haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

A show for Helen Marten is either a triumph of abstract painting or a game. Either way, a voice explains, it is “conquerable resistance,” and how can you resist?

Evidence of Theater weighs the evidence, with enough theater to confuse anyone. Her images hold out plenty of temptations, from cute little animals to breakfast cereal and a game of chess. Still, she has her devotion to painting. So which gives her work credibility, painting or the game?

Maybe abstraction was always a game. Postmodernism could point out the rules, in the spirit of seeing through them, while formalism could insist on them. And the game played out on a huge scale, in Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Marten herself has both floors of a gallery, at Greene Naftali through November 4. The ground floor alone has space for a dozen large paintings, which morph upstairs into video. In place of a press release, your only guide is a personal essay, with due reference to Roland Barthes. “The fundamental structural agenda of evidence is scattered,” she admits, “but it has rhythm and logic.”

It also commands space, with (as the rules of Modernism go) art as object. Framed panels hang in larger white frames much like partitions, at all angles to the paintings and the walls. One rests on the lower white frame and the floor. Elements of sculpture and assemblage take them further into space. Most have a proper grid, as both an overlay of wood and a painted one. That still leaves space for savvy gestures, splashes of color, and cryptic symbols.

Still, is it only a game? The permutations suggest just playing around, and painted grids do look like chessboards. Physical chess sets appear, too, with abstract, unconventional pieces. They get along easily with a standpipe, a work desk laid out as a kitchen table, and much else. Marcel Duchamp, the ultimate modern chess player, would approve. And then there is the ultimate refusal of fine art’s game, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Was this Pop Art all along or just a more detached and devious game?

In prints within a panel, the cereal box and a corn flake rest in the hand of a smiling character with a striped suit, a white beard, and a preposterous handlebar mustache. Is he a product spokesperson, like Colonel Sanders, or a skeptic? Text in those prints gives the words of a psychologist, even as the person at hand keeps his mouth closed. “You can test reality,” says the psychologist, where “you” could be either the consumer or the product developer. There is always the taste test. There is also, he insists triumphantly, that conquerable resistance.

He is not the only judge, quite apart from you. Once a figure in black robes takes his place, and once the painted image of a man leans forward, anxious or lost in thought. The more you look, the more others multiply, too, including (a title has it) “good judges.” I do not believe they are the Bible’s twelve judges of Israel. Is it hard evidence or theater? The Old Testament god has nothing on the demands of “theory.”

For all that, painting rules if you let it. With such artists as Cecily Brown and Amy Sillman, the fluid space between abstraction and representation has become the norm. Quite apart from painting, Buckminster Fuller called one project The World Game, without a trace of cynicism. At stake in the game was the planet. What is at stake here is harder to say, and it may depend on whether you look at the big picture or up close for details—and on just how much Colonel Kellogg’s gets on your nerves. For now, like Oscar Wilde, I can resist anything but temptation.

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

If you live in the Arctic cold, you had better cherish your way of life. For an artist, but not only for an artist, that includes the traditions that shape one’s craft.

Still, you might welcome a little company now and then beyond “the people”—in the native language, the Inuit. It might even open the imagination to a certain challenge. Shuvinai Ashoona finds that challenge, too, in an unlikely place. She draws Polar Bear Sketching People, at Fort Gansevoort through November 4.

At over eight feet long, a work by that name also has ample room for a rabbit making art and a still more fantastic being, plus a more ordinary circle of women friends in a reassuringly domestic interior. Another row of women is slightly less artistic but just as proud, as Holding What They Made in Town. And what they made is clothing, which it may require leaving home now and then to communal facilities with shared tools and access to markets. Made My Clothing at Clothing Center says so, although there two women are joined by that might be their pets carrying on their craft as well. Closer to home, a husband and wife can still appear carving soapstone together. Either way, they proclaim, Keep the Circle Stronger.

Way too glib and reassuring? Much of today’s celebration of diversity in art can seem that way, but reassurance may not come quite as easily as first appears. An Inuk, or Inuit person, Ashoona lives on Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut and the Northwest Passage, between Greenland to the north and the Hudson Bay. Yet the warmth of a parka appears just twice, unless you count the fur of a polar bear, and what the women made in town are t-shirts. I am shivering already. New York winters are bad enough.

Ashoona is nurturing fantasy while attesting to a way of life. One scene takes place under the sea. She is also broadening her vista to take into account the breadth in her mind of that way of life. In another work, she is Drawing Like an Elephant, a creature that does not often keep company with Eskimo and Inuit, even if it could draw. Her technique, too, looks to traditional Asian art and its calligraphic impulse. Her primary media are colored pencil and ink on paper.

This gallery has a fondness for the influence of folk art, in cultures far from New York and most often to the South, as with Dawn Williams Boyd, Myrlande Constant, and Willie Birch. This is Ashoona’s first exhibition here. Still, this is work on paper on an ambitious scale, although not uniformly so. It is also sophisticated enough to accommodate her chosen media’s gentle colors and dappled light, with dense spots of gouache akin almost to Pointillism. Colored pencil lends a wavering texture. Ink enters to thicken outlines and to flatten form.

She also nurtures paradox, between work on paper and mural scale—or between fantasy and that way of life. It allows rocks and sea to take on a shaping role, close to abstraction, while the figures remain less than grounded. One image, again at eight feet long, shows people in boots, Moving Our Campsite. Another, at eight feet high, assigns separate groups of people to sky and sea. You can always blame climate change for the absence of ice. Then, too, you need not see the ice to relish the warmth or to know that ice is there.

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