haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

Ask an artist or two about their work, and you can almost hear the gears turning. Where to begin?

It is unlikely to be where Paul Cadmus began an interview, with the old masters. He rattles off an eclectic and eccentric mix, with little in common but the impossible—the search for timelessness and pleasure. One and all, they root that search, too, in the human body. Who knows where the search would end and in which New York? I also work this together with my earlier report on another New Yorker, Edward Hopper, as a longer review and my latest upload.

That interview plays on video amid a show of his male nudes, mostly drawings, at D. C. Moore through March 16. As a hasty addition, he says that he hopes nonetheless to contribute something original. That extra something could be the frenetic detail of his drawings and the unapologetic expression of his desires. Others, like Edward Hopper, roamed the streets of Manhattan and gazed at its bridges. Still others looked to a world of dreams or to modern art itself. It may be impossible to say whether Cadmus starts by looking within or without.

Where to begin indeed? For Cadmus, the list of influences begins with Luca Signorelli, whose early Renaissance precision fed the sinuous outlines of his standing nudes, and the fleshier women of Peter Paul Rubens. It extends to the Rococo wildness and weightlessness of François Boucher. Along the way it has time for the undisguised and disturbing eroticism of Caravaggio before his subjects turned to pain and death. When Cadmus draws a man lying in bed, he, too, can offer temptations but only scant comfort. In the changing room at the Y in 1933, from an artist just short of thirty, or a Subway Symphony from the 1970s, men are literally climbing the walls.

That Y.M.C.A. Locker Room has no lockers, only partitions that open onto still more men. The subway, too, not in the show, has an unnaturally wide aisle in unnatural perspective, but not wide enough for the behavior of crowds. In the drawings, a man lies on a stone like a dead Christ, while those in bed lie on their backs as well. They look just as restless awake or asleep. Standing or seated men lean forward, curling into themselves. It is more a sign of agony than introspection.

They are at once inviting the male gaze while turning away. They have the lean, muscular bodies of the Renaissance but a refusal of Renaissance idealism. Right on the way in, one has thick calves and thighs, but preposterously narrow knees and ankles. Cadmus does not name an influence from the late Renaissance, but for him its Mannerism began earlier and persists to this day. Is this magic realism truly magic or realism? He himself would say so, but do not be too sure.

The question always hovered over prewar American art, and the Whitney called its look at American Surrealism in 2011 “Real/Surreal.” One could see Cadmus alongside Philip Evergood, Peter Bloom, and Jared French. They, like George Tooker and Edith Gregor Halpert, struggled with social realism and their nightmares alike. Realism took them Coney Island and men on shore leave, but also to the desires they found there. Meanwhile George Bellows has entered history for his love-hate relationship with bulked-up boxers.

Whatever you call it, it could seem hopelessly out of touch. Is starting with the old masters, like Cecily Brown and Kehinde Wiley, unlikely today or merely pretentious? At the height of Modernism, it could seem a refusal to face reality. It does, though, face a contemporary issue head on, sex. In another painting, Cadmus takes his troubled relationship with a man to the beach, along with his lover’s new wife.

He is also in love with technique. Paintings stick to an early Renaissance medium, tempera. Drawings have a dense crosshatch in crayon. A man’s blanket has discordant colors on each side, but most stick to black with equally dense highlights in white. I may still look down on his art and his confused desires, even while admiring them. But then he must have felt the same way.

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

To continue from last week on ICP, the International Center of Photography would like you to know: it is concerned.

It is concerned not just about you, politics and wars, or even the planet, although its center of concern has been growing ever since its founding. A celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, through March 6, encompasses more than one hundred fifty works, spanning at least as many years and much of the globe. It has kept rethinking photography along the way. What began as the hopes of a leading photojournalist to keep his vision alive has changed, along with its name. “ICP at 50” opens with portraits of Americans, but African Americans—as couples, at choir practice, and alone. It cannot be an accident that its concern for dignity leads into a second, smaller show of David Seidner, a white fashion photographer who died of AIDS, while new acquisitions in photography at the Morgan Library seem blissfully secure.

The center’s very origins lay in concern, and the C in ICP first stood for just that. Cornell Capa created the International Fund for Concerned Photography in 1956, in concert with Robert Capa, David “Chim” Seymore, Werner Bischof, and Dan Weiner, becoming the ICP we know in 1974. To this day, it boasts of the lines out the door for its opening. I still miss how well its Fifth Avenue mansion showed off photography, although I have followed it on its journey to a midtown office lobby, a basement space on the Bowery, and (with luck) a permanent home on the Lower East Side across from the Essex Market. It may not have space off the entrance for more than coffee and a gift shop, but it has a library, media labs, and a school. One of two floors for galleries has narrow walkways, but it pays off in the drama of looking down, not to a bloated museum atrium, but to art.

It can also boast of the two hundred thousand prints in its collection, so many that “ICP at 50” can handle only one per photographer. (You will just have to take its word that Elisabeth Sherman, Sara Ickow, and Haley Kane as curators, examined each and every one.) The show is a survey of photography all by itself. The section on the nineteenth century also points to a changing medium—from tintypes that allowed only one-off prints to plates that could print again and again. An unknown photographer, it turns out, printed in color as early as 1935, decades before the saturated colors of Helen Levitt and William Eggleston. But then Levitt’s photo of legs sticking out from under a car is street photography, too.

ICP will always have a soft spot for photojournalism. It has had recent shows of Magnum Photos, with its dedication to social history, and Robert Capa in Spain. The older of the Capa brothers, he witnessed the Spanish Civil War from the point of view of those who fought against fascism and lost. Sure enough, the poster photo for “ICP at 50,” by Gerda Taro, depicts a Spanish militia member in dramatic profile, raising her pistol. The show then leaps ahead to Martin Luther King, Jr., from Weiner, and JFK shaking hands from Cornell Capa himself. One need not claim a photo of the lunar lander for fine art, not when it is credited to NASA rather than an artist, but why try when the medium reaches to the moon?

Still, the story continues. Diversity remains in focus well after early black America. Gordon Parks has Ralph Ellison in a midnight hideaway like the protagonist of Invisible Man, but with music, making blackness audible and visible. Paul Mpagi Sepuya puts his own black body in question in a mirror study, and Mickalene Thomas looks as ever at herself. For once, her glitzy self sits off center and closer to the rear of her tacky surroundings. Taro’s Spaniard is kneeling, as much to display her youth and beauty as to take better aim.

Just ticking off the women contributors would be a lost cause. Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deana Lawson continue their unraveling of black identity, in the case of Simpson with enigmatic text. Others were creating modern photography, including Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, and Ilse Bing, whose shades of gray look more vivid and mournful every day. Still others mark the shift to present-day concerns. It is not just a matter of feminism or a matter of pride. When an unseen woman for Lee Friedlander casts her shadow on another woman, her back to the camera, she is casting a long shadow on photography itself.

It is about what photography does and is. For An-My Lê, photography’s public record can only approach her private history as a woman from Vietnam. But then ICP has always had its private side, like the intimate records of “Love Songs,” “Face to Face,” and “Close Enough” in just the last year. It has also begun to challenge photography as a reliable medium. That is where Postmodernism and such women as Laurie Simmons, Louise Lawler, and Barbara Bloom come in. Simmons and Lawler have their dolls and rephotography, while Bloom needs a whole wall to place images in an uncertain museum context—and I pick up the story of ICP’s formal and private sides another time, along with a look at photographs at the Morgan Library.

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

Before there was capitalism, there was money. Think of Judas and his thirty pieces of silver. Matthew, before becoming an apostle, might have collected taxes on it.

It may have been a flimsy thing or awkwardly bulky and heavy, but a lot turned on it. Now the Morgan Library makes the case for just how much, in “Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality,” through March 10. If it has a discomforting moral for an institution founded by a man of means to display priceless possessions, it may say more than the museum itself ever knew. Together with a report on “Morgan’s Bibles,” it is also the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

The Morgan gives new meaning to “your money or your life,” the afterlife. When Hieronymus Bosch painted Death and the Miser, with sacks of money tempting a man on his deathbed, he was taking up a subject familiar from illuminated manuscripts and Sunday sermons. If a deathbed seems an unlikely place to accumulate wealth, it is only, after all, a parable. The show includes Petrarch and Geoffrey Chaucer, who wove the message into their poetry (although Chaucer also makes the case for merchant cunning). Bosch himself had an unmatched talent for bringing an older world view to the very height of the Renaissance. As his interior passes into depth, in proper perspective, it presents one temptation after another in cabinets, shelves, and doors.

More than half the show elaborates on that message. A still more lavish deathbed scene appears in The Hours of Catherine of Cleves from around 1440, across from the fire of Purgatory. Boys in another book of hours scramble for a shower of coins, ignoring the Visitation of Mary and her mother, Anne, on the facing page. A saint flees an entire golden mountain, by Fra Angelico, while gesturing toward an actual city on a hill. With Albrecht Dürer, the prodigal son at last comes home. If accumulating wealth is bad, spending is worse.

It was not too late for the prodigal son, and it is not too late for you. So at any rate goes the story, but has its moment already passed? Bosch’s painting teems with devils, and devils always put on the best show. Those boys scrambling for money could be your neighbors at play. One work on display is more lavish than the next, from the gold leaf of medieval painting to the subtler richness of the Renaissance. Saint Francis may have renounced worldly goods, but a High Renaissance collector possessed Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Francis in the Desert.

Those contradictions run happily through the show, right down to its title. Is this medieval money, merchants, and morality? Not just morals are changing. A show that opens with Bosch cannot be all that medieval, and sacks of gold are not yet money. (Wikipedia assigns a present-day equivalent for thirty pieces of silver, but I am not so certain.) Bosch hangs next to an imposing strongbox and actual coins from the late 1300s, so flimsy that one might mistake them for paper tokens in a child’s game.

The exhibition tells a different story as well. It is about the emergence of a new merchant class and the spirit of capitalism—for whom wealth was a mark of divine favor and charity is owed to only the “deserving” poor. By its end, money becomes more intricate and weightier. It had to do so, because coins at first established their value by their weight. And then mere paper takes on arbitrary value as well. If a medieval manuscript has its unmatched glories, a merchant’s register or a text on money management is a book, too.

The curators, Diane Wolfthal and Deirdre Jackson, add two paintings, for additional stages in a Renaissance economy. They are not just displays of wealth, like so much art in Tudor England, but portraits of getters and spenders. The first, by Hans Memling, a man in black holding a pink carnation, hesitates to speak of just what he does for a living—but the second, by Jan Gossart in 1530, glories in it. The tools of this man’s trade have the magic of still life, and his records hang like wallpaper. They foretell a time when wealth can go not to charity or the church, but to a library like Morgan’s, and the party of religious zealots can favor tax cuts to the wealthy. Fitting or chilling, a camel need no longer go through the eye of a needle for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.

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

“I’m HIV positive. It doesn’t have to be negative.” So runs a magazine ad that David Seidner accompanied with his own photograph, of himself. Can his optimism withstand his dying and his anxiety over what he had become as an image maker?

The International Center of Photography opens with a self-portrait. Retrospectives often do, but Seidner was a fashion photographer first and foremost. It consumed pretty much the entirety of a sadly abbreviated life. Yet surely fashion photography is not about the photographer, right—and not about art? Such, at least, is convention, but his torn allegiance powered some provocative art, through March 6. You can only return to “ICP at 50” chastened and questioning.

Photography is always about looking, through the camera and the human eye behind it. It is also about making you want to look—for photojournalism, at the urgency of breaking events. For fashion photography, that means making you look at a look that you will want for yourself. It is a work for hire about work for sale, and Seidner knew that, too. He snagged a contract, an exclusive contract, with Yves Saint Laurent. He loved it because photography for him was always about appearances, ones that he could manipulate and turn on himself.

Seidner in that self-portrait is lying down, seductive, provocative, and vulnerable. He turns the camera on other men as well, with an overlaid black grid. It defines his work as art back when the grid of late Modernism ruled. It also highlights the body and dismembers it. That can mean a naked body, a clothed body, or, in other work, a fragment of clothing alone. It is a polished image but also a teaser for what may never come.

He brings the same versatility to fashion. He directs the eye to the model and the designer, and he does not distinguish the two. A magazine feature about a designer requires no less. He elevates his subject while taking it apart and reassembling it, with multiple exposures and with mirrors. Nicely dressed store mannequins look more individual and alive than many a professional model. One can almost claim to know what they are thinking.

If that were not sufficiently a matter of art, Seidner devotes a series from the 1990s to well-known artists. Hung in four rows of four photos apiece, their unsmiling faces appear up close, approaching you and challenging you. Naturally he includes himself, as a boast but also in wonder as to whether he belongs. And then he is back with clothing, billowing outward. One hardly knows whether he has fallen prey more than ever to fashion or turned away from the model. The conventions and the fashion still turn me off, but they have me thinking.

An eye to appearances is also an eye on gender, and Seidner was gay. He died of AIDS in 1999, at forty-two. One might see his work as his coming out or anxiety about his identity. It has its parallel in art and anti-art photography of his time, like that the self-portrait as a pose for Cindy Sherman or dolls in place of mannequins for Laurie Simmons. It looks ahead to painting by women today that makes a point of the body but minimizes the self-questioning. I hardly know whether to call Seidner more or less radical for that.

He accords with the current interest not in minimizing fine art, but in refusing to set it apart from design and craft—no more than photography from painting. Museum shows of fashion are still mostly pandering, but the Jewish Museum has recovered magazine photography for art as well. ICP sees Seidner as long neglected but vital to its collection (pairing it with its fiftieth anniversary show, no less). It has his tear sheets, but it ends with something else again. A final series sets orchids in blurred close-up against a backdrop of fabric. It becomes pure color, but still an emblem of impending death.

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

You know what they say about conceptual art: you can’t give it away.

Rirkrit Tiravanija disagrees, and he should know. He has been giving it away for thirty years now, and people are, literally, eating it up. I have had his Thai curry more than once in the galleries and received compliments on his free t-shirts, with their cryptic but high-minded messages giving nothing away. If that has you nodding off, he has served strong coffee to museum-goers who might balk at the café’s prices and invited others to make tea. He has built his own radio tower to get out the message. Now MoMA PS1 devotes more than a full floor to his equally high-minded career, through March 4.

I do not often think of ping-pong as a spectator sport, but Tiravanija sets out a table in the museum’s two-tier gallery, so that anyone can play and spectators can look down as in an arena. Mañana Es la Cuestión, its surface reads, and people line up in a photograph behind it, forming a question mark in front of Mexico City’s grandest cathedral. He relishes collaborators, and he sees tomorrow as an eternally open question. Just who will come together for an answer? Could it be you? That still leaves him front and center, and his menu may be getting old, but such is conceptual art.

Tn truth, the opening line was mine—an attempt to play on the nature of conceptual art. If there is only a concept, there is nothing to give away. That is not true for all conceptual art, which can be physical indeed, and it is not true either for Rirkrit Tiravanija. His retrospective includes old pots and bottles that went into his curries, looking only mildly disgusting, and the show’s largest room is set out spotlessly for cooking anew. He serves curry only on weekends during the course of the show, and coffee is available only late Fridays, but you can make tea anytime. Come on a Monday, and you can probably snag the ping-pong table (but no t-shirts).

Tiravanija will always be torn between the physical and the conceptual, what a past show called “theanyspacewhatever.” The show opens with a wooden shed that replicates the layout of one of his earliest exhibitions. Sure enough, its first room is cluttered with memories cast in chrome—an old TV, VCR tape, crumpled clothing, and an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Chairman Mao. Sure enough, too, its second room lies empty. Back in 2007, I reflected at length on what it means to be an idealist in mainstream art institutions, and I leave it to you to read more for the full story. Here I ask only how that plays out at MoMA PS1.

For one thing, he sees himself as catering to basic human needs, like food and clothing, and he has replicated his bedroom for a promise of shelter—like the artist known as Puppies Puppies in the lobby gallery of the New Museum and Andrea Zittel before her. Yet needs are immediate, and that bedroom is long gone. He sees his work, too, as for all the senses, including taste and smell. Yet it depends on the bare fact of familiar objects. He sets out the instruments of a rock band, quality instruments at that, for others to play, along with recording equipment. I did not dare to pick up a guitar, but music and silence alike are in the air.

For another, it can grow seriously self-involved. You cannot have slept in his bedroom or on an orange mat, here topped by a backpack. He carried them on his way to an exhibition, sleeping where he could and walking on open ground. Was that humility or all about him? The question dogs all his work—and an entire movement devoted to giving things away, Relational Esthetics. Just when does giving become a true collaboration with the receiver?

It can also devolve into nostalgia. Back in his chrome days, Tiravanija also cast the urinals at CBGB. I miss the place myself, but not that much. All the same, art for him is political, like the slogans on his t-shirts. One of my souvenirs from past shows reads Freedom Cannot Be Simulated. Paintings on newsprint read Fear Eats the Soul, Less Oil More Courage, and The Days of This Society Is Numbered. A wall-sized painting becomes a simulated brick wall, in the style of Philip Guston.

Yet it cannot be too clear or too political. You will not find Guston’s KKK here, and that goes with the further tension between collaboration and taking a stand. As the retrospective’s title has it, he is catering to “A Lot of People.” No wonder he has always served mild curry. As an artist from Thailand born in Argentina and able to remember the bathroom at CBGB in New York, he knows at firsthand what it is like to build bridges. His work almost sinks under the tensions, and I came away without a freebie, a meal, or much in the way of insight, but the welcome was real.

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

Late in the tenth century, a Nubian wall painting shows an imposing figure in priestly robes backed by a still taller one. It is Bishop Petros protected by Saint Peter, his namesake. No surprises there, but for one thing: the bishop is black, for Nubia spanned today’s southern Egypt and the Sudan. Peter, in turn, is white, for the Christianity of the Roman Empire had extended its reach to Africa, even as Rome had fallen long ago.

With “Africa and Byzantium,” the Met takes a fresh look at the Byzantine empire that emerged from the division of Rome’s in 395, but with the cracks showing at least two hundred years earlier. Here it no longer centers on Constantinople, or Byzantium (today’s Istanbul) on the Bosporus Strait connecting Europe and Asia. It looks south, to Syria, and then west across North Africa from Egypt to Algeria—and further south to present-day Sudan and Ethiopia, through March 3. Nor is it the place where painting has gone to die, in the “dark ages” between classical art and the Renaissance. It is open-minded and eclectic, a model for diversity in art now. It is where at least four major religions met, fought, and reached an ever-changing agreement.

William Butler Yeats in “Sailing to Byzantium” had it wrong. This is a country for old men (and women), with a respect for authority and antiquity. More than a hundred years after Saint Peter, Jesus looks after a Nubian dignitary. The two wall paintings are so alike in style and dimensions that they could have been painted together. These really are “monuments of unaging intellect,” but an intellect that accommodates Christianity, Roman gods, the Coptic culture of Egypt, and Jewish scholars in Alexandria and Tunis. Nubian armies repelled Islamic invaders, but by all means throw the Koran into the mix.

To ask the Met, histories of Western art have had it wrong, too. Byzantine art may have you thinking of Madonnas, where the child gestures regally but stiffly and well-articulated folds in her black robe only bring out their flatness. Gilding makes them look that much more inert, and the harsh outlines of their features make them look as if they were squinting. And sure, many such icons appear here, but in an open, fluid history. Rather than a sudden turn from classicism to darkness and back, it presents a continuing narrative connecting and explaining them all. It has room for blackness, too, although the ultimate authorities are white.

The show opens with mosaics, in a firmly classical world. Their pale colors have all the brightness of ancient Rome, with well-articulated figures in wide-open spaces, stretching their limbs as they prepare for a feast. Then come small jugs in African red clay, in the shape of heads with whimsical faces, and bowls, a lion, and a dolphin in clear rock crystal. The sheer variety of media stands out, as does the debt at once to Rome and Africa. Jewelry, textiles, and carved boxes for precious possessions confirm the picture. The bronze bust of a crying child picks up where the red clay left off, but with the poignancy of being young, helpless, and black.

A textile shows Greek or Roman gods, but also black. Do not be surprised either if similar figures appear to either side of a Madonna and Child. What religion is this, and which myth is which? Here Christianity claims everything and anything for its own. The flattening comes soon enough, but its disrespect for naturalism allows other liberties. Why stop with an icon when you can throw in as many Biblical or folk anecdotes as you like? The heads of apostles as oil lamps run to further whimsy, even as the icons deny it.

How good is this history? I am well outside my expertise. As with shows of early Buddhism and women of Mesopotamia, I may not contribute something beyond a recommendation the way, I have argued, a critic should. I can only share my personal encounter, from the perspective of European and contemporary American art—including art that itself journeys to Africa. Bear in mind, too, the Met’s nasty habit of presenting a curator’s minority interpretation as law. In shifting the focus to North Africa, has it left both Byzantium and African art behind?

It is fascinating all the same, and the many languages on display make a strong case as well. The curators, led by Andrea Achi, get to ask if you knew that Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt. The last room throw in a few living artists who respond to tradition with pattern and decoration. Given museum trends toward making everything about contemporary art, I can only be grateful that there are not more of them. Think of the exhibition as not history alone, but also an ideal. I can live with that, a white lie, and a black Artemis.

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