Pick an Artist

John Haber
in New York City

Haber's Reviews . . . by Artist or Critic

Even after Postmodernism, the best way into art is through its creators and interpreters. So take your pick! I list many group shows as well, all now alphabetized. (A search accepts their names, too.)

I have loved, learned from, and derided all too many artists and critics. Here I list those I rely on most to unravel art history. My articles often spotlight large museum shows, rather than the galleries I more often visit, because others will know them—and because they allow me more space to think and to dream. Need more help? Try this handy glossary of art terms.

Abramovic

For twelve days Marina Abramovic plays, literally, the starving artist. In The House with the Ocean View, do she and gallery visitors share an energy field or a dark complicity?

When does a woman staring back constitute a self-portrait, and when does her sexuality become instead vulnerability or even stardom? Rebecca Horn flies close to death in early videos, Marina Abramovic alleges "erotic rituals," and Roni Horn turns her camera on another woman.

Should one trace motion in painting and new media to illusion, vision, or physical sensation? "<Alt> Digital Media" and "Video Acts" get one thinking, with heavy lifting from Marina Abramovic, Bruce Nauman, and others.

Art cries out for a great alternative space, but as alternative to what? I find out at the reopened P.S 1, especially in rooms by John Coplans, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Robert Wogan, and Marina Abramovic—whose art creates a dark politics of memory.

Aitken

Terence Koh floods a museum with light and Jesper Just sets off fireworks, while Doug Aitken illuminates three sides of a museum tower. Have they located new media in sensual experience or the multiplex?

Akerman

What happens when a Jew and an avant-garde film maker confronts echos of the past? Chantal Akerman looks at Eastern Europe after the Cold War.

Albers

When Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy came to America, did they bring fine art, sound design, or more consumer products? "From the Bauhaus to the New World," James Turrell, and "Aspects, Forms, and Figures" all have one asking.

With Homage to the Square, Josef Albers showed how long a painter could persevere in his art. Did American Modernism need his European rigor?

Does painting have critics "Seeing Red"? A survey at Hunter College, influenced by Josef Albers, starts with the psychology of color, but Walter Biggs, James Nares, Nancy Scheinman, and Gregg Stone have something else in mind.

Allen

In "Headlines," such artists as Jonathan Allen, Carlo Vialu, and Amy Wilson confront, appropriate, and literally make headlines. When art and politics intersect, why must they meet on such contested ground? A second part looks at controversy surrounding the show itself.

Alsoudani

What ever happened to violence in art about Iraq, and what makes it so sexy? Ahmed Alsoudani and Raymond Pettibon.

Altmejd

David Altmejd, Pipilotti Rist, Julianne Swartz, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Jane and Louise Wilson are back, Jonathan Cramer channels Jackson Pollock, and Bjorn Melhus changes the channels on Jerry Springer. Is Chelsea truly over the top?

Alter

Robert Alter's brand of literary interpretation praises works like the Bible, where there are so many voices that even God may not have the final say. When he too takes up arms against dissenting voices, those left-wing academics, should postmodernists be running for cover—or chortling?

Altfest

"They are amazing," writes John Ashbery in his poem "Some Trees." How can still-life from Ellen Altfest, an actual dead tree from Anya Gallaccio, and an apparent science experiment from Olafur Eliasson all reach for amazement?

Alvanson

When an artist documents the world, is she engaged in directed dreaming? In an interview, Kristen Alvanson finds "the rigorous bastardization of dream."

Amorales

Can installation art reveal a hidden New York? Carlos Amorales, Urs Fischer, Mike Nelson, and Reynold Reynolds dig deep.

Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet

Can the experience of a book stretch from one mind to a household and out to an entire public world? A "Medieval Housebook" suggests how, set alongside shows of "the Medieval world" and of controversial works by Giotto and others from Assisi.

Andre

Had enough of the war on terrorism and struggles over memorials to 9/11? Carl Andre and M. Meshulam lower the volume.

Not long ago Carl Andre took a long last look at the oldest gallery in Soho. Is his Minimalism getting chillier in a postmodern age or even more inviting?

Andrea del Sarto

When Andrea del Sarto paints The Sacrifice of Isaac, should one identify with Abraham's dilemma or the look in Isaac's eyes? A selection of "European Painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art" offers an unusually intimate history of Western art.

Angelico

Can one really reconstruct the art of Fra Angelico from his days as a workshop assistant and without his frescoes or major altarpieces? Maybe not, but one may see the birth of the Italian Renaissance instead.

Antonello

Painting is dead, people say every few years, but did it have a birth, too? The Italian Renaissance had to discover oil painting, and Antonello da Messina made that discovery stick.

Antoni

Has art become more fragile or only a critic's authority? Janine Antoni, Amy Bennett, Matthew Geller, Kevin Hanley, Peter Sarkisian, David Shapiro, and E. E. Smith put them both to the test.

Arbus

Diane Arbus may make everyone look weird, but she first has to make everyone look. How did she catch you looking, too?

Arcangel

What distinguishes digital art from boys playing with their boy toys? New media looks for definitions in old-fashioned contraptions by Cory Arcangel, Charlotte Becket, and Tim Hawkinson.

Armstrong

What does this Jackson Pollock mean to you? John Armstrong thinks that art's value lies in something very personal, but the Gere collection, of some sixty early landscape sketches in oil, shows how personal reveries in art took shape not all that long ago.

avaf

Arthur C. Danto calls his essay on Peter Fischli and David Weiss "The Artist as Prime Mover." Why, then, do they, Andy Goldsworthy, avaf, Alexander Lee, and so many others seem intent on trashing the gallery?

Avedon

Can Modernism accept fashion photography only by denying its aims? Richard Avedon can look pretty classy anyhow.

Baechler

Can Soho recover memories of modernity? Donald Baechler, Stephen Westfall, Wendell McRae, and Tim Hawkinson take on the construction job—with everything from abstract painting and photography to machine parts.

Baerveldt

Would a feminist display an empty dress and nurse a mannequin like a sick child? Erzstbet Baerveldt reflects movingly on the perplexities of a woman artist.

Balincourt

Can fall in Chelsea start any sooner? Jules de Balincourt, Liset Castillo, Dean Monogenis, Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher, and others pack the city.

Ball

Does art take science—or vice versa? David Hockney cannot keep either one straight, while Philip Ball brings them together in a fascinating history of color.

Barney

One year late, Matthew Barney has finally come out on video, if only at the Guggenheim. Does his five-part cycle gives new meaning to museum blockbusters?

Has art become a product of museum advertising, one-of-a-kind genius, or just a lucky accident? For Michael Kimmelman, Lina Bertucci, and Matthew Barney, they all add up to star power, and Hal Foster wants to know why.

B. Bartlett

What defines conservative art—an accessible artist, an academy of fine art, or a sober realist at home in one? William Wegman and his dog emerge from the calendars, the National Academy Museum Annual from 181 years of torpor, and Bo Bartlett from the American tradition.

Does realism stand for representational truth, a style and a means of representation, or a period or two in art history? A tour from Giotto and Jan van Eyck to the American Realism of Thomas Eakins, George Bellows, and John Sloan leaves open the puzzles that Bo Bartlett and others are solving today.

J. Bartlett

With Rhapsody, Jennifer Bartlett took painting apart, but could all the king's horses after Modernism put it together again? With "Against the Grain," the Edward R. Broida collection tries to fill a gap, both in the Modern's permanent collection and contemporary art's history.

Baselitz

Fifteen years later, can George Baselitz still set the art world on its head? Just try it in the Guggenheim's already titled rooms.

Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat projected countless many words and images onto himself? At his retrospective, does self-expression became one more image of the artist?

Did Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists of the 1980s sell out, get forced out, or aspire to move out all along? "East Village USA" evokes a scene of experiment and entrepreneurship, like a trial run for art today.

Did Andy Warhol decline from artist into celebrity, or was he asking for it all along? A film about Jean-Michel Basquiat—an artist who knew celebrity all too well—does not shy away from Warhol's late work.

Bassano

Can art from Toledo means more than El Greco? From Ohio, the Toledo Museum shows art history's grappling with humanity and nature in such figures as El Greco, Piero di Cosimo, and Jacob Bassano, while Spain and St. John the Divine set aside "Time to Hope."

Batchelor

Can art set color free and design free the mind, without both adding still more stifling constraints? "Color Chart: Reinventing Color," inspired by Donald Batchelor, and "Design and the Elastic Mind" pursue two postmodern utopias.

Baudelaire

If Charles Baudelaire distrusted Impressionism, how can his Paris streets stand for the birth of Modernism? I call it just part of the postmodern paradox.

Bauer

Philip Taaffe erects totems, John Bauer ghostly architecture, Julian Lethbridge textbook Pollocks, and Jonathan Lasker abstraction as a kind of graphic novel. Has abstract art really gotten over irony?

Bauhaus

Bearden

Romare Bearden identifies with the Renaissance—the one in Harlem and the one in Italy, too. Can one still call his collage Pop Art or an African American voice of the 1960s?

Becket

What distinguishes digital art from boys playing with their boy toys? New media looks for definitions in old-fashioned contraptions by Charlotte Becket, Cory Arcangel, and Tim Hawkinson.

Beckmann

Did Max Beckmann disdain Modernism or bring it to Germany? From a brutal, mythic past to a decadent, impoverished present, Beckmann confronts a nation's masks.

Bellini

In the postmodern age, is there still such a thing as overinterpretation? A painting in the Frick by Giovanni Bellini sheds some breathtaking light.

Bellows

Benglis

After feminism, how does one tell the good girls from the bad girls? Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Anna Gaskell, and Margaret Murphy prefer not to say.

Does a dark opening with sharp teeth, sculpture like frozen lava, or a look of desire buried in the mask of a clown suggest a male artist's wrestling with industrial scrap—not to mention deeper fears about female sexuality? Lynda Benglis, Lee Bontecou, and Cindy Sherman show that a woman artist can make the story more complicated yet.

Do Chelsea's once idealistic galleries now form a business district—or a theater district? Michael Fried argued that "theatricality" precedes and follows modern art, and he could have been arguing with me as I checked out such artists as Cindy Sherman, Richard Tsao, castaneda/reiman, Deborah Turville, Scott Tunick, and Lynda Benglis.

Bennett

Whose life is this anyway? Amy Bennett, Robert Doisneau, Neo Rauch, and Sophie Calle all have deceptively traditional, penetrating views of realism, and their tales unfold against a complex world, but they bring one on intimate terms with the human comedy.

Has art become more fragile or only a critic's authority? Amy Bennett, Janine Antoni, Matthew Geller, Kevin Hanley, Peter Sarkisian, David Shapiro, and E. E. Smith put them both to the test.

Bertucci

Betancourt

Should one trace motion in painting and new media to illusion, vision, or physical sensation? Daniel Rozin looks in the mirror, Michael Betancourt in pop psychology, Diller Scofidio + Renfro at the spy camera, and Peter Paul Rubens into his own heart.

Bidlo

Mike Bidlo creates emblems of the postmodern museum, like his turning Marcel Duchamp into bathroom wallpaper, alongside Tom Merrick's inflatable green dinosaur and Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's bird house out at P.S. 1. Do these twists on the museum look any different, now that the Museum of Modern Art has bought that Contemporary Arts Center lock, stock, and toilet?

Biggs

Biesenbach/Walker

Can art, as Dave Hickey demands, still "civilize us"? The enormous futon that Klaus Biesenbach and Wendall Walker call Volume, SHoP's manic sculpture garden by the name of Dunescape, and "Around 1984" with its look at the 1980s do their best, but Barbara Kruger wittily refuses to try.

Blackmon

Julie Blackmon, Clark and Pougnaud, Thomas Demand, Benjamin Fink, and Alex Prager make photography at once domestic and fantastic. Can anyone tell what they create, what they stage, what they find, and what they manipulate?

Blaine

Does abstraction really have to stand for painting, as if meanings stood still apart from art and culture? Skip over the decades with Nell Blaine, Milton Resnick, Anne Truitt, Sean Scully, and Simon Lee, and see if the whole idea of abstraction is still standing.

Blake

Is it just a few years ago that Soho felt like a carnival? I offer a light, off-the-cuff summer 1994 tour, with the most space to Michael Heizer, Jenny Holzer, Laurie Simmons, and Nayland Blake—who sees that art has something in common with both sides of a certain kinky philosopher.

When I think of sex, violence, and sheer play, am I talking about childhood or art? "Visions of Childhood" at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center lets Nayland Blake, Lewis Carroll, Nan Goldin, Grace Goldsmith, Laurie Simmons, and others ask just that.

Bloom

Do collecting and mirroring add up to narcissism? Barbara Bloom puts real and imaginary museums through their paces, while Beth Campbell acts the same wherever she goes.

Bluemner

Who knew that prewar American art had such an explosion of color? Oscar Bluemner starts as an architect and draftsman, only to reinvent himself in New York, exhibit in some heady modern company, and die almost forgotten.

Blum

When Rachel Whiteread casts common objects, does she leave monuments or their absence? She flirts with grandeur, but Sydney Blum restores sculpture to kitchen duty.

Blunt

How many lives had Anthony Blunt? Surely the specialist in Nicolas Poussin and the Cambridge spy have nothing at all in common—beyond the complexities of a life, of scholarship, and of their time.

Bois

What most hurts contemporary art, a lowering of standards in the name of critical theory—or a commodity culture that breeds amnesia about past experiments? A new textbook by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh upsets conservative critics by daring to ask.

Bontecou

Does a dark opening with sharp teeth, sculpture like frozen lava, or a look of desire buried in the mask of a clown suggest a male artist's wrestling with industrial scrap—not to mention deeper fears about female sexuality? Lee Bontecou, Lynda Benglis, and Cindy Sherman show that a woman artist can make the story more complicated yet.

Bonvicini

As installation art takes over, can any sculpture garden bother with plants or a gallery with real life? Monica Bonvicini, "In Practice" for 2007, and Jannis Kounellis give it a try.

Botero

Which supplies the most grisly erotic theory—high heels in the mud, Abu Ghraib, or gold chains? Marilyn Minter, Fernando Botero, and "The Gold Standard" know what is naughty and nice.

Boucher

François Boucher found his models in women, children, and art. Can his drawings rescue for modern eyes a workaholic's confusion of artifice and observation?

Bouchet

How did so much earth and the dark corners of New York streets get inside? Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset create an underground End Station, Peter Wegner a paper labyrinth, and Mike Bouchet a pungent alternative to Walter de Maria, while emerging artists "Make It Now."

Bourgeois

After feminism, how does one tell the good girls from the bad girls? Louise Bourgeois, Lynda Benglis, Anna Gaskell, and Margaret Murphy and prefer not to say.

Boursier-Mougenot

What has invaded Chelsea in the fall—birds, meteor showers, drugs, or just art? Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Yayoi Kusama, and Rivane Neuenschwander have their own ways of looking to the sky.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's bird house creates an emblem of the postmodern museum, alongside Mike Bidlo's turning Marcel Duchamp into bathroom wallpaper and Tom Merrick's inflatable green dinosaur bird house out at P.S. 1. Do these twists on the museum look any different, now that the Museum of Modern Art has bought that Contemporary Arts Center lock, stock, and toilet?

How long will Chelsea offer a mix of warehouses, idealism, chic, and big money? In late 1999 it at least has room for Postmodernism, laughter, and laser-cut tears, including Andreas Slominski, Gary Hill, Eric Magnuson, Diane Samuels, and Céleste Boursier-Mougenot.

Bradley

Slater Bradley, Lucas Samaras, and John F. Simon, Jr., remake their image and surrender the copyright. With Macs so expensive and bytes so cheap, what else is a digital artist to do?

Brancusi

How many postmodernists can dance on the head of a pedestal? Constantin Brancusi takes sculpture off base.

Brannon

Can art escape the prison house of language? Zen advertising from Matthew Brannon, a labyrinth of quotes from Joseph Kosuth, and an excised library by Simryn Gill lay a trap of words.

Braque

Can one locate the origins of modern art in something other than painting? Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso may not have discovered Cubism in film, but Henri Matisse sure knew textiles, and Stuart Davis literally drew on New York.

Breton

Could André Breton get enough sex? With "Surrealism: Desire Unbound" and Salvador Dalí the Met allows Breton's movement plenty of desire, but too small a revolution and not nearly enough madness.

Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition

For once, can outdoor sculpture evoke the lazy months of summer? In 2005, Sol LeWitt, "Set and Drift" on Governor's Island, "Sport" in Socrates Sculpture Park, and an incarnation of "Between the Bridges" called "Rapture" all give it a try.

How long will New York look to the sky at Ground Zero? Outdoor installations in 2003 from Wim Delvoye, the Socrates Sculpture Park, and "Between the Bridges" have one reimagining the ground below.

Can art find common ground for grieving? A path lies from Ground Zero to Brian Tolle's Irish Hunger Memorial and the BWAC twentieth anniversary of sculpture "Between the Bridges."

Bronson

How can science and art intersect, and, if they cannot, will opposites attract? Jessica Bronson, "Produced at Eyebeam 2005," Mark Dion, Michal Rovner, and Jacob van Ruisdael feel the attraction.

Brookner

When Anita Brookner looks at Romanticism, she sees only discontents and infinite longings. So what makes Caspar David Friedrich's Moonwatchers so at home with nature in turmoil, the darkness of night, and the far-away heavens?

C. Brown

What could be more academic these days than abstract art, except maybe turning against it? Cecily Brown has to make one ask, but along with James Hyde and Rebecca Purdum, she may offer too many answers.

D. Brown

After five years in Iraq, can art have mere intimations of disaster? Deborah Brown, Paul Chan, Joy Garnett, Lucien Samaha, and Meg Webster reveal the anxious artist.

Bruegel

When Pieter Bruegel and Jacob Lawrence created work for reproduction, how seriously did they take themselves and all that moralizing? Perhaps it takes a little high seriousness to create a truly popular art.

From Jan van Eyck to Pieter Bruegel, can such shimmering, personal art have emerged from a shared workshop? When a museum opens its own back rooms, two institutions come under the spotlight.

Buchloh

Buren

Does the Guggenheim still have a place for art? Daniel Buren, Hilla Rebay, and Jorge Oteiza take one back to the Museum of Non-Objective Painting and forward once again, to museum empires and empty ramps.

Busse

Summer and photography alike promise a window onto nature. How, then, do Dietmar Busse, Roger Ricco, and Sharon Lockhart present "Mutilated/Cultivated Environments"?

Still more names!

jhaber@haberarts.com