NEW.YORK
ART.CRIT

Why are there no great women artists? The question is old now—at least as old as the 1971 essay of that name by Linda Nochlin. Without it, questioning modern art might never have had the same urgency. Neither would new art ever since, by men and women alike.

Is it still worth asking? Is it still even a question? Jerry Saltz asked it angrily in 2009, long after Postmodernism had put it museums through the wringer. He sounded out of touch after so many years, but he could still point to MOMA’s permanent collection. He could just as well have mentioned the one show on every mainstream critic’s top ten list, including his. Picasso’s last decade showed the great man still working through lust, love, painting, and his own enormous ego.

Male self-indulgence is not going away any time soon. Emerging women artists, though, are not doing so badly either, while recovering the past takes time. And as it comes, it may not look in the least like a canon of great women artists. It may look more like diverse artists at work on their own ideas. How did women like Cindy Sherman end up on both sides of the camera? Take three born before 1950 that the list makers missed—Barbara Crane, Amy Greenfield, and Barbara Ess, who fragment both the body and the medium.

Crane photographed Chicago starting in the 1960s, Greenfield worked afterward with alternative film and new media, and Ess has recaptured a video camera’s low-tech look most recently. They all tackle the moving image, including Crane’s collage that resembles black-and-white film strips and Ess’s blurry color photographs of surveillance cameras. But only Greenfield actually gives up stills. All fragment the body, but only Greenfield gives it overt sex appeal. For all three, though, unseen eyes are enjoying themselves—except when, as noted last week, they were censoring Greenfield on YouTube.

Together they are the subject of a longer review—and my latest upload, It brings together articles that first appeared on this page in an earlier form. That risks reducing three women to a time line or to each other. Greenfieldhas, who has collaborated with Nam June Paik, is worth a book to herself. Ironically, Picasso old and young fragmented women’s bodies, too—with some of the same ambiguity. However, the juxtaposition adds to a story that was already worth telling.

It is not only a question of women’s agency, not when Greenfield can collaborate with men and direct men behind the camera. (One feminist project dropped her for doing just that.) It is just as much about seeing and getting others to look, when men may refuse to do so. When Bill Viola puts the human body through fire and water, he reaches for eternity. If only, like Greenfield, he could accept fragmentation of his own ego on both sides of the camera.

At Pace, in its second Chelsea space through March 20, a black bus faces off against a cage on the same scale, like a cattle car. The press release calls “2TRAPS” a critique of reason. None too reasonably, it cites Max Weber’s great sociology of religion as a model. Yet emotion for Sterling Ruby looks anything but liberating. As he wrote on a previous work (in full capitals), “The past has cheated me . . . / the present torments me . . . / the future terrifies me!”

Reviews of Bronzino drawings at the Met often single out the Florentine master’s relevance today. And the parallels between his time and Postmodernism are startling. “Instead of the late Renaissance or the antithesis of the Renaissance,” I wrote back in 2003, “one might well call Mannerism the Post-Renaissance.” They had it all—riffs on art’s last grand narrative, a transition to art’s future that never seems to come, religious wars, and an uncertain state of empire. For artists like Pontormo and Parmigianino, art held anxiety and sexuality, nostalgia and fierce rebellion, glossy surfaces and crumbling forms, instability and identity, politics and private obsessions. If rationality and technology today equate to Modernism, they once meant High Renaissance symmetry and linear perspective.

Ruby is in the running for today’s leading mannerist. His dark ceramic loops on white pedestals, at Metro Pictures in 2008, sure looked mannered enough. Franz West might have left them as droppings on the studio floor. If their gnarled surfaces reflect literally a hand job, his next New York show supplied some on video. In “The Masturbators,” late last fall at Foxy Productions, naked porn actors did their duty on bare sets. For Ruby even transport, physical or ecstatic, means confinement.

The “stalagmites” reappeared at LA MOCA as a further image of entrapment. “SUPERMAX 2008,” which I did not see, claimed to map the Pacific Design Center onto a maximum security prison. And now this. Pig Pen consists of security gates, like ghetto storefronts at night, but a good four layers deep. More gates confine the black vinyl seating on Bus, which in fact transported convicts before serving a rock band as a tour bus—named, of course, Extreme. I take this history from lettering across the bus and on faith, although the garish orange lettering is hardly legible and faith is in short supply.

Roberta Smith ranks Ruby high on her list of “bad boys.” He clearly shares an obsession with bright lights, big gestures, surveillance, sex, and death. With black spray paint, florescent tubes, and the bus’s display of loudspeaker cones and their chrome housing, he even matches the color scheme of Banks Violette, as in his memorial to Dash Snow. Black is the new black. Like the bad boys, too, he can be thoroughly glib and piercingly clever at the same time. In its title alone, Pig Pen puns on filth, police, and prison, and it wallows in whatever it can.

However, Ruby lacks the cheerful pandering of Jeff Koons or the confident moralizing of Damien Hirst. He does not have the detached smirk of Paul McCarthy, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, or Mike Kelley and Michael Smith. He is too deep in abjection. A short stoop almost admits one into Pig Pen, where the zigzag of gated panels could indeed invoke Modernism, like Broadway Boogie-Woogie for Piet Mondrian but way, way off-Broadway. I found Ruby’s past work, including “The Masturbators,” just plain boring and the new work obvious. But it confronted me, invited me in, and must have confronted and invited the artist as well.

As a bit of housecleaning, I have archived a review from yesterday of “#class” at Winkleman, organized by William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton. I moved into it a review from last year of Powhida at Schroeder Romero (which at last count was still looking for a new space). Previously, this had fit awkwardly into an article about what counts as criticism, given the growing number of outsiders playing the role of critics. That includes not just visitors to a novel installation, but especially to online critics like myself.

I plan to follow up soon on life after Twitter. I shall expand that earlier article for some recent Facebook exploits by Jerry Saltz. Stay tuned.

How dare I review Powhida anyway? His work already amounts to an extended art review. He has also preemptively defined criticism as a “vestigial practice . . . largily replaced by description.” (Well, I could always correct his spelling.)

Maybe one could find all of us an alternative gathering, with more attention to how the art scene should behave. Make us sit through class. More precisely, welcome them to “#class.” The month-long, wide-open exhibition risks going nowhere fast, but that is precisely the point. Artists and dealers might learn a thing or two about themselves. They already did, Powhida’s solo show the year before.

If you are reading this, you have navigated to my blog’s new URL, and I am grateful. Welcome.

I have eliminated the splash screen and made the blog my home page. That means that the blog really is my home page. If you go to its old location, www.haberarts.com/blog, you will find lots of great menu choices—but no new posts. So please take that “/blog” out of your bookmark, and head regularly to the real thing: www.haberarts.com.

Part of me will miss the splash page. I used the animation mostly to prove that I could master Flash, and now I am not even sure I could. However, I knew it was offputting to see it all the time, and it discouraged people who went to my site from coming back or staying. The blog’s changing content should also get more search engine hits.

Things really have changed in the fifteen years or so since I started. Back then, I hardly imagined readers. I used the site mostly to teach myself. In fact, I outright discouraged readers. You had to play a game to enter. The home page had three links, randomized by javascript as to which worked and which gave pop-up invitations to try again.

I got readers anyway. The site soon had so much content about so many artists—and, back then, fewer competitors. There were no art bloggers, and I never thought of this as a blog, rather than a webzine. There were no great image collections. If you searched the Web for an artist, I was almost always in the top two hits. Now the Web is an embarrassment of riches, and I am happy to be lost in it.

Not so long ago, Jerry Saltz urged museums to stay open all night, free, for artists only. Not that museums lack for cheap hours, that artists could all pass a means test, or that artists are all night people. However, my favorite comment nailed what truly makes them so special. They would just treat the place like an opening, ignore the art, and socialize. The savvy ones would network. I know I do.

No one knows an artist’s dilemma better than Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, in all its idealism, egotism, and friendly or brutal competition. Without that muddle, they know, no art would get done; but with it, all too many artists struggle to survive. More than three years after Dalton’s 2006 exhibition, which asked, I am still trying to decide whether I am a loser or a pig. (Well, okay, loser for sure.) And who knows? If Powhida had not made Jeffrey Deitch the center of a map of the art world (a link away from Saltz), LA MOCA might never have stolen him away.

Like all their work, “#class” balances precariously between satire, serious criticism, performance, and confession. In fact, at Winkleman gallery through March 20, it leaves open from day to day just where it will fall. At any given time, the artists might be working, talking, and selling for whatever the traffic will bear. Or they might be inviting others, if inviting is the right word, to “Shut Up Already, I’ll Look at your Art!” Round-table discussions tackle the ins and outs of life from art school to New York City—and how much either one matters. Guest performers might be playing motivational speaker, declaring The Celebritist Manifesto, musing “On Failure and Anonymity,” or reading aloud from Alan Kaprow, who wrote back when happenings were really happening.

The day before the opening, classroom furniture had arrived, chalkboards of green paint covered the walls, and Dalton was putting the finishing touches on their unfinished message. One spot read “market my ass” (pun definitely intended). Another repeated a promise never again to serve as an unpaid intern, like a child atoning for bad behavior. An hour into the opening both inscriptions had vanished, as visitors left their own messages, lists, and equations. Mostly, though, people were drinking and networking. See, that comment had it right after all.

A few nights later, Powhida was driving a discussion of whether the system works, while Edward Winkleman demanded a vote and commanded the chalkboard. Things had landed firmly on the side of the serious. People spoke freely, sharing their own frustrations and investments in the system. I talked way too much myself. No one felt pressured to sit through it all like a class, but no one really wanted to leave. It was hard to believe that we were in a gallery well into the evening, without so much as free beer, though the walk back was a chastening reminder.

Maybe I needed a reality check. Even seriousness and humor have their limits. One could see it on the chalkboard, where the dream of collaboration had driven out the artists’ pungency. One could hear it as the group that evening struggled to define the system, much less whether it works and what counts as success. (The vote divided evenly, with Powhida and Winkleman on opposite sides.) An intimate gathering was not going to solve anything in two hours anyway.

Not that Dalton and Powhida believe they can. In person, I suggested considering not just whether the system works, at least for some artists, but how it works—and what that says about how “#class” works. Surely the exhibition, to borrow pomo vocabulary, is also an intervention. Modest as ever, Powhida denied trying to change, much less abolish markets. He reinvented art criticism for an off-site event anyway, a tour of Chelsea. Still, the difficulty says a lot about the show’s limits and ambitions.

Its gamble on collection action puts demands on the artists and dealer, and they are giving generously. Group sessions go out on webcasts. Both Winkleman and his co-director are working late and Sundays, as well as juggling the 2010 art fairs. Both artists must put in time every day, and the schedule keeps changing even apart from the snow. For all that, the show means artists talking mostly to each other—all within the confines of a gallery. And that means it sometimes struggles to say enough about anything.

It also risks losing the edge that Dalton and Powhida brought in the first place. Something like that happened just weeks before, when the Bruce High Quality Foundation held its own class in a gallery, with real chalkboards but no teachers in sight. The jokes were real, but their target had already moved on. Like recent articles by Roberta Smith, both shows attest to a sense of frustration everywhere—including frustration with the power of actual art schools. The title “#class” in fact refers to at least three kinds of collective—Twitter, the classroom, and socioeconomic class. But who can afford to cut class?

Yet “#class” knows all that, too. If the system can absorb anything, why not open the gallery to others and watch it happen? Dalton and Powhida also care enough to appear in person, while the anonymous Bruces play hit-and-run. Maybe it takes both tactics to define the system and success. What if there multiple kinds of failure, just as in free markets? I asked just that when I attended.

Markets always have winners and losers, but one can still feel dismay at the exclusions. I admire the contribution of mainstream galleries. I feel it again at shows like this. Even so, I feel deeply for those who only wish they had time and income to make art. And that sad outcome counts as a market that works. At other times, the free market cannot even claim that much.

There are things a market is just not meant to do, quite apart from rescuing those who cannot find jobs. Many beyond artists and buyers benefit from art, which contributes to and shapes culture at large. That is why government and others support museums, other nonprofits, and individuals, both directly and indirectly. There is also outright market failure in art, just as in the housing boom and bust. It appears in wildly inflated prices and reputations, driven by a closed circle of collectors and celebrity artists. Markets do correct themselves, and reputations die, but in the long run we are all dead.

All this makes it hard to talk about “the system,” as if it all held together with enough circles and arrows. In a handout for “#class,” Ben Davis makes a savvy start. He supplies “9.5 Theses on Art and Class,” and he neither dismisses art as a luxury good, nor elevates art to a sphere all its own. It is not a bundle of laughs, but I am not ready to vote yet on whether the system or the exhibition works. Four weeks is bound to contain surprises and successes, and I have already seen it happen several more times. If I were you, I would not cut “#class.”

Even in 1913, Williamsburg had emerging artists. Man Ray for one emerged from there, and he emerged quickly. It is the subject of a longer review—and my latest upload.

That year the Armory Show brought Nude Descending a Staircase to America—and with it the scandal of modern art. Within two years, Ray began the most ambitious work of American Cubism, The Rope Dancer Accompanying Herself with Her Shadow. A year later he pretty much single-handedly created an American Dada. Five years after that, he was off to Paris, where he transformed photography. “Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention” tells the artist’s story as one of constant self-invention.

Perhaps it has to tell that story, for a man born Emmanuel Radnitzky. Perhaps it has to tell that story, too, as the Jewish Museum. The eldest son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Ray faced the usual dilemma of cosmopolitan and Jew. Then again, the dilemma of assimilation and exile could explain the whole idea of an avant-garde. Ray’s life in fact unfolds quite smoothly, and his reinventions fit just fine within the story of Modernism. No wonder a gallery retrospective back in 1997 before told much the same story, and I integrate a short review written then so that now a fuller account of the artist appears in one place.

Through March 14 the museum starts right out with the reinvention. It gives more than the customary space to Ray’s early work, often dismissed as derivative. It also starts with half a dozen portraits of the artist—one at his bar mitzvah in 1893. The curator, Mason Klein, points to the influence of J. A. D. Ingres in another, a self-portrait in spare, broad strokes of ink. Pablo Picasso contributes another. And then another self-portrait applies white curves like star tracks to a blurry photograph.

One already has in miniature the evolution from Jew and conservative art student to a Cubist’s eye and Surrealist photography. One can keep looking to the artist’s Jewish origins for signs of continuity and transformation. Does his name sound like a work of poetry and a photographer’s fascination with light? The artist’s father, Max, had already changed the family name to Ray and called the boy Manny. With only a slight change, the anonymity of assimilation becomes the breadth of all mankind. It also hints at Dada’s disdain for self-expression and identity.

He left one signature work after another, in a small and abbreviated career. Hitting everything out of the park comes at a price, of not being terribly good at singles and running the bases. The somber paintings serve as a reminder that “School of Paris” today often means conservative. So in their own glorious way are the Rayograms. Ray turned photography inside out, but as modern painting—part of why photograms today have a newfound popularity. As the century gets a fuller history, maybe even conservative in art can take on new meanings, and so can Modernism in America.