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art reviews from around new york

It makes sense somehow to think of a dancer as a visual artist. It suggests the affinity of modern dance with performance art, both so often silent except perhaps for music. Make that often plotless as well. It gives new meaning to that old phrase for sculptors like David Smith, drawing in space. It captures the tricky qualities of some great painting—the tactile and the visual. And that combination surely applies to Trisha Brown, a dancer who can make one think of works on paper as painting or as choreography.

And I mean large works on paper. At Sikkema Jenkins through January 25, they stretch nearly eleven feet tall and wider than a human body. Identification with the body only grows, too, the more time one spends with them. Most sheets have a vertical format, like a person standing. Step back from the spare black marks, and hints of a figure or two appear—perhaps to vanish and then to appear again. One could be crouching, an arm raised high to pierce the air. Others could have backs, breasts, or buttocks thrust forward, and I could swear that I made out two faces kissing amid the swirl of black.

If one has any doubts, a back room has a video of, lo and behold, dancers. They move slowly and portentously but fluidly and constantly. They may touch, but barely, as if to insist not so much on communication or mutual desire as solitude and sensation. On paper, bodily sensation arises from texture, too. The sole small work, by the entrance, introduces the vocabulary of smudges and traces. Brown uses graphite and oil pastel, the lines close to breaking apart as she stretches or presses them across the the white expanse of paper.

Historically, seemingly opposed terms like tactile and visual have often described art its most classical. Giotto gave the Renaissance what Bernard Berenson called “tactile values,” but also a formal and visual unity. The sculptural form and symmetry of High Renaissance painting seemed their logical extension. The opposition returned with a vengeance in late Modernism, in Clement Greenberg’s calls for “flatness” and Harold Rosenberg’s for “action painting.” These critics wanted “pure painting,” but also an extension of the living and breathing painter. One can picture Jackson Pollock circling a drip painting as a dance.

In fact, Brown’s designs, all from 2002 and 2003, look like nothing so much as late Pollock, when the canvas all but emptied out, color vanished, and the human figure almost emerged. A painter of Pollock’s time only wished that he had sheets of paper this large and, compared to stretched canvas, this close to the wall. Her ten large drawings are not identical in size, but they can easily look it, and they make the gallery a kind of theater. Yet Brown is of quite another generation, a postmodern dancer born in 1936 who collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg. Perhaps one should picture the collective dance rather than Pollock’s brooding loner. Perhaps one should sense the visual comedy of Pop Art—or those diagrams for where to place one’s feet in dance class (already the subject of a “performances score” for Clifford Owens).

Perhaps, but if anything she trumps Pollock’s high seriousness and detachment, but without the high tension. How can you know the dancer from the dance—especially when neither is smiling? It may say something that the show looks bland and arbitrary in jpg rather than in person. Now, people long disdained Pollock’s late retreat from abstraction, too, not to mention the sweeping gestures of a late de Kooning, which these works also resemble a bit. For all three, though, the tactile values are there all the same, and (come to think of it) late Pollock and de Kooning are looking better all the time. Maybe one can start to see them, too, as postmodern.