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art reviews from around new york

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.

Christopher Culver does not exactly have a love affair with New York. His works on paper are too unflinching for that—and too short of explicit human connections.

They are a record of his attachments all the same. That includes his attachment to drawing. Charcoal and dark pastel lend his surfaces both sharp-eyed realism and soft-focus texture. Their very intimacy invites one into his life and allows one to mistake it for one’s own, at Chapter NY through December 9.

Culver calls his show “Manhattan,” and there is no mistaking the city. It has the sidewalks with their awkward drop-off at the curb. One can see how dead birds would have come to an untimely end on the street. It has the views out a window that never quite opens onto rooftops and open sky, with hints of both enclosure and ways out. It has a soft light in that uncertain space between day and night. That, the drawings say, is the space where he lives, too.

It recalls the stereotypical apartment that artists can barely afford, with way too little sunlight or starlight at all hours of the day and night. The stuffed animal on a bed must be his, too, in a New York where adults need whatever affection they can get. Not that he ever appears, but then neither does anyone else. Life and art alike have the ability to evoke things unseen while testifying to the visible. Life or art could dissolve at any moment, just as the drawings dissolve into stippling. They are just another way of getting things right and taking care.

He shares the show’s title with the “Analog City” where I myself grew up and a familiar movie. Like me more often than I care to say, Woody Allen makes a point of nostalgia, but with his often bitter, rapid-fire jokes. Culver’s dead birds, struggling house plants and other unexpected juxtapositions defy nostalgia, and his humor takes things slow. One can move from work to work uncertain what will come next, each with a layering that hides what might otherwise cohere into text or other images entirely. That, too, builds a sense of connection. Back outside, Tribeca’s clumsy paving and poorly maintained streets seem off-putting by comparison.

It may seem strange to go from Culver to photography. He cares too much for work by hand—and hardly at all for photography’s documentary impulse. It may seem stranger still to cross the continent and to go back in time more than fifty years. Yet all I could think of was the layered black and white of Jay DeFeo more than fifty years ago, recently at Paula Cooper through October 18. A stubborn Bay Area artist, she had finally finished The Rose in 1966, if that is the word for a massive construction whose whole point is never to be finished. Then she moved to Santa Monica for five years and picked up a camera for her own portrait of socialization and seclusion.

She, too, was drawn to still life but cannot leave it alone. The layering can arise from cutting and pasting photos, photocollage, or a staged assemblage akin to Surrealism. It can fall into abstraction, morph into faces and bodies, or become something else entirely, like the old-fashioned telephone that one might mistake for a black liquid pouring down. Maybe I should have thought of Salvador Dali and his telephone topped by a lobster claw. Could the process recall her sculpture after all with its labor of love and hate? Not really, but it makes a fascinating addition to a career so often known for a single work.

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

Cecily Brown should have learned her lesson. She has been staring at her reflection in a mirror for thirty years now and seeing only a temptress, a crone, a death mask, or a skull.

She cannot help looking, though, for she is only human. Besides, she is a woman and an artist, and this is a savvy woman’s art, at the Met through December 3. It should have you looking, too, but you will not see anything as dreadful as death. This is painting so lush that it keeps coming back to life.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity and a striving after fame and fortune in art. Brown came to New York in the 1990s, with the much hyped Britpack (or Young British Artists), only she chose to stay. I caught her in 2000 as an emerging New York artist at MoMA PS1 (then just P.S.1), again with a growing approach to Abstract Expressionism, and in 2020 with her aspirations to the Old Masters. In between she brought her torments and seductions to the Drawing Center. (I cannot repeat all that here, so by all means follow the links for more.) As a postscript, George Condo, too, takes pride in faking history, at the Morgan Library, but with a greater Postmodernism and a great deal less thought—and I bring this together with my report on Condo as a longer review and my latest upload.

Surely Brown is due for a retrospective, and surely she is the last person to need one. The Met keeps its aspirations modest, in the long central room of its wing for modern art. It can handle just fifty works, about half of them preliminary sketches, but it can make almost anything look like a blockbuster. It does not need a monster of a mural that dominates, for now, the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum with its elusive subject matter and lavish red. It does not even need much in the way of Brown’s development as an artist. She began with lighter backgrounds and sketchier subjects, adding denser subjects and more colorful brushwork, and finally veering toward monochrome, but she is still a woman staring at her reflection while daring you to stare at both.

What you see may depend on you. Will you find the corpse in Blood Water Fruit Corpse—and is that paint blood and water or the thing itself? Will you find corpses everywhere else? Or are they even corpses, for white spirits rising and pink flesh in ambiguous poses close to the floor could be very much alive? You may need a hint to spot a cat hiding under a table, but it has no fear of death. And yet Brown’s titles allude to a long tradition of fearing death in life.

Vanitas long attached to a woman at her mirror, for youth will fade, and fruit are still life—in French dead nature, or nature morte, like Brown’s Lobster, Oysters, Cherries, Pearls. Skulls are momento mori, or remember death. Hers arise as if of their own accord from girls in frilling dresses, for the skull’s eyes and nose, and an arch, for its top. (A smaller scene serves as its mouth.) Rooms for still life have the grandeur and luxury of aristocratic Europe, with other reminders of the past on its walls. A table spread for a picnic could be a banquet or a mad tea party, awaiting Brown in her madness or you.

The show’s title, “Death and the Maid,” positions her as forever between life and death, old and young. So does a brushy painting called BFF. The term is up-to-date, but paint itself (an older artist advised her) will always be her best friend. And that could be her real theme, for all the heavy titles. Still life can morph into interiors, into bodies in an unstated narrative, or abstraction. Painting is like that these days, shifting among genres, but she was among the first in making it so.

The overtones do get in the way. Death and the Maid alludes to Death and the Maiden, the maid bringing flowers in Olympia by Edouard Manet, and (gulp) a woman’s role in the workplace today. A shipwreck with no visible ship may allude, tenuously, to Théodore Géricault—and Willem de Kooning and his women hang over them all. Another still life is after Frans Syders, the Flemish painter, because what still life is not? One might do better to treasure the ambiguity and forget the details. Or treasure a world well lost and the paint.

For all the moralizing, Brown traffics in pleasure. When she riffs on The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, by Pieter Bruegel, she has not made up her mind. The picnic table has an ashtray, because she has any number of bad habits, and she is in no hurry to give them up. But then neither was Snyders. The freshness of this world accounts for his appeal, too. Brown’s art may lie first and foremost in seeing through the excuses to make art.

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