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art reviews from around new york

Cauleen Smith could have even a New Yorker nostalgic for Southern California. That may sound like a tall order, although the sensation may last all of fifteen minutes, but Smith will make you feel right at home, recently at 52 Walker. And I work this together with a recent report on immersive video by Mary Lucier as a longer review and my latest upload. Smith, too, shows how a multichannel video can and cannot encompass a life, but will one fall for the illusion or pierce it? Is this really the video of a lifetime?

Smith sets out plush sofas—so comfortable that you may get up only to be sure that you have caught all four of the installation’s projections. Throw rugs can hardly cover the upscale Tribeca gallery (aka David Zwirner), but then what could? Besides, you know what people say: everyone out there is famous for fifteen minutes.

That includes Wanda Coleman, and Smith, who appeared in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, is out to extend the late poet’s moments of fame. The filmmaker is nostalgic not just for the city of her childhood, to which she has at long last returned, but also for a black woman who loved music almost as much as words. This is The Wanda Coleman Songbook, through March 16 (and apologieas for the late post while I catch up a bit), and you get to play DJ. You will just have to trust the gallery that Coleman, who died in 2013, earned a reputation as the poet laureate of Los Angeles. Her name may not mean much to a New Yorker, but then neither might this view of the great city without a city. This is LA as itself poetry but oddly remote from life.

Smith, who is African American, does not quite efface the urban core that many blacks call home, but she does relax and enjoy it. She treats the film’s multiple channels as an immersive experience. Two projections cover the facing long walls, the other two the alcoves to either side. Besides the sofas and rugs, she includes a coffee table for Coleman’s books and a quaint countertop with a good old turntable, where the songbook in question plays along. Smith commissioned music for the five tracks of an EP. Now she invites visitors to place the needle and to listen.

An EP may seem like a letdown or a rarity for those nostalgic for LPs, but this one is itself art. It comes in pink vinyl with splotches of bright red. I am tempted to say blood red, but in the installation’s spirit it might be better to think of candy canes and melted strawberry ice cream. Coleman also went by the name LA Blueswoman, but only some of the tracks are bluesy. All are as close to background music as the projection. It could be a direct retort to the California of Ed Ruscha.

Where Ruscha goes heavy on irony and detachment, Smith is sincere and totally involved. Where he photographed Every Building on the Sunset Strip, she is seemingly random but also selective. She cuts among sunsets, palms, utility poles and a railroad crossing, where she waits like anyone else for a train to pass before she can move on. The building on the far side has its share of graffiti, but she does not see it as defacement. Even the region’s bane, traffic, looks charming from overhead on a highway at night. Segments may rush past, but they feel slower and longer, like those proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. Poverty and luxury alike are nowhere in sight.

So much else is surely missing, not least the poetry. Coleman’s words appear on-screen now and then, but difficult to read, and aloud on vinyl, but just as difficult to hear. Is there a dark side? Three cut-outs leave their silhouettes on the walls, as more utilities and a creepy mask. Still, in a fourth projection, outstretched fingers like an ILY (I Love You) sign spell LA. As you head off to the gallery scene, downtown restaurants, and an overcrowded Canal Street, that sign-off, too, will soon be gone.

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

Raymond Saunders casts a long shadow. He cannot help it, not in a two-gallery show where the shadows will not stop coming, all but decimating the walls. Its layers keep coming, too, in oil, graphite, enamel, oil pastel, and plenty of pasted paper.

Unlike Anthony Dominguez, he is anything but an outsider, except perhaps to New York. Yet he, too, found his art waiting for him on the street. For him, that meant not its hidden corners and subterranean passages, but on boarded-up buildings and in the air. And I bring this together my report on Dominguez as a longer review and my latest upload.

For Saunders the details accumulate, in years of found objects, frail scraps, and paint—to the point that one can neither put a name on the shadows nor dismiss them. They may lurk in the background, as shadows in the shadows, or seemingly leap right off the canvas, aiming for you. Should you start in Tribeca, a shadowy figure does both just as you come in, at Andrew Kreps through March 30. You may find yourself poring over the clues, there and at David Zwirner in Chelsea through April 6, to see where they lead. If you never do find out, try not to blame yourself. That first shadow is watching.

Black may be his favorite color, but it is not his only color. That figure’s bright yellow face and shock of yellow hair would be hard to overlook even if the rest of his body were not hunched within a loose black coat. But then the yellow continues unbroken behind him—and the blackness returns behind that. Saunders loves reversing expectations, including the expectation that the ground must be white. He must like, too, undermining the distinction between painted image and ground. Works hang on the wall and serve as walls themselves.

Black may function as a ground for fields of color, like that yellow or a tart reddish pink. It may serve, too, as a playground for his impulses, in chalk scrawl. Numbers in that shadowy first painting run horizontally, as if to count the seconds, while a tribute to Charlie Parker reads Bird above a poignantly small photo. Approaching ninety, Saunders is old enough to remember when chalkboards, meaning blackboards, were black. Above all, a painted surface may serve for whatever he cares to find, whether advertisements or warnings. He calls the show “Post No Bills,” after a 1968 painting and the image it contains, but then he has no qualms about breaking the rules, including his own.

The show has more room to run through his violations in Chelsea. His methods suggest graffiti, but he is defacing only himself. It returns him to the streets, and his quotations are decidedly urban. Like black, they also allude to his status as an African American. While the LA artist has had little exposure in New York, he is at home enough to borrow a delightfully nasty front page from the city’s once-stellar alternatively weekly, The Village Voice. You may have forgotten whatever scandal, but he has not.

The references can be inscrutable, especially compared to the text art and political art of his time. You may dismiss his collage on one visit as a waste of good waste, see it on another as dazzling. (I did the first on catching him in LA art at MoMA PS1 in 2013, and look now.) Still, he will always have a firm reference point in the shadows and himself. An artist’s palette is just an illusion, but brushes are real enough, as if painting themselves. They are also black.

His favorite or not, “Black Is a Color,” as his 1967 manifesto has it. I can only wish that a formalist like Ad Reinhardt had adopted it as a motto, but Reinhardt died two years before. Like a Minimalist himself, Saunders works with monochrome and the space as well. He covers some walls in his tar-like black. He cloaks others in a caked white that is already coming off the wall. Naturally the cracks are black.

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

James Welling can make photography look like painting or, for that matter, pretty much anything else you like. He cherishes the marks of a photographic print all the same.

Photos for Welling come in all kinds, but they always make an impression. In close-up, orange lilies flare out in all directions, not least toward you. Streaks of yellow and purple might almost have come from a loaded brush, but alongside the precise outlines and vivid green of spores and leaves. They are in a great tradition of painted flowers, but they speak not of death within nature, but of life. Unlike painting within that tradition, from Flemish still life to Cecily Brown to this day, they do not serve as a warning, apart from a warning about painterly or photographic accuracy itself, at David Zwirner. If you leave thinking instead of silkscreen flowers from Andy Warhol, another artist with thoughts of death, you would not be far wrong.

Waves splash up against the picture plane, but they take their color from photocollage. They have the texture of bare canvas or of rocks along the shore. Like a classic seascape, more texturing brings out the blue of the ocean, both up close and up to the horizon. Its horizontals echo the familiar format of a landscape, and sure enough this is a painter’s territory, the Maine coast that drew Winslow Homer to set up his studio and to look again to the sea. The gallery compares it to the gray sea for John Marin as well. It is Welling’s usual UV-curable ink on aluminum nonetheless.

Wooden double doors have their own peeling paint, in a saturated blue that should surely have faded. They, too, insist on the picture plane and the human activity shaping nature. Welling’s landscapes are a built environment, from Cubi, sculpture by David Smith on the Yale campus, to windows set back within concrete cubes for the brutalism of a government center in California. I mistook the layered horizontals of piers and background architecture for an ocean liner. The scenes range across the United States, but they keep returning to the artist’s worktable, often as not outdoors. Stones and fabric in his studio have harsh lines and deep folds that all but insist on brushwork, but they dissolve into the dots of a screen print.

Welling’s mind games are never less than visual, and they give equal attention to the photographic process and to real things. He calls the show his “Thought Objects,” through February 10. They invite one to rethink the artist’s thoughts and the medium. He starts with photographs, but each print is a distinct object and a distinct step in the process as well. One can easily imagine plated loaded with ink pressed and dragged onto aluminum. One can see why he appears at MoMA in a show not of photography but of late modern prints, in collaboration with Jacob Samuel.

Welling has appeared in all sorts of contexts, as well as in frequent shows at the gallery. He has indulged in abstraction with black quadrilaterals and direct impressions on sensitive paper. He has been part of what Walter Benjamin called the Arcades Project, what the Met called “The Poetics of Place,” and what a gallery called “The Photographic Object.” He has appeared in ghostly color negatives and in washed-out blue in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. He comes closest to his experimental side here with prints that leave much of the paper untouched. All you get is traces of photography that only thus find their way into prints.

It is easy to take him for granted, and (as you can see from the sheer number of links), I often have. It is easy enough, too, to dismiss his large prints as pretentious, and they are not. Old standards of beauty, it turns out, get along just fine with the harsh scrutiny of UV light. You can start to ask something that you might have overlooked: in that moment between camera work and the print, is the photo an aim, a process, or a thing in itself? It takes all three to create a thought object.

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