Doug Aitkin at 303 Gallery

Sonic Fountain, the centerpiece of Doug Aitken’s show (all works 2013) includes a large, round hole jack-hammered into the cement floor and filled with water. From above, a system of pipes with five spigots drips water into this small pool. The drops fall in programmed rhythms and are doubled with recorded water sounds. Each splash is synchronized with more synthetic and resonant recorded splashes, as if they were reverberating in a cave. Nearby sits a pile of excavated rubble.

The overall effect is perversely theatrical and yet formally awkward, with the five spigots arrayed like corners of a square and one in the center. The rhythm of the drops is predictably regular and yet irritatingly unmusical in a way that calls to mind someone practicing rudimentary beats on a drum. The synthetic sounds are both cheesy and redundant, yet manage to make the physical drops sound, by comparison, oddly banal (reminiscent of toilet splashes, sadly.) Likewise, the atmospherics make the laborious excavation seem relatively puny and prosaic. The whole thing cancels itself out. Oddly, it is also suspiciously similar to a more successful piece—Untitled (2011) from Jim Hodges’ 2011 show at Barbara Gladstone—in which Hodges made a nearly identical hole and rigged a disco ball to gradually lower itself from the ceiling until submerged.

Aitken’s other sculpture here, Fountain (Earth Fountain), (2012) is blatantly derivative of a more famous work. In a large rectangular vitrine the letters “A-R-T”, built from Lucite, ooze smooth creamy mud resembling milk chocolate. It immediately recalls Robert Rauschenberg’s Mud Muse (1971)—itself a large rectangular vat filled with mud rigged to bubble and sputter like lava. The use of the word “ART” here merely underlines one obvious subtext of Rauschenberg’s piece: that something as ubiquitous and abject as mud could so effectively be corralled into the realm of art. This makes Aitken’s rather polished version more like CliffsNotes for a canonical work than anything else.

Here’s an even more tired trope: holes punched in gallery walls. While this device can be effective (if not subversive, as in the works of Gordon Matta-Clark) it’s become such a cliché that, at this point, Aitken’s version feels merely decorative. What’s worse, the holes are just-so: neatly cut through both layers of sheetrock with the interstitial space casually patched with cement and painted over. This creates the unconvincing impression of a rough but perfectly circular hole, over 8-feet wide, somehow spontaneously punched through a thick concrete wall. The large text pieces framed by these holes and situated a few feet behind them—Sunset (Black) and 100 YRS—are jokey, slick and elegant in ways that seems more like edgy design than art.

Another text piece, MORE (Shattered Pour), is made from faceted planes of mirrored glass spelling “MORE” with wet-looking broken mirrors coated in resin scattered in each letter’s convexity. It might seem custom-made to satirize art-market acquisitiveness except that its anodyne quality could just as easily play into it. Either way, it’s a nice looking object, but the viewer is left wanting, well… more.

Bjorn Copeland at Jack Hanley Gallery

Bjorn Copeland at Jack Hanley Gallery

September 5 to October 06, 2013

A chorus from acclaimed Indie Rock band The New Pornographers that goes “It came out magical, out from blown speakers” is testimonial to moments when music is transcendent despite technical glitches. Simultaneity of broken equipment and sonic pleasure is one that Bjorn Copeland, of the musical collective Black Dice, must know intimately as it is one that he embodies perfectly in BD Mix, (all works 2013) a Yamaha amp oozing black polyurethane foam.Call it abject synesthesia, this is the perfect totem for his group’s embrace of the broken, distorted, noisy, chaotic, and experimental aspects of music-making....

Read the full review at Artcritical.com

Jen Mazza at Stephan Stoyanov

Whether or not one has read Marcel Proust’s works, you might be familiar with his “madeleine,” the cookie that initiates his 1913 novel The Remembrance of Things Past: Swann’s Way by transporting him through time and memory. Jen Grazza, as if to signal how books, as objects, can be similarly evocative, depicts the first six pages in three paintings (2011). The paintings are striking upon first glance, with their prestidiginous skill and academic precision (the type-face text of whole pages re-created down to the very serif), and it quickly becomes apparent that their virtuosity belies a painterly, if somewhat conservative, sensibility.

Most of the works in Grazza’s exhibition “The Words (Le Mots)” feature books, in fact—either the cover or pages opened to text or an illustration. Each one, centered and parallel to the picture plane, is surrounded with hazy old-master-esque backgrounds of layered glazes of alternating warm and cool colors. These abstract yet individuated backgrounds function as a signal that Grazza’s careful paintings of her singular subjects are more akin to portraiture than still life painting. Recalling the oft-quoted line by Gilbert Highet (used frequently on Barnes & Noble paraphernalia): “These are not lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive upon the shelves!”

Throughout the exhibition, Grazza displays an astonishing knack for duplicating style, including imitations of the affably bland graphic design of old Penguin paperbacks, as in Civilization (2012), loopy middle-brow Modernism as seen in Le Planetarium (2011), the fine curlicues of various logos and publisher’s imprints, and a reproduction of a Rothko in Le Ravissement (2012). The trompe l’oeil accuracy is impressive and yet, fortunately tends to fall short of pastiche. Grazza is always duly conscious her sources as fastidiously copied images and attributes of objects. They convey not just the original printed materials, but also the ravages of time: the dusty yellow pages, faded colors on the covers, and the wear, tear, creases, scuffs-marks, and folds which provide evidence the books were read and loved. This attention to the book as object also becomes a metaphor for the individual relationships that readers have to books as texts – how everyone’s experience of the same book is, nonetheless, unique.

One might say Grazza is attempting to reverse the effects described by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: to re-invest the mechanically reproduced object with the “aura” of a specifically personal one. The play of light and shade on the edges of pages and brown leather covers is treated with a variety of coloristic flourishes typically reserved for the human figure. These ostensibly drab elements are modulated with several nameless, fleshy shades of beige, grey, tan, ochre and mauve (as well as a few rogue notes of teal or light violet high-lights). This gives them a certain oily corporeality that recalls, perhaps ironically, De Kooning’s famous assertion, “Flesh is what oil paint was made for,” as well as the not-quite-dissimilarly biblical phrase, “And the Word became flesh.”

Julian Hoeber at Harris Lieberman Gallery

Travel across the US and you might encounter a type of roadside attraction known as a Gravitational Mystery Spot. It features an off-kilter structure which induces vertigo or disorientation that is generally attributed, by roadside hucksters, to either some gravitational anomaly or a paranormal phenomenon. The real source of the effect, however, lies in a simple architectural trick...

Read the full review in Frieze.

Mark Flood's "The Hateful Years" at Luxembourg & Dayan

Mark Flood might be one of the most prophetic and underrated artists of the 1980s. Working in a variety of media and formats – including painting, writing, installation, modified readymades, combines and photo-collage, not to mention the records of his band Culturcide – Flood’s anti-aesthetic sensibility has influenced a younger generation of artists that includes Josh Smith, Nate Lowman and Anthony Burdin. Dating from a time when pop subject matter was treated with varying degrees of cool indifference or irony, Flood’s is a unique, unusually impassioned and intensely oppositional voice. One gets the impression that... 

Read the full review in Frieze.

Review of Tom Thayer at Derek Eller Gallery

 


THE FAMED EXPRESSIONIST EDVARD MUNCH WAS KNOWN TO leave his paintings out in the rain on occasion, a habit he explained by saying, "It will either kill or cure them." I don't suspect that Tom Thayer has ever left one of his paintings outdoors but they do have a cracked, desiccated and weathered appearance that suggests it might not matter if he did. The cut-out corrugated cardboard figures hanging from dirty strings and gnarled curls of wire also help give off the impression that this work has been sitting undiscovered in an attic for about 30 years—despite the fact that everything here is from 2012 and Thayer is only 42-years-old.


Even his videos—which are subjected, it would seem, to every form of analog video degradation known to man—have a "Video tape dumped in a mop bucket" feel. The best of these, Empirical Video Study is shown as a projection. Its multicolored, oscillating wave-forms and distorted abstractions remind one of what the unpaid-for premium cable TV channels (the scrambled porn) used to look like, except the colors are more muted—pale, static-y tangerines and faded, off-tint magenta's predominate. That, and its rhythms are more furtive and hypnotic than herky-jerky.


All of this would seem to be deliberately anti-aesthetic, faux-naïve, or a pointed affront to good taste except that Thayer's overall attitude isn't a rejection of (or an ironic gloss on) anything so much as it is marked by a casual but complete indifference to those standards in the first place. To pull a variegated collection of clumped-up lint from the dryer's lint filter and use it to fill in a goofy cut-out profile of a face—With the Force of the Moon and the Ocean—isn't an act that's determined in opposition to anything. It's a gesture, particular to itself—as if to say, this is the world, or part of it. It is abject, quotidian, fraught with pathos, entropy, degradation and sadness, but also charming, weirdly funny, and beautiful.


It's a refined vision, also. The overall formal intelligence and sense of economy (along with the silhouetted figures and dangling strings) calls to mind late Jasper Johns, but the general tone is reminiscent of a different artist altogether: the Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still. Paintings by Still tend to feel as if one is staring into outer space and finding that there's no one out there: we're all totally alone. Imagine, then, if Still had the sense of humor to hang a Johns-like cut-out silhouetted figure in front of that existential void. It's funny, yes, but not exactly "ha ha" funny. By suggesting that we're all alone, it resists that condition by attempting to communicate—even as it implicates its own efforts as comically futile. This is paradoxical—funny because it isn't funny, and sad because it's utterly mundane: the type of thing best expressed through corrugated cardboard, lint and VCR-tracking errors—just some of Thayer's derelict materials.

Review of Benjamin Butler's "Some Trees" at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery

Originally Published in Artillery Art Magazine

One might easily dismiss Benjamin Butler's paintings as blandly pretty or ironic "bad painting," a faux-amateurish retread of early 20th century Modernism. But they are, in fact, rather subtle paintings with a deceptive simplicity that belies a lot of art-historical knowledge and painterly know-how: the kind of work that takes time to warm up to.

All of them in his recent exhibition "Some Trees" depict not so much trees, as a nearly schematic glyph: the idea of a tree. As in Untitled Forest (2012), for instance, the suggestion of branches is rendered as one or two veering curves attached to a vertical line—enough to convey "tree"-ness. Mondrian's trees come to mind, as if Butler is picking up an art-historical loose end and running with it, although, stylistically, they are more akin to Alex Katz. Similarly, Butler's nods toward Minimalism suggest an attitude of resisting both the idealism of pure abstraction and the picturesque qualities imbued in his subject.


Initially, almost everything about these paintings seems to assert their status as an object. Paint is applied in ways that are unassuming and spare: either dry and scumbled or in very thin washes. These techniques emphasize the grain of the canvas, its materiality. Green Forest (2010-2012), a piece comprised of five oddly-proportioned columnar canvases (each about 76" x 7"), similarly asserts the canvas as an object—not unlike Frank Stella's early work. Also, like Stella, Butler's marks are sometimes laid down in tracks with slight space between them, as in Autumn Forest (Sixty-Three Trees) (2012). Without much over-painting, every step of his process is visible. This makes them performative in a way that feels both loose and fastidious—that is, deliberate and controlled but not precious or fussy.

Butler's consistent allusion to trees complicates all of this insistent materiality. The overall flatness is contradicted by the tree motif, which lets space—an intimation of sky—open up behind them. This implies a horizon line situated (with one exception) outside the frame. That is, these are trees that we are looking up at, an attitude suggesting, it would seem, a kind of reverence for his subject (or, perhaps, for his early 20th-century sources). Forty-Five Trees at Sunset (2012), for instance, seems, at first, almost like a grid painting or a mosaic before suggesting, gradually, the sense of light emanating through a forest. It also has a surprising, very evocative, sense of place. Like Milton Avery, he can wring a lot of atmospheric effect out of surfaces that would seem, initially, rather abstract. In fact, the best summary of Butler's work might be contained in the John Ashbery poem from which he garnered his title (Some Trees): "That their merely being there means something"—though, perhaps in Butler's case, the reverse. For all their "meaning"—their paradoxes, ambiguities and art-historical name-checking—we are left, in the end, with the specificity of their simple presence.

Other Reviews of Benjamin Butler's work:
Ken Johnson
Will Heinrich
Roberta Smith

Review of Amy Feldman's "Dark Selects" at Blackston Gallery

In & Out, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 75 x 80

The paintings included in Amy Feldman’s debut solo show “Dark Selects” (all works 2012) all convey a sense of quick efficient activity constrained by the unity of the single driving impulse: as if a rush of practiced activity could be a way of chasing after one clear yet multifaceted thought. Each work is an initially flat-seeming grey-on-white abstract composition that is revealed upon closer inspection to preserve, to varying degrees, some traces of their painterly production – some drips, light scumbling, and over-lapping brush-strokes. The thin nearly consistent application of paint makes the presence of intermittent drips and off-hand, apparently unfinished areas seem initially incongruous while their overall flat opacity allows them to seem integrated, however tenuously. It’s this dichotomy of form and material held in an unusual and fragile harmony that generates their most unusual effects.

That is, from a certain distance the quirky elegance of her compositions seems like an unlikely result of the gestural intensity implied by the drips. But up close this sense of reserve evaporates and the exact opposite impression occurs: the overall coherence of the whole seems like a contrived or artificial product of an alternately haphazard or deliberately off-hand patch-work of marks. It is weird and destabilizing but also thrilling to see paintings that seem almost at odds with themselves. For instance, in Owed – a large circular donut shape with repeated semi-circular edges like a cartoon cloud (or anus) - the subdued coherence of the work fragments completely, reveals itself to be an utterly provisional, almost an accidental product of these accumulated visceral efforts.

Owed, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 80 x 80.

Look at them even closer; put your nose right up to the surface of All or Nothing, for example, and you’ll find something else entirely: a fine spritzing of tiny speckles (like paint applied by flicking the bristles of a brush loaded with watery thin paint) distributed almost uniformly across the canvas. From farther back these speckles dissipate into a vague texture accentuated by hazy accumulations, as if offering an amorphous vibrational counter-point to the svelte grey composition. Despite her works remarkable clarity, she’s determined how their effects might differ dramatically with viewing distance or, even, how a slight shift in perception might reveal a vastly different aspect or attitude. They also play with our perception of time. Far from seeming merely quick, these speckles demonstrate how these paintings are actually crafty, pain-staking, and calculated

In & Out, for instance, features a series of concentric not-quite-circles – more like round-corned wobbly off-kilter rectangles – that seems to recede into space inconsistently and then waver as the well-calibrated negative space asserts itself. Despite its relative simplicity, it seems unpredictable in a way – as if all the capricious choices of a virtuosically idiosyncratic hand give it, spatially, a complex ambiguity. The edges of the forms seem to waver and undulate. By painting over the edges of the frame and harnessing the figure/ground relationships into an unexpected optical illusion, Feldman also manages give the painting the sense that it’s about to defy physics – to warp and weave like a glitch in the Matrix. This effect is echoed in All or Nothing – a riff on Kenneth Noland’s famous Chevron paintings. The double “V” formation is contained in a vertical banner form that seems ready to start flapping in some illusory breeze and wrest itself free of its physical support any minute.

All or Nothing, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 96 x 80

She also demonstrates how even a simple form, in the most capable hands, can become fraught and out-of-control - subject to entropy, destabilization, or implosion - once it gets too big. She’s made a point of finding the line that separates control from chaos and then stepping just over that line. In this sense, the flat graphic quality of her work is a measure of her control, confidence, and familiarity with her own visual language, while the drips, which seem almost too neat or consistent but also incongruous, become an index of her anxiety. They’re accidents, that is, but accidents on purpose (as they say.) Far from being just an ostensibly incidental by-product, it just might be that it is these “accidents” which (by adjusting all of the other variables) she’s been conspiring to engineer all along.

Other Reviews and blog posts about Amy Feldman:
Roberta Smith
Anaba
Two Coats of Paint
Howard Hurst

Joyce Pensato's "Batman Returns" at Friedrich Petzel Gallery

For More images of the exhibition see the Friedrich Petzel site.


The idea of the artist’s studio transferred into the gallery is a relatively familiar one. As this show demonstrates, however, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a good one. Part of this has to do with the nature of studios. Artists studios are always an object of fascination for art lovers. Studios are the machines that we build to build our work. Great art is likely to be the product of an interesting machine. Our studios, like our houses and apartments, are also products of how we organize our minds.

Here the studio detritus is included along with several of Pensato’s white and black enamel paintings. Scattered throughout the gallery, on the floor or piled on stools and milk crates is a large collection of stuffed animals, found images, drawings, photographs, and toys. Most of them are characters that appear in her paintings. All of them are spattered with her black and white enamal paint, as if catching flack from any number of intense painting sessions. Most of them look filthy too - as if they’ve been kicking around on the floor of an art studio for years (as they undoubtably have.) Some of her milk-crates and stools have enamal hardened on them like shiny black icicles. Most impressively, there’s an astonishingly huge chunk of accumulated enamel paint (several inches think and large enough to cover a wide swatch of studio floor.)

What’s wonderful about this, as is often the case with artists’ studios, is that the machine that she’s built to build her work (her studio), is so of-a-piece with her work itself that it almost renders the paintings themselves a bit extraneous. Fortunately, that’s not the case. If the paintings couldn’t be made without all the bizarre accoutrements of Pensato’s studio then it’s also true to say that her studio couldn’t have been made without the paintings. Here, they reinforce and inform each other. They show us a lot about how she makes her work and even more about why she would in the first place.

It’s nearly impossible not to see Pensato’s work in relation to Mike Kelley’s, especially in light of his recent death. Kelley famously examined the pathos of dingy stuffed animals. However, where Kelley only ever made anti-paintings and explicitly rejected and the attitudes of Modernist painting, Pensato has found that the tools of painterly abstraction could be quite effectively brought to bear on the problem of exploring these characters’ weird combination of charm and abjection. If there’s an immediate art-historical source for Pensato’s painterly technique it’s probably De Koonings black and white enamel paintings from the late forties. By melding Kelley’s unusual concerns with some serious painterly chops, Pensato seems to reveal something about the expressive force of both. While these projects might have seemed at one time diametrically opposed (Kelley once spoke, figuratively, of his “figure/ground” oriented art school training as a type of “trauma”), Pensato has shown us how surprisingly compatible they might actually be.

Her resolutely controlled figure ground relationships force us to see the simple, stark out-line of these characters as if for the first time. The black and white areas tend to flip back and forth between their status as positive or negative space. The intensity of her brushwork, the drips, and the anguished simplified expressions not only evoke German Expressionism but also transmute some of its power. They seem less like cartoon characters in this context and more like spectres of our own subconscious – the rage-filled cartoon duck inside of us all. Cartoon characters, by their nature, are usually presented as slick brightly colored illustration or shiny plastic objects. This belies the fact that the emotions they access in us might not be so neat. The intensity of her mark-making, and her proficiency with these materials helps to reinforce and accentuate some of the darker, latent content of these characters. Rather than an ironic exercise, this seems like an appropriate form of redemption. Donald Duck’s angry, dark soul never looked so good.

Review of Chris Martin at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

This image is a Chris Martin painting from a previous exhibition, for images of the current show see: the Mitchell-Innes & Nash site.

If you spend a lot of time looking at art there inevitably come moments when you find yourself liking things that you wouldn’t normally think of as the type of thing that you like and vice versa: things that seem like the type of thing that you’re usually predisposed to like but which nonetheless disappoint. In the case of Chris Martin’s show at Mitchell-Inness Nash, it was the latter, for me.

There is, after all, a lot to like about his work. There’s a seemingly fearless attitude toward painting at work here. He seems to be having fun. His big color fields – often in harsh unadultured primary colors or combinations of orange and green – on huge canvases - have an initially pleasing monumental presence. He's not shy about approaching the word “heroic.” With its grand scale, curvy oscillating forms, and characteristically loose facture this is painting that openly advertises its faith in “painting” as a vehicle for transcendance – an aspiration they advertise more successful than they fulfil.

The inclusion, here of several images of psychedelic mushrooms, gnomes smoking pipes, an oriental carpet used as a ground for painting, and images of Miles Davis, also all speak of a striving for transcendence or, perhaps, maybe just a valorization of mind-altering drugs. Martin’s commitment to painting itself encourages the former. Even so, these two attitudes (of painterly commitment and an almost Dada-esque habit of under-mining his own paintings by punching holes in them and attaching random pictures and objects) sit uncomfortably with each other. The images and objects themselves are treated as if their inclusion in the paintings is a stylistic choice rather than an encroachment on the painterly field by a contradictory attitude: hippy tapestries meet John Cage. It ends up feeling like he’s taken the lessons of Rauschenberg and Johns purely as stylistic cues. What’s weird about this is that one gets the sense that this is a vein of painting that has defined itself against the idea of “theory” and “post-modernism” as much as it defines itself in favor of anything else. His attitude seems to be, almost overtly, a calculated rejection of Warhol’s attitude even as he seems to owe a great many debts to Warhol.

The most jarring instance of this disjunction occurs in a painting of – of all things – Amy Winehouse. The painting looks like nothing so much as a mediocre Schnabel. Amy Winehouse’s face is crossed out with two overlapping, sloppily executed “T” shapes. It would be unmemorable except for the occurrence of a few haphazardly placed light-gray foot-prints – as if Martin simply stepped onto the still half-dry paint and the dust and grime on his soles adherred to the surface. It could easily be accidental although we know, from the context, anyway, that it isn’t. What’s jarring about this is how calculated its apparently chance occurrence appears to be. It seems not so much accidental, as in Pollock’s paintings – an incidental side-effect of painterly activity - as it seems to evoke Warhol’s parodic painting of dance-routine foot-patterns. Those paintings codified the idea of making a painting horizontally rather than vertically, declaring its status as a conventional move. What seems odd about this foot-print here is that it seems calculated to come off as uncalculated – as if we’re meant to applaud his insousciance for “breaking the rules” when we already know that this has been defined as a "rule." In his own words Martin describes his practice like this “The discipline is going into the studio and moving materials around. Then I just back off, suspend critical judgment, and just let things happens.” Maybe that “suspending critical judgment part isn’t such a great idea, actually.

If the boundary between painting and the world is so undeniably porous, then why hasn’t he let more of it in? The materials that he includes in his paintings suggest that we might put “anything” into a painting but then the “anything” that he lets in seems oddly proscribed. As numerous artists have demonstrated the familiar detritus of the world is adequate material for art, with or without paint. Likewise, painting remains perfectly capable on its own. Martin’s material promiscuity and painterly chops are all good things, but the confusion of means with ends strikes me as relatively myopic. If you’re going to open your paintings up to the world, open them up all the way.

Carter Mull

Carter Mull’s “The Days Specific Dreams” at Taxter & Spengemann from 5/6/11 to 6/11/11
As published in Artillery Magazine.

The more things change, the more things stay the same. That might sound like a trite bit of conventional wisdom, but there’s more truth to it than we sometimes seem to acknowledge. At least, I might hazard to guess, Carter Mull thinks so. With a mix of images that focuses on the technology of media and communication, art-history, and pop-culture appropriations, his work suggests a sense of visual time travel and inspires the thought that the past is less distant than we think. His almost kaleidescopic and of-the-moment style – big colorful photos collaged together using a mix of digital and traditional photographic techniques – makes older appropriated imagery seem brand new while familiar pop subjects are contextualized historically. A rather contemporary looking Brillo box in Z is for Marylin (b) (2011), for example, suggests the degree of our precise historical distance from the Pop artists like Warhol who pioneered the use of that type of subject matter.

Granted, none of this is, undoubtedly, the first thought that his work is likely to evoke. Perhaps the opposite, actually. These things are, after all, pretty flashy with a prismatic palette that would suggest associations with amateurish quasi-psychedelic PhotoShop trickery if it weren’t pulled off with an impressive elan, scale, and technical expertise. They come off at first like nothing more than fantastic eye candy so it’s almost startling to recognize that the style is as much a means as an end. The compositions are vaguely reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s loose funky grid formats although his intent and imagery are more like Sigmar Polke’s.

The first clue, then, that these works might be up to other things is the repeated use of an unfolded front/back page of The New York Times, photographed straight on, parallel to the picture plane, and centered squarely in the middle of his compositions. Newspapers have a particular, essential, relationship to the history of pop art, of course, but here they’re used to evoke both the dailyness of the mundane, their dissolution into the digital world and, contrarily, their opposition to the daily and mundane: a reminder that the alternately sudden and gradual march of historical events can and do cause seismic shifts in the shape and structure of the world that we all have to live in. It’s hard then not to imagine these works slipping into the past one specific day at a time.

Alternately, the older images serve an opposite function. In Typist, an engraving of a loom from Diderot’s Encyclopédie (an 18th century encyclopedia) is over-laid with a rainbow hued gradient that could have come from some currently hip graphic design source: a recent iPod or American Apparel ad, for instance. Juxtaposed with the silvery reflective prints of iPhones scattered all over the gallery floor, the unavoidable message is that even antiquated technology was once newfangled too. That is, our perception of the past is based not on some rational sense of chronological time but, rather, keyed to the aesthetic of its representations. That’s something worth remembering.

Karl Wirsum

Review of Karl Wirsum at Derek Eller Gallery in September of 2010 as published in Artillery Magazine.

Karl Wirsum’s show “Drawings: 1967 – 1970) at Derek Eller Gallery, is his first solo show in New York in 20 years and, judging by the evidence on hand here, this has been an aggregious over-sight. Maybe not a surprising one, though – Wirsum’s career – like that of the other members of the group of Chicago Imagists known as “The Hairy Who?”, was built on a certain indifference to the supposed cultural elite, in particular the supposed importance of New York as a cultural capital. As it turns out, though, we obviously need artists like Wirsum more than they need us.

At their most basic level, the drawings in this show resemble, very superficially, what happens when kids try to learn to draw by copying superheroes out of comic books without understanding how the patterns of light and dark and over-lapping contours are supposed to create volumetric form. This is usually a liability but by employing this technique deliberately – not unlike how Lichtenstein revealed the abstract qualities of comic book panels merely by blowing them up to epic proportions – Wirsum finds an opportunity here.

One of my favorite drawings in this show was a black, yellow, and orange drawing of a cow-girl twirling a lasso. It feels like something that could be a strip club neon sign straight out of Las Vegas but it’s somehow more mysterious. There’s a totemic quality about it as if the buxom cow-girl has been elevated to some sort of mythological status while the crummy aesthetics and lurid materialism of the source material has been identified as grotesque and roundly rejected. Another drawing here of a red-head in a pin-up pose (all of the ddrawings here are figures of some sort) seems to simultaneously mock and re-invent its source. The hair is treated as a flat abstract firy red shape interspersed with lightning-like white hightlights while the body looks unfinished, defined only in contour, with a face and arms filled in with lines that suggest razor-wire as readily as lip-stick.

Other works include a pair of sexy legs with a black helmet shaped skirt and the caption, “Nazi helmet skirt”, and a few drawings of what might be native women appropriated from old National Geographic’s, and a standing figure with a frogs face and a vibrating body of abstract psychedelic doodles that reminds me of the phrase “like being inside of an Aztec pinball machine” which the comedian Marc Maron once used to describe what it was like to close his eyes while under the influence of some very intense mushrooms. In all of these works Wirsum is taking familiar types and motifs and rendering them strange alien, totally abstract, and precisely differentiated. Characters, images, areas of abstract decoration, or stylistic choices, sometimes seem to reoccur but never exactly the same way twice. Despite – rather, probably, because of – his drawings loose funky attitudes, it’s immediately clear that they are products of sophisticated visual thinking in which multiple ends are always approached simultaneously, and a semi-improvisational process in which every line seems to be part of a process of discovery.

Hiroyuki Doi at Ricco/Maresca Gallery

Review of Hiroyuki Doi at Ricco/Maresca Gallery as published in Artillery magazine.


The term “Outsider” whatever it might have once meant is, at this point, nothing more than a marketing angle for galleries to sell art made by artists who exist outside of the normal social and power structures of the art-world – meaning, mostly, that they don’t have MFAs. Granted, some historical examples of artists from this category (Darger, Wolfi, et al) are real marginal characters – lunatics, cranks, and social isolates (not to mention the occassional pedophile) – but being an artist is marginal to begin with. Not just that, there are at least a few “insider” characters that might be described variously as lunatics, cranks, social isolates or even pedophiles.

Hiroyuki Doi would have to be a prime example of how this category has become irrelevant and therefore misleading. Doi is an untrained artist who started making work late in life (in his 30s.) Now, he’s sixty-four and, having been in a show at The Folk Art Museum and made appearances at The Outsider Art Fair, makes some of his living selling art. I suppose that, given his biography, what makes him an “Outsider” is the fact that he made work for a long time, solely for its own sake, for his own personal satisfaction. Of course, that’s not the definition of an “Outsider,” that’s the definition of an artist.

His work itself, for what it’s worth, bears none of the hall-marks of mawkishness that we might associate with that category either. Each piece is made from ink on paper, and composed of innumerable tiny circles, varying slightly in size though all about ¼” or smaller, organized in a loose Mandala-like symmetry. The term “obsessive-compulsive” might almost apply except that their repetitiveness belies an astonishing intricacy. They have the look of of light-filled effervescent sea foam or airy nebulae – ephemeral but also concrete. Not unlike a Jackson Pollack painting Doi’s Alkaseltzer constellations allude, tantalizingly, to any number of natural phenomenon without literally representing any of them.

Each circle seems to form a spontaneous grouping with the circles around it and therefore to form aggregate structures at varying scales. In part, this happens because his precise touch allows him to activate negative space inside of each circle. This sense of order – a consciousness of every part (at any scale that we choose to examine the work) – also effectively communicates the idea that these circles are meant to be seen as metaphors for the individual. We’re all unique and special, they seem to suggest, but only as part of a larger whole. In the U.S., the notion of the totally atomic, self-reliant, transcendently special “individual” underlies many of our guiding myths (cowboys, celebrity, laissez faire economics) – even as the modern world has completely eroded any actual autonomy. Our core beliefs, as a nation, are, on some level, misguided and deluded – not just wrong but absolutely contrary to reality. Doi’s work (abstract though it may be) suggests a useful antithesis.

Black Acid Co-op at Deitch Projects

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

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

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

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

Mike Williams

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."

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

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