour during restoration of Kenwood House. For now, the Met calls its display “Rembrandt at Work,” and one can study the purpose of all that brushwork, starting with the clothing. In the Met’s portrait, Rembrandt builds the folds with sculptural precision, while next to it he draws out the mottled colors of a fur collar or the intense red of a shirt front. One can also see how much has changed. In the Met’s portrait, from the cocked beret on down, an artist’s work clothes and glance half-aside announce his artiness. Just a few years later, the artist seems more impoverished, but somehow richer—and more unflinching.

He has survived bankruptcy, a factor one has trouble not reading into the weary majesty of the Frick’s self-portrait from around 1658. He has survived the death in 1663 of his companion, Hendrickje, whose 1660 portrait hangs nearby—and he faces the future without flinching, with the brushes and maul stick that might have helped with that perfect circle. Most call the circle a boast, referring to legend that Giotto proved his Renaissance genius by tracing one freehand, and Rembrandt painted a calligrapher attempting just that. Rembrandt’s self-portrait adds a second circle, however, with one cut off by the frame and the other by his body. His geometry is forever doubled and incomplete, and his palettes show not a sign of paint. Rembrandt died in 1669, still resisting closure, but beginnings and endings never come easily.

Note: I have added this as a postscript to a previous loan from London two years ago, including Rembrandt, as part of selections from the Dulwich Picture Gallery at the Frick.

Any artist knows what it is like to live with failure—the failure to be recognized, the choices that never quite pan out, and the risks that make it all worthwhile. John Chamberlain had to live with something else, his singular achievement. Oh, yeah, Chamberlain, the guy with crushed automobiles. So colorful, so raw, and so him—and it is the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload.

No wonder, at the Guggenheim, I lingered in front of a huge sculpture in the lobby. Its silvery strands twist together, like the pipe cleaners that a lot of kids used to call their first work of art. The tall, narrow, impassible arc rests on six clumsy feet, like a cartoon elephant. I appreciated the breather before tackling those auto parts. I knew I had seen this sculpture somewhere before, from the late Ken Price or someone still more tacky and contemporary, maybe one summer on the Park Avenue median. Its title, Sphinxgrin Two, deserves an accent on grin.

Only one thing: the work is Chamberlain’s. He died in December 2011, four days before Christmas, four months short of his eighty-fifth birthday, and just weeks before his retrospective, “Choices.” He missed quite an event, but that still gave him time to plan encounters like this one. It gave him and the curator, Susan Davidson, time to fill most of the big space off the first ramp with long, slim, staggered black parallels on the floor. He called them Gondolas, but they look more powerful and more ancient, like a swift Athenian fleet.

He was also restless, in his art and with his reputation. He liked to deny associations with a car wreck. Maybe he was trying too hard for legitimacy, but he had his reasons. After the Navy, he had studied at the University of Chicago, where he picked up on David Smith. An early work of welded steel looks like Smith’s early “drawing in space,” only it spins out from its base in unfinished circles, more like doodling than formal clarity or a Hudson River landscape. Unlike Smith, too, he never actually worked as an auto welder, and he came to New York City via the artier community of Black Mountain College—like Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Dorothea Rockburne.

The Beat impulse nurtured his improvisations in metal. So did his encounter in New York with his other greatest influence, Willem de Kooning. A decade ago, Pace gallery paired Chamberlain and de Kooning, and I suspected cheating in favor of “fine art,” like the sculptor’s own denials. Still, one starts to see the painter’s colors everywhere, along with the looseness of his Long Island landscapes and the slashing, bulging verticals of his women. The other work in that first room hangs high on the wall, like a painting but more massive. Conversely, one starts to see de Kooning’s turn to color in the 1950s as a response not only to nature and to abstract art, but also to the commercial and industrial landscape of America.

At the Guggenheim through May 13, Chamberlain stays so varied and so contemporary that I blew it in the lobby. Maybe it has too much foam, but it gains a complete chronology. Maybe a late foam sofa (a material that had interrupted his career in welding forty years before) looks like trash, but one can sit in it. (Aw, go ahead.) And the retrospective brings another revelation as well. Those two words, crushed automobiles, have a breadth all his own.

In a photograph by Anne Collier, at Anton Kern through May 12, someone holds an open book, with a pair of eyes on facing pages. If art is a mirror onto nature, here it is a window onto an artist’s book, as reproducible as a photograph—or as unique. The well made-up eyes in black and white could belong to the same person as those slim, bare outstretched arms in color. A woman is reading, but the book is reading her, with a cold objectivity at odds with the multitude of subjective eyes and I‘s. The viewer can contemplate them both, but each remains unknown, fragmented, and divided, and they and the artist are already staring back. Everyone involved claims control, and everyone is in double trouble.

Collier has played this game before, a game of eyes, doubling, and redoubling. In her contribution to a 2007 group show, “Strange Magic,” the doubling placed one eye within another, like the start of an infinite regress. And both belonged to Faye Dunaway in The Eyes of Laura Mars. The redoubling may take place across work, like paired but distinct photographs of paired but distinct SLRs. A woman’s arm lies behind one pair of cameras, legs behind another. The redoubling may also progressively reveal or conceal, like stacked panels on the floor in one photograph or sheets of paper pinned over one another in a second.

The front sheet of paper offers to define relevance, three times over—and each time as a question. What, for one, does it all mean? For one thing, it means sex, or at least it means gender as defined by others. In previous shows, the open book contained a seascape at dusk or the constellations, in line with the traditional identification of women with nature, the body, “the primitive,” and the rest of an undergraduate seminar—but they keep getting better. Those panels on the floor show clouds, and Collier titles two photographs of breasts to bring out the resemblance to mountain landscapes. A reclining woman seen from the rear is looking at a photograph of African sculpture, with a light meal on the floor.

Those others, the ones asking questions and creating definitions, belong simultaneously to past and present. The reclining woman quotes J.-A.-D. Ingres, and a naked torso by Edward Weston is a calendar page for the month of Veteran’s Day. A series shows postcards and greeting cards that emulate old still-life painting but with an unlikely assortment of luxury goods, including cameras. Collier is taking the usual swipes at advertising, popular culture, and art history, but also seeking precedents in artists who already subverted sexuality and vision. The ad in one photograph tries to appropriate Caravaggio, but she takes him back—while also taking back the female subject’s felt sadness. The breasts have the look of “rayograms,” or photograms by Man Ray, and clouds have floated within an eye by René Magritte.

Collier is not, then, just shooting women, and she is not just shooting male fish in a barrel. Oh, it can sure look that way. All this rephotography can seem a holdover from the “Pictures generation,” with the same chill certainties. Still, she does not need to insist quite so much on literal quotation, as with Sherrie Levine. She allows temptations, especially as she moves past constellations and hard edges to soft bodies and wide-open eyes. I would not say that she is warming up, but she does seem willing to let viewers figure things out on their own.

When “Strange Magic” opened, it seemed all about feminism, identity, and appropriation. Over time, photography has become more slippery and more relevant, as it has continued to cross genres and media. Of the others in that 2007 group show, Liz Deschenes has treated a photograph as a theater set and not just as a theater. Sara VanDerBeek in New Orleans has approached abstraction while bearing witness. Eileen Quinlan and Amy Granat have come still closer to painting while breaking symmetry and by hiding human presences. Collier is much more detached, in part because she is looking back. She looks back, though, because she misses what she finds.

Diego Rivera wanted his art to carry weight. He wanted to bear the weight of history, in Mexico from the Spanish conquest through Civil War and Revolution—but not only history. With the frescoes he created for The Museum of Modern Art, one can see just what else. It is the subject of a rather longer review, in my latest upload.

Rivera wanted to embody the greatness of art, from pre-Columbians past the Renaissance. And he was determined to rebel against and to compete against them all. He wanted to assume the cutting edge of art, to capture a rising industrial America and a burgeoning skyline. He wanted his murals to become a part of New York’s landmarks. He wanted those murals to have serious physical weight, in a classic medium of slaked plaster, lime, and wood. He wanted to remember the laborers who suffered under so much weight, and he wanted to foretell a global communist revolution.

He got all his wishes, too, except of course for the very last. He completed five murals on Mexican history for his opening at MOMA in December 1931. The museum, then two years old, gave Rivera only its second solo show, and the first went to Henri Matisse. Not bad company at all. Rivera set up shop in the museum with assistants six weeks before and worked furiously on the spot. One mural entered the museum’s collection, and he added three more a month later, with visions of New York.

If many today remember him more as Frida Kahlo’s husband, this show could change that impression. The Modern through May 14 exhibits five of his murals from 1931 and 1932, along with photographs of the others, an unrelated mural, and insights into their making. Frescoes do not travel easily, and Rivera could not detach the work that had made his name from the walls of Mexico. He sought instead to create a new form, the “portable fresco.” He made use of steel frames to support smaller and lighter constructions than whole walls. Here, too, he wanted to be world historical and modern.

One can rediscover a work already in MOMA, Agrarian Leader Zapata. It shows Emiliano Zapata in white, standing next to and holding the bridle of a white horse. The men behind appear as a row of swords, tools, and machetes, and one looks to Zapata’s blank eyes for warmth and comfort. It takes some time to notice the dead man in a soldier’s boots, tan uniform, and yellow gloves at their feet. Zapata’s horse sparkles up close, too, to the point that one wants to touch. Colors come as highlights and as disruption, and near monochrome can bring light.

Maybe Rivera and Kahlo are not so far apart after all. Both push their subjects firmly up against the picture plane, and both have an almost preposterous confidence in themselves but an undercurrent of unrelenting suffering. Rivera would have hated a review in The New York Times that called these small murals “anemic,” when he wanted his art to bear so much weight. Rather weighty himself, he had an increasingly huge pot belly and an ego to match. A clerk’s resemblance to John D. Rockefeller, Sr., could be one more instance of Rivera’s biting the hand that feeds him. Yet he had the imagination to describe more than he knew.

Can an installation still be overwhelming and not mind-numbing? Can it stop short of an artist’s private language or a five-ton public spectacle? For a brief while, those labels actually passed for compliments. In the boom years, it seemed, what artist (mostly male) did not deserve a memorial to himself? That model has taken a hit, just as painting as self-expression took a postmodern hit the generation before. And yet painting is back, and piles of trash are not exactly going away.

Take not just Sarah Sze at her most fragile and expansive, but also Michael Mahalchick and Andy Coolquitt on the Lower East Side. Matt Hoyt, Bill Walton, and Bill Jenkins have approached the problem by sheer modesty, with small objects and, amid all the clutter, a delight in the handmade. Like them, Mahalchick seems desperate not to promise too much, with his mess tossed here and there—rearranged, like (seriously) some slices of bacon, as needed in performance. Coolquitt delights in excess, at Lisa Cooley through May 6, in big boxes, bright colors, brighter lights, and marks of destruction. Yet he has ties of his own to formalism. One enters past a “chair” of fabric-covered metal, its rigid V right out of the Bauhaus, and Cordy Ryman could almost have made his column of colored stripes, give or take its melted disposable lighters.

Others try to ground an installation in architecture, set design, or the artist’s studio. Guyton/Walker have their own modern stage, and Leslie Hewitt manages all as if dissolving the gallery walls. Mahalchick loves to be on stage, perhaps especially if need never get out of bed. At the 2012 Dependent art fair, he reportedly took advantage of the hotel room to restage a certain famous bed-in for peace. John Lennon and Yoko Ono could not have sung “Give Peace a Chance” for half as long—or with half as knowing a carnival air. His exhibition at Canada (where it closed April 22) includes a guitar, a cot, studio scraps, and not much else.

Coolquitt, too, has trouble leaving anything behind, and even a good show can look like a fire sale of his personal life. His private obsessions extend past the lighters (and a sign thanking you for not smoking) to fruit drinks, beer cans, and sculpted hands with a certain obscene gesture. A box allegedly holds dead squirrels. One has to wonder about his lifestyle. At the same time, he longs to recreate the gallery as a public space. His welcome extends to a title like A nice soft space, for wall-mounted cushions, and to the centerpiece, a plywood box covered with Plexiglas that he imagines as an old-fashioned hardware store counter.

Sze hints at model cities, with fragile utopias that never reach completion and always threaten to come apart. Coolquitt’s utter disorganization leans more to furniture than architecture, like an artist or a dorm mate obliged to make do. He indeed calls the show “Chair w/Paintings,” after that more or less actual chair. He likes tubular designs, sometimes topped by lampshades—although the actual lights come as the end of a giant dumbbells, one end up against the wall. Again he is adding pop-culture glitz to Minimalism. These things become repeated elements, but rarely side by side and never quite coming together.

He is acting out some old dilemmas—not just in art, but in America. Does democracy rest on liberty or community? No wonder America captured the avant-garde with Abstract Expressionism, and critics still debate whether to see most the abstract or the expressionism. No wonder, too, that Mahalchick never does get all that far past a private joke, while Coolquitt comes alive in Lisa Cooley’s new, larger space. One hardly dares lean on the counter or against the cushion, and one has to keep circling past that chair to find more stand-ins for the artist, who somehow left his pants on the floor. One can, however, feel both overwhelmed and quite at home.

Note: I guess ambitious but messy, impulsive installations are not all bad after all. I have therefore added this to the end of the review of Sarah Sze, on much the same thematic space between sculpture, architecture, and installation.