haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

The War to End All War did not end war, and the Holocaust did not put an end to anti-Semitism. Racism in the United States has its own ugly history as well. Can a contemporary black artist and a Jew from another era face it together?

The Jewish Museum opened its latest show the day after Donald J. Trump’s reelection with an archival image of a lynching. Both Trump and the lynching drew larger numbers than I ever imagined. Draw your own conclusions.

A video cuts between the grainy photograph and still another spectacle—a carnival in Paris, Texas, where the black man in the photo suffered a grisly death. It lingers over colored lights and rides, with the cutest of animals as their seats. It lingers even longer over the moment before death. Nor is it the only image of a lynching in “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out,” where Trenton Doyle Hancock “confronts” (as the museum has it) Philip Guston through March 30. Guston began drawing the mob nearly a hundred years ago, when its threat was all too real. Hancock to his delight is still catching up.

Born in 1913, Philip Guston has become a gallery and museum staple for his images of the Klan, including himself in his studio with blood-red hands and a white sheet over his own head. At first he earned anger and disdain for his turn from the comforts of postwar abstraction, later, as his fame grew and “mere” cartoons became fashionable, for his subject. Only recently Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts came close to canceling a retrospective, opening at last without a black curator. An African American, Trenton Doyle Hancock is still based in Texas and still grappling with the same sense of guilt and the same fears. He was not even born when Guston returned to that theme in 1969, but the Ku Klux Klan haunted him from an early age as well. One can still ask just who is confronting whom.

Guston’s early drawings have a nasty realism, Hancock’s a loaded ambiguity. In a photograph, he lies on his back in a corner completely covered by a sheet. He could be a dead body left for disposal or a Klansman catching up on sleep. Guston’s later figures are closer to caricature, with a nose borrowed from Richard Nixon. Often he sets just two figures side by side, as the artist and his model or the racist and his victim. He may never have left the studio for all one knows, but it is scary enough inside.

Hancock has much the same pairings, but with a recurring hero, named first Loid and then Torpedoboy. The character is at once captive and superhero. He is also both a participant and an observer. He may turn white from shock, far whiter than the murderer, or pitch black as if seen through the white man’s eyes. He also has more colorful pop-culture scenery, like the fair grounds. Paintings get much of their colors from plastic cups and lids. In ink on paper, dialogue or commentary runs wild without offering a pat resolution.

The controversy is not just about putting a good face on black experience in today’s culture-affirming art. It is about who has the right to speak for whom. Born in Canada to Ukrainian Jews, Phillip Goldstein grew up in LA from age 6. His parents had found safety and must have hoped for, well, normalcy, but he never could. You will recognize the turn against him from the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where a white artist, Dana Schutz, dared to paint the open casket of Emmett Till. They were taking responsibility for what they fear most.

Black artists, too, face their share of shoulds and should nots. Kara Walker has had no end of complaints for appropriating stereotyped black silhouettes. Should an artist paint only what she sees in the mirror, and should a male novelist incorporate only men? Should art stop speaking out against bigotry? I sure hope not, and I appreciate the sheer cacophony of voices at the Jewish Museum from just two artists. As Hancock has it in a recurring title, Step and Screw!

I have written way too much elsewhere about Guston, at the Met and in Chelsea, but then this is Hancock’s show by far. Yet the more time he spends on Guston, pouring through the estate in preparation for this show, the closer he feels. Did Guston paint a ladder to the sky, as his approach to memories? Hancock’s hero thrusts one leg through a ladder of his own. His are big canvases and maybe a bit silly, and I cannot tell the show’s four themes and sections apart, but daring and controversy go a long way. As a Jew in my own way myself, I can feel the mob growing closer and the spectacle all too real.

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

To pick up from last time on winter at SculptureCenter, the years that gave birth to sound art and text art also brought an uncanny silence. Strange perhaps, but hardly a contradiction.

Painting was losing authority, abstract or representational, and something had to take its place—not more stories about saints, sinners, or the artists themselves, but Minimalism. And if industrial materials could invade the gallery, why not something barely seen or heard? Where Minimalism boasted of art as object, subject to gravity, sound art was in the air. Now ASMA and Tony Chrenka bring their own silent music, but the stories and the objects are back as well.

ASMA may sound like a coughing fit, but it is much the familiar mix of ice-cold sculpture and sound. The collective (Matias Armendaris and Hanya Beliá from Mexico) calls the marvelous basement tunnels an “ideal space for music,” but the only sound this winter was of water, drip by drip. You had to listen carefully if you were to subject yourself to the water torture, through February 3. It also dared you to connect three distinct sections and motifs. One comes straight out of Minimalism, light sculpture—not in neon, but in older sources of light. The artists direct them through glass.

What looks like a bulb has a hand-made geometry, and what looks like a lens is just a glass disk. And the lack of focus continues into work that sticks more closely still to Minimalism’s industrial sheen. What light there is reflects off relief elements on polished spheres, like disco balls where dancing is prohibited. A third basement tunnel brings anything but dancers at that. Female dolls the size of small children lie on shelves or on the floor, seemingly unable to rise. One has at her feet a furry black creature like a wildly overfed rat.

One last space, for video, may or may not unify the three. It treats the basement as a source of images or abstraction. The dolls themselves aspire to the sexual charge of work by Laurie Simmons, but the point seems to be the music and the silence. Both continued upstairs, through December 22, in a side gallery that most recently held Bastien Gachet, but it is not out to give you the creeps. It takes Minimalism and music seriously. It makes up for a lack of poignancy with a bit of clarity, trickery, and paint.

Chrenka covers the walls at eye level with thin paired verticals, one brown and one white, each with a slight lateral twist. You may take them for twigs. I could swear that I had seen this strategy before, but its familiarity is deceptive. Julianne Swartz, for one, has herself both leaned wood against the wall and created sound art. Chrenka, in turn, has not salvaged branches but rather guitar necks, cutting away the frets. I smell a rat.

The cuts leave only bumps at left and right, which the artist reinforces by painting over them. The paint also helps them adhere to the walls, and it reinforces the silence. The slats broaden at top, like actual guitar necks waiting for someone to tune the strings. You cannot finger these fingerboards, but the white of the walls looks all the more compelling for that. So where is the promised music, and just where is that “ideal space”? Maybe the dolls are too world-weary to listen or to sing.

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

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.