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art reviews from around new york

In “Love Songs” (at the International Center of Photography this past fall), photography was not just an expression of love or a record of love. It was an act of love itself. For Iiu Susiraja (at MoMA PS1), that love seems directed mostly at her.

Not for the photographers in “Trust Me,” who reach out to family, friends, romantic partners, and (lest that leave out anyone) “other networks.” It is about “forging connections,” but connections may prove fragile or elusive. It requires trust in others, at the Whitney through February 25, but can you look at a photograph and trust in what you see?

To Moyra Davey, reaching out is an ongoing project, and it keeps circling back to her. For the show’s title work, as curated by Kelly Long, she mailed identical envelopes to everyone she could trust, who handed them right back. Perhaps the differences never mattered much in the first place. Davey has taped a photo to each one, the tape as prominent as any connection. The subjects, from meds (lots of them) to trees, can seem revealing or remote. As she writes in black pen, “most people will divulge more than you would wish,” and that may or may not include her.

As Bob Dylan sang, “I’ll see you in the sky above, in the tall grass and the ones I love.” Barbara Hammer presents Barbara & Terry, in the grass and in one another’s arms. A couple of mixed race, for D’Angelo Lovell Williams, reaches out across still taller and paler vegetation. It might almost be shredded paper from Davey’s envelopes. Mary Manning photographs friends just milling around, but also flowers, almost like a silkscreen for Andy Warhol. Jenny Calivas herself sinks into water or mud, perhaps never to return.

Shadow and light, too, provide a cover. Subjects for Muriel Hasbun hide not just in the reeds, but in a ghostly overexposure. Genesis Báez turns herself and her mother into multiple silhouettes and their shadows. Elsewhere she stays out the picture, connected to her mother by a thread. It might be all that remains of their love. Lola Flash settles for a single face lost in a glare, perhaps her own.

Maybe they are all simply overexposed, under photography’s harsh gaze. Still, they share strong feelings and a sense, however elusive, of place. It could be the return address on Davey’s envelope. It could be the sea off the coast of Florida, where Williams goes for a swim. Is that a wheelchair on the moon for Flash? No, it is a beach in Provincetown, on a sandy hill beneath a blistering sky.

Place may refer to ancestors, much as for Hasbun—who adds the words “all the saints,” both in Arabic and in the Spanish of her native El Salvador. Williams reenacts the final stage in a tortured African American journey from Nigeria to George. Place may also refer to gender and the body. After all, who can imagine connections apart from desire? Alvin Baltrop is once again cruising the Hudson River piers, like gay men in a time of Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz. Dakota Mace makes her prints from chemicals on paper exposed to light, because her own body cannot tolerate photographic silver, and calls them Bonds.

Susan Sontag saw photography as, inevitably, exploiting what it claims to lament or to love. Not in this show, so modest that its eleven photographers (from the Whitney’s collection) could almost be one. Not when the self depends on others for its very identity and existence—and not when trust is so hard to sustain. Laura Aguilar poses with a cardboard sign, “Will Work for Axcess.” For Franz Kafka, “A book is an axe for the frozen sea within us.” Here art knows best the frozen sea.

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

Martin Luther King, Jr., took his case to the people. He could not have inspired so many had he not, but who knew that he was such a regular guy? Who knew that he was just another part of the black community and its local heroes?

At least he is in memory for Taking a Pass. The civil-rights leader stands beneath the trees in a place that you, too, might like to call home, with a clunker of a car that could not quite bother to fit into the picture. The kids beside him see nothing out of the ordinary in his presence—or in the football in his hand, winding up for a pass. If the March on Washington had not been so huge, the Mall might have made a terrific playing field. For Taylor, the real black heroes are always with him, waiting for him and you both to receive their greatest gift, at the Whitney through January 28. But then a self-portrait can be England’s Henry V from the Tate.

Born in 1958, Taylor painted King only recently, but every inch of his life is as vivid as yesterday. Did he number King among his heroes? Surely, but also the Black Panthers and others who turned to confront a violent nation. And do not forget artists, friends, and family. Besides, like David Hammons, they were often as not one and the same. Taylor’s brother was active in the Panthers in Oakland, before retiring to his family’s home state, Texas, to breed dogs.

They demand a great deal, much as King wears a suit just to play football, and one of the kids shows up in a tie. The car is a spotless white. Huey Newton of the Panthers sits, armed and enthroned in a peacock chair, as in a well-known photograph—and the artist often works from photos in search of heroes, much as in 2010 at MoMA PS1. He also works from paintings, much like Bob Thompson and Barkley L. Hendricks at home in a museum, and he cites as models the social satire of Max Beckmann, Philip Guston, and Francisco de Goya in his Third of May. He poses Eldridge Cleaver after Whistler’s Mother and adapts a portrait by Gerhard Richter to Cassi Namoda, an artist from Mozambique. He numbers whites among his artist portraits as well.

King with a football notwithstanding, Taylor cannot take his heroes off their pedestal. Still, he is not just rubbing it in. He is not, like Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley, making strangers and street people into icons. If anything, work from the 1990s mocks icons and their pedestals, with found sculpture and painting on the likes of malt liquor and cereal boxes. He can face the darkness, in black skin or in death at the hands of the police, and discomfort. A little girl dresses up for her mother, but The Dress, Ain’t Me.

At times he seems almost determined to fit in. The curators, LA MOCA’s Bennett Simpson with Anastasia Kahn, call the show his “B Side,” the more experimental side of the record, but do not believe it. He grew up in California and studied at Cal Arts, where he sketched skillfully and well. He comes closest these days to the casual realism that has become the mainstream thanks to Alice Neel. Still, he comes by his caring naturally. He worked ten years at a state mental hospital, on the night shift.

He has his own way with Neel’s style, too. He makes maximal use of white with seemingly accidental traces. He also keeps his sense of humor. He calls one champion athlete See Alice Jump. Darker, flatter colors pull a painting from 2017 close to abstraction, because (in full caps) The Times Thay Aint a Changing, Fast Enough! Frowning or grinning kids can look sullen or sinister.

He has a knack for taking heroes as friends and friends as heroes. Still, he cannot avoid the temptations of either one. A man at the grill for the Fourth of July is barely an individual, much less a shock. The exhibition stopped me in my tracks just once, with a whole room for the Black Panthers as store mannequins, like a revolution’s empty suits. Still, you can always be grateful for cornbread fresh from the oven. Taylor’s mother made it herself.

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

This has been a good year for sculpture as a high-wire act, but Ruth Asawa had a way of bringing it back to earth. Together with my earlier report on high-wire sculpture, it is also a longer review in my latest upload

Like Gego, she worked most often in wire—suggestive of the modernist impulse to reconceive sculpture as “drawing in space.” Yet she could not stop drawing everything that she saw in every medium that she touched, from what she called “potato prints” to a bentwood chair in felt tip and ink. Now the Whitney devotes an exhibition to nothing but drawing, as “Through Line” through January 15. The title could refer to her approach to sculpture, but influence ran both ways. It took sculpture into lightness and drawing into mass.

Like Gego, she worked outside the mainstream, the first in Venezuela and Asawa in San Francisco. One could almost blame Bay Area art for her obsessive touch. Both, too, were displaced by World War II, Gego as a German Jew and Asawa in the internment of Japanese Americans. She must have felt a return to art as a return to freedom, and she later attended a bastion of breaking bounds, Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Still, she kept her eye on detail, like fish scales, the pores in a cork, or the veins and outlines of a leaf. She cared way too much to let go.

Wire can come as an airy rebuke to the unbroken welded steel of sculptors from David Smith and Alexander Calder to Mark di Suvero, Tom Doyle, and Joel Shapiro. An artist simply tied her wire to hold it together. Still, sculpture for Gego can also serve as a model for architecture in 3D and in mass. For Asawa, sculpture emulates the human form, with bulges like hips. It also has an inhuman vertical symmetry, bringing it closer to abstraction. So does folded paper between drawing and sculpture.

Born in 1926, Asawa grew up on a family farm in California, near dirt roads that already must have taught her to look down. Black Mountain College encouraged her interest in origami, but her teachers had higher aspirations. She studied math with Max Dehn and a vision of the future with Buckminster Fuller. She patterned receding circles after Merce Cunningham in dance. A 1989 video shows her still learning from movement as plain as breathing. Most of all, she said, Josef Albers taught her to see, but her abstract art shows the influence of his devotion to color and nested squares as well.

She also worked in the college laundry, and she used ink stamps meant for sorting as tools for drawing. It was the closest she ever came to conceptual art, but already repetitive in the extreme, one bed linen or shirt after another. Later, with kids in school, she picked up on the pleats in their clothing. The curators, Kim Conaty and the Menil Drawing Institute’s Edouard Kopp, speak of the found and transformed. They also arrange the show by themes, although I have trouble telling them apart. Still, it suits an art so determined that it barely changes from her return to California to her death in 2013.

She loved dance, but not as a collaborator among friends like Robert Rauschenberg. She was instead a lifetime learner, and she learned from everything. Her forms within forms include tree rings in the regions redwood forests, but she was just as fond of plane trees in the city, in Golden Gate Park. For Asawa, it gets hard to separate nature and culture, no more than fish scales and laundry stamps. Other sections of the exhibition speak of rhythms and growth patterns—patterns that she could have discovered or imposed. Maybe both at once.

Ilana Savdie paints big, with irreverent abstractions that span the rainbow. So do her themes, from gender to global power, in what the Whitney calls a “riotous excess.”

Raised between Colombia and Florida before settling in Brooklyn, she is herself a model of diversity. In other words, just another day in the galleries, only this is the lobby gallery at a major museum, through October 29. It has me thinking about the place of contemporary art in the museum. It has me thinking, too, about what to expect from abstract painting today. And I bring this together with other recent reports that ask much the same question, on JP Munro and “Abstraction from Nature,” as a longer review and my latest upload.

This could be the most fun I have had in ages in a hoary institution like this one. If not, it is entertaining enough, and Savdie will try anything once to make it so. She counts among her inspirations the carnival in Baranquilla, her birthplace in Colombia, and carnival is as good a description of the work as any. It takes its intensity from stains blending into one another and raised fields of acrylic and oil dotted with wax. Flat, hard-edged colors have biomorphic outlines that hint at still more. When a more regular element appears, in paired stripes, they earn that name Barnett Newman gave to his verticals, “zips.”

Blue spills across some paintings like sky or sea. Others have a paler color at center, like a profiled face or a chasm. It could be pulling one into something dangerous or pushing one out and away. They would be at home in more than one downtown gallery with a taste for abstract art as installation. Sure enough, Savdie opens with drawings in pen and acrylic, in black on white, hung against wallpaper or wall painting of her devising. It depicts tight rows of fuzzy red balls interrupted by fleshy blobs, like the artist’s hand or bare butt.

As for the imagery, I could make out a hand or two, its nails extending to the point of claws, but little more. One painting claims to include a trickster from Francisco de Goya and his graphic imagination, another a half human, half elephant, and half monkey from the carnival. (If that adds up to more than one, think again of excess.) They sure tricked me, who could not see either one. Nor could I see the loftier themes of which the curators, Marcela Guerrero and Angelica Arbelaez, make so much. Savdie gets to stand for sexual diversity and Latin American art today.

If that threatens to devolve into a formula, this could indeed be just another day in the galleries. The Whitney, to its credit, makes the lobby gallery free and open to walk-ins, although without access to a bathroom, much like Chelsea galleries a few blocks away. The wall with works on paper opens onto a modest gallery at that, with room for fewer than a dozen paintings. One can almost imagine a dealer’s desk in the narrow entrance. It could serve as a model to other museums willing to offer reasonable access. Instead, they are risking their mission and their finances to appeal to collectors of contemporary art.

That includes the Frick and the Morgan, although both have done so with flair. Sure, the Whitney has always spanned the historical and contemporary, only starting with the Whitney Biennial. Sure, too, private galleries face the same dilemmas. Is there anything left for abstract painting now that anything goes, beyond today’s taste for elusive imagery and the artist’s hand? Can one see half the subtext claimed for their exhibitions as well? I cannot swear that Savdie adds up or stands out, but she is still putting on a show.

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