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art reviews from around new york

Nearly sixty years after its struggle for independence, eighteen years after its civil war, and nearly a decade after the Arab spring, Algeria is still waiting. To trust the Wallach Art Gallery of Columbia University, it is “Waiting for Omar Gatlato.” Together with an earlier recent report on Gulf War art, it is also the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.

If that sounds like an awfully obscure title for an exhibition, it should. It borrows from a forty-year-old text on Algerian film, well before contemporary African art. That, in turn, refers in its proper name to an older “film classic,” as the gallery has it, in a show about anything but film. Yet its two dozen or so contemporary artists are not just watching or waiting, through March 15. Many are still struggling simply to break out of old narratives and, only at times, succeeding. Mounir Gouri even calls his video Shipwreck.

Already, you must be bracing yourself for a stern recent history lesson, much as when the gallery looked at Harlem art or black women in European painting, and Louisa Babari (with Célio Pailliard), just for starters, supplies one. In a dark, empty alcove that you might be quite happy to overlook, a voice fills you in on Frantz Fanon, “close combat,” and “colonial pathology.” Sara Sadik appears on screen in vivid colors, but she is just lecturing, too—about beurs, or Europeans of Algerian parents like herself. (Think of Berbers, the country’s principal Arab peoples.) And the curator, Natasha Marie Llorens, plainly loves lectures, especially when they still point the finger at France. The Cardinal’s Arm by Fayçal Baghriche, a gilded arm grasping a gilded cross, literally points one in a largely Islamic nation.

France here weighs heavily, so many decades after the fact—and centuries after Eugène Delacroix and his Women of Algiers. Fanon, who wrote the book on colonialism with The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, served in a hospital during the French-Algerian war. The show’s title also plays on Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, while shunning so much as a mention of Becket’s fellow absurdist and fellow fighter in the French resistance, Albert Camus. While Camus hated Colonialism, he also hoped against hope for a multicultural society in his native Algeria. (And no, The Stranger is not a defense of the random killing of Arabs.) Yet the artists have divided sympathies as well.

After the lectures, Sadek Rahim and Lydia Ourahmane may come off as the most dogmatic—the first with Lady Liberty in carpet fibers, the second with chains ending in dog collars on the floor. Still, one is as funny and wistful as the other is sincerely chilling. And the brutalism of concrete for Islamic training camps, in photos by Sofiane Zouggar, is chilling, too. Titles appear throughout in French and English, while Arabic characters appear just twice. Yazid Oulab places them on musical instruments, reconstructed to map unheard sound patterns, while Adel Bentounsi transfers keyboard labels to a pressure cooker. Life here really is a pressure cooker and, contrary to William Butler Yeats, unheard music is not necessarily sweeter.

A European heritage appears as a mixed blessing for Halida Boughriet, who strands his subjects in a Paris museum. It does as well for Mourad Krinah, whose abstract rendering of war draws on the scale and color of Joan Mitchell together with a Renaissance battle scene by Paolo Uccello. It may yet, too, for Dania Reymond, who looks back to a French botanic garden in 1832 as a study in acculturation. Self-rule, though, comes at a price as well. That is not western clothing that binds Sonia Merabet. In an animation, Massinissa Selmani approaches a ruling dictator with an electric fan, as if uncertain whether to serve his needs or to blow him to the winds.

The dominant tone is melancholy, as in the archly dour drawing of a bird by Hakima El Djoudi, as Melancholy of the King. Shipwrecked in a rusted lifeboat, one of Gouri’s North African refugees can only strum a sad song while his bare-chested companion attempts to dance. Cheap housing, in wood fragments from Karim Ghelloussi, becomes Memory of the Jungle. People look out over their own country in paintings by Bardi, EL Meya, Fella Tamzali Tahari, and Djamel Tatah, wary or in pain. Tatah’s women also pose in front of a Minimalist red backdrop while just one edges toward a painted shoreline, trapped between East and West in geography or in art. Now that, since last April, a long and often dictatorial regime is gone, you will just have to see where they end up.

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

Water is the stuff of life—unless, of course, people have poisoned it and reduced it to a dumping ground for plastics. Unless, too, electronic devices have already stolen the title.

Marina Zurkow and Sarah Rothberg cannot offer you a drink, except virtually, but then they do not offer to charge your phone for you either. And they do create a digital and sculptural environment, at Bitforms through March 15. You might even find it refreshing. As the show’s title has it, art and science have their own “Wet Logic.”

It begins drily enough, with their Toilet Joke. Blue plastic pellets cover the seat of a toilet, all but nailing it shut. (Just try to find relief on the way to the galleries these days, now that the new Essex Street Market has made its restrooms for customers only.) They might have accreted there over geologic time, and the artists speak of the gallery’s front room as existing in just that. They ask how much humanity has disrupted that “linear history,” to the point that the planet is “unable to flush away more waste.” (Rest assured that they use recycled plastic.) Sure enough, an iPhone peeps up from the pellets, supported by them.

If this is a joke, it entails a grim sense of humor. Still, the phone displays a soothing, silent video of ocean waves, their pale blues set against the darker pellets. Both plastics and devices, they suggest, can mimic and bury the stuff of life. The artists collaborate again with a fishbowl seething with its own currents, as Study for Toilet Joke. Did the final version of the joke take on a virtual life of its own? Will either version come down off its pedestal?

Their solo work begins in stark low tech. Zurkow’s wall of Accretions, in ink stamped on cardboard packaging, traces another commercial history, filled with ice cream and human hair, but also an earlier generation of kitchen waste. Sardines descend from a ship like, depending on your degree of optimism, a ladder up or torpedoes. Images have the brute style and dystopian sci-fi references of an earlier Modernism. Tall videos of the ocean’s depths update her dark vision as Oceans Like Us (pun intended), accompanied by soothing music, algae, and fish nets. If a clear plastic bottle and milk carton are sinking, fish are rising, and one can always hope for them or for us.

The gallery has dedicated itself to the promise of interactive media since its opening nineteen years ago in Chelsea, as with Casey Reas, Daniel Canogar, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Daniel Rozin, and Lynn Hershman. Here the screens convert the room into an aquatic environment, in a style between naturalism and a cartoon, as if daring you to tell the difference. And things get more interactive still with the latest twist on that vision, thanks to Rothberg. If you cannot get access to a toilet, you can still flush one, in virtual reality, as Water Without Wet. You can also raise a glass, only to spill its liquid in small but steady drops. You just must share the cryptic space with a bright ocean sky and, now and then, the dark silhouette of a woman.

The drops seem unlikely to land on a house plant that sometimes enters the picture. Proverbially, too, they cannot fill the sea. Still, they seem to belong to a single stream extended across artists and media. A vital future here seems both unlikely and hopeful, as do the ocean’s odds of outlasting human beings. I have tried virtual reality since my first attempt at the former Moving Image art fair, and for once I did not feel as if I were about to trip or turn into a cyborg, although I hardly lasted the full eight VR episodes. If I did, I might at least fall into the sea.

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

Oh, for the days when giants walked the earth, leaving now and then the mark of their presence in paint. Oh, for the days of art before irony, small-bore politics, and personal confessions. Oh, for the days of “Epic Abstraction.” (And, oops, my apologies, for the Met had this listed as “ongoing” to the last minute, but I see it closed February 4, so allow me to catch up a bit with a late posting.)

I am (mostly) kidding, but the museum (mostly) is not. Its rehanging of its holdings in postwar art under that name over the last year merely updates it halfheartedly for the present. In fact, it takes Abstract Expressionism as a “jumping-off point” to contemporary art, without quite knowing where to land. It bows to contemporary views of art, with room for more than dead white males, and it bows to recent art as well with strategic pairings. It also allows a glimpse of present-day curatorial practices with recent loans, purchases, and gifts. An epic, it argues, needs time to complete its recital, assuming that it ever will—and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review, in my latest upload.

One day, the Met will get around to renovating its rooms for modern and contemporary art—with luck while it can still display that art in the Met Breuer. (Given the politics of museum expansions, that is by no means a certainty.) For now, the Lila Acheson Wallace wing will have to do as it stands. Its first two rooms are large enough for epic painting and intimate enough for drawings, with surveys in miniature of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. They open onto cross-sections of Abstract Expressionist New York and then color-field painting, including Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell. And then the space opens up and things get really epic.

The selection has no shortage of existential drama—and the museum declares as much in its opening wall text, with a quote from Barnett Newman. “We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce world war.” Later on, Clyfford Still weighs in as well. “These are not paintings in the usual sense,” he wrote. “They are life and death merging in fearful union.” Art here is a matter of life and death.

So much so, in fact, that it makes room for more lives and more deaths, beyond New York and North America, and not all of them are epic. Japan felt the fierceness of war, too, in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Pollock shares that first room with Kazuo Shiraga of Gutai, the Japanese collective. Working in 1958, Shiraga smears mud brown into blood red over acid purple and rust yellow, with his bare hands and feet. Sure enough, a late Pollock across the room has his foot prints as well, along with terse drips and tense echoes of a human head beyond anything that Gutai imagined. Soon enough, echoes of traditional calligraphy by Inoue Yuichi will introduce Franz Kline in Black, White, and Gray and the totemic blacks of Robert Motherwell, with a signature Elegy to the Spanish Republic. Yayoi Kusama from Japan will turn up before things are done.

As with Kusama, the opening to other lives extends to women. They number Hedda Sterne, who posed among male “action painters” for a famous photograph of “the irascibles.” (Her echoes of machinery are Her echoes of machinery are more fussy than epic or distinctive, but worth the acquaintance.) Most rooms also center on a single sculpture, including work by Barbara Hepworth, Louise Nevelson, and Anne Truitt. Nevelson’s mammoth black enclosure, only rarely on view, could well sum up her career—from each of its sculpted sides to glass tiles covering a dark interior that no one but she will ever enter. Alma Thomas precedes other black artists, including Thornton Dial and Frank Bowling, while Carmen Herrera, though hardly at her best, brings Minimalism up to date for 2012.

Not that the Met trashes a conventional history or the need for history itself. It makes the point in that opening text. “So we actually began,” Newman continued, “as if painting were not only dead but had never existed.” Yet the curator, Randall Griffey, quickly pounces on the idea of a tabula rasa, or blank slate. He connects the movement’s mythic themes to Surrealism in Europe and global interchange. The idea that art cannot start from scratch also motivates the inclusion of here and there younger artists, like Mark Bradford and Chakaia Booker.

Abstract Expressionism has suffered plenty of trashing—from the cooler stance of Andy Warhol and Pop Art to a refusal of gesture in Minimalism or conceptual art. Feminism and the brutal irony of the “Pictures generation” had their refusals as well. The Met, though, is perfectly O.K. with bigness. Easter Monday by Willem de Kooning, it boasts, is the largest painting that he exhibited in 1956, and Nevelson’s Mrs. N’s Palace is her largest work ever. The museum welcomes macho in art after World War II. It just extends the welcome and the macho to women, but is that enough?

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

Burning oil fills the skies of Kuwait, while a voice can intone only the lamest of comforts about beauty. For Monira Al Qadiri the fires still rage after nearly thirty years, but their “heat becomes lost.”

Across the hall at MoMA PS1, Khalifa Qattan finds that his painterly visions of The Deep Wound and Polluted Earth have become “prophetic” but that much harder to grasp. Just within, Karen Finley in no end of text on canvas reminds Americans to assume responsibility and to “get a life.” In “Theater of Operations,” a local artist’s words and images may never encompass the suffering or the heat. Yet right-thinking Americans are there to pronounce what it all means, through March 1, and it is the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload.

Oh, that Gulf War. A college student today could hardly remember Operation Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991 to repel invasion from Saddam Hussein. No more can the youngest Iraqi artists in the show, like Ali Eyal abstracting away from Google Earth or Urok Shirhan in the Netherlands. Few could so long after George W. Bush began his Iraqi war in 2003—destabilizing the region, torturing supposed enemies, and killing or displacing millions on the basis of criminal lies. In their art, though, the earlier war never did end, and one can only wonder if it never, ever will. A glowing painting must remain forever unfinished, because a Clinton administration strike killed Layla Al-Attar, and seemingly nothing since has changed.

For the curators, led by Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib, nothing could—in an exhausting show spanning every floor of the museum, much like “September 11” there in 2010. The first rooms stick to the first Gulf War and the final rooms to the second, but chronology breaks down in between. The eighty artists fall in no particular order at that, with no obvious divisions or common themes. Dia al-Azzawi and Rafa Nasiri of the pioneering New Vision Group turn up apart from one another, with several works apiece. It makes choosing winners simply impossible. Fortunately, those stubborn Americans are here to offer instruction.

Is that the same “orientalism” that artists like Karen Finley would rightly decry? Mary Kelly can always trot out pretend medals and Sue Coe graphic violence, while Louise Lawler and the Guerrilla Girls can always locate the problem in museums and the treatment of women. Tony Cokes can always turn his lectures into PowerPoints—and Jenny Holzer, far more perceptively, into crawl screens. Martha Rosler will never lose her biting wit, but she is still recycling her collage assault on consumer culture and the war in Vietnam. A corner pile of licorice from Félix Gonzáles-Torres resembles ammunition, but it is still his candy. When Luc Tuymans in Belgium plays on Condoleezza Rice’s African American features to damn her as secretary of state, that does not sound terribly progressive either.

If nothing here ever changes, like the face of Saddam that still disguises portrait photos by Jamal Penjweny, that comes only naturally to Thuraya Al-Baqsami in Kuwait or Nuha al-Radi in Iraq, caught between a more ancient art and the present-day face of war. It can also come intentionally—with a turn to how war is perceived. Michel Auder sees only a “TV war,” Richard Hamilton his living room, and Thomas Hirschhorn a touch screen, but then they cannot turn off the screen. Rainer Ganahl recreates screen captures from CNN, Fox News, and The New York Times in paint, while Rachel Khedoori fills seventy thick volumes with every news article she can find, in fine print. For Allan Sekula, the media have made this a “war without bodies.” For Harun Farocki, it has become “war at a distance” as well, thanks to “smart bombs.”

Yet something has changed, drastically. For one thing, the invader became the United States. For Roger Brown, the first Gulf war boils down to a dollar sign, but for bodies on the ground it could not. With the second Iraqi war, though, some of the same artists register the difference. Reservists in photos by Judith Joy Ross become war protestors a decade later, while al-Azzawi’s painted protests have taken on the look of Picasso’s Guernica, but with troubling stains of red. That same shift has drawn in such artists as Melvin Edwards, Fernando Botero, and Richard Serra.

For another thing, the first war sent many into exile—so that now they, too, are seeing a war-torn land from outside. Earlier works do include Palestinians like Elia Suleiman in a desolate New York apartment, but no one else trapped between worlds. (And why bring in the Arab-Israeli war at all?) If the very contents of a life have since become portable, that may explain the many artist books. They include accordion books by Mohammed Muhraddin and Ali Rashid, books chained in barbed wire by Ghassan Ghaib, books with gaping holes by Shakir Hassan Al Said and Mohammed Al Shammarey, and a book to hold stones by Nazar Yahya. Maybe virtual reality does not have the last word after all.

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

Mary Frank is not just a visionary. But then neither was Charles Burchfield, back when Modernism was just bringing art back to earth. Yet showing them together brings alive their most unearthly twentieth-century visions, at D. C. Moore through February 8, and I would have told you about it sooner, but this review had first to appear in Riot Material magazine.

Frank has always had an eye on planet earth. She studied with Max Beckmann, the artist who refused to look away from Germany in the 1930s, even after Beckmann’s exile in America. And then she studied life drawing in New York with Hans Hofmann, the teacher of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. She has stood out among artists less than half her age in a 2009 group show of “Natural Histories.” She returns now to painting after a decade of photography with an eye to nature—her surroundings at home in the Catskills. That return, though, marks even her most naturalistic subjects as not altogether of this world.

It hardly hurts to see her, from the 1980s right up to the present, beside work by Burchfield from his mid-twenties, and it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload. They may seem an unlikely pair—the Midwesterner and the Englishwoman, the aspiring artist in 1917 and the artist still active today at eighty-six, watercolors and paintings literally set in stone. The gallery considers them two separate shows, with Burchfield first in his chosen medium, watercolor, although they share a room and even a wall. Still, his New England shades easily into her upstate New York, his views of the seasons into her timeless narratives, and his dark storms and fiery fields into her steady intensity. In context, her new work looks even newer.

In a 2010 Burchfield retrospective at the Whitney, one could see how nature for him served as his own private apocalypse (and I invite you to read more at the link for a closer look), but the turn began early. He could not have exemplified the American modern in 1917, because he was still creating it, and he never cared much for familiar forms or formalism anyway—not even at his closest to abstraction. His stalks and trees ascend into the air as if of their own volition. And Frank’s figures rarely set foot on the ground, not even in stone. They find refuge where they can in the nooks and crannies of a very material sky.

Frank became known first for sculpture—with one eye on the human form, one eye on Modernism, and an inner eye on her doubts about both. A woman’s head may break off into planes, as in Cubism, or seem on the brink of melting away. Its features may look defiant or heartbreakingly and vulnerable, but more often both at once. An example turns up just now in “Making Knowing” at the Whitney, a show of craft in American art since 1950, and another in the back room here, but as only a prelude to painting. There the hints of Cubism are gone, and women are rarely alone. In fact, they are not half as clearly human.

Small paintings on shale-like stone work well enough on their own, but on a shelf together they set out her vocabulary and a single natural history. The figures in black or white include birds, reptiles, primates, and humans—or an evolutionary stage in between. A man and woman, huddled together on canvas, have not altogether lost their fur. Stone fragments turn up in the larger paintings, too, along with additional strips of canvas, for a layering of materials and thoughts. Wavy incisions into thick white bring out the texture of paint, but also the material weight of art itself or that sky. With a predominance of red, the air may have caught on fire as well.

Her monoprint in “Natural Histories” had a deep red, too—its humanoid monkey, I wrote then, “bent like a fossil in mystic contemplation.” Frank’s subjects now are still fossils and still mystical, but they can no longer stay still long enough to contemplate anything, whether the great beyond or their fate on earth. They leap, swim, float, or sink as in an apocalypse or a dream. Two may appear to confront one another from opposing sides of a diptych, unless one is too busy dragging behind her a fish. After “I caught an enormous fish,” Elizabeth Bishop in poetry “looked into his eyes” and had to let the fish go. Frank cannot let go of anything in pursuit of her vision.

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

Had any of us bought something on the Bowery in the last five years? Jan Tichy had just finished taking questions when his dealer turned one on the audience.

Its members could hardly have missed the lighting stores up the block on the way to the gallery, but had they ever once gone in? They knew the stores well, it turned out, and shared a concern that a rough and tumble neighborhood had all but given way to something sleek and new, but only two raised their hands. And Tichy shares their concern when he calls a show “Light Stop,” at Fridman through February 23. He is selling actual lighting fixtures, recalling their history, and letting in the light.

I raised my hand, but I was cheating, I have to admit. I last replaced my bedroom lamp nearly ten years ago, although I still see these stores as a real New York resource, like so much in an ever-changing city. Like the rest of the audience, I am less likely to set foot in one of the nearby restaurant supply stores, but Tichy is also cooking with gas. Literally so, for it ripples through a slim fluorescent tube along with the light. He treats them both, the gas and the light, as parts of his work—along with the black mounting, the wiring, and the gallery’s electrical outlets. What, though, does all that have to do with gentrification?

Not much, perhaps, beyond political correctness, especially for an artist born in Prague and educated in Israel rather than downtown New York—and especially when galleries like this one contribute to the retail demise. Still, he may well depend on those stores for his materials, and he gives them a visual and material presence in his work. He takes a direct impression of what they sell in busy photograms, where they look like department store windows at Christmas or entire city streets at night. (Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler achieve much the same effect with glass bulbs in the latest Cooper Hewitt design triennial.) Broader circles of light stand out with eerie precision amid the blur. If that were not enough, slow-motion slide shows capture nearby buildings directly.

Of course, the Bowery shops are not exactly friendly neighborhood stores. They are destinations, based on price and variety, and the threats to retail pretty much boil down to four words, rising rents and the Internet. Of course, too, lighting as art has been around since Dan Flavin and James Turell in the 1960s—and light as the subject and means of art far longer, as in oil paints for Jan van Eyck. Slimmer fixtures become art for Lucas Michael, Carol Salmanson, Banks Violette, while Hans Haacke, Glenn Ligon, and Bruce Nauman use neon signs for text. They stand, too, for the American landscape for such photographers as Joel Meyerowitz. Tichy gives his, though, more literal twists.

They lie half hidden in corners. They become geometric patterns in an imagined carpet, side by side or crossing one another on the floor. Others rest on tables, while a slide show plays out on adjacent walls, depicting the city after dark. They are once again part of the neighborhood. In a second slide show, the night gives way to broad daylight. Color and light triumph at last, unless they were there all along. One may just need to wait for dawn.

Do the show’s twin agendas, then, make sense after all? Can something so abstract address practical concerns, much like a light shop? Maybe not, but Tichy, whose video I first encountered at the 2013 New York art fairs, takes one’s time to get it right. One can access the daytime slide show only through the one at night. The night slides also include large bright circles. Are they the moon—or just another gathering of the light?