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art reviews from around new york

Not every art movement has a letterhead, especially a movement dedicated to questioning art. Yet Dada did, and Tristan Tzara set out to use it. Please excuse me if I use another catch-up post to tell you about it.

Tzara, the poet and the movement’s founder, and Francis Picabia wrote fifty artists and writers in ten countries, asking for contributions to an anthology, to be called Dadaglobe. They imagined a volume of up to three hundred pages and ten thousand copies, with four categories of art. It never came to be, but a recreation documents some rakish personalities and iconic works. Could Dada have taken over the planet?

The letters went out in late 1920, in German (in typescript) or in French (in truly atrocious handwriting). By then the movement was already torn and scattered, with Surrealism to rise from its ashes. No wonder Dadaglobe succumbed to financial woes and infighting. It was also not all that global, apart from exiles like Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray in New York. Contributors came mostly from major European capitals, especially Paris and Berlin. They are nonetheless a litany of modernists—including Constantin Brancusi, who otherwise had little to do with Dada, and Jean Cocteau, the playwright and poet, who often wished that he had as well.

They also had an impressive share of women artists, such as Sophie Taeuber (later Taeuber-Arp), Adon Lacroix, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Luise Straus, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, Hannah Höch, and Suzanne Duchamp (here with her Factory of My Dreams). They included others less well known as well, such as Johannes Theodor Baargeld, who grafted himself onto ancient statuary, and Jean Crotti, who portrayed My Other Me. Some who photographed contributors and their work are lost to history. Throw in the contribution of Dada to book art, even an art that died in the making, and the Museum of Modern Art has quite a historical aside, through September 18. Samantha Friedman and Adrian Sudhalter as curators can claim some serious detective work in realizing it. Its impact may depend on one’s patience with memorabilia. Yet that, too, suits suits the period’s argument for mechanical reproduction as an assault on fine art—an argument that resonates to this day.

Contributors were asked for photos of themselves, photos of their work, works on paper in a limited range of color, and page designs. Beyond that, the details were left to them, and they came down very much in favor of art. As revolutions go, this one had style. Few will recognize the artists, but everyone will recognize their care to look dapper, even when Picabia labels himself at once a failure, a gigolo, and a clown. A few photographs take advantage of the medium to submerge the artist in shadow—or subvert it a bit with added drawing or text. Most, though, do not.

The photos of their work have a comforting familiarity, too, and the Modern helps by often setting them beside the original. Duchamp’s Bride retains its soft browns, and the glass of his To Be Looked at looks all the more shattered in a silvery print by Man Ray. Photos restore Brancusi’s wooden head to its lost figure. All these embody the movement as collaborative, and so does André Breton wearing a placard designed by Picabia. Depuis longtemps, his protest reads, tas d’idiots (“for a long time now, a pile of idiots”). That means you.

Here and there that kind of assault on supposed civilization peeks through. It appears in Man Ray’s construction site as The Most Beautiful Sculpture in America or Jean Arp’s Laocoön as dog intestines. Mostly, though, they take to the particulars of design and the imagination. Even Kurt Schwitters and George Grosz leave memories of war behind. They treat page design as particulars, too, rather than as templates for an artist’s book. Maybe a little at a time, they could create a world.

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

Since that first installation of “Rooms” at today’s MoMA PS1, have its rooms shrunk? One might well have thought so with “Forty,” a recent look back forty years to that very first exhibition in Queens. It stuck to a single floor—and closed altogether Saturdays in July. Elsewhere, though, a room has grown.

In his most famous work, Vito Acconci masturbated beneath a false floor at Sonnabend gallery in Soho. For a retrospective of Acconci in performance, through September 18, rooms claimed instead their full size and plenty of activity—and my apologies for a late post, to catch up a bit amid a busy fall season. Not all barriers, though, fall away, and (together with earlier reports on “Forty” and Lucas Samaras) it is the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload.

Seedbed, from 1972, thrives on boundaries. It fits with Minimalism’s aim of encompassing more than sculpture as object, to alter one’s perception of the entire space, walls and floors included. One could enter and wonder, where is the art? One could, that is, until one heard the sounds of, ambiguously, torture or pleasure. The work thrives, too, on that false floor hiding the artist. Acconci spoke of the work as interactive, because it involves the viewer, but the interchange runs only one way.

It upends the old idea of art as germinative, for his seed falls only to the ground. It also turns self-portraiture into primary narcissism, with the artist invisible but inescapable. It boasts of a man, then age thirty-two and none too athletic, able to repeat the act for as long as you care to listen. Donald Trump should have compared the size of his hands with him. The retrospective does not try to replicate the experience, with a new floor and audio recording, since that could hardly make the same boast. It does, though, have a video close-up of Acconci in action, leaving no doubt that he could keep it up.

Acconci bridges performance as endurance, as for Chris Burden, and as bad-boy art, as for Paul McCarthy, Tom Sachs, and Mike Kelly. Like Martin Creed, he also connects narcissism with its unspoken partner, self-disgust. Other performances involve spit, gargle, saliva, and something shoved up someone’s ass (ten to one his own). They often involve genuine interaction in collaboration with a woman at that, Kathy Dillon, who smears him with lipstick and rubs one breast while he stands behind her, miming her gesture. Yet they leave no doubt whose body is on show.

After 1980 he did open his work to his audience, with installations closer to architecture and landscaping. This exhibition, though, sticks almost entirely to six years, ending around the opening of P.S. 1. And those years came fast and furious. Maybe you had heard of Acconci in performance shadowing strangers, tearing out his body hair one strand at a time, and shadowboxing blindfolded with, of course, himself. He turns out to have more, dozens more, which here become their own hyperactive installation. His archives appear embedded in silvery curved walls and, off to the side, a skeletal but loft-like ceiling—all on top of a communal table thrusting out a window, like a springboard onto gentrification. Photos, documents, and small monitors are plentiful, although large projections are few.

A retrospective as installation pays off in spectacle, while reinforcing the narcissism. It ends, to the extent that it has a direction, with sound art and what Acconci called his epic film. Both amount to a voice declaiming about America. One such piece lends its title to the exhibition, Where We Are Know (Who Are We Anyway?). Aren’t you glad you asked? Lest there be any doubt, one performance consists of his pointing to himself.

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

Perhaps you go to the Frick to escape this world. Perhaps you go to the Rococo, too, to escape this world, with all that period’s overindulgence and flights of fancy. Now, though, the museum returns to the very founder of the Rococo, Jean Antoine Watteau, only to find a world at war.

The Frick still has the stately beauty of its Fifth Avenue mansion and a precious quiet even when it is full. (No children!) It has a collection that rewards contemplation rather than rushing from room to room. You may find echoes of yourself in a saint in contemplation of nature and divinity at that, thanks to Giovanni Bellini or to Jan van Eyck and Petrus Christus. For now, though, the Frick has Europe at war. And Watteau was there to witness it.

The War of the Spanish Succession has been called the first world war, for good reason. While the conflict largely skirted France, whose king was attempting to replace the king of Spain, Watteau had ample opportunity to go behind the lines, while still in his twenties. He could take advantage of France’s place not quite at the front, to observe soldiers as not just agents of war but men. They could indulge in a moment to socialize or to themselves, in idleness or fitful sleep. The artist had little patience for images of valor anyway—like world leaders on horseback for Diego Velázquez in painting before him or Jacques-Louis David to come. In the process, he invented the moment to moment record of world events in art and photography today.

This being Watteau, it was always an extended moment. “Watteau’s Soldiers,” at the Frick through October 2, brings together four paintings and a dozen drawings, most from around 1710, to show him observing closely and reassembling his observations, without a compositional study in sight. The process helps account for his work’s enormous intimacy and sadness, grounded in empathy and realism. He combines two or three figures on a single sheet, at times the same man. Then he recombines them in oil, where their gazes cannot meet. The drawings seem accomplished and composed, the paintings a panorama of isolation and inaction.

The Frick has a special fondness for the Rococo along with more stately pleasures, as with “Watteau and His World” some years ago. It has its period rooms for the period’s sillier side, with Jean Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher. And Watteau invented an era along with its antidote, starting with the freedom of his harlequins and women. Even his scenes of military life have the picturesque along with their frankness. One may associate Watteau, music, and theater, but of course drummers do accompany the troops, and this is a theater of war. One may not expect women in their company, dressed for a day in the country, but they were present, too.

In one painting the line of war lies beneath trees, with an eye across a grassy plain to smoke and fire far in the distance. In another the supply train has darkened, with broader areas of heavy color. At times their actors interact, like a threesome that could almost be dancing or a procession on its way to safety or to hell. Just as often, though, they fall apart into a series of disparate stories—at ease, asleep, or maybe even dead. Their mix of dignity, helplessness, and reticence appears in the painted faces, with eyes as little more than points, and in the sketched poses, almost exclusively from the back. The show includes a Flemish precursor, Philips Wouwerman, and two followers, but there is no mistaking Watteau’s honesty and rapid gestures.

On paper they run to parallel strokes in red chalk, often with the addition of darker and narrower curves to lend clarity and weight. On canvas they may range within the space of an inch from detailed figure studies to something more like cartoons. In a painting from the Frick itself, The Portal of Valenciennes, the outline of a face and disheveled hair thrown up against a wall could be shrieking in horror or pain. In chalk, a man face down could well be crying, and a kneeling figure could be praying or awaiting the whip. Still, other men have arms akimbo, pipe in hand, or rifles to their side at obvious ease. They all belong to the pageantry of war that history may choose to forget.

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

Not everything by Bruce Conner is explosive. So when his art does explode, one had better take notice. MoMA announces as much, with the image of a nuclear test on the wall outside his retrospective, through October 2—and it is the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload. Yet the real explosion took place in his head.

That image is, of course, already blown up—from military archives of that terrible July day in 1946. And the explosions continue in two of his short films. Both start slowly enough, one in off-kilter footage by Conner himself from his year in Mexico City, starting in late 1961. People meander past close-ups of magic mushrooms. Then the colors take to the sky, in fireworks. The other, from 1976, relies on the dozens of ships and planes off Bikini Atoll to capture the quiet before the cloud rises to encompass everything in black and white.

Is it coincidence that the first is Looking for Mushrooms and the second, Crossroads, of a mushroom cloud? Not one bit, although one is so personal and the other as impersonal as they come. Conner drew for the first on his friendship with Timothy Leary, but he sketched a mushroom cloud as early as 1963—and titled it after a street address in Kansas, where he grew up. Is it a coincidence that the second film’s title recalls not just the military’s Operation Crossroads, but also a song by by Robert Johnson, the blues musician, and then Cream? Probably, but I can imagine his relishing the coincidence. For Conner, the desire to expand experience lived alongside fears of what already lurked in his heart.

He moved all his life between the thrill of motion and hope of a quiet center within, but both carry the creeps. His very first film, A Movie from 1958, cuts rapidly among a succession of speedsters—horsemen, carriages, bicycles, racecars, and sure enough a mushroom cloud. At once comic and exhilarating, it begins with a zeppelin over New York City and ends with a train going off a cliff. Later films revel in a woman’s dancing, with the jerky fashions of the 1960s, but also in the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination replayed again and again. Dreams lead to madness, but then paranoia does sometimes follow a trip.

Not that he was a boomer, which may explain why postwar American came as such a shock. Born in 1933, he moved to San Francisco only after his studies, in 1957, but he fit right in. He had been working in collage close to abstraction, and soon enough accumulation becomes a sinister habit, much as for a friend, Jay DeFeo. Assemblage starts with Ratbastard in 1958—named for the Rat Bastard Protective Association, a Bay Area artist collective. It takes the form of a filthy handbag lined with newspaper, wire, and nails. It joins everyday possessions and a woman’s sexuality, and it takes comfort in neither one.

Mostly, though, the creeps keep piling up, only starting with assemblage around 1960. Women’s nylons enclose dark shrines. They evoke both sex and spider’s webs, like twin traps that the mind can never escape. They also bind a puppet child to a high chair, as if writing in pain—alluding, too, to a rapist’s execution by electric chair. Sculpture in black wax descends that much further into night, including a couch for Sigmund Freud. A hand print stains paper with blood.

A retrospective called “It’s All True” boasts of his ability to disappear before one’s eyes. Curated by MoMA’s Stuart Comer and Laura Hoptman with SFMOMA’s Garry Garrels and Rudolf Frieling, it also makes the case for a major artist. It shows him as painter, sculptor, performance artist, and more. Yet the explosions come only between the mushroom clouds and the mushrooms, with all their majesty and terror, and so at last does release. Crossroads ends with a solitary ship, an empty sky, and a surreal calm. A wild career could almost have ended before it began.

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

What is there to do when the war has no end? The question, once spoken, hangs in the air long after a video plays to its end. It hangs over the entirety of “But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise,” at the Guggenheim through October 5—and it is the subject of a fuller account, in my latest upload.

The show of art from the Middle East and North Africa is the latest in the UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, following art from Latin America two years before. (The corporate name translates into funding for purchase from among the work on display.) The curator, Sara Raza, makes good use of the tower galleries, tailoring work to entire walls or enclaves, although limited space means that two artists rotate in only in July, a little less than halfway through. The series boosts the museum’s commitment to contemporary art as well as global art. And the commitment appears real. A year after the installment from Latin America, the same space had an unforgettable show of Doris Salcedo, from Colombia.

Mariam Ghani, who created that video, was born and lives in New York, of a Lebanese mother and Afghan father. She also typifies the show’s strategies. She confronts past and present, Europe and the Mideast, colonialism and Islamic art. One channel shows a museum in central Germany built in 1779 that became a model experiment for Nazi Neoclassicism. The other shows a palace in Kabul, built in 1929 and fallen into decay. Together, they supply A Brief History of Collapses.

Who has collapsed, and who is responsible? A breathless narration rushes past, without emphases or affect, daring anyone to make the connections. It seems culled from far too many academic lectures and far too few particulars. The work has trouble looking for answers beyond museum interiors, and so does the entire show. Yet it lingers over places far away, claustrophobic but filled with light. Its questions do indeed hang in the air.

City planning returns often, from the Internet and from the air. Haerizadeh paints over YouTube, improving it no end, while Ahmed Mater flies over Saudi Arabia in an official helicopter that monitors the pilgrimage to Mecca. From above, the mosque becomes a science fiction fantasy. Ali Cherri borrows aerial maps of Beirut as a fault zone. The influence of Fluxus appears in Mohammed Kazem’s sheet of white, scratched to produce a tight pattern of small bumps. Hanging on the wall and rolling out onto the floor, it could be a monochrome painting, a player piano roll, or an ancient scroll.

Like Kazem, the show’s best work makes the confluence of cultures explicit, while leaving open whether to see the diaspora as productive or a loss. Nadia Kaabi-Linke has by far the largest and most geometric sculpture. Flying Carpet draws on The Arabian Nights and memories of street vendors selling rungs, but as shifting volumes of steel, rubber verticals, and their shadows. And Ergin Cavusoglu spins out dust trails into colored lines, converting the museum floor into both personal histories and earthworks. One might hesitate to walk beneath the first or on the second. They carry that much lightness and weight.

It will take others to cross into Africa and the Middle East, as sites of conflict and lived experience. Others are doing so in photography, like Barry Frydlender and Shimon Attie, or conceptual art, like Walid Raad—but not here. For all the show’s heavy talk of politics, philosophy, and logic, it comes most alive apart from any of them. Cavusoglu also has a video of people reciting Italo Calvino and Anton Chekov, as Crystal and Flame. They could be telling stories over a common meal, as part of what holds families and peoples together. For once, war seems far away.

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

For once, the New Museum deserves a hug. It even comes with a teddy bear—and then some. Are no two snowflakes alike? “The Keeper” has no end of collections to make you wonder.

Step behind a partition, through September 25, and you may think that you have stepped into not just another installation, but another museum and another age. Ydessa Hendeles fills two rooms with three thousand family photographs, all of them with teddy bears. Partners (The Teddy Bear Project) also contains any number of stuffed animals themselves (hugs!) and additional photographs of their owners. In a show about the impulse to preserve and to collect, it takes that impulse beyond the point of excess, to something more like a dream. It also insists on that excess as part of both a museum’s collection and memories of home. Just whose memories? With four floors and countless obsessions, from more than a century and around the world, “The Keeper” is big on spectacle but short of answers—and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review, in my latest upload.

Hendeles has arranged her project as antiquities, in museum vitrines beneath mahogany lamps, amid spiral stairwells connecting floor to ceiling shelves. It opens all at once onto something very much like J. P. Morgan’s 1906 library in the museum that bears his name. Those who miss the old comforts of the Morgan Library, before a Renzo Piano renovation directed a visitor elsewhere, will sigh in recognition. And those who come to the former New Museum of Contemporary Art for the contemporary and for art may wonder if it has cast aside either one. They will find remnants from the National Museum of Beirut, shattered and displaced by fifteen years of civil war, but nothing of their history. They will find dust, pills, thread, and chewing gum from New York streets, scavenged by Yuji Agematsu, but little sense of place.

“The Keeper is like that”—filled with familiar sights, unrestrained obsessions, and puzzling directions. Sometimes the contributors seem to be working out the puzzle, too, as they go. You might not even notice a space behind that partition, but for the narrow corridor it leaves on the other side. There a row of photos carries Ye Jinglu through sixty-three years, until his death in 1968. As discovered by Tong Bingxue, the sitter returned each year to a professional portrait studio, starting as a dapper young man of age twenty-one. In the process, he was not just aging, but also staging his life, struggling with his identity between East and West, modernizing himself and his image, and becoming more fully human.

Madness and the stuff of thrift stores have to recall a fully contemporary obsession—with folk art and its recovery for the mainstream. And obviously much here counts as outsider art, if not the entire exhibition. A family of Gee’s Bend quilt makers in Alabama also appears. Is an art collection itself an obsession? Aurélien Froment patterns a “picture atlas” after a pioneering art historian, Aby Warburg. The question, though, has to run through the entire show.

It also threatens to undermine the show, not least because the curators, led by Massimiliano Gioni, dance around it. Maybe they were not quite obsessive enough. They miss the chance to explore the growth of the art world and the dominance of wealthy collectors. They miss much of contemporary art along the way. Maybe Bove does not lean to the obsessive object or the obsessive installation, but plenty of others do, like Fischli and Weiss or Tara Donovan. Just a few blocks away, at the Drawing Center through September 2, Gabriel de la Mora salvaged fabric from old radio speakers, set out in pairs facing one another across the gallery, like a veritable echo chamber.

So are no two snowflakes alike, in a show all about numbers? Maybe so, but Wilson Bentley required five thousand glass negatives and fifty years to find out, beginning in 1883. And for Zofia Rydet, who took up photography only in her sixties with the urge to document every home in Poland, “there are no two similar . . . houses,” but their proud or dutiful inhabitants quickly start to look much the same. Thankfully, “The Keeper” as a whole does not, and what may sound like too many objects and too little art gains in interest by its sheer accumulation. Then, too, one collection invites visitors inside its obsession. With the teddy bears, you can discover the old museum in the New Museum.

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