haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

Edward Hicks has become an exemplar of American folk art for his visionary landscapes filled with life. His earthy realism is far more sophisticated than his status would suggest. Warm colors and well-rounded figures all but pop out of the canvas, even as faces remain emblematic and the construction in depth more than a little awkward. It is still the country you only wish you knew.

Peaceable Kingdom, his most popular painting, embodies that wish, and more than sixty versions survive. Well-dressed Americans, adults and children, share the scene with wide-eyed animals, with equal claims to nature, culture, and an emerging nation. Still another painting extends its harmony to black and white America as well, but prospects were hardly peaceable, and the Civil War was only fourteen years away. The American Folk Art Museum gives it pride of place in “Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North,” through March 24. The museum also brings the story up to date with five recent and contemporary African Americans, as “Marvels of My Own Inventiveness.” Drawing on its enormous collection, it aims to make presences and absences alike difficult to overlook.

Hicks aimed for much the same. He lived among Quakers and others opposed to slavery, and his painting describes a community in which blacks work the land as autonomous beings. This kingdom was in truth a republic and not a distant utopia, but within reach. Now that outsider art is finding an audience, in galleries and collections, it helps to remember that it had one all along. Folk art always belonged to the community—and quilting or glazing to those who knew and admired craft. For Hicks, that community could still return.

Not that Hicks was naïve about the future or, for that matter, about art. His community had developed its own rifts, and more than one version of Peaceable Kingdom shows a majestic tree riven as well, as a warning. The Folk Art Museum, too, intends a warning. Slaves and free blacks alike are a presence in American history that many would just as soon overlook, while legal and other restrictions enforced their absence. The same story applies today. Still, “Unnamed Figures” paints a pretty upbeat picture.

It includes black faces, like a fully realized couple by William Matthew Prior in 1843. It includes black presences in landscape. Can you spot them, and just what are they doing? For whom are they doing it at that? Longer, narrower landscapes once hung high above furniture or a door. They served their purpose in the home, but they make anyone, black or white, that much harder to spot.

It includes black artists, like Joshua Johnson, a successful portrait painter. Did you notice that he has white sitters almost every time? His one black sitter was family, painted not for the market, but for their sake and his own. Ammi Phillips is another rarity, a woman in early American art with a white, middle-class following. Did you notice that two of her portraits include a strip of cotton and (lord help us) a watermelon? n each case, you have to supply what is absent and why.

Still, this is not a game of “Where’s African American Waldo?” Blackness itself becomes visible. Another black artist, Moses Williams, renders it in profile silhouettes. Early photos turn to blacks as well, and the museum throws in more recent photos of the descendants of slaves as well. They breach the show’s limits, but they reinforce that presences still matter. The museum also recovers a well-worn headstone, its name crying out to be read.

The museum makes room for well over a hundred works, on top of the room for “Marvels.” (It does not feel crowded.) It has other media as well, such as a powder horn and embroidery. If women could find a voice in textiles, like the Gee’s Bend weavers in the Deep South, why not blacks? It has minstrel shows in works on paper and a diorama as surreal as a Joseph Cornell box. But then where would racial tensions be without embarrassing stereotypes?

The show makes a point of the ubiquity of those tensions, by skipping right past the South. It sticks to New England and the mid-Atlantic states, including Joseph Shoemaker Russell with a black storekeeper in Philadelphia and Francis Guy in a Brooklyn winter. It benefits from folk art’s near indifference to traditional distinctions like landscape and genre painting. A view of a house by Rufus Hathaway in 1795 opens onto an active port in Massachusetts. Just what is folk art anyway? You never know these days, but this once it speaks for true outsiders in the peaceable kingdom.

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

“The only body part that does not elicit disgust is tears.” It is a sad and lovely thought. It is also just one line in a not at all mournful video by Mary Helena Clark, at Bridget Donahue through March 23.

Lovely or sad, it could even be true, if not for all or for all time. It may leave you wondering whether to turn away in disgust or to cry. Clark sees disgust as a refusal of one’s animal nature, but also its epitome. She tracks the wish to transcend and to embrace the body, human or animal, starting with teeth. She leaves it to others to sort out the contradictions, if they dare. She leaves it to you, too, to decide what she herself believes and to shed a tear.

Words appear on a side wall, as the left half of a two-channel video, and more than halfway down, like subtitles. They change in response to the images at right, but never comment directly. They unfold silently, again like subtitles, but also like words without an author or a voice. They could be turning away from humankind itself, along with, as the work’s title has it, Neighboring Animals. The images, too, do not tell an obvious story. They could be chance impressions or a natural history of raw flesh and teeth.

They give due weight to natural history, including clinical studies of animal anatomy and appetites. They linger, too, over a reliquary for, supposedly, a tooth from Mary Magdalene. Piety, it appears, does not turn away from dentistry after all. Not that conflicting desires can ever go away. Footage lingers over the ornate jar but never its contents. Does science itself identify with its animal subjects or see scientists as superior?

You may not care, not as actual apes appear on camera, suitably charming. Humans appear, too, but in Medieval depictions as well-dressed monkeys, with their own appetites and charm. If the body elicits disgust, it also elicits desire. If Freud is right, disgust may itself fuel desire and desire disgust. Does it all come down to piety or basic instinct? Who knows?

An opening room takes you to the zoo, where people get to enjoy themselves, whether animals do or no. Human laughter emerges from windowless steel doors. One can imagine passing through the narrow space between them while the doors press in, like rusted steel from Richard Serra or nude bodies from Marina Abramovic. Do not even attempt it. The gallery forbids it, and it would leave you all too human.

Small sculpture putters along on the floor—deadbolts that slide back and forth or move awkwardly ahead. They are not going to lock you in. Photos could pass for shots of the room itself, sterile and framed. They actually show a hatchery, yet another scientific nurturing of the animal. Clark never lets on to her own degree of desire and disgust. Yet she tempts others to confess theirs.

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

Gabriel Orozco will show you art in a handful of dust. It is a rebuke to traditional art forms all the same, with a little help from Jacob Samuel.

Dust is a space, but not a landscape. Orozco makes that clear on the opening page of a series of prints. So what if it, too, is a work of art? Samuel, a printmaker in Santa Monica, has worked with some sixty leading artists over more than thirty years. Many of them would otherwise have refused to enter any space that reeks of fine art. That includes the space of “Jacob Samuel and Contemporary Etching,” at MoMA through March 23.

What kind of print is right for modern and contemporary art? It could be lithographs for their relative ease of making—and for a poster style going back to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. It could be silkscreens, for the world after Andy Warhol, or monoprints, where anything goes. For Max Beckmann and German Expressionism, it could be woodcuts, with thick, jagged outlines that speak of a crude past and a still harsher modern world. But no, for Samuel favors a medium as disciplined as etching. He took it up in the late 1980s in the studio of Sam Francis, the abstract painter, and has been seeking collaborators ever since.

In etching, the artist makes incisions, akin to freehand drawing, in a protective layer over a metal plate. An acid batch then penetrates the incisions, leaving its cuts in the plate. Wipe away the protective layer, brush ink over the plate, wash away all but what has found its way into the cuts, press the plate against paper, run them through a printing press, and (voilà) you have an etching. Each of Samuel’s collaborations led to an entire series of prints, and many have entered the museum’s collection. It has been a learning experience for everyone, and he likes it that way, even if the artist gets the credit. It takes both parties out of their comfort zone.

The curators, Esther Adler and Margarita Lizcano Hernandez, open a modest show with a display case for portfolios, with elegant, intriguing covers tailored to the artist. They close with two walls for sample prints from many more. In between, they focus on series from a single artist—with the added interest that prints, however ephemeral, can come in multiples, as series of series. That includes series of series of dust. Samuel favors series in a single tone, and several artists favor limited tones within a single work as well. For John McElheny, that means an elusive white on white.

A video shows instruction from Francis himself, who pronounces himself indifferent to whether the work will sell. He wants only to try things—like his big splashes of primary colors. That must have been a daunting message for an aspiring printer with a career in mind, but if Samuel had reservations, he keeps them to himself. It certainly prepares him for some difficult artists. I never could decipher McElheny’s white text or decide whether his minimal forms represent champagne flutes. I am still searching for signs of a notorious social butterfly, Harry Crosby, in prints by Charline von Heyl, such as slippers and a silk scarf.

The artists had to learn something beside printing technique. Christopher Wool, known for his word paintings, says that it helped him find his way to drawing again. James Welling, known as a photographer, instead assembles quadrilaterals into larger shapes, starting with paper scraps and software. Samuel had to learn far more. How was he to transform dust into incisions with Gabriel Orozco—or, with Mona Hatoum and Matthew Monahan, masking tape and human hair? Jannis Kounellis keeps piling on the challenges, with molten lead, smashed glass, coffee grounds, and more.

They enlarged his view of prints as well, beyond etchings. They took him to aquatints with Dave Muller and to drypoint with Barry McGee (while Kounellis used both). They had professional needs, like dance notation for Meredith Monk,and personal ones, like Marina Abramovic making (she hopes) love potions, Chris Burden in the wilds with knives, and Muller sharing home turf with bears and dragonflies. They all had to learn new questions for art. How much line, how much texture, and how much text? The contemporary etching wants to know.

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

An-My Lê could be a citizen of the world if she did not have so many memories. Her retrospective opens with a photograph of a schoolgirl. Could it be her?

I doubt it, but with Lê you never know. What looks later like ground action in the Vietnam War is only a recreation in North Carolina or Virginia—or a training exercise in California for wars closer to today. Wall text speaks only of her return to Vietnam in 1994, nineteen years after the fall of Saigon, and what she set out to see. Still, she is not saying, and she herself had barely entered her teens when she left for America. But then she is never saying, in photos that speak for all sides, apart perhaps from her own. She is forever “Between Two Rivers,” at MoMA through March 16—and I work this together with recent reports on photography from Lagos and from Tracey Rose in South Africa as a longer review and my latest upload.

That serious schoolgirl says little as well. She takes care with everything, right down to a proper hat, and her glance gives nothing away. Nor does that first series in Vietnam. Boys playing soccer dissolve in a blur, while adults mill about. A tiger cage and a vast interior with a single desk are devoid of life. Yet Lê is determined to see it all and to listen.

She is caught up in it all as well. That first series took her to the former South Vietnam, where she had lived, and to the north, which held childhood memories as well, but of her mother’s childhood. It also includes shots of Louisiana, where she had fled. The Vietnam War reenactment did not just allow her to participate, but demanded it in exchange for letting her observe. Naturally she fought on both sides. And could that be her playing pool with sailors?

Lê gives the show’s title in English, Vietnamese, and French, not just because Vietnam was once a French colony, but also because she spent much of her childhood in Paris. The two rivers are primarily the Mekong and the Mississippi, but also the Seine, the Rio Grande were she traveled to observe the border, and the Hudson, where she taught upriver from New York City. She also finds affinities. The Mekong and the Mississippi both have storied deltas and storied poverty, and the bayou has a parallel in Vietnam;s tall grass, swampy pools, and flat, parched land. It, too, might make a miserable place for a war. It also helps drive a lifelong conviction that landscape means as much as people.

How much do they mean? They are still not letting on. One might never know one side from the other in the reenactments without a photo’s title. Maybe that is what was so wrong with the war. For ever so many, as another title has it, it was Someone Else’s War at that. Events Ashore shows the U.S. Navy engaged in scientific research, earthquake relief, and flood prevention, but Lê knows that all these, a navy included, may descend on countries like a show of force.

Her latest series, a shift to color, takes her across the United States, looking for clues to its controversies and turmoil, and she herself may wonder whether she finds them. Students protest against guns, but half the time in the background. Migrant labor blends easily into a cattle drive, and the White House briefing room is breaking down or still setting up. Here Confederate statues are neither going up nor coming down. Her very artlessness can seem an evasion. The closest her reenactors come to war’s drama and fear is lightning descending on night ops.

The curators, Roxana Marcoci with Caitlin Ryan, take one series at a time. Think of them less as finished work than as personal projects, to which Lê can devote herself completely. She does arrange one series in an open circle, like an old-fashioned diorama. Its fourteen landscapes cover a lot of ground. Does that add up to common ground or telling contrasts? Once again, she is not saying.

Lê’s photos can seem all but artless, and well-meaning critics may praise her more for her history than for her art. The Navy removes unexploded ordinance, but with none of the poignancy of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, for whom Vietnam’s past is a minefield, or of boat people for Danh Vo. That diorama might be more immersive if its components meant more. Still, silence speaks to her own sense of helplessness or displacement. When she returned to her last childhood home, “I felt that I didn’t recognize anything,” but she kept looking. For her, a refusal to take sides is taking sides, but in a different war than either side ever knew.

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

Ask an artist or two about their work, and you can almost hear the gears turning. Where to begin?

It is unlikely to be where Paul Cadmus began an interview, with the old masters. He rattles off an eclectic and eccentric mix, with little in common but the impossible—the search for timelessness and pleasure. One and all, they root that search, too, in the human body. Who knows where the search would end and in which New York? I also work this together with my earlier report on another New Yorker, Edward Hopper, as a longer review and my latest upload.

That interview plays on video amid a show of his male nudes, mostly drawings, at D. C. Moore through March 16. As a hasty addition, he says that he hopes nonetheless to contribute something original. That extra something could be the frenetic detail of his drawings and the unapologetic expression of his desires. Others, like Edward Hopper, roamed the streets of Manhattan and gazed at its bridges. Still others looked to a world of dreams or to modern art itself. It may be impossible to say whether Cadmus starts by looking within or without.

Where to begin indeed? For Cadmus, the list of influences begins with Luca Signorelli, whose early Renaissance precision fed the sinuous outlines of his standing nudes, and the fleshier women of Peter Paul Rubens. It extends to the Rococo wildness and weightlessness of François Boucher. Along the way it has time for the undisguised and disturbing eroticism of Caravaggio before his subjects turned to pain and death. When Cadmus draws a man lying in bed, he, too, can offer temptations but only scant comfort. In the changing room at the Y in 1933, from an artist just short of thirty, or a Subway Symphony from the 1970s, men are literally climbing the walls.

That Y.M.C.A. Locker Room has no lockers, only partitions that open onto still more men. The subway, too, not in the show, has an unnaturally wide aisle in unnatural perspective, but not wide enough for the behavior of crowds. In the drawings, a man lies on a stone like a dead Christ, while those in bed lie on their backs as well. They look just as restless awake or asleep. Standing or seated men lean forward, curling into themselves. It is more a sign of agony than introspection.

They are at once inviting the male gaze while turning away. They have the lean, muscular bodies of the Renaissance but a refusal of Renaissance idealism. Right on the way in, one has thick calves and thighs, but preposterously narrow knees and ankles. Cadmus does not name an influence from the late Renaissance, but for him its Mannerism began earlier and persists to this day. Is this magic realism truly magic or realism? He himself would say so, but do not be too sure.

The question always hovered over prewar American art, and the Whitney called its look at American Surrealism in 2011 “Real/Surreal.” One could see Cadmus alongside Philip Evergood, Peter Bloom, and Jared French. They, like George Tooker and Edith Gregor Halpert, struggled with social realism and their nightmares alike. Realism took them Coney Island and men on shore leave, but also to the desires they found there. Meanwhile George Bellows has entered history for his love-hate relationship with bulked-up boxers.

Whatever you call it, it could seem hopelessly out of touch. Is starting with the old masters, like Cecily Brown and Kehinde Wiley, unlikely today or merely pretentious? At the height of Modernism, it could seem a refusal to face reality. It does, though, face a contemporary issue head on, sex. In another painting, Cadmus takes his troubled relationship with a man to the beach, along with his lover’s new wife.

He is also in love with technique. Paintings stick to an early Renaissance medium, tempera. Drawings have a dense crosshatch in crayon. A man’s blanket has discordant colors on each side, but most stick to black with equally dense highlights in white. I may still look down on his art and his confused desires, even while admiring them. But then he must have felt the same way.

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

To continue from last week on ICP, the International Center of Photography would like you to know: it is concerned.

It is concerned not just about you, politics and wars, or even the planet, although its center of concern has been growing ever since its founding. A celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, through March 6, encompasses more than one hundred fifty works, spanning at least as many years and much of the globe. It has kept rethinking photography along the way. What began as the hopes of a leading photojournalist to keep his vision alive has changed, along with its name. “ICP at 50” opens with portraits of Americans, but African Americans—as couples, at choir practice, and alone. It cannot be an accident that its concern for dignity leads into a second, smaller show of David Seidner, a white fashion photographer who died of AIDS, while new acquisitions in photography at the Morgan Library seem blissfully secure.

The center’s very origins lay in concern, and the C in ICP first stood for just that. Cornell Capa created the International Fund for Concerned Photography in 1956, in concert with Robert Capa, David “Chim” Seymore, Werner Bischof, and Dan Weiner, becoming the ICP we know in 1974. To this day, it boasts of the lines out the door for its opening. I still miss how well its Fifth Avenue mansion showed off photography, although I have followed it on its journey to a midtown office lobby, a basement space on the Bowery, and (with luck) a permanent home on the Lower East Side across from the Essex Market. It may not have space off the entrance for more than coffee and a gift shop, but it has a library, media labs, and a school. One of two floors for galleries has narrow walkways, but it pays off in the drama of looking down, not to a bloated museum atrium, but to art.

It can also boast of the two hundred thousand prints in its collection, so many that “ICP at 50” can handle only one per photographer. (You will just have to take its word that Elisabeth Sherman, Sara Ickow, and Haley Kane as curators, examined each and every one.) The show is a survey of photography all by itself. The section on the nineteenth century also points to a changing medium—from tintypes that allowed only one-off prints to plates that could print again and again. An unknown photographer, it turns out, printed in color as early as 1935, decades before the saturated colors of Helen Levitt and William Eggleston. But then Levitt’s photo of legs sticking out from under a car is street photography, too.

ICP will always have a soft spot for photojournalism. It has had recent shows of Magnum Photos, with its dedication to social history, and Robert Capa in Spain. The older of the Capa brothers, he witnessed the Spanish Civil War from the point of view of those who fought against fascism and lost. Sure enough, the poster photo for “ICP at 50,” by Gerda Taro, depicts a Spanish militia member in dramatic profile, raising her pistol. The show then leaps ahead to Martin Luther King, Jr., from Weiner, and JFK shaking hands from Cornell Capa himself. One need not claim a photo of the lunar lander for fine art, not when it is credited to NASA rather than an artist, but why try when the medium reaches to the moon?

Still, the story continues. Diversity remains in focus well after early black America. Gordon Parks has Ralph Ellison in a midnight hideaway like the protagonist of Invisible Man, but with music, making blackness audible and visible. Paul Mpagi Sepuya puts his own black body in question in a mirror study, and Mickalene Thomas looks as ever at herself. For once, her glitzy self sits off center and closer to the rear of her tacky surroundings. Taro’s Spaniard is kneeling, as much to display her youth and beauty as to take better aim.

Just ticking off the women contributors would be a lost cause. Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deana Lawson continue their unraveling of black identity, in the case of Simpson with enigmatic text. Others were creating modern photography, including Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, and Ilse Bing, whose shades of gray look more vivid and mournful every day. Still others mark the shift to present-day concerns. It is not just a matter of feminism or a matter of pride. When an unseen woman for Lee Friedlander casts her shadow on another woman, her back to the camera, she is casting a long shadow on photography itself.

It is about what photography does and is. For An-My Lê, photography’s public record can only approach her private history as a woman from Vietnam. But then ICP has always had its private side, like the intimate records of “Love Songs,” “Face to Face,” and “Close Enough” in just the last year. It has also begun to challenge photography as a reliable medium. That is where Postmodernism and such women as Laurie Simmons, Louise Lawler, and Barbara Bloom come in. Simmons and Lawler have their dolls and rephotography, while Bloom needs a whole wall to place images in an uncertain museum context—and I pick up the story of ICP’s formal and private sides another time, along with a look at photographs at the Morgan Library.

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