EASYREEDER

Gay City

The Word Is Concept

(01/20/2005)

Robert Barry’s innovations can’t easily be articulated, but still hold sway

Before the computer, there was the word processor. Before the word processor, the typewriter. Before Photoshop, there was the page, the manual margin set and the eye. And so we reach back to works by Robert Barry, circa the young ‘70s, when the typeset letter on a page represented a bold assertion––that art can be without substance.

In the beginning, as the Apostle John would have it, was the word.

Twelve of Robert Barry’s “Drawings from the Seventies” are currently on view at Gasser & Grunert Gallery. The works, spare letterset and letterset and pen on vellum, engage the debate over the primacy of concept in art. In some sense, of course, that battle has been fought and forgotten—conceptual art has become intrinsic to the discussion of painting, sculpture and performance. Yet the clarity of Barry’s words on paper, words on grids, lays out the assertion with a sparser recourse to intellect and technique….

Manifest Destiny’s Insouciant Babes

(12/23/2004)

Pin-ups, high-velocity ammo, gun-metal gray: Pax Americana’s muscle

We bring guns & ammo, tits & ass. Why worry? Fat Americans. Fat cops. Buxom beauties in tiny bikinis bearing first aid.

In his third body of work since a transition from sci-fi abstractions, Sebastian Gross Ossa brings obsession to a finely articulated sense of shape and color. The high energy of Ossa’s abstract work has been channeled into his current project—canvases rich with not only irony, but also a sincere awe at the might of Americana culture, however insipid.

Ossa, originally from Chile, brings an outsider’s sense of bedazzlement to the American dream girl, with a series 25 works, 23 of which bear titles such as “Stacy loves the USA,” “Ashley loves the USA,” “Patty loves the USA” and “Linda loves the USA.” While very much in keeping with World War II pin-ups, Ossa’s girls are more bimbo than girl-next-door, and where Alberto Vargas would have achieved something mischievous, Ossa realizes something lascivious…

Returning Cap’n Crunch to Politics

(11/08/2004)

Nicky Nodjoumi reminds us that art with polemics can also be witty

The political right of this nation sees popular culture as being in the hands of the left. They also see popular culture as shallow and ineptly managed. And they are largely correct, as the left is well aware.

For the last 40 years, pop art, kitsch art and other forms have lambasted society’s material extravagance as so devoid of redemptive character as to be a fascinating study of pure evil. What geniuses, these artists, to bring life to Captain Crunch. (Thank you Will Cotton—I mean it).

On the other hand, political art has taken a long, slovenly turn into the silly, the amateurish and the laughably reductive. All the potential humor and, in political parlance, nuance of the “artiste” is squandered on sophomoric equations of blood on maps and so-and-so is Hitler…

Signs of Its Times

(09/12/2004)

Jerry Saltz’s retrospective pays homage to nearly six decades at the School of Visual Arts

Jerry Saltz probably has a lot of apologies to make. Not even the 101 artists he is currently showcasing can adequately represent all those who have passed through the doors of the School of Visual Arts—and represent the school’s overall impact.

And even at that, half a page will be nowhere near enough to cover the volume of work in Saltz’s curatorial effort, which spans recent work by artists who attended SVA mostly during the past 25 years. Due to Saltz’s strength as a curator, there’s not a weak work in the lot—and, almost lamentably, not even a jarring moment.

While many art schools have a style of their own, SVA, now located only a few blocks from Chelsea and the center of the New York art world, has allowed its students to be fed as much by the time they were living through as by a dogmatic aesthetic. A late 70s and early 80s graffiti style is represented by artists such as Tim Rollins and Keith Haring (posthumously awarded his MFA in 2000) and an East Village aesthetic is engendered by a burly 1979 work by Kenny Scharf, “Hydrogen is God” (acrylic on a found object)…

Building Blocks Meet the Sky

(08/13/2004)

The Met’s annual roof garden installation incorporates nature

“Have you been up to the roof garden at the Met? Oh, you should go. So and so and I went just the other night. It’s open late you know. There’s free music. And a bar.”

Warnings closely follow, of hordes of pastel T-shirts of every hue and multi-generational families winding down their day in Gotham, nearly the next best thing to Great Adventure.

Well, the city does welcome tourists from all over. And you survived Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, despite feeling like you were in a Fassbinder movie for weeks.

So, yes, brave the jam-packed elevator and the potential neophyte association to see the Andy Goldsworthy installation of white cedar, split-rail domes that house ovoid granite stones stacked in towers…

Rose Bond, “Gates of Light”

(07/13/2004)

The Synagogue tells its story.  The stained glass windows are illuminated by an animation that flickers with the passage of years, and the aspirations of generations of immigrants.  Rose Bond’s outdoor media installation at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, “Gates of Light,” tells the story of a New York Street, and a New York neighborhood, but more broadly, it tells the New York story: the great joy, the great sorrow, is that everything changes.  Every fifty years—taking as markers the economic crisis of the 1850s, the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1970s—the city has rebirthed itself, reincarnating into forms unrecognizable to past generations.  For city dwellers, that is the tragedy—not just the lost favorite restaurant, but the sense of identity that roots in a home, a place of origin, that remains largely the same.  But, for city dwellers, it is also the boon of New York: that we may change, and accept change, and remain plastic to tomorrow…

Convenient Definitions Distrusted

(07/09/2004)

“From the heart.”  “From the gut.”  These are the clichés of artistic diminishment.  Our culture struggles against conservative atavism; the notions that there is no forward momentum in creative enterprises.  The great works are made; the great artists have died.  The smallness of the assumption that a creative project should endeavor solely to the end of “emotional resonance” reflects not only the outdated philosophy of musty out-of-the-way Universities, but the positioning of art as a trite, impoverished substitute for experience.

It’s often the case that a show is too easily ascribed to purely emotive intentions, and it would be a disservice to Leemour Pelli’s current show at Annina Nosei not to acknowledge the archness in her choice of titles “From the Heart,” or the deep ambivalence and political distrust inherent in her apparently romantic tableaus.

The medium size oil paintings depict, for the most part, hazy, repeated images of couples embraced—embraced perhaps in the midst of a Waltz, or in the midst of love.  With such titles as “Time for Love,” “First Love,” Pelli teases at the pleasing Hollywood agendas.  But Pelli, whose renderings, as well as her use of repetition, demonstrate her fully conscious of film, realizes these romances with a well-articulated sense of dread.  There is no individuation to any of Pelli’s figures, and their waltz, over and over again, is a direct address of the expectations of formulaic love, and the resulting failure that such expectations bring about.

Pelli’s tie-in to present-day politics is equally chilling; the show, in hues of red, white and blue, brings to mind not only the model of family as perpetrated upon populations by religious minorities, but all the models of family that are excluded by the narrowly construed.  Whether it is a question of equal rights for women in Saudi Arabia, or gay marriage in America, Pelli recognizes the fairytale romance as emblematic of our devolutionary tendencies.  Spooky and unapologetically hopeless, Pelli’s Cupid is armed by Haliburtan.  

Michelle Segre

(06/14/2004)

Michelle Segre

Derek Eller Gallery

A vortex of similitude.  In the eight medium size works of ink and gouache on paper, at the artist’s first show with Derek Eller Gallery, Michelle Segre merges the biomorphic and architectural.  Segre’s lines render congruous blocks of cells and blocks of cement.  Faces will emerge, as will castles—all with an equal weight of importance.  Assumption of perspective and proportion are intentionally tortured by Segre.  Bugs outsize castles.  Looming eyeballs give the impression of immensity.  All at once, Segre’s style is futuristic fantasy and scientific illustration.  The works, with their old-fashioned precision, turrets, and suggestions of novel inner organs, harken to an indeterminate past and/or future.  Always, to Segre, with her swirling currents of ink, there is an allusion which is as indicative of the physicist’s Big Bang as of the zealot’s Apocalypse… 

Sailing Forth from Lesbos

(06/12/2004)

Hilary Harkness’ women lay down the rivet guns to spray some real ack-ack

Mention of Mary Boone’s Chelsea gallery generates an expectation of big paintings.

In the current exhibition of new works, however, Hilary Harkness takes license to show three, and only three, relatively small paintings. Why three small paintings?

The paintings depict allegorical scenes—cross sections of lodges and ships peopled by lanky Caucasian pin-up girls. The women, clad in sailor suits and blue undergarments tailored to runway specifications, are active sailors, working on the deck of a battleship (“Crossing the Equator”), or indulgent participants in the sadomasochistic escapades during an officer’s leave (“Matterhorn”). The figures, evoking fashion illustrations of the 1940s, are psychologically in step with World War II imagery…

Super Hero Narratives

(06/10/2004)

Depicting the progeny of villains to disprove art’s mythology

Oil on canvas. Large and medium-size paintings. The color is energized, yet more akin to the brown and yellow hues of old prints, or comic books, than the lurid candy shell tones of much contemporary painting.

Jonathan Meese, in “Dr. No’s Son,” continues his painterly deployment of his narratives. Meese has previously engaged his paintings with historical subjects: Nero, Imhotep, Caligula, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler. In his current exhibition, Meese includes references to Echnaton, the Egyptian pharoah who first introduced monotheism, and El Dorado, the lost city of gold…

Swishes that Pack a Punch

(04/10/2004)

Elizabeth Dee

Nobody can fill up nothing like Carl Ostendarp.  A lightening-like red conniption in the lower left hand corner, and a whole wash of a pinkish/orangish red (106 x 140 inches of it) is there.  To say what it is that’s there is the challenge, as Ostendarp’s canvases are more apt to cry out what they aren’t.  Uncool.  Cool.  Articulate.  Inarticulate.  Pretty.  Ugly.  Refined.  Coarse.  Placid.  Anxious.  Complicated.  Simple.

In Ostendarp’s ninth New York solo show, and his second solo show at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, three tremendous canvases, scaled to Joan Miró’s “Mural Paintings” of 1962, are simultaneously affable—conducive to a discourse with a viewer—and defiant of conclusive explanation.  In a ground of “radical emptiness,” which is a term coined by Ostendarp, a blob or form or squiggle or tuft will take on a character as significant of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art as of Dr. Seuss and comic books. .. 

The Past Illuminates A Promising Present

(03/15/2004)

Vestry Arts juxtaposes DiBennedetto, Schoolwerth with Bellmer and Tchelitchew

Notions of greatness excite and revolt serious and not-so-serious artists everywhere.

But as one gets closer to the nexus of greatness—a pig’s litter of critics, artists, dealers, and collectors who get their chance to decide—one realizes the description is silly. Very often, the difference between great and not-quite great is a weird stew of happenstance and momentum. Still, the assertion is continually made, “There’s no great art now; it just ain’t what it used to be.”

In the inaugural show at Vestry Arts, Miguel Abreu, properly disregarding such atavism, has grouped drawings by contemporary artists Steve DiBennedetto and Pieter Schoolwerth with Hans Bellmer (1902-75) and Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957). DiBennedetto and Schoolwerth are an unlikely match; DiBennedetto known for his gloppy and colorful abstract excesses, Schoolwerth for his tightly conceived and rendered madhouse realism…

Homicidal Teenie Bopper Icons

(02/11/2004)

The truth and beauty at the heart of our cultural delusion

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” that is all

Ye need to know on earth and all ye need to know.

In his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats neatly synthesized what probably remains to this day the most often-cited cultural inanity. And what is the result of the formulation? There are two–– the reduction of people to ornaments, and a justification for ignoring anything unseemly or unbeautiful as untrue.

In her first show with Brent Sikkema, “Marlene Olive—June 21, 1975. 33 Hibiscus Court, Marin County, California,” Marlene McCarty, via six large-scale murals, sustains her attack on presumptions of truth. America’s teen girl is the ultimate victim and perpetrator of the cult of beauty, and McCarty has long dedicated herself to the embodiment of this dichotomy, in the form of the American teen murderess…

Disguising Patriotism with Desert Hues

(01/15/2004)

A not-so-subtly entitled exhibit jabs at Dubya’s saber rattling

So ubiquitous is the fashionability of camouflage patterns in our culture, it blinds one to the militarization that it suggests. Andy Warhol’s series of camouflage abstract paintings, so foreboding and prescient in their day, now take on a wholly naïve character. Jane Benson, obscuring the glitz of holiday foil garlands with camouflage-colored spray paint, emphasizes a shift from fashion as ornamentation to fashion as not-so-secret weapon.

The U.S. takeover of the world, for better or worse, will ultimately be achieved by cultural infiltration. This fact is not lost on the current administration, and they’ve made the policy clear: as a citizen, the best thing you can do to support America in a time of trouble is buy stuff…

The Primary Force in Politics

(12/15/2003)

Stephen Ellis articulates an argument that challenges commonplace cultural expectations

Jeremiah, of the 24th book of the Old Testament, was a seer who railed against sinners, priests, false prophets, kings, and generals, and was claimed by some to be a previous incarnation of Jesus Christ. And why has Stephen Ellis titled his current show of abstract paintings “Jeremiads?” What could Jeremiah have to do with contemporary art in 2003?

The notion that art is without politics is itself a political stance. The fact that our culture is so thoroughly inculcated with the idea of art that is free of politics is a victory of an atavistic, backward view. Creative thinking has been largely relegated to party tricks and crocodile tears—Jeremiah himself is mistakenly associated with the Book of Lamentation, and weeping. In truth, art, as the origin of language, is the most primary element of politics, and historically demonstrates itself to be just that, whether in the form of a new, insurgent written language invented by the ancient Hebrews, or an album by Public Enemy…

Manifest Destiny

(11/07/2003)

Jonah Freeman, Michael Phelan examine the ersatz American frontier

Big dreams and a vast wilderness. But where has America gone? Jonah Freeman and Michael Phelan, in a collaborative show at John Connelly Presents, explore the new American frontier of mall design.

When the wilderness is gone, the two artists suggest, there remains only the ersatz wilderness that we create from our own fantasies. The densely packed installation—with its fake stone linoleum floor, stuffed penguins, and rotisserie chicken—encapsulates the new American gathering place; a limited edition print, produced in tandem with the show, is entitled, “The Gathering.”

In a new world where there is no natural presence, we recreate nature in our public places—whether through fountains, or bronze casts of Native Americans, or, as is the case here, stuffed penguins. Freeman and Phelan make us acutely aware of the yearning and absurdity of our ecological taxidermy…

Stripping Context to Find Meaning

(10/17/2003)

Funerals for iconic structures revere their lives

Sometimes the art. Sometimes the buildings.

In his aptly titled photographic exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in Chelsea, Hiroshi Sugimoto explores life in our world community by revealing architectural monuments as objects divorced from their presumed social relevance. A blurred lens and odd camera angles reduce such icons as the Eiffel Tower and the Brooklyn Bridge to relics of a world mysterious and misunderstood. Through this distancing perspective, Sugimoto suggests that our comprehension of our own Earth is illusory; in fact, by being within the moment, our perspective is as shadowy and incomplete as if we were in another time, looking back.

Sugimoto’s black and white images, however, are not merely indicative of an inability to know ourselves. Rather, the lushness of Sugimoto’s black and white (subtle reds and greens abound) suggests the complexity of fine wine; to be tasted and known, but only for an instant.

As much as Sugimoto renders architectural statements like the Guggenheim Bilbao into world wonders that defy present-day architectural contextualization, so too does he forbid himself any participation in present-day notions of art. His lens gives the impression that it is both considered and entirely happenstance. The photos are themselves “great” monuments, but also just snapshots. The lack of human beings in the works emphasizes not only the differences of architecture across time and tradition, but an ineluctable sameness. Buildings, like people, all stand under the same sky, in the same wind.

No woes, no joys, no politics: Sugimoto’s ever-present reverence is for the life within the building, indeed within the body. Sugimoto’s photographs represent a kind of funeral for each of the buildings they capture, and by this outlook, we can appreciate our own buildings, and cultures, and lives, in a way that usually eludes us.

A young woman I knew once asked an old country doctor what it means to die. And he answered, “It means you lived.”

Amorphous Questions of Emotion

(09/19/2003)

Lush fantasy colors and the daily war absent in mainstream cinema.

Transgendered individuals battle to be accepted by the mainstream. So do experimental filmmakers.

Ilppo Pohjola s(ill-Poe poy-Yo-la) addresses assumptions of the “subversive” in his pseudo-documentary, P(l)ain Truth, that chronicles a transgender sex change. The Finnish artist and filmmaker, whose films have been widely screened at festivals and group shows around the world, makes his debut American solo exhibition at Klemens Gasser & Tanya Grunert, a Chelsea gallery with a strong film and video program.

In P(l)ain Truth (1993), Pohjola fuses the mainstream cinema language of over-simplification, with the experimental film language of symbolic meaning. Based on a true story, Pohjola names the form “Symbolic Documentary” as the film does not investigate the facts, but rather, addresses the more ambitious and amorphous question of emotion. The film is charged with stylized renderings of the sexualized body, as well as the clinical text of the medical establishment, which becomes literally written into the flesh of the “patient.”

A soundtrack by Glenn Branca adds an eerie undertone to Pohjola’s reconstruction—both physical and mental—of an individual’s sexual identity.

Pohjola’s Routemaster (1999), which screens in the larger room of Gasser & Grunert, juxtaposes black-and-white race cars as well as races with tinted images of human cadavers that have been employed as crash-test dummies. Pohjola’s technique is part mechanic, part medical examiner, in both ways reducing everything to pieces. Three versions, with three different musical scores, evidence the interchangeability of his artistic concerns, and, by extension, all concerns.

With visual emphases gleaned from structuralist film and minimalist art, Pohjola’s employs repetition, variation, and quick cuts to produce a paradoxical slowness, as if representing the movement of life in a strobe light. In our own ever-racing culture, Pohjola affirms that we are the crash-test corpses, riding shotgun, awaiting spiritual deaths that are as assembly-line as they are inevitable.

Pohjola’s films give a glimpse into what’s missing in mainstream cinema––the lush colors of fantasy, and the daily war that provides us all, depending on our moods, with victory or defeat. Themes of sex and death, evoked by Pohjola’s bold sensibility, generate a saturated and lasting impression.