The Floating Eyeball

Black Acid Co-op at Deitch Projects

2009-10-01T14:17:00.001-07:00

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s new installation “Black Acid Co-op” is unrelentingly dark, sardonic, and bleak: several reproduced “meth labs” appear here, some of them burned out (as meth labs are prone to exploding), along with a few gratuitously filthy bathrooms, a reproduction of a China-town type boutique, and one room that resembles a twisted satirical version of an art gallery itself. “Black Acid Co-op” is the third version of an installation that has had two previous incarnations: “Hello Meth Lab in the Sun” (in Marfa, Texax), and “Hello Meth Lab with a View” (Miami, Fl.) which were both realized with the help of the artist Alexandre Singh whose touch is also evident here. This version, anyway, is a compelling vision of a world that is falling apart, burned out, stained, rotting, moldy, and over-run with mass-produced crap – one that’s either over- or under-lit (mostly with fluorescent lights) and found in derelict basements, abandoned store-fronts, and burned out shacks in the middle of nowhere.

As with many other young artists including Justin Lieberman, Nate Lowman, and Dan Colen, among others, there’s an over-riding obsession with both abjection and kitschiness of the lowest possible order - this time manifest in what would seem to be their essential subject: meth labs, a subject that seems, all too conveniently, to tie together most of their primary obsessions: kitschy detritus (the boxes of sudafed and bottles of drano that meth is made from, for example), an aura of abjection, hopelessness, impending doom, as well as the seedy, dark American underbelly manifest here as a semi-ironic embrace of criminal activity. It’s also a short-hand for the rural America which artists in this vein (those heavily influenced by Richard Prince) exploit in a way that often seems primarily condescending.

Another problem here is a lack of touch. The artists are too ironically distanced from their materials to engage with them as specific abstract forms – or as materials rather than cultural signifiers - and the overall effect is a flurry of ready-made content swarming together without an entirely cohesive purpose. The oddities found here, a random binder of old Polaroids found on the floor or a poster for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, for example, are compelling as sad relics, but no more so than if we found them ourselves, say, in a junk-yard somewhere.

Something about scale, as well, gets lost. In an installation this big, too much of it feels like dead-space or a theatre set. I found myself wandering around inside it, from place to place, startled or entertained by the sudden transitions and sense of verisimilitude but dissatisfied with most of the individual parts. In the end, it’s like a stream of unceasing commentary comprised of vaguely related ideas rather than a coherent thought articulated over time. But maybe that’s the point: a meth addict prattling on about nothing, seething with sarcasm, paranoia, and random cultural obsessions. Nevertheless, attitudinal posturing, no matter how well executed, isn’t the same thing as unflinching realism.

Justin Lieberman's "The Corrector in the High Caslet" at Zach Feuer Gallery

2009-10-01T14:15:00.000-07:00

Justin Lieberman's work is a sardonic kitsch sucker-punch. A potent combination of ironic nostalgia and abject materials, his execution is always impressively thorough - like a three-dimensional Mad Magazine installation on a bad acid. Here he displays phalanxes of familiar collectibles and familiar Pop icons – comic books, baseball cards, beanie babies, VHS cassette tapes, For Dummies books, etc…. – all coated in goopy translucent plastic resin.

As always, Lieberman’s work elicits a reaction but one wonders if this isn’t a product of its almost ready-made content. After all, this sort of darkly ironic excavation of pop cultural detritus is such a familiar genre within popular culture that it's really a matter of wondering whether or not Lieberman isn't merely another art-world certified entry into that crowded field. His work does evoke the feeling of queasy dread that we feel, living in world permeated and over-run with all sorts of hollow, debased crap, as it were - from Beanie Babies to Baseball Cards - although the impulse to wallow in it strikes me as perverse or self-limiting. Likewise, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Jim Shaw et al, have mined similar territories pretty thoroughly.

In effect, Lieberman’s work epitomizes the us-versus-them approach to pop-culture appropriation: High-art being “ours” and the pop detritus being the crap that we’re either critiquing or ostensibly redeeming. Lieberman makes this overt by titling his exhibition “The Corrector in the High Castle.” By making reference to Philip K. Dick’s novel (“The Man in the High Castle”) about a world in which the Nazi’s won WWII and therefore ruled America, he seems to be suggesting that American’s most reactionary right-wing political tendencies may be part and parcel of our penchant for cheap mass-produced detritus. After all, it’s easy enough to suppose that people that collect Beanie Babies are generally Republican.

What is interesting about Lieberman’s work is that it not only epitomizes a generational tendency towards sarcasm (one that’s all negation and no commitment) but it also embodies it physically. Psychologically, coating objects is a way of taking ownership of them but it’s also a way of distancing ourselves from them, by effacing them. By coating these objects with clear plastic Lieberman emphasizes this psychological paradox and redefines a very familiar critique by essentially literalizing it – thus highlighting how all acts of appropriation are framed by underlying forces of attraction and repulsion – a desire to reveal as well as to efface - as well as assumptions about class.

Nevertheless, the ostensibly dichotomous nature of American politics and culture would seem fairly obvious at this point. It only reveals a lack of willingness on our part to either implicate ourselves or to reevaluate the categories of “us” or “them” in the first place. That is, if collecting Beanie Babies, for example, is so creepy and fetishistic, then why has Lieberman bothered to assemble these materials himself (thus re-enacting behavior that he implicates as pathological), and why are we the ones standing here, looking at them.

Wade Guyton

2008-02-22T12:39:00.000-08:00

Review of Wade Guyton at Fredrich Petzel as published in Artillery

There was something grim and stultifying about Wade Guyton’s installation at Fredrich Petzel. The floor was laid with black painted plywood and the paintings on the wall are all nearly all-black monochromes, made by repeatedly feeding the canvases through an inkjet printer. As the card for the show, depicting 6 inkjet printer cartridges, also seemed to indicate, this was obviously some sort of a heavy-handed statement (about mechanical reproduction, the monochrome, or the gallery context, perhaps) but it hardly seemed worth trying to parse out.

Mostly though, it just reminded me of all the “boys in black” type of art from recent years and how dated those stylistic quirks already seem. The surfaces of Guyton’s printer paintings are so flat and dull as to be effectively dead (presumably on purpose though, I suppose). As I stood in the gallery I soon found myself staring at the walls and ceiling of the gallery, admiring an unusually elegant sprinkler system. If the purpose of this art is to make us aware of the physical circumstances of the gallery context, it certainly worked. After that, there’s nothing left to do but leave the room.

Joyce Pensato

2008-02-22T12:35:00.000-08:00

Review of Joyce Pensato at Fredrich Petzel Gallery in Flash Art on-line.

Mike Williams

2008-02-22T12:34:00.000-08:00

Review of Mike Williams “Cancuned and other Paintings from 2007” at Canada Gallery as published in Artillery

In Mike Williams’ painting Tom, a bearded man holds a stick of Tom’s of Maine deodorant which, strangely, appears to be dispensing a bearded face that resembles the man’s own. The bearded man seems curious but ambivalent while the deodorant-face is appears to be quite jovial. Normally this type of surrealistic scene – one concerned with the body and its funkier processes – would evince some trace, at least, of anxiety– but not here. The message is simply the reminder we all have bodies and that its messy processes are just a part of life.

Williams, anyway, does seem to sincerely love these types of surrealistic devices and employs all sorts of similar tricks to good effect. In one painting, a dog in a small room reaches almost to the ceiling. In another, an anthropomorphic frog-like Heineken bottle writhes on the floor in front of mysterious silhouetted figures. What separates this from art-historical Surrealism, is that Williams knows that it’s not possible to see these formal devices as a way of channeling subconscious imagery – at least, not anymore - since, at this point, they’re more likely to just channel art-historical Surrealist gimmickry. At any rate, sometimes a painting of a frog-like Heineken bottle with green anthropomorphic appendages is just a frog-like Heineken bottle with green anthropomorphic appendages. –Likewise, sometimes a cigar really is a phallus.

What makes Williams paintings so affable and entertaining is that he seems to be comfortable with either inversion of this syllogism. Like any art, it might very well be about his subconscious, but he also knows that these Surrealist tricks are just conventions to play with for effect. In a way, these paintings are about this process of self-consciousness itself. They seem to say, regardless of what we do and our intellectual justification or rationalization for doing so, it’s still, nevertheless impossible to know that “subconsciously” we don’t have other (even, possibly, contrary – motivations for doing so) - and then acknowledges with a wink and a nod that, well then, yes, obviously there’s nothing that we can do about that then, now is there?

Surrealism aside, what really seems to carry his paintings is their detail obsessive quasi-pointillist mark-making. The aforementioned dog-in-a-room, for example, is less compelling for the goofy surrealism and amusing scale-shifts involved than it is for its lustrous painting and the specificity of his visual language. The dog’s coat, is comprised of deep brown’s, burnt sienna, and yellow ochre, all modulated with an array of subtle, rich hues that nearly glimmer in the dog’s fur (or on the surface of the canvas). Here, as in the unctuous crystal ball in “The Duchess of Tareyton”, I think that I can best see what Williams is going for: a type of furtively obsessive mark-making that’s neither “filling in”, nor modeling, exactly (nor “Obsessive Compulsive); but rather, a complex exploration of the line between representation and abstraction; and a search for the hidden place where material transforms, mysteriously, into a new type of sign.

Review of Mike Nelson's "A Psychic Vacuum."

2007-12-13T12:12:00.000-08:00

Mike Nelson’s: A Psychic Vacuum, sponsored by Creative Time is the latest addition to a genre of installation art that attempts to create either replicas of “real” spaces (or fabricates fictional though hyper-realistic spaces out of “real” stuff), while usually adding a clever surreal or conceptual twist. This territory has included Christoph Buchel, Justin Lowe, Gregor Schneider, and Christian Tomaszewski. Schneider, for example, once turned part of Barbara Gladstone’s Gallery into a sepulchral parking garage while Lowe recently created a replica of a typical New York City bodega within Oliver Kamm’s 5BE Gallery.

With the Lower East Side’s derelict Old Market, Nelson’s been supplied with a massive ready-made, a picturesquely decaying building which he’s transformed into a sprawling, quasi-Lynchian labyrinthine installation filled with decrepit musty rooms, salvaged junk, and bits of Americana. Entering, initially, into a filthy derelict Chinese food restaurant and passing through its back kitchen, visitors subsequently encountered, among other things, a long bar with a few scattered stools, mausoleum-like walk-in freezers, and a cavernous room filled with drifts of sand piled up almost to the ceiling. One little room appeared twice, almost duplicated although one could notice odd subtle differences in some of the details.

Nelson’s particular flair, actually, is for these little dramatic moments. By controlling pacing (almost like a film editor) through the size, scale, and arrangement of these spaces and selecting the odd details that create mood (like a great set designer) he creates a lot of momentum and drama out of our own movements and turns particular discoveries into “moments”. My favorite part was trying to learn my way around, to mentally map, the densest part of the installation - a convoluted tangle of small rooms near the middle of the installation. Still, without a commitment to sculptural form or a discernible narrative, the whole project falls back on a type of realism which becomes, in essence, tautological. Things here are representations of themselves (not unlike film-sets, actually, which are similarly partial). The room of sand at the end invokes the grandeur of the desert and initially feels fraught with archetypal symbolism or otherwise psychologically loaded (and maybe it is), but these implied meanings are never fully consummated in any specific, meaningful way. Sometimes a room full of sand is just a room full of sand.

But the larger problem with A Psychic Vacuum was that it was so intent on creating a sense of dislocation and realism that, paradoxically, it seemed to constantly assert its status as art - like how bad Photo-Realist painting is constantly reminding you of just how impressively well it was painted. Inside, I wandered around, nearly lost, and yet, still found myself visualizing my location in terms of the intersection outside the building; as if the whole installation (regardless of all of its little shocks and amusingly disorienting features) was – far from being a vacuum – rather, a black box: a discrete location within a categorically definable “art” experience or place, (literally speaking, on the corner of Essex and Delancey) – and more defined by its context than defining it.

Judi Wherthein's Corporate Logo Review

2007-11-15T12:49:00.000-08:00

My review of Judi Wherthein's show "Corporate Logo" at Art in General is up on Frieze on-line.

Carter Mull Review on New Frieze Site

2007-10-04T19:31:00.000-07:00

My review of Carter Mull's show "Ethics of Everyday Fiction" at Rivington Arms is up on Frieze's newly launched web-site. This new site will feature on-line exclusive short reviews of shows while they're still up. What a concept! I'm really happy to be a part of this new feature as my reviews usually don't see the light of day until months after the show is already over and nearly forgotten. So check out my review and go see Carter Mull's show for yourself!

He's also in two pretty good group shows. Practical F/X is at the uptown Mary Boone gallery and the other, "Post-Retro", is at Brooklyn Fireproof in Williamsburg. They're both worth checking out.

Banks Violette

2007-09-29T16:44:00.000-07:00

My Review of Banks Violette's recent shows at Team and Barbara Gladstone as it appeared in the most recent issue of Artillery:

There’s something about Banks Violette’s strategy of melding high and low (Minimalist sculpture with the aesthetics of Death Metal) that I find a little obvious. It’s as if his high art credentials are meant to validate the cultural slumming while the sub-cultural cachet of death metal injects crusty old forms with a jolt of intensity or an air of authenticity. In actuality, it feels more like an exercise in stylistic genre-blending than invention - averaging out into something safe and accessible rather than remaining either rigorous or marginal.

It’s a given, anyway, that the monolithic and serial forms of Minimalism are symbolically kin to tombstones. Infusing Minimalist tropes with death metal theatricality is both obvious and almost campy in its literal take on the genre’s latent symbolism. Violette wants his art to be about big issues (death, morality, etc…), but the work’s marriage of these disjunctive forms is so jarring that it’s impossible to see beyond their function as art-historical or cultural signs.
A work featuring fluorescent tube lights hanging askew and large black wooden beams in a rectilinear formation is obviously meant to recall Sol LeWitt’s Variations on Incomplete Open Cubes (as well as Dan Flavin’s use of fluorescent tubes, and Donald Judd’s - or Liam Gillick’s – commercially fabricated objects), but these are intentional over-deliberate references rather than assimilations of those artists work. It also presents what seems like an obvious metaphor for entropy that doesn’t embody this quality in its presence: entropy as an image rather than a product of process. This effect makes his work feel more like commercial product than sculptural form. It also makes his work’s take on death (itself a product of entropy) seem a little tepid.

Violette’s work is best seen in comparison to other emerging artists working in similar territory. The Neo-Gothic werewolf sculptures of David Altmejd and the rock-inflected chaos of Anthony Burdin’s videos are, respectively, more complex, visceral, and less amenable to art-historical parsing. Violette also draw heavily on Damien Hirst’s melding of Minimalism with death-inflected subject matter but lacks the accessible clarity that Hirst, at his best, can achieve.
Despite his obvious intentions to deal with serious issues, his work’s most striking effect is art-historical. As an extension of Minimalist-derived techniques for using commercially available materials and procedures in art, Violette shows how the planes and surfaces of Minimalism could become the scaffolding of a rock concert set or the more complex articulations of musical equipment. The variegated knobs, swiveling arm, and tripod-like structure of a cymbal stand are closer in form to one of Judd or Flavin’s “specific objects” than we might normally think. Unfortunately, this formal innovation say too little about Violette’s ostensible content - death, morality, homicide, or death metal subculture - but it is an accomplishment, however short it falls from realizing his larger ambitions.

Kwik-E-Mart Article.

2007-09-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

My Kwik-E-Mart article as in appeared in the most recent issue of Artillery:

Approached from the side-walk, the exterior of the new “Kwik-E-Mart” – a completely re-branded 7-11 on 42nd St. near Times Square - is a sight to behold. The unexpected appearance of this fictional store-front lifted from “The Simpsons” world and recreated in real life is thrilling and hilarious. A few other select 7-11s (about 15, nationwide), feature this total transformation, while all 7-11s nationwide will offer some of the related merchandize and product re-branding. Standing on the sidewalk, one can watch smiling, bemused strangers come out of the store with “Squishies” (the fictional “Slurpee” equivalent form “The Simpsons”) in their hands. In terms of the public’s non-dutiful appreciation, “Kwik-E-Mart” might have “The Gates” beat.

Inside, you can find numerous Simpsons related products, from Buzz Cola and Squishies to Krusty O’s cereal. Other 7-11 products have been promoted with Simpsons-styled advertising. Donuts, for example, are advertised with the slogan “Go Ahead, they aren’t called Don’t Nuts”. A photocopy of a hand-lettered sign reading “This is Not a Library!” is posted above the magazine rack, hovering neatly between cartoon and phenomenological worlds.

Cross-brand promotions of this type are familiar enough but I can’t think of a similar attempt to meta-fictionally re-brand an entire store. Inside the lofty confines of the art-world, some recent projects of related intent have included a promotional campaign for a fake, unfilmed, movie (“United We Stand” by Eva and Franco Mattes 0100101110101101.ORG), and the recent transformation of Oliver Kamm 5BE gallery into a replica of a standard New York City corner bodega by the artist Justin Lowe. More conceptually similar might be the work of Michael St. John who makes 3-D sculptures of 2-D cultural artifacts (both high and low): a Nike Swoosh, for example, or a head from a Basquiat painting.

At any rate, there’s something witty about a company embracing a fictional parody of its own brand as its branding. Let’s not forget, a lot of those satirical criticisms leveled at 7-11 and its ilk by the Simpsons writers are well on target: ever actually eaten a 7-11 pre-packaged sandwich? (Don’t). It’s possible to wonder if this project was a hard sell with the “suits”. The bizarre upshot of this is a sort of (semi-intentional?) truth in advertising: irony turning in on itself. Meanwhile, as I plunk down a buck-fifty for my “Squishie”, I realize that I don’t really mind. Mmm… Slurrrppppeeee…

A little disappointingly, they do eagerly break the fourth wall by offering merchandize of Simpson’s characters that wouldn’t have merchandize inside of the Simpson’s universe (Homer, Bart, etc..) in addition to offering merchandize that does or could exist in their world (Krusty O’s and Radioactive Man comic books). However, it’s interesting to see how certain things do (or don’t) shift unwittingly between the two worlds. Of course, taking it seriously enough to nitpick on this level belies a ridiculous willingness to go along with an absurd premise in the first place. Can promotional merchandizing be Brechtian?! By heightening our awareness of the function of product tie-ins, placement, display, design, promotion, visual marketing, and branding – not to mention irony - it does throw the whole dynamic of consumerism and exchange into a new light. Can this be art? Probably not, but it is pretty good entertainment.

At any rate, what carries the whole project is the overall visual élan with which the Simpson’s style has been tweaked, to good effect, for “reality”. The presentation, interestingly, falls a little short of cartoon-y. A “Buzz Cola” sign, for example, features a notably restrained use of gradients in its design, for example, but it’s also more schematic and simplified than the more familiar rococo graffiti of contemporary soft-drink packaging. (This is also turned out to be prescient, or timely, as Coca-Cola has recently announced plans to release a more flat and streamlined redesigned can.)

In the end, whatever it’s promotional or conceptual intent, this project’s effects turn on questions of what our world can look like. We’re so acclimated to thinking of cultural detritus as part of our environment, that we forget sometimes how arbitrary, subjective, or historical determined, the look of, say, a Slurpee cup might be – that these are works made by people. Can we ever know, in our own time, what our stuff actually looks like? Maybe, but Kwik-E-Mart, Squishie’s, and Buzz Cola et al offer a revealing example (in both their incongruity with and resemblance to their respective meta-fictionally isomorphic brands) of just how much we might always be taking for granted.

Matelli review in Sculpture

2007-08-21T10:06:00.001-07:00

My review of Tony Matelli's last solo show at Leo Koenig is out in the new September issue of Sculpture magazine.

More Recent Old Review: Rachael Harrison

2007-07-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

Review of Rachael Harrison’s “If I Did It” at Greene-Naftali

Rachael Harrison is one the best contemporary sculptors around and this outing at Greene-Naftali, titled, “If I Did It” after O.J. Simpson’s title for his unreleased book, shows her at the top of her game. The sculptures here, each titled for a famous man, hewed closely to her typical formats – generally lumpy, stucco-ed, brightly painted, misshapen quasi-formalist sculpture adorned with kitschy knick-knacks, as well as a long rebus of photographs of sculptures depicting faces. The results here were nonetheless surprising in new ways.

Typically, these pieces all present a number of contradictory ideas about space and how radically different sculptural motifs, using a free-associative approach to meaning, can be juxtaposed. Each element seems to mock our tendencies to read them in familiar ways. Does it matter how beautiful, formal, well-crafted, or whatever, an abstract element is if there’s a can of “Arnold Palmer’s Lite Half & Half Ice Tea/Lemonade” nestled into one of its crannies (or that this can makes its appearance in a sculpture titled “Tiger Woods” – get it, “half & half”?)? It does, but only because the efficacy of a punch-line is mostly determined by its set-up. Part of the can’s jolting incongruity is that it suddenly becomes a formal element, as well, forcing you to think about what this ridiculous thing looks like i.e. utterly bizarre.

Elsewhere these tricks achieved mixed results. A tall roughly rectangular monolithic sculpture with a thermostat mounted on its side was titled “Al Gore”. Painted in both warm and cool tones, it initially seemed like a joke about color “temperature”, but the title reduced it to a one-liner. Likewise, a piece titled “Fats Domino” with a can of Slim-fast set on top is sculpturally impressive but the “Fat/slim” pun is a little grating. Another, titled “Johnny Depp”, painted in metallic gold paint and violet which included a large hoop ear dangling off it was more subtle and convincing. The clashing shades of fake gold were stunning, vulgar, off, and mesmerizing all at once.

A ring-bound book of Harrison’s source material and inspiration here also provided insight into her practice and offered unusual clues to her sculptures’ significance. A quotation from the enlightenment philosopher John Locke for example, describes how “complex” ideas derive from simpler ones: how the simple ideas of “red” and “sweet” together might form the complex idea of a “sweet, red apple”. Aside from offering an analogue for Harrison’s practice (where complex elements would seem to combine in mounting complexity) it also provides an alternative explanation for the funny Styrofoam apples appearing elsewhere on a couple of her sculptures (and, therefore, a concomitant comment on her tendency to deflate complex meanings back to the comical incidentals of particular forms – as if John Locke was a guy who wrote about apples). Whatever else apples might signify, a Styrofoam apple (with an apparently real bite taken out of it) is nonetheless, like Ms. Harrison’s sculptures as a whole, an ineffable, marvelous oddity unto itself.

Another Old Review - Ann Craven's 400 Paintings

2007-07-18T15:40:00.000-07:00

Review of Ann Craven’s 400 Paintings at Gasser & Grunert
Originally Published in Artillery Issue 5

Ann Craven has a tendency to repeat herself. In the past this has meant re-painting an entire show with a single adjustment: doubling the size of the canvases. Last year in a show of featuring 15 nearly identical paintings of deer, she scattered empty beer cans all over the gallery and provided free beer for visitors during gallery hours – a concept created in collaboration with the painter Josh Smith and titled “Deer and Beer”. This time around she’s painted the moon, 400 times, from life over the course of a single month – each painting identical in size and scale. A concurrent show at the Cincinnati Art Center featured a series of 400 duplicates –paintings that she made from the 400 originals. As an added twist, in a nod to Felix Gonzalez Torres, two stacks of small posters were placed on the floor. One was a reproduction of a painting from the original series, the other, a reproduction of a painting from the series of duplicates.

The 400 moon paintings stretched around the room in arrangement which might be called salon-style though it also resembled a sort of fragmented, off-kilter grid and also called to mind the word “constellation”, given the celestial subject matter. Each of the relatively small, square canvases presented a fresh variation on her theme - ranging from nearly monochromatic, to cloud-obscured views, murky concentric circles of fog, moody glimpses through skeletal silhouettes of tree brances, and several elegantly efficient treatments of yellow or orange crescents.

With her narrow set of constraints and carefully limited palette, Craven exploits seemingly every possibility available and reminds us that, for as long as it’s there, people will always stare at the moon and invest its image with Romantic, emotional, poetic, and meteorological significance. Adjacent paintings grouped roughly into themes. The appearance of a single bold stroke representing a moon-obscuring cloud felt brazen and thrilling next to a stretch of nearly austere crescents. Her paint handling in each was both light and self-assured – towing a fine line between loose and controlled, though erring on the side of too loose, and was reminiscent of both Katz and Richter, yet distinctly her own.

At any rate, her method of repeating herself may have less to do with the encyclopedic array of art-historical references which she’s incorporated into her work and more in common with a musician practicing a simple melody in order to assimilate its subtleties into physical reflexes. And while her various conceptual maneuvers are generally well-considered, I did wonder, as I haven’t actually seen them, if the trick of reproducing 400 paintings is absolutely necessary. But this is beside the point, by tying together ostensibly disparate practices and ideas, Craven isn’t simply trying to convince us of her own cleverness (or how inside of art history she is), but rather to channel the inchoate joys of art, art history, and (while deigning to dismiss the issue with sly, humble irony) the ever-effulgent possibility of the new.

Old Reviews - Matthew Ritchie's "Universal Adversary" at Andrea Rosen

2007-07-18T15:28:00.000-07:00

There's more posts on the way but in the meantime I'm going to post a few old reviews here. These are things that I've had published a while but aren't on-line. Here they are.

Elwyn Palmerton
Matthew Ritchie's Universal Adversary at Andrea Rosen Gallery
Matthew Ritchie's recent show "Universal Adversary" began with a lightbox mounted outside the gallery featuring a quotation from Ezekiel: "their appearance and their work was as if a wheel within a wheel" it began and then continued "their rings full of eyes, round about them as four". The quote aptly evoked Ritchie's visual style and cosmological inter-disciplinary approach to art-making in addition to establishing his installation's quasi-religious tone of apocalyptic foreboding. Inside the gallery, the combination of a row of prismatic light-boxes (in which the images of ascending figures changed and dissolved depending upon your viewing angle), his swirling Arabesque latticework ("drawing" as architectural intervention), and the muted Earthy tones of the paintings created a cathedral-esque vibe – a tone amplified by an audio recording of a monotonous voice - the titular "Universal Adversary", presumably - intoning a litany of disaster scenarios that sounded as bureaucratic as it was ominous; the exhibition's title was lifted from a government report listing 15 threats to the U.S. population.

The overall effect was relatively tranquil, almost meditative – ironically so, considering his sprawling, chaotic aesthetic and paranoiac narrative – perhaps a reflection of how comfortable we are with the media's near daily hysterical pronouncements. In this sense, Ritchie's take on this sort of trendy religious/apocalyptic content was one of the more nuanced, lucid, and original interpolations of this recently popular theme.

The paintings, for their part, still feel like they contain the essential juice of his enterprise. This time around they're more painterly but they still contain his familiar diagrammatic flourishes – e.g. directional arrows, equations, and black outlines – as if his language will always remain an uncomfortable hybrid of contradictory devices - stuck somewhere between the picturesque and the schematic. The four shown here were redundant enough to suggest a series of stills rather than effectively independent paintings. His framing methods also, by focusing more on scale and density of information than on composition, accentuate the cinematographic as well as cosmological impulse in his work – as if he's alternately zooming in and out on a single, infinitely large and detailed, entity.

Given this tendency, one might expect more from the videos: two pixilated/grainy animations depicting atmospheric beachscapes or marshlands in mostly sepia and brown tones. Video ought to provide Ritchie with room to explore and reveal more of his inherently kinetic world but, unfortunately, he only manages to animate it. In a way, they're less cinematic or dynamic than the paintings; they're flurries of visual noise over static backgrounds – essentially an animation cliché: moving figures over a stationary ground.

Still, Ritchie's rigorously conceived world always elicits a combination of perplexity and wonderment – even when he fails to reveal enough of it. That he's flirting with its destruction is a tantalizing, amusingly ironic, and seemingly inevitable prospect, but the results felt timid: an atmospheric evocation of impending doom, an ambiance of paranoia, and the calm before the storm rather that the cataclysmic shit-storm that Ritchie's obviously capable of conjuring up. I guess we'll have to wait to see what comes next.

New Kwik-E-Mart in Times Square

2007-07-05T13:12:00.001-07:00

Not sure if this art or what exactly, but who cares. Everyone should go check out the 7-11 on 42nd St. that's been transformed Quik-E-Mart (it's between 8th and 9th).

Here's a flickr set of photos of a similarly transformed store in Burbank, C.A.:
http://flickr.com/photos/rdr07/sets/72157600590001691/

It's pretty amazing. You can purchase any number of products hitherto-unavailable outside of the fictional world of the Simpsons. Grab yourself a Squishie, some Buzz Cola, or Krusty O's. The whole atmosphere is incredibly entertaining. The employees are even wearing official "Kwik-E-Mart" garb. I especially love the "fake" ads which say things like "They don't call them Don't Nuts", "Our Hot-Dogs are Filled Bunly Goodness", and best yet "Buy 3, for the Price of 3".

Best Promotional Movie Product Tie-in Ever.

Archive of Reviews

2007-07-05T12:25:00.000-07:00

Here are some things that I've written that you can find on-line:

Noah Fischer's "Rhetoric Machine"
Anthony Burdin's "Anthony's Revenge"
Michael St. John "I'm a Child of Divorce, Gimme a Break"
Matt Bua and Jesse Bercowitz, "The Largest Bowie Knife Ever Made"
Oliver Payne and Nick Relph's "Sonic the Warhol"
Nicole Cherubini
Tara Donovan, "Untitled (Plastic Cups)"
Michael Bell-Smith
Review of Space Boomerang at the Swiss Institute

Also, I've written about Dana Schutz for Art Review for the new issue (July/August).
You can read it on Art Review Digital.

I also write for a magazine called Artillery, a free L.A. based publication, on occassion. A few galleries in Chelsea and maybe in Brooklyn put it out so pick one up if you happen to see it.

My New Art Blog!

2007-07-05T11:18:00.000-07:00

My main intent in starting this blog is to create an ongoing archive of my art reviews. Since I publish in a diverse bunch of magazines at unpredictable intervals, I figured that it would be useful for people who would like to read my writing for me to provide ongoing account of my activities as a critic - with links to the articles themselves where possible. My plan is to update this blog, at the very least, whenever I publish something new. As the frequency of this is about once or twice a month, this is most likely about how often you can expect to definitely see new posts here.

As I understand that this is grievously infrequent and that such an intermittent enterprise runs the risk of being utterly forgotten, I'll probably try to throw in a few other odds and ends. I'll also let you know if I'm doing anything as an artist or curator. I'll probably also throw up some recommendations of things to see and maybe some capsule reviews or other commentary on the art-world.

I tend to be an achingly neurotic writer and therefore not much of a blogger by nature. I'm more into the over-edited and agonized-over-every-word and finally ready-for-publication piece of writing produced on occassion than the daily, diaristic, quasi-epistolary style that seems more appropriate for blogs, but well... who knows... So, here it is.