haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

Gutai came late to the party, but what a party! That could describe the entire course of postwar Japanese art, in a nation with deeper shocks on its mind than Modernism.

It could have left a stale, tepid rehash of Abstract Expressionist New York. (Remember the scathing tone with which critics once pronounced Joan Mitchell or Helen Frankenthaler “second generation”?) It could have meant a subtle revisioning of western art through eastern eyes, much as the Guggenheim in 2009 pronounced a view in the opposite direction “The Third Mind.” It could have imbued abstraction’s splashes, drips, and tears with echoes of devastation and rebuilding.

Now the Guggenheim finds all three, but something else as well. The Gutai Art Association, founded in a town near Osaka in 1954, had the advantage of its distance from both Tokyo and the west. It could start relatively fresh—fresh enough to see one change after another in western art and to relish the turmoil. Its collective activities parallel not just painting, but Fluxus, Black Mountain, Yves Klein, and the happenings of the 1960s still to come.

In this mad scramble of places, times, and movements, one spends most of the show in the 1950s while “Somebody to Love” plays from across the ramp. Gutai came late, but it partied like there was no tomorrow.

To be sure, the group started with Jackson Pollock. Its publication featured Pollock’s spread in Life magazine, and it invited Life to come document it as well. When the founder, Yoshihara Jirō, set out a chalkboard with the invitation to “draw freely,” he was collectivizing Abstract Expressionism. And visitors have responded by spilling color onto the wooden frame and support. Jirō bows to tradition, too, as with a calligraphic black painting broken by a white impasto circle. It is hard not also to think of destruction after a bomb.

Gutai’s manifestos, though, have almost no trace of deference, tradition, or darkness. They speak to “today’s consciousness” and “a new autonomous space for pure creativity.” Some projects reached out to children. “Gutai: Splendid Playground,” through May 8, invites one to step inside Yamazaki Tsuruko’s red vinyl cube from its outdoor exhibition of 1955. It uses video to track the making of art right down to The Drama of Man and Matter in 1970. One can hardly complain if the museum’s crowds and their cell phones ruin the contemplative and collective spirit.

Maybe one has to ruin the spirit in order to appreciate it. The installation runs chronologically, while each floor has a nominal theme such as “play” and “performance.” Yet something serious underlies the glib optimism and helps connect the movement’s competing versions of eastern and western art. Its name means concreteness, and it spoke from the beginning of not separating spirit and matter. Where conceptual art often leaves a physical or documentary record, it can make a point instead of its own vanishing, like the invitation from Yoko Ono to cut away her dress. Although Mukai Shūji burned all his work in 1961, Shiraga Kazuo’s mud wrestling left a work of art.

So did Yoshida Toshio’s burns in a panel, Tanak Atsuko’s sand drawing, Montonaga Sadamasa’s nails coming out of a pillar, Shiraga Fukiko’s bullet holes, Uemae Chiyū’s glue and sawdust, Shimamoto Shōzō’s hurled bottles of paint, or Murikami Saburō’s passing right through the canvas—and the leftover unsettles the closure of a performance just as deconstruction would predict. The colors and compositions can seem as heavy as any second generation’s, much like Tachisme in France and Arte Povera in Italy—but then the first does derive from a word for stain, and the latter tore apart the work of art.

By the end, the movement left more shiny objects and bright lights, looking quainter and quainter on successive visits, but it partied hardest long before psychedelia. The Guggenheim gives more weight than expected to the performance, while Hauser & Wirth recently, through last October 27, gave more weight to polished works of art. That makes sense, given the priorities of museum revisionism and gallery sales, but one needs them both. For Gutai, the spirit requires a concrete remainder.

Note: I have added this as a postscript to a longer recent review of “Tokyo: A New Avant-Garde” at the Museum of Modern Art, to fill out my latest upload. That show had room for Gutai, the subject an an earlier museum retrospective and review, and this fills out the picture.

I had been wondering where Cordy Ryman went. Well, not really, since he has pursued his gallery’s meanderings through smaller spaces and art fairs. Still, that could have entailed certain compromises, especially for an artist who leaves one so unsure when to call a work site specific. At the very least, he had to dismantle a ten-foot triangle over the desk when his last dealer departed the Bowery.

I should not have worried. He may well have taken some of it with him, to the Visual Art Center of New Jersey through March 24, to help piece together some of his largest work yet. He is also back on the Lower East Side, through May 12, for a fuller picture yet. Lumber never had it so good.

Windowboxing expands on a triangle, with a bit of a plateau on top, to cover much of a museum wall. It must have burst apart here and there in the process. The wood tiling has become open squares of varying sizes, like stretchers or picture frames in search of canvas—or like his earlier Door (pictured here). Many nestle within others, upright or diagonally, as if in storage, while two by fours tilted up and out to hold up the rest. I should hate to call it a system of support. The brightly colored inside edges, in yellow and red, and ample surrounding space add to the work’s lightness and resemblance to plain old painting.

Others with him at the Center, in Summit, New Jersey, obsess way too much over painting without actually doing it. In Katie Armstrong’s hand-drawn animation, the male narrator fantasizes about meeting Frida Kahlo on a train, before she morphs into a force of nature—running deer, to be precise. Less charmingly, Jordan Eagles pours real blood from a slaughterhouse into Plexiglas and resin. Just in case any of his Red Giants does not glow suitably enough or reek enough of death, he backs some with copper. At least Andres Serrano and Chris Ofili came by their precious bodily fluids the old-fashioned way, with a Catholic upbringing. Here the only “Sensation” is kitsch.

As Windowboxing suggests, Ryman is sparring with the architecture, just as in his corner pieces that never quite mount a stairwell or a room. He is also playing with the old metaphor of a painting as a window onto the world—here with multiple windows looking every which way and none. One might think, too, of Allan McCollum’s “surrogate paintings,” those frames and matte surrounding only black, but without the hectoring, dismissive irony. Ryman always leaves open the possibility for painting, geometry, the handmade, and art as object, very much like his father, Robert Ryman. He just has to start again from their scraps. And that includes the scraps of his past.

In the next largest piece, scraps of art and other debris compete on an equal footing. One of four rectangular fields recycles wood from an older work, while the other three settle for whatever he can find. Each imperfect tiling has its own color scheme, in close shades of fluorescent paint or in nothing but wood. The differences suggest the logic of theme and variations in older hard-edged abstraction, another kind of recycling, but without a fixed vocabulary of primary colors. The pattern could even serve Ryman as his flag painting, after you know who. Then again, the changes could simply point out how much room is left to play around.

If smaller panels do less to engage the architecture and sometimes elude me as well, still they insist that, all along, the scraps are of painting. In fact, back in New York at Dodge, for what the gallery calls “Adaptive Radiation,” Ryman puts painting and two-by-fours through even more paces.

They can disrupt the image or the picture plane, collide again with their frames and the corners of a room, or cluster with so little paint that one might not even notice how their varying lengths reshape the rectangle. One variation on his early corner pieces looks like little more than a branch blown in from the street, except for its bands of color.

Again the two largest paintings play off the gallery most effectively. One set of slim beams angles off the floor, slides up, and arcs past the stairs, only to return across from where they began. His Rafterweb Scrapwall comes almost to the top of the two-tiered space beyond, as well as out onto the floor, like a majestic Islamic carpet. If all that starts from squares, each square distinguished by the disarray of smaller blocks within it, they are building and scrapping abstraction.

Note: I have wrapped this into a longer article, containing earlier reviews of Cordy Ryman and others. I have also revised it for continuity and, I hope, a fuller appreciation of the artist. I have written elsewhere about other  recent shows that work with the scraps of abstraction.

In Dante’s Inferno, in the seventh circle of hell, suicides have become trees, with harpies eating away their leaves and nesting in the branches. It is a pain lasting through eternity. For Mary Hrbacek, too, a forest has human longings. She gives trees human limbs and gestures. They reach out, often toward one another, and at least once they touch. Now and then, they may even find creature comforts.

Hrbacek did not have The Divine Comedy in mind or a watercolor on the theme by William Blake. She has no harpies, although goats nestle in one small acrylic. Where Blake hints at beings trapped within sturdy trunks, in one case upside-down, hers are the trees—their temptingly familiar forms all right side up. Still, her titles speak of unfulfilled desires, Reaching and Imploring. The twisted, leafless branches contain demons. She mostly cuts her trees off from the ground, much less from their roots.

They are not just suffering. The associations in her artist statement run from fantasy to her favorite tree in Central Park. The paintings, too, are neither entirely naturalistic nor folklike. Skies run to mostly flat backgrounds in shades between silver, blue, and green, and one title accepts graciously how much the bark looks like camouflage. The ambivalence extends to trees as monarch and wanderer, witch and bewitched, and she clearly identifies with both sides of the story. Most are women, but their sensuality does not depend on that.

As with Lisa Yuskavage, one could grow skeptical of the drama, along with the occasional boobs or butts. One tree has the smile of a cartoon lizard. For all that, Hrbacek is softening contours and extending her range. At Creon through April 30, she smudges charcoal into paper, creating multiple blacks, and one painting, unstretched, extends from floor to ceiling, cut from an eighteen-foot roll of linen. It also has gradations of light in the sky and no hint of a face. As it happens, the greater naturalism goes with more extreme gestures, particularly in charcoal, but also in the nine-foot tree’s thin limbs and the hollow stump of a lost branch.

Hrbacek is closer in spirit to Romanticism than to the contemporary urban and suburban theater of John Currin. And American art has a long history of parallels between human relations, humanity and the land, and art and nature—what Asher B. Durand called Kindred Spirits. Even a poet as postmodern as John Ashbery wrote of “Some Trees” as “amazing: Each / joining a neighbor,” so that “you and I / Are suddenly what the trees try / To tell us we are.”

Louise Dudis is on still more intimate terms with trees, but the real thing. As her show puts it, at Robert Henry through April 28, she brings one at “Eye Level with the Smallest Leaf”—and then some. Her camera picks out the texture of bark and lichen like pigment on canvas, with the leaves a firmer background. She does not, however, work small. Successive prints set side by side create a larger panorama from a single tree, the small gaps between them bringing the picture plane that closer. One could mistake them for a fisheye perspective except for the mass at the center, and one could mistake its twists and turns for taking place in real time, only the motion is all hers then and yours now.

I always thought that Dante’s punishment for suicides is unbearably harsh, given that they would not have come to their fates without suffering in life. At the end of Purgatory, though, he comes to another tree, the Tree of Knowledge, and allows it to bloom.

Photography has finally outgrown smart phones. With Thomas Ruff, at David Zwirner through April 27, even Mars looks small by comparison.

Make that ma.r.s., short for NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Survey—and the source of high-res images for some equally high-tech photo-manipulation. The planet’s surface looks dizzying enough on its own, thank you, but Ruff overprints it in two colors. Put on the cheap 3D glasses, the kind with red and green lenses, and you can imagine walking right into its craters. Unlike the prints and the gallery, they barely contain you. A second series runs taller still. At just under eight feet, the swirling abstractions have lost any hint of their origins as photograms, beyond their ghostly contrast between black and white.

You may also feel manipulated, because you are. From only a few feet away, Ruff’s Mars looks all but flat. Yet to experience a crater’s actual size, one would have to step back. And photograms, by definition, are the direct imprint of objects, on a photosensitive surface exposed to light. Whatever happens on this scale to the thing itself, from Man Ray and Surrealism to E. E. Smith—or its ghostly forgetting? Is it worth the artist’s grand gesture, all to bring photography closer to László Moholy-Nagy, the origins of abstraction, and fine art?

Not that photography was waiting till now to think big. Ruff turned monumental twenty-five years ago, with faces too cropped to count as portraits rather than presences. Thomas Struth captures museum interiors at nearly life size, to put the institution and viewer alike on the spot, while Thomas Demand projects his paper models on much the same scale. (What is it with these Germans named Thomas?) Even Richard Misrach has felt the temptation to print his American landscapes larger than before, including his new beach pictures at Pace through June 29, like an overworked artist’s summer vacation. Grandeur has become the norm in other ways as well, as with displays in series for Bernd and Hilla Becher.

It can mean a grander time scale as well, as with the camera obscura for Vera Lutter—or with long exposures and seven continents for Darren Almond. Thierry Cohen, for another, photographs glittering skies, but the skylines are dark, doctored to dim their artificial lights. He shot the stars from a different location, halfway around the world, then merged it with the city, as if nature had taken its revenge. (Cohen shares Danziger with Lloyd Ziff’s photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith from 1968 and 1969, and that means in retrospect competing with the best of them, but they will never, ever look so innocent again.) Does it matter that Cohen’s stars, through May 4, would in fact have shown above the city at just the right time? Maybe not, any more than it matters just what Ruff used for his photograms, for photography is thinking big.

But why? One answer is simply the technology that makes this resolution possible, and I do not mean the iPhone. (See, the devil made me do it—or at least made me buy larger and larger printers.) Painting since Abstract Expressionism and Gerhard Richter has supplied models as well, as have Minimalism’s theater and Postmodernism’s assault on the natural. Ruff, Demand, Cohen, and Jeff Wall are all staging rather than documenting the world before them. Without the glasses, Ruff’s colored streaks look downright painterly.

Photography always had aspirations. “Faking It,” at the Met through January 27, went back before Photoshop, including the leap into the void from Yves Klein that erased his safety net. “Photography and the American Civil War,” through September 2, shows the medium reaching for an impact from the very start, with stereo views of the dead. That does not even count conventions borrowed from painting, such as posing soldiers with their weapons. Later, Alfred Stieglitz was at the center of American Modernism, and he was never just taking pictures. With another recent trend, keeping Polaroids alive, photographers may seem nostalgic for simpler times—but the slow pace of “instant photography” rebels against snapshots in its own way.

Do monumental prints, then, merely update past excesses for big markets? Maybe, but money changes everything. If you think of Ruff as lobby art, you will not be surprised to find his Mars in the lobby for Gagosian up on Madison Avenue. It you think of him instead as shooting holes in convention, transforming Modernism into manipulation, you can relish the beauty and the transformation. Then again, if you worry that collectors now take pride in seeing through conventions, too, who am I to argue? Sometimes the most vivid pictures are shallower than they appear.

Let me tell you a story, about a white kid in New York. Yes, “Blues for Smoke” surveys some fifty years of mostly African American art, at the Whitney Museum through through April 28, but this is all about telling stories. It is also the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload.

This white kid is listening to jazz, a lot of jazz, free jazz, the freer the better. He never thought he would listen to jazz at all, but this is not his parents’ music. It has the crazy rhythms and clashing harmonies of the rock he had found not all that long before, in nights at CBGB on the Bowery—but with far more virtuosity and even more of the poetry. It has the equally crazy, clashing personalities that a kid just out of college can appreciate, like Sun Ra, for whom “space is the place.” Rigorous and demanding, it holds out the promise that music naturally finds its future. In all that, it is also like art.

At least it is like the art that he had come to New York to create. This is around 1980, when one could nurse a drink through a set without a cover almost anywhere in the Village, and jazz is one of the few pleasures that a young painter can afford—except for galleries and museums. And those have their share of shocks, too. Apparently, there is more to art, much more, than a relentless march toward abstraction. Come to think of it, going back past John Coltrane, to classic jazz and the blues, there is more to music, too. Maybe it is time to listen harder, both to what is changing now and to his parents’ music as well.

For one thing, he might notice that there is more to jazz than abstraction. For African Americans, there has to be. Jazz is a part of their heritage and their identity—and their contribution to the culture and identity of others, too. So is music a matter of tradition or form, the vernacular or high culture, identity or ambiguity? What about art? “Blues for Smoke” asks just that, but without waiting for an answer, and of course what lingers throughout is what can constitute art or race, when subject matter or science cannot. Alternately resonant and confusing, it is less a history of African American art than a quirky guide to the present, with a great soundtrack.

When “Blues for Smoke” misses, often as not it is aiming high. It asks what jazz or the blues means for others, black and white alike. It insists on the importance of African American art by not setting it apart from others, much as Kira Lynn Harris calls her silvery wallpaper by the stairs Blues for Breuer (as in Marcel Breuer of the famous chair and the Bauhaus). And then it asks how the broader culture (or my white kid) understands what it sees and hears. It does not identify artists as black or white, and you may find yourself wishing you knew. And then you may find yourself feeling guilty that you asked.

Context here is everything, starting with music. It starts right in the lobby gallery, with four musicians on video performing a composition by Albert Ayler, the sharp-edged tenor sax player of “energy music,” who died in 1960 at only thirty-four. Stan Douglas uses both sides of the screen for the performance, with the soloist on one side. On the other side of Hors-Champs (“off camera,” or literally “out of field”), musicians wipe their brows, hold their instruments poised to their lips, withhold them again, and finally kick in. While they amount to outtakes from an actual music video, the two sides come together seamlessly in real time. One feels not only questions about space and meaning, but also like being there.

One can enjoy the show as simply a smart curator’s wildly personal choices. Bennett Simpson of LA MOCA consulted with Glenn Ligon, the artist, which explains much of the time frame. In a sense, the entire show is an artist’s improvisation. One can take it, too, as a present moment coming together—obsessed, as Sigmund Freud would be glad to see, with a generation ago. If art seems stuck in the past right now, one can take this show as an assertion that artists are still creating. And then it gives their rootlessness its roots.

I hope you checked out Darren Almond on a busy day. He may not literally take your breath away, but he may well leave you wondering about the status of life on earth.

One way or other, the British photographer is in a position to know. He manages to cover all seven continents, from polar ice under an icy-white sky to tropical waters bathed in light. One could have crossed the planet at Matthew Marks, through April 21, just by turning one’s head. Judging by the distances and the dates, he must have moved fast, but he sure took his time along the way. He often worked by moonlight, the exposures taking up to an hour. Another photo shows the traces of planets or stars, in broken but still perfect circles in the sky.

They are breathtaking enough—and not only because of scale, although the show has room for only sixteen. (Hey, there are plenty bigger out there these days, when art in search of sales is so often out to impress.) They are also very much composed. One sees the drama of a waterfall from behind a black outcropping and a long horizontal of jagged cliffs from the air. A bright river rises up past bare branches and its own shallow eddies, before disappearing behind trees beneath distant mountains. Woods make their dark cross like a scar on a verdant plain.

In each case, the foreground invites one in while keeping one out. The cliffs could be a flyover with nowhere to land, the bright river the start of a journey in some epic trilogy yet to be filmed. Almond’s forbidding point of view no doubt helps determine the size of the prints: anything smaller would make contemplating danger easy, as for Richard Misrach—and anything larger would immerse one in the landscapes, as in Chernobyl for Diana Thater. Almond’s own video installation two years back purported to describe a monk’s “walking meditation,” but there is no easy walking or meditating here.

One cannot even find one’s way around. The pictures are not arranged geographically, like a National Geographic special or guided tour, and their titles, although specific when it comes to place and time, do not bother to name the continent or nation. The tropics and star trails are in Hawaii, the waterfall in Iceland, the river in Colorado, and the grass in New Zealand, but I know only because I have access to the Web. No human beings are visible to call any of them their home. The dislocation extends to time as well as space, but then time is space when one can simply turn one’s head. The long exposures give the appearance of broad daylight under a full moon.

The exposures also make photography a science experiment, much as it was in its origins, not excluding an ongoing experiment on the viewer in New York. An exotic device, on display along with the prints, is said to measure electromagnetic radiation and to rotate in sufficient light. Its foil sheets and glass jar could come right out of an antique laboratory. The whole show resembles a research report by extraterrestrials on their first visit to planet earth. Conversely, if the places look utterly unfamiliar and uninhabited (or downright uninhabitable), one could oneself be approaching a distant planet. I told you right off that breathing might be difficult.

If it sounds more than a little pretentious, it is, but beautiful as well. As that combination suggests, it is also representative of the latest twists and turns in the notion of the sublime. These visions are not mutually exclusive, just as Abstract Expressionism helped to create fresh interest in the Hudson River School, but they are distinct all the same. A spiritual and esthetic ideal in its origins, the sublime took on a sense of nation building in nineteenth-century America, of self-making in the time of Jackson Pollock, of ego-tripping for Matthew Barney, and now a kind of ego-undoing in the hands of an upmarket gallery and an inward-looking photographer.

Where painters like Asher Durand or F. E. Church set their scale in contrast to mere humans, Almond excludes people—and where they poised on the edge of a continent, he crosses all the continents on the way to another world. Get out your spacesuit for a trip to earth.