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art reviews from around new york

To live in an ever-changing city is to know loss. It is what makes you a New Yorker—the passing of friends and loved ones, the restaurant where you knew the menu by heart, the bar where all the customers knew you by name, the bookstore that taught you what and how to read. For Alvaro Urbano at SculptureCenter, it is as if a painting had come to life, only to insist by the very stillness of its actors that he will never see them again.

The show is his “Tableau Vivant” (literally a living painting), through March 24. Successive “In Practice” projects take the back room, and downstairs (as you will see next time) the pair known as ASMA listen for the sounds of Minimalism. Urbano pays tribute to a place where people once gathered and to its one-time creator, Scott Burton. Alvaro knows that he cannot bring back either one. You can still see benches from Burton in Manhattan, and people really do gather there and take their rest, but you better hurry. A renovation in Battery Park City has already slated them for removal.

Not that it matters, but a tableau vivant was a nineteenth-century fashion, and it, too, is not coming back any time soon. People put on an act, staging a favorite work of art. No worse, I suppose, than those who use 3D glasses and projections to put you in the middle of a painting, as if The Starry Night were a planetarium—and no better. Urbano’s tableau, however, is no mere reproduction. He salvaged whatever he could from the atrium at the former Equitable building in Manhattan, only a block from the Museum of Modern Art. That does not include people.

Back in the 1980s, Scott Burton brought Brutalism to Minimalism, as if nothing could be more hostile to human feeling, but with fine marble and flowers. He had an architect’s sensibility as well—a commitment to public spaces. Not all were cherished, and not all survive, but such is the city. This one fell victim to yet another tasteless renovation in 2020. Born in Madrid and based in Berlin, Urbano got there just in time and carted off roughly half. The result steals the show, as Atrium Furnishment.

Presence and absence alike haunt its semblance of a plaza where people once hurried past or stopped for lunch. It is a recreation in spirit, and spirits can be threatening. Urbano breaks up Burton’s marble circle, meant to evoke a clock face and the dreaded nine to five. It can now broaden to cover SculptureCenter’s main hall. (Converted by Maya Lin, the former trolley repair shop has its own spirit life.) It has the original’s beauty, but also its formidable mass, and it no longer welcomes seating.

Visitors are warned not to touch, for their own sake as much as the work’s. Leaves that have seemingly fallen are metal, with sharp edges. Their fall colors bring a reminder of death. Much the same colors shine out from light boxes propped here and there on the marble, streaked like a rock face and a geological record. The original’s flooring is gone, but a drop ceiling has collected no end of dust, and one lone object bangs against its glass as if trapped within.

Bastien Gachet has his own “object-based dramaturgy,” as he calls it, in the side room (since given over to Tony Chrenka) through this last October 21. Where you might hope for a bathroom, he sets a bone-dry sink. A keyboard lying on top has nothing to communicate, and a bucket on the floor holds what could be diluted blood. The rest of the installation lacks quite the same shock, but its bare wood furniture is creepy enough. I cannot swear what it has to say, least of all something about “pre-intentional,” real, and fake. It seems real enough to me.

Still, he and the more evocative work out front should have anyone asking what has been lost. Gachet also speaks of the imminent, emergent, and durational, and Urbano, too, confronts the passage of time. Burton’s trees have become his bare leaves, which can never die because they were never alive. They also create a bridge from the chill of an office building to the fragile warmth of Central Park. He took the form of his leaves from the Ramble, north of the park’s lake and south of the Delacorte Theater and Great Lawn, once a popular queer pick-up space. Burton died of AIDS in 1989.

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

Polonius: Will you walk out of the air, my lord?
The prince: Into my grave?
     —Hamlet 2:2

Twenty years ago, on entering his fifties, Ralph Lemon gave up quite a career in dance. He had left the Meredith Monk dance company in 1985 to found his own, but that, too, was no longer enough. Maybe he was sick of telling others what to do.

While he had continued to dance for Alvin Ailey and others, he had always loved choreography as an art of collaboration—and any musical theater as mixed media, mixed influences, and sheer mania. He could fulfill that only in what he liked to call No Dance, meaning performance. And now he takes that history to MoMA PS1 as “Ceremonies out of the Air,” through March 24.

Some reaching so monumental a decision would say they never look back. Lemon always looked back. He had made a point of injecting politics and history into his work, ever since co-founding the Mixed Blood Theater Company in 1976. He calls one work The Greatest (Black) History Ever Told, with his usual mix of ambition, irony, sincerity, and a gentle sense of humor directed first and foremost at himself. He looks back in a collage to a rural kitchen, where folks wear animal masks to tackle a half-eaten plate of pancakes and an untouched whole pineapple. He calls another piece, of half-length sculpture, his Consecration of Ancestor Figures.

If the collage is only a footnote to performance, performers elsewhere wear masks, too. It is his Rant (Redux), a raunchy and contemporary but still totemic song and dance. The title may refer to its recreation of a piece from 2000, but then what comes around goes around for Lemon, and he embellishes it further with Rant Residuum. They make a nice welcoming act to the exhibition, on four-channel video that gives a sense of performance in close-up, by Kevin Beasley and others, but also theater in the round, with the audience on camera, too. The singers are black and the song is black popular music, but the audience is both black and white—or maybe, as Lemon sometimes says, “blackified.” Recent paintings are a collage of mixed culture, but also a look back at his own past work.

They are a look back, too, to his first love in art, painting, which continues with sheer abstraction, of circles embedded in the cells of a suitably sloppy grid. This is the world of his ancestors, but also of art, and that breakfast takes place across from an actual table of aluminum and black steel, set with unappetizing sculpture and draped below with electric lights. Lemon tackles the remains of Minimalism and performance, too, in FBN—where BN is Bruce Nauman, and F is a four-letter word. The floor piece looks more like a gravestone than a celebration. At whom is the irony directed this time? You can judge for yourself.

Meanwhile, in still another video act, Lemon goes about his business of “harvesting” string. He may always be harvesting whatever he can toward whatever strikes his fancy. James Baldwin turns up in animation, barely blinking an eye. Yet the cast is rich, past and present, human and animal, and just one more thing as well. He finds his oldest collaborator on a final mission into space. Its videos take three rooms apart from the main display of his work, but he knows he has a long way to go.

This is his Walter Carter Suite, where Carter, born in 1907, was perhaps the last surviving sharecropper. The old man can collaborate on a spaceship regardless, although Lemon does the bulk of the work—and Carter, he seems to say, has better things to do than dwell on a painful history. If the human race is to endure, it, too, will have to transform that history into an improbable future. He is already listening, too, for extraterrestrials, with an antenna dish on top. In case you were worried, the ship also doubles as a doghouse. The completed ship on display in the gallery (or maybe another version of it) lacks both the dish and a dog, but it is only a work of art.

How silly is this? It becomes poignant all the same, as one of the two old men lies asleep or inert on rumpled sheets, with an old woman watching over him. (Lemon is now seventy-two.) He could be dead or dying, but in time he gets up, grabs the gun by his side, and leaves. He might have departed for this world or another. Unless, that is, one world is just the other redux.

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

Ever wonder why pianos are black? Oh, sure, they come in white for the cheesiest of stars and Vegas acts, the kind that stop just short of dancing on the keyboard, but still with a touch of class. Julius Eastman was both cheesy and classy enough in his day to title a composition Evil Nigger, neither reigning in hell nor serving in heaven. He was, though, a serious avant-garde musician, and don’t you forget it.

Glenn Ligon, for one, remembers, and he builds an exhibition around that composition along with baby grand pianos and his own celebrated paintings, as the very image of blackness. If piano keys are mostly white, you will understand, at David Zwirner/52 Walker through March 22.

If you cannot decipher that image or pierce the silence, fine. These artists dare you to listen up. Both, too, know their way around jazz, where Miles Davis had his Live Evil. Ligon places a neon sculpture at the very center of the installation, with the opening syllable of Toni Morrison’s Jazz repeated and scrambled. Sth already sounds like a whisper akin to silence. But then his art often bears the marks of its own defacement or, deconstruction might add, erasure. The French for “under erasure” in Jacques Derrida is in fact sous rature, or scratched out.

Eastman’s composition sounds jazzy enough, too, when you can hear it. Just past the sculpture stand four pianos, with no performer in sight. Three, though, are Yamaha player pianos that kick in once a hour. It is worth the wait. Can music be at once lilting and brooding? His layered riffs on a single note sure is, and maybe a black artist has to be. As for the fourth piano, it is an antique for that touch of class.

The show also includes a print based a later composition, Thruway—where, you might say, the traffic barrels on through. Eastman’s rhythms guide a second neon as well, a wall sculpture, with the word speak blinking on and off in response. It appears a good dozen times within an oval, on top of the blinking, for repetition twice over. Ligon, now in his sixties, is a natural collaborator, who takes pride in his blackness but betrays uncertainty with each and every word. Ligon’s Whitney retrospective in 2011 seemed to grow out of a single text painting, Today I Am a Man. Rather than start over, allow me to refer you to my longer review then.

He was deceiving himself and no one. As an adult he was always a man, and white America could always deny it. He, in turn, could measure out the toll with repetition and erasure. A large text painting is pretty much illegible, and a still larger one approaches monochrome black. It effaces itself with coal dust, just as coal effaced working-class lives. The word America appears in large type upside-down, backward, and burnt.

Eastman, who died in 1990 at age fifty, gets a full wall for sketches and prints hung high and low. His words, too, could be confessional or a lie. If you cannot read them at that height and cannot make sense of what you can read, it happens. The score to Evil Nigger hangs by the front desk. It could serve as a score should, to lean on, or as just a teaser for his larger career as composer, pianist, vocalist, and conductor. Sth could also be the sound of words caught in his throat.

The gallery has featured blackness before in shows of Bob Thompson, Arthur Jafa, and Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Her title, “MASK / CONCEAL / CARRY,” could speak for them all. The space risks becoming making a ghetto for so prominent a Chelsea dealer, but I am not complaining. This is still Tribeca, and Ligon is exploring the limits of community and confrontation. He is also finding himself newly at home in collaboration. This is not one but two evil niggers.

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

What do you hate most about modern architecture? The odds are good that Paul Rudolph will have had a hand in it.

Could that be why his star has faded, to the point that you may never have heard of him? The Met places him at the very heart of his generation. It asks to see his work as soaring into space in all its material form, through March 16. True, if his most ambitious plans for New York had come to be, the Lower East Side would never have become a gallery scene. Gentrification has closed more than a few hot galleries anyway.

So what is it about modern architecture that drives you crazy? Is it Brutalism, with its concrete façades and, at times, brutal assault on the viewer? Rudolph called concrete “the material that can be anything.” Is it the urban planning of Robert Moses, leveling and dividing entire neighborhoods, with highways that still cut off half the Bronx from the other half and Flushing Meadow Park from the largely Dominican community. Rudolph was there, too, as designer of highways that would have barreled through Washington Square Park and the life of lower Manhattan. If Moses has become the evil mastermind in stories of New York, surely Rudolph deserves a terrible place at his side.

Is it the isolation of apartment towers for the wealthy few? Is it their long shadow cast on Central Park and capitals of Asia? Rudolph found commissions across Asia, for skyscrapers that left landscaping, public access, and pedestrian traffic to others, should they care. Yet he never lost his love of open space and modern materials. The fine shading of his pencil sketches alone aligns his interiors with sunlight. At his death in 1997 he still sought his “concretopia.”

To tell the story of modern architecture through the eyes of Paul Rudolph is like retelling Othello from the point of view of Iago, but with a difference. In place of that arch-villain’s “motiveless malignancy,” Rudolph laid out his motives clear as can be, and they can seem downright contemporary. In fact, he may have a closer parallel in Othello himself, with a spectacular rise and fall. He became chair of Yale’s School of Art and Architecture in 1958—and proposed a new building for it four years later. His plans for Robert Moses put him on magazine covers. That includes plans for yet another highway, along the Hudson River waterfront—all too close to where the city’s wealthiest galleries stand today.

Their failure made the magazines, too. The argument, by Jane Jacobs and others, against his assault on the street grid has been central to visions of the city ever since. Had his plans for the waterfront gone through, miles of parks, sculpture by David Hammons, the High Line, and Little Island would never have come to pass. Sometimes the good guys win one, and this time they did. Washington Square Park has had a revival. Just how bad, though, were the bad guys?

Unlike Moses, Rudolph was not content with subordinating neighborhoods to suburban access. He imagined integrating highways and vital architecture in a single structure, with towers overlapping roads. In his sketches, you might have trouble spotting the cars. Nor was he averse to decoration in architecture, although he preferred to find variety in the materials themselves. He saved a panel by Louis Sullivan in the shape of an older carving—perhaps because its plaster reminded him of the potential of concrete. Colored pencil enlivens his design for a chapel, to the point that rising diagonals of color overpower the worshippers and the altar.

The curator, Abraham Thomas, places him in the “second generation” of modern architecture, along with I. M. Pei and Eero Saarinen. Pei’s entry pyramid for the Louvre has a place in public memory, so why not Rudolph? Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport has become a hotel precisely because people will not let it go. The Met does not so much as mention such older architects as Marcel Breuer, whose former Whitney Museum made Brutalism itself a marvel. Nor does he mention Louis I. Kahn, whose Yale museums upstaged Rudolph’s academic towers and showed that concrete, too, can admit the light. Rudolph has no such fans, but he can help see what connects them all.

Consider how he went about constructing a tower. He worked like a child playing with blocks, stacking and staggering. It brings rhythms and variety—and encourages the eye to rise along with it. It amounts to repeated cantilevers, as with Frank Lloyd Wright, but without asking to defy gravity. It is modular, making it adaptable and affordable. Air and light can enter freely as well. Most of all, it calls attention to Rudolph’s favorite materials.

So what if they land like a ton of bricks? His designs keep rising, but do human beings have a place? His tubular wheeled chairs recall the Bauhaus, but are rigid and uncomfortable all the same. Still he was fully a part of his time. When he allows near cylinders to run the length of a structure, he approaches Kahn’s translucent Kimball Museum in Fort Worth. His own firm, near the Plaza Hotel and since demolished, anticipates today’s fondness for open offices. You can decide whether they would be open to you.

Art was in turmoil, so why not the Eiffel Tower? In the cool hands of Robert Delaunay, it barely touches the earth with its unforgettable steel frame.

Is it rising into the sky or collapsing once and for all? When he paints it again in bright red, has it caught fire, figuratively or for real? How about all at once? So it is with “Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris,” at the Guggenheim through March 9—and I work this together with an earlier report on Sonia Delaunay as a longer review and my latest upload.

It was 1911, and Cubism had shattered convention with its assault on structure and representation. Pablo Picasso had not yet introduced rope into his illusory tabletops, marking the transition from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism. Already, though, one could speak of a choice at the very heart of modern art, between Cubism’s line and, thanks to Henri Matisse, Fauvism’s color. But why choose? Robert and Sonia Delaunay wanted both line and color, and they were not alone. The tall gallery off the atrium has a startling display, from their rainbow colors to the deep blues of František Kupka and Francis Picabia.

It was color in motion at that, like Kupka’s closely packed curves of translucent whites, akin to stop-action photography years later. Marcel Duchamp dismembered a nude in much the same way, shocking New York at the 1913 Armory Show. Many an artist now at the Guggenheim exhibited there as well, including Albert Gleizes, more often remembered as a minor Cubist. Gleizes returned to New York during World War I after serving in the military. For Europe, the sense of turmoil was all too real. And still modern art’s School of Paris soldiered on.

But was it Orphism? Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet, coined the term, but history books have mostly settled on Delaunay’s choice of Simultanism. The curators, Tracey Bashkoff and Vivien Greene, want something more poetic and encompassing than he could ever have produced. They include many outside Simultanism, like Gleizes and Duchamp. They see an international movement as well, from Natalia Goncharova in Russia to Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright in America—perhaps the first in modern art. Gleizes himself painted the Brooklyn Bridge with the same broken diagonals as Delaunay’s tower. The turmoil had spread.

The shows sees the same exploration of motion in the tumbling bodies of Fernand Léger in Paris and Gino Severini in Italy—and the same approach to abstraction. In fact, Orphism got there first, before Vasily Kandinsky. It sees the same exploration of color in Paul Signac. Was Post-Impressionism more “scientific” than Orphism could ever be? Perhaps, but Signac had also painted a critic and dealer as a magician, pulling a flower out of his hat. This was turmoil, but it was still magic.

What, then, sets Orphism apart if everyone belongs? It was not just color or line in motion, but also a device to achieve it, circles. Sonia Delaunay has dozens of them, and Robert Delaunay changed the shape of his paintings to disks. They delighted in the globes of Paris street lights and in a Ferris wheel, only a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower. For Marc Chagall, the Great Wheel gathers light within its circle like a nighttime sun. The parallel to color wheels in color theory (Kupka’s Disks of Newton) must have been hard to miss.

Modernism has another pair of stories to tell besides line and color. For critics like Clement Greenberg, it meant an escape from clichés and conventions into a higher realm of art. For Postmodernism, it has meant instead putting a torch to fine art as distinct from life. It had to pass from Cubism to Dada—or, with Sonia Delaunay, from painting to fashion as a part of life. And here, too, Orphism refuses to choose. Art and its fire were in the air, like the Eiffel Tower and the Brooklyn Bridge.

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

Alexis Rockman has returned to nature. He can hardly help it, for he considers it an imperative as an artist, but it will not be easy—not when humanity itself may well be extinct.

It has run what the subtitle of his show, “Naples,” calls its “course of empire,” at Magenta Plains through March 1. Naples itself may be already underwater. Just downstairs, Tseng Stealing sees much the same threat to America, without the halfway comic allegory. Yet his barren landscapes seem no less familiar and true. For an unforeseen context, I work this together with a report from nearly twenty years ago on “Monuments for the USA,” of artists obsessed an American Empire and its course as a longer review and my latest upload.

Only a year ago at the same gallery, Alexis Rockman seemed a true Romantic, with a capital R. He turned to bright, true colors on watercolor, a traditional medium for nature studies in close-up—much as for artists from John Constable to Beatrix Potter. Search the Web for the likes of them and you will find images of Italy and, yes, the course of empire. Thomas Cole, a founder of the Hudson River School, made it a five-part allegory for past Europe and an emerging America. He also made it a model for a new American art. Scientists may have made the medium their study, too, but these were the facts of culture, art, and myth.

Cole’s allegory opens with a pastoral ideal and ends in terminal decline. America, he thought, could outlast Europe, but it needed a course correction. The work may reveal its own near-fatal struggles with expansion between banks, railroads, and slavery as well. Rockman, too, is making a course correction. He has once again a dense wall of works on paper, well observed, but in brown like an old photograph, and the brushwork has taken on stippling like an encrusted surface. And that texture carries over into his first large painting, of a whale breaking the surface. It creates roiling, bubbling waters, its nose towering high above.

It also dares you to know what is real, what is human, and just what is going on. A curved band at the bottom in black distances the scene, and, easy to overlook, a yellow-orange palace rests at the right on the sea floor. You will see many more of its like in sunlight as the show continues, but then you may never know for sure what counts as broad daylight. The whale dwarfs the palace entirely, as does the wall behind a second scene, with lampposts, fish swimming past and nosing about in front. Is that a street scene, sunken for good, or are the fish inheriting the air? Is the glimpse of a grand villa behind the wall part of the same scene or not?

It gets either better or worse. Comets dive through the rest of the show, and another fish swims through the sky trailing a shower of gold behind. It could be an advertising banner for empire trailing behind an airplane or a discharge from its rear end. Rockman can overdue it, in his imagery and garish colors, and I hate to start over on him with a second review. Still, he is newly vivid in his return to nineteenth-century Italy and America. He also complements his last show and keeps you guessing what comes next.

Tseng Stealing skips right ahead to American decline, just in time Donald J. Trump’s second inauguration. He may seem, like MAGA, most at home in the debris and the show’s “Mouthful of Dirty Copper.” Environmentalists may cringe at his acres of abandoned trailers and discarded trucks—or at least call for land-use management. Others may claim it as their own. Yet it looks familiar for good reason. It has muter color than Rockman’s, like many ordinary cars, homes, lots, and open sands.

He also uses the density or emptiness of to construct a painting. Objects may spill onto or into one another, while successive plains may continue out into the distance, textured by bare trees, with titles like Open Wound. So much for affordable housing. It may be a map of empire, but try not to panic. America is always building and destroying more. Its very muteness seems true to life and its construction akin to painting.

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