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art reviews from around new york

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.

There has to be more to architecture than the clash of finances, egos, and ambitions. There has to be more to museums, too—but not, sadly, when it comes to the wars over the Museum of American Folk Art.

Not that it houses a museum. As you no doubt have heard, the Museum of Modern Art bought its next-door neighbor lock, stock, and barrel in 2011, when what is now the American Folk Art Museum decamped for smaller quarters by Lincoln Center. And the Modern intends to demolish the building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien (more recently at work on the Barnes Foundation), for yet another expansion.

It will have had a short but remarkable life. Completed in 2001, it quickly won the World Architecture Award for best new building in the world, the Municipal Art Society Masterwork Award, and later the American Institute of Architects National Honor Award. No amount of prizes, however, could shield it from a different kind of architecture lesson, about finances and ambitions.

The ego trips began with the Museum of American Folk Art itself. It undertook its renovation in 1997, tempted by the lure of celebrity architecture and the promise of larger audiences. Nor was it alone. Just to list developments since then says something about museum politics and the pressure to aim high. To name only a few, the Met kept encroaching on Central Park and Fifth Avenue, the Morgan Library bridged from its old home to that of J. P. Morgan, ICA Boston covered the waterfront, MOMA assimilated P.S. 1 once and for all, Amsterdam’s museum district added what looks to at least one critic like a gigantic bathtub, the Guggenheim proposed another expansion on top of its toilet tank, the New Museum piled its white boxes on the Bowery, the Drawing Center sought a place at Ground Zero and then backed away, Yale University connected its art galleries, the Whitney announced its move from its Modernist classic to the Meatpacking District, and the Met promised to move right in. Yoshio Taniguchi started work on MOMA’s last addition to its empire in 1997, too.

In each case, critics swooned, before wondering in time whether the buildings add anything new or indeed work at all. Would the Museum of American Folk Art be any different? Maybe yes, in a building that somehow resonated with both Postmodernism and tradition. Herbert Muschamp, an apostle of the new, called it “already a midtown icon,” while Paul Goldberger, his predecessor at The New York Times and no stranger to the canon, praised its sensuality.
Still, the museum had borrowed $32 million to finance the expansion, and the bill came due all too soon. (It defaulted.)

Its neighbor to the east was already eying the property—and another expansion, designed by Jean Nouvel. The French architect’s first plans for the site rose slightly akilter to the height of the Empire State Building, windows crossed by enormous struts. To make it happen, MOMA under Glenn D. Lowry had snatched up two town houses and a hotel just further west. He offered to swap land, but the Folk Art Museum refused. It had not yet given up on its ambitions, and it clung to the walkway between West 53rd and 54th Streets, with again the misplaced hope of greater traffic. Lowry must have been delighted, with the chance in the end for a still larger apartment tower for MOMA that just happens to include additional exhibition space, mostly still to be determined.

“It’s not,” he assured The Times on April 10, “a comment on the quality of the building or Tod and Billie’s architecture,” and alas one has to believe him. Of course, that does not sound much like a reason to tear down a beloved building, so Lowry also questioned whether its façade conformed to MOMA’s “glass esthetic.” If a glass esthetic hardly describes the Museum of Modern Art that Taniguchi all but destroyed, he was plainly making excuses. Barry Schwabsky in The Nation compared it to trashing a Kandinsky that clashed with the office décor. Just how much has MOMA learned from the last expansion, with its failed spaces and lack of room for art. Is art even a priority?

That takes one back to the glorious enigma of the Museum of American Folk Art. One could call it hand-crafted or industrial, much like folk art and design. From the outside, a descending triangle cuts sixty-three silvery brown rectangles into three planes, only gaining mass as they reach the street between a narrow door and window. Inside, past the bronze and white copper, are still stranger collisions of green and white walls, wood floors, mottled stairs, and narrow corridors ending in pools of light. Martin Filler in The New York Review of Books calls its loss an “act of vandalism,” and petitions are circulating to save it. Yet it already seems almost suffocated between its neighbors, meaning MOMA, and not everyone agrees that saving it would be good for art.

Jerry Saltz argues that it could never serve MOMA’s permanent collection, not even small work. I would not be so sure. That collection includes outsider art and modern design, Lowry does not raise anything like that objection, surely all those prize committees had the sense to look inside the building, and surely no building could be that bad, not even Taniguchi’s. I hesitate to enter the debate, because Nouvel has had successes elsewhere—and because I had too little acquaintance with the museum in its sad and wonderful decade. Still, I have to caution Saltz or anyone, given the crippling past enthusiasms, the later disappointments, and the real story of insiders and outsider art, finances, ambitions, and egos. What does it say that MOMA’s chairman, Jerry I. Speyer, is a real-estate developer?

Note: as of early May, the museum blinks. The future is still uncertain, but I shall report more soon.

Perhaps the most important artist of the early Renaissance passed his life in a small town. With “Piero della Francesca in America,” through May 19, the Frick does its best to reunite a colossal altarpiece and to offer a history of his coming to New York. It shows how he brought an otherworldly calm to early Renaissance humanism—and, ultimately, to modern art. And it is the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload.

Not that Piero della Francesca never saw the world. No one better understood the Renaissance ideals often associated with Leonbattista Alberti, who wrote about art’s truth to nature, virtue, and humanity—in, of course, flawless perspective. Still, he became a member of the town council in today’s Sansepolcro and remained one until his death in 1492. Pretty much all his work dates from twenty-five years or so, through 1472, and he all but fell off the map of art history for a while.

People used to call the entire century the Italian “primitives,” and his stillness seemed downright unnatural. The wide eyes of his risen Christ have seen more even than death.

One altar in Sant’ Agostino held four paintings now in the Frick Collection, including a standing Saint John the Evangelist. About four feet tall, in a harsh white beard and majestic red cloak, his head lost in perhaps his own book, he has towered over visitors from almost the Frick’s origins. One can see why the generation that elevated the stillness and complexity of Paul Cézanne and Jan Vermeer recovered Piero della Francesca as well. One can see how he became the artist’s artist from his century, much as Sandro Botticelli a generation younger became the public’s. With a second standing saint from Lisbon, a small panel from Washington, and an unrelated seated Madonna from the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the Frick offers a rare chance to see what that changing understanding means for today.

The Madonna and Child makes a good place to start, and anyway people are drawn to it. Four standing angels form a half circle around an enthroned Mary. Portrayed as boys, they make her look that much larger than life. Jesus, seated erect on her left knee, reaches toward a pink carnation in her right hand (and not, by the way, what the Frick’s scholars call a rose), a symbol of his embrace of his adult future. Each angel has a cloak and wings of a different color. Each treads lightly on the ground, but each poses and faces a different way.

Clearly something spooky is going on, but what? The play of symmetry and strangeness extends to the shallow architecture up against their backs, just two of its walls visible. It almost anticipates the gallery as white box today. A mysterious shadow falls across the step of Mary’s throne, itself inlaid with marble and carved medallions.

Step back and everything falls into depth, exactly as it should. One can almost overlook that one never does see any more of the throne, and the room presses in so closely that Mary would bump her head if she tried to rise.

By the same token, one can overlook Piero’s humanity. Early critics would certainly have noticed the inconsistencies. They would have wanted Jesus to grab the flower like an infant at play, which is how other artists humanized the symbolism back then. Still, everything has its place, including the rich shadows filling out the robes. By all but hiding each angel’s wings, the artist has treated them first and foremost as children. In his world, great and timeless events are still taking place, and one can only expect a few paradoxes and maybe even the creeps.

Realism mattered to him, especially in the cause of the unreal. Saint John often hangs at the center of a small room at the end of the great hall, where it can dominate the vista from far away. Impressive as that is, it looks twice as large with support from a second saint—and maybe ten times as large as life.

People seem to know that the enthroned Madonna should be apart, since they photograph it that way for Facebook, but one can still see it that way. One can step way back or come close, and everything in Piero turns on that strange double perspective. One can see how a small-town boy become a calm, otherworldly presence, first in the Renaissance and again in modern art.