Day Tripping

The Skies of Chelsea, Fall 2006:
Kusama, Boursier-Mougenot, and Neuenschwander

Birds, meteor showers, shooting stars—it sounds like heaven. At least it may sound more like tripping than gallery going. As it happens, the most relaxing moments in Chelsea's crowded fall allowed a vision of the sky.

Not everyone's ideal of art is peace and quiet. However, even this long after the 1960s, sensual overload can allow a little rest and relaxation, and that can allow time for surprise as well. Besides, these days a Chelsea gallery almost has to have too much or too little going on, as at any other fairground or shopping mall. Otherwise, one might have to look at painting and sculpture instead of an installation. Somehow, the art market, new media, and critical theory all seem to converge on the latter.

Did you truly hear birds, then, see a passing meteor shower, experience an LSD trip, lose yourself in a house of mirrors, or just visit Chelsea this fall? Did you catch new media or old? Sometimes, it grew hard to tell. Yayoi Kusama, who really does go back to a psychedelic age, helps set the tone with her ladder to the heavens. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot and Natalie Jeremijenko both evoke the call of nature, while Rivane Neuenschwander and Bill Dolson alike imagine meteor showers. One could contrast them as day and night.

Time to relax?

Even when Yayoi Kusama does not turn a gallery into an installation, one goes for the sensual overload. She has tried her hand at poetry and performance, and her work includes sculpture and prints, cool metal and soft surfaces, bright rooms and a dark one behind a curtain. It takes time to catch them all, like taking in all the rides at an amusement park. Still, her latest show stands out for its focus on discrete works, and the smallest adopt the scale of traditional indoor sculpture. They even stand on pedestals.

In fact, they extend their pedestals, with polished cubes almost at eye level. They offer a choice of openings, and they keep one guessing about which to try and what one might discover inside. With all those choices, I cannot really give it away, so I shall simply tell you. Sometimes you see right out the other side, sometimes you see only glass, sometimes you see the reflection of your own eye, and sometimes you see another peeking in, too. One could call it a hall of mirrors, except that one gets to stand on firm ground. She calls something like this an Infinity Box, but the vanishing point seems improbably close rather than impossibly far away.

People often place Kusama with psychedelia and the "summer of love," but it makes sense that the Whitney left her out of the 2006 Biennial. That show drew on underground film and alternative musicians from the 1960s and 1970s, and it recalled the birth of the culture wars as a dark and noisy night. In contrast, Kusama had a room for herself in the 2004 Biennial, a show dedicated to diversity and pleasure. One person at a time could enter, to stand at the end of a narrow walkway surrounded by water and mirrors. I could have been waiting to dance, meditating on the expanse of oceans, or walking the plank.

Her art does sound psychedelic, with a difference or two. She makes time to relax and float downstream amid darkness and glitter. Her titles suggest her native optimism—Infinity Box, Ladder to Heaven, Shooting Star. My favorite new work, the largest, extends its soft tentacles from ceiling to floor. It resembles a Louise Bourgeois spider or Eva Hesse netting, but as a cuddly stuffed animal. Kusama loves surfaces way too much to leave them as metaphors for the unconsciousness.

Kusama seeks a balance between collective surrender to the visual and artistic control, more like a happening than a trip—like Yoko Ono inviting others to hammer a nail, but angry when John Lennon wishes to do so before the opening. One waited on line at the Whitney, if not quite as long as at Disneyland, and Kusama calls the shots for each portal of the mirrored cubes. Born in 1929, she may sound old for a baby boomer, too, but she arrived from Japan in 1958, just in time for the party to begin. In fact, she had had her bad trips in childhood, when she suffered frightening hallucinations. She has harnessed her fears, and she still is managing them on her own terms. Given her materials, I should sound petulant to call her work shallow pleasures, so I shall simply say that she manages them well.

Kusama's stature has grown over the years, even if I would not call this her most stellar outing, for all the shooting stars. I think of her when I see the idealism of, say, Rirkrit Tiravanija. Nick Cave, the musician who appeared recently with emerging artists at the Studio Museum, is another who cannot remember his dreams without decorative retouching. Cave means his Soundsuits literally as suits, perhaps for his band. Their outrageous wardrobe may evoke anything from African colors to Mardi Gras to a bad hair day or empty suits. Maybe this once, if an artist tried to allude to less, he might accomplish more, but Kusama, too, suggests a delightful world in which not even infinity requires depth.

For the birds

Mostly, however, it takes more this fall to induce tranquility or a dream. To see how much more Céleste Boursier-Mougenot wants, it helps to think of the history of sound. Remember when quadraphonic promised to surpass the illusion of stereo? In her recreation of an English cathedral, Janet Cardiff did it ten times over. As heard last year, in "Take Two" at MOMA, she has used forty speakers to convey the experience of a choral work by Thomas Tallis, the Renaissance composer.

The motet itself employs eight choirs of five voices, to honor a queen's fortieth birthday, and Cardiff's tidy circle of speakers reflects the precise sonic variation at different points in Salisbury Cathedral. Now, one rarely expects to find oneself within the space of a performance, rather than seated facing the music. One also rarely expects to find a museum room so full of voices and as apparently empty of art, an expectation that Martin Creed exploited on the cheap. Cardiff uses sound here to transform a gallery many times over—into the space of bare gallery, the space of John Constable's favorite cathedral, the space of Elizabethan England, the space between a Catholic's beliefs and a Protestant's celebration, the space of the performers, and the critical space of installations now. More often Cardiff uses sound to make familiar places annoyingly subservient to her voiced narratives. This once, she allows the participatory space of a visitor's free movements and a shared ritual.

Have I stumbled into a continuation? From the entryway at Paula Cooper, one might mistake the slow, sustained overlays of sound for church music, and Cooper's central chamber has the symmetry, scale, and aura of a cathedral anyway. And then one sees the vacuum cleaners, set out in total disarray—and an unlucky thirteen of them to boot. The hum has one amazed at what household appliances can do with all their hot air, and the objects themselves could mock Minimalism's aspirations to order and cleanliness. In fact, however, Boursier-Mougenot has rigged each one to play a single note on harmonica, although I kept thinking he was actually razzing me thirteen times over. Tim Hawkinson could not make contraptions as funny, ingenious, and self-effacing.

Boursier-Mougenot has sounded off on this space before. In his first show at Cooper, he let plates and saucers chime as they floated randomly in plastic, backyard swimming pools. Shortly before, he turned a room at P.S. 1 into a bird house, with wire hangers and whatever else lay at hand. In each case, I noted the openness to chance and change, the use of junk to deflate expectations, the installations that filled a space without imposing on it, the juxtaposition of a natural or outdoor environment with interior constraints, the freedom he gives one to circulate and to find associations, and of course the sense of humor. I overlooked how much he relies on sound to transform space.

Still, forget the space of cathedrals, or at least acknowledge that Cooper's triangular gable more closely resembles vernacular American architecture. Boursier-Mougenot makes one aware that one can reach out, touch, and maybe help clean up the joint—if only one dared. He does not reach across centuries or into eternity, rather than for what lies in front of one's eyes and ears. He demands a few double-takes, and he has good comic timing. He also allows himself and you to feel pretty silly. Rather than Cardiff on a budget, one might call it the anti-Cardiff.

Natalie Jeremijenko still makes art, as her installation subtitle puts it, "for the birds." She outfits a gallery rooftop of to "recognize the valuable services they provide for the Manhattan ecosystem," supplying food, waste treatment, and "cultural amenities." Her elaborate plans have some fun at the expense of installation art, ecological pieties, urban density, and the old debates over nature and culture, but with some honest reverence for all the above. Will birds share, she asks, will they use a weapon against another, will they use the concert hall to perform and amplify their lovely songs, will they self-medicate when given the opportunity, and will they cash in on their 1,000 square-foot West Chelsea garden at market value? Well, I actually made up the last, but I quoted the rest from the press release, and it may suggest why I left worried that the humor may come laced with just a bit too much piety. I like the concept, but I wish that the documentation within the gallery seemed less desiccated and distant from the action above—with not a hint of bird song.

Chance of showers

Not so very long ago, new media always meant not sound or nature but video—or an artist's grainy, underground film. Today data-driven art makes up a hefty share, and already its early examples look as awkward as Windows 3.1. Whether that translates esthetically into the awkwardness of Degas's ballerina, of family photos on MySpace, or of a ham-fisted painter I leave, this once, for you to decide.

Perhaps digital art still often brings back memories of that screen saver you ditched ages ago, but what if you could walk into the picture? What if its shifting, colored pixels became cobblestones and the white space between them the clouds above? I had that sensation when I entered the main gallery at Tanya Bonakdar. Across the broad ceiling, palm-size colored dots circulate, as if following an indecipherable algorithm. They stand out brightly against the translucent glass, but also against apparently less regular arcs that I mistook at first for paint on the floor. I imagined that Rivane Neuenschwander was contrasting the virtual space of digital art with the real space of older media, with the ample space of a room, and with the still ampler and more virtual space of perception.

In point of fact, the drop ceiling holds circles of tissue paper, and fans blow them freely about. Those static patches on the floor had simply slipped through the cracks, and visitors before me had trodden them underfoot. One can wait quite a while to see their fall, and it brings perception further down to earth to catch not a falling star or a shower of rose petals, but gravity pulling their masses equally and inexorably to the ground. At least one woman artist has broken the glass ceiling. And then, for one last twist of perception, one has to marvel at their number—all from that very day. The gallery sweeps up every evening.

I have asked one to see new media not as a message, a mere expression of technology, but as mappings of contemporary art. When Neuenschwander skips high-tech algorithms, she alters the landscape. Minimalism, as with Sol LeWitt confronts conceptual logic with the viewer's perception of something organic. So do digital interpretations of real-time data. In contrast, the Brazilian artist uses a mechanism that incorporates chance to probe one's own imposition of order. I think of the colored paper as less nostalgia for the hand-made than surrender to simplicity and happenstance.

Still, Neuenschwander does like to pull the plug as another Brazilian, Tunga, never can. The back room displays a manual typewriter, and the rest of her exhibition depends on it. On paper, she shapes arbitrary, typed characters into large block letters and equally simple images. Nearer the entrance, she displays apparent night skies constructed from paper circles, all punched out of The Arabian Nights—as if she has no more tales left to keep herself alive. These works feel like throwbacks, to familiar classroom exercises or Dada poetry. She does best when she abandons literal disruptions of textual narratives so that visitors can create their own.

Thanks to Bill Dolson, one can still hope for a passing shower. He fills the Manhattan skyline with meteor showers, and he fills the room as well, with multiple projections, each from a different vantage point. The cosmic events do not look terribly apocalyptic. They do not even look terribly real. However, the surrounding images defamiliarize space, much as the synthetic tracks across otherwise unvarying landscapes disrupt time. Besides, New York's own magic makes up for any lack of digital wizardry—and with luck artists from Kusama to Dolson want one questioning the primacy of science and technology, too.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Yayoi Kusama ran at Robert Miller through November 25, 2006, Nick Cave at Jack Shainman through November 11, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at Paula Cooper through October 21, Natalie Jeremijenko at Postmasters through October 7, Rivane Neuenschwander ran at Tanya Bonakdar through October 14, and Bill Dolson at Eyebeam through October 21.