haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

SculptureCenter misses the old neighborhood, and it should know. It has made its home in Long Island City long enough to have seen everything change.

Founded in 1928, it moved to a dead end just off the main drag in 2001, early enough to have driven change itself. Can it, though, truly miss the days of empty storefronts, abandoned buildings, and nowhere to live or to eat? R. I. P. Germain shares the ambivalence, even as he brings his own graffiti and shuttered gates, as Avangarda. It may have been be a bit corporate for street smarts or an avant-garde, but he and Claudia Pagès in the back room found an antidote to dryness in something very much like SculptureCenter all the same, through March 25.

It took a long time for gentrification to reach the neighborhood. You can now find a decent bookstore and a noodle joint right across Jackson Avenue from SculptureCenter, although real growth lies closer to the East River, amid artist studios, craft breweries, and a waterfront park with a gorgeous public library. Still, change in New York comes with conflicting claims and a welter of graffiti. Developers demolished a building across from MoMA PS1, just a short walk from SculptureCenter, angering those who miss its paint job as a genuine expression of neighborhood spirit. The developers, in turn, tried to cash in on its street name by adopting it for apartments. Are Germain and SculptureCenter already late for the party?

The Berlin artist may not know his way around the hood, but he does mourn a loss of community. As his name has it, R.I.P. He describes storefronts everywhere as places to go and to meet. At the same time, he sees them and the gates that cover them as obstacles, designed to keep people out. And Germain sets out four gated storefronts, one after another, like a series of obstacles. You can walk past the first, but will you pass them all?

Not that they go all that far toward filling the impressive main hall at SculptureCenter. That can only reinforced the impression of abandonment. It can also restore faith in the trolley repair shop that Maya Lin left largely intact while putting it to the use of art. Each of Germain’s gates has its own graffiti, but not with the naiveté and egotism of tags. They come teasingly close to text but impossible to read. All that you may remember is the image of a silvery robot, on a rampage or on guard.

Their backs offer a slightly different picture. One has a glass door. A small assemblage on the floor behind each one includes a pot, a potted plant, and a magazine with its own dark stories to tell. Germain may be leaving open the possibility of life or closing it off for good. The entirety looks confused and slightly pathetic, not to mention out of touch with Long Island City today. But then welcome to the search for affordable housing and community in New York.

Pagès payed a different kind of tribute to SculptureCenter and its basement tunnels, through February 19. Not that she would admit it, but her video could well be exploring them. Downstairs, the institution displays “world cinema” from a recent biannual in Taipei. Together, their fifteen works take a serious commitment, but dipping in may be enough. It accords with the themes of incompleteness back upstairs. I caught some shifting patterns, disaster areas, and zombie creatures, but nothing like the basement’s own layered history.

Pagès can match that history and then some. Her explorations take her to a cistern in Spain, where her camera’s restless motion may remind you of your own. Moorish invaders remade the ancient roman caverns as their own, before Christians used the structure for a church and moderns for a fancy hotel. If her wanderings seem to lack direction, the video does not—abruptly flooding the tunnels and leaving her waist deep. Did you think that an institution called SculptureCenter would be showing sculpture? Gentrification itself may leave you high and dry.

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

Sometimes I worry that SculptureCenter has lost track of its mission. It may never be a center of the action, close as it is to the long-overdue resurgence of Long Island City. Often as not, though, its contents have little to do with sculpture, rather than video or conceptual art.

Now Tania Pérez Córdova gets real. She is, says the center, “using materials that are historically related to sculptural practices—like metal, ceramics, plastic glass, and marble.” She does, that is, not counting bird droppings, makeup, cigarette stubs, and human hair. One may have to get up close at that to sense a disturbance, apart from one small thing: that sculptural mass may itself seem left over from a work crew or artist’s studio. Clumps of marble may end up in the trash, too. Could they then have a second life as art?

If something other than sculpture is all that remains, through December 11, you can understand. The site itself, a former trolley repair shop and its basement tunnels, is too much for many an artist to resist. Julian Abraham “Togar,” as he calls himself, converts them into his OK Studio, a place to make music. He lays out instruments for a full band, with messages on the walls assuring you of his good intentions. (In Case of Emergency / Call Me by Your Name.) He personally rocks out on video by the sea or by a stoop, drumming and chiming away.

Drummer’s Gonna Drum, Togar’s titles read, and Rocker’s Gonna Rock, but what about sculpture? Has it grown superfluous for those who can look around them and see? Marina Xenofontos calls herself a sculptor, on the slim basis of small cylinders rotating more slowly than the eye can see and deck chairs from a cruise to her native Crete. Devin L. Mays simply shovels pebbles from the often-empty sculpture garden up against the far wall, so that its mass becomes more than halfway sculptural itself. Someone should have thought of that just up the street at MoMA PS1, where the courtyard devolved into a pebbled wasteland with concrete walls from the moment it appeared. And then there is Córdova, in sculptural practice.

Practice makes imperfect, but one does have to get up close to see much out of the ordinary. On inspection, that black marble serves as little more than an ashtray for the bird droppings, makeup, and cigarette. Up close, too, shampoo bubbles up from a vinyl container, the kind often used for spackle or cement, like crystalline sculpture. As a further twist, that container is itself a replica, of itself. Córdova molded it, melted it down, and poured the results into her mold before adding bubbles. She began the series with a found trumpet, and it continues with a fragment of corrugated aluminum roofing on the building out front.

The Mexican artist is playing around with the industrial, like Minimalism, and the replica, like Postmodernism. She is playing, too, with solid objects and “negative spaces,” like Rachel Whiteread casting entire buildings. Mays plays around with the familiar, too, when he throws in shipping pallets, with a poncho for an element of color, although it dilutes the creativity of his shoveled stone. It could pass for debris left over from installation a little too well. Córdova has also cast in bronze the design of larger spaces, public or private, like urban squares and rooms, for what look like Rococo picture frames. They, too, may not quite come off, but the puzzle of here and elsewhere, positive and negative, continues.

It does, too, when another tub holds artificial saliva. She is spitting on fine art, unless it was not quite spit and not so pretentiously fine. She recasts as well the partition that divides the exhibition space from the front desk. Or rather, she replaces it with anti-hail mesh (whatever that is), littered with “industrially destroyed private information.” She is again questioning public and private, but also speech and memory. The saliva fell from a speech of (she promises) fifty-two hundred words, and a performance just once during the show’s run, In Other News, rewrites the headlines.

The flip side of communication is perception, and a larger, veined marble holds contact lenses, “of color different from human eyes.” And the flip side of both is physical presence and bodily sensation. Córdova’s single most sculptural work casts faces, as repositories for ice. As it melts, they reassert their ghostly impression, but so does the artist in replenishing it so that it can continue melting. So many bodies of work may leave a lesser impression, but all sensation has its limits. The polka dots on a black vase are An Unknown Person Passing By.

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