The problem, or perhaps it is the element of cinema that is problematised, with all this work is the act of narration: how to tell. If you are going to tell –as well as show– with film, well how are you going to do that? This is a question Burt Barr muses upon in his economically installed current show at Sikkemma Jenkins.

It was a while, in terms of film history, before filmmakers decided they had to tell as well as show. But once the narrative ploy did get hitched to cinema it has been a tough divorce to push through.  (Something to do with the children? Hollywood’s much loved 18-25 year old demographic I mean).  Avant-garde film has been peppered with assaults upon narration both in principle and per specific techniques of classical narration from the get go. In the era of contemporary art Warhol, by making a fetish of “I have nothing to say”, tried to situate narration’s absence within a nexus of banality. Alas for him his provocative titles and subjects rebelled and thus, Taylor Mead’s Ass, Blowjob, Empire et al, despite Warhol’s slight of hand, are all situated in a discourse of and upon cinema and the fateful fact that its material does actually move.

Barr does not use the evocative titles or subjects of Warhol. Relatively straightforward descriptors: The ship, The Arrows, Soap Suds expose the quietude of the un-narrated world. Barr’s films –single frame, tightly cropped, all but devoid of movement within the shots, are close-ups of the objects named in the title. They all tippy toe, as a body, toward the territory of photo-riddles.  These are images that do not render banality because they are all party to a dialogue about murder.

Photography, it has been said, stops the flow of life, and thus, is flirting with death. If this is the case, in Barr’s dallying films of the everyday it is the terminus of narrative, its final closure, not its absence, that is being played out.  The riddle is, if you will, if photography killed painting, did cinema kill off the still photograph? And is Barr killing off cinema with slow-slow motion film? If yes, it is because of the simple and almost invisible fact that Barr’s images do move.

The image merely shown, and not narrated, is as pure vision: the thing seen and known. And because Barr’s films are ‘nearly still images’ when one is reminded that they are not, still images that is, by a returning flicker of movement, movement itself becomes the stain on perfect visibility. Movement is the murder of plenary sight and knowledge, and all that goes in train with that.

That Barr’s almost-photos do move provokes a conundrum about what is next and how it will be shown: will there be something or not? Not, for 50 minutes and 51 seconds in most cases, is Barr’s answer. These film want to tell us something it seems but can do no more than show. There is not here an absence of narration, rather narration is foreclosed.

Black and white film is the insistent choice of Barr. Black and white “are the only two colors I need” he has said. Importantly black and white film evokes time past. It is how our memories of that past, unknown to us through personal experience, have been born and then tamed. But the film world, the black and white film world that Barr deliberately chooses, has always seemed half-dead, half-alive to some. Writing in 1896 having just viewed the Lumier’s cinematograph Maxim Gorky penned, “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. … It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre…. It seems as if these people have died and their shadows have been condemned to play cards in silence unto eternity.  Their smiles are lifeless… This mute, grey life finally begins to disturb and depress you. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim”

Barr has in his film work what we might call a sustained curiosity about movement. It, movement, is eviscerated from the otherwise narrative flow forward of the film, but it is frequently returned to us the viewer as the spinning, the rotating motor movement of a turning lawn sprinkler, and with probably more punch, a sink drain hole.   As is well known, the fascination with things that turn about themselves is a characteristically autistic means of engaging the world. The autistic child (see Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress) directs a recondite stare toward the spinning wheel, the turntable, the fan etc.  And this too has something to say about death. Or perhaps more accurately a refusal to engage with living –which has its own teleological conclusion.

Most glibly murderous are Barr’s traffic arrows. Immediately present as the diacritical marks of the American road, they point in either direction with no logic available to render a choice. Neither one nor the other makes a difference. The  immobilized, frozen viewer (driver?) staring endlessly until a decision is made by narrative force or, in fact, by Barr after 50 minutes and 51 seconds. Cut! Either it is the perfect conceptual fence to sit upon because the film has movement, but it does not move toward its ineluctable end. It could  loop on forever. Or it is the perfect road movie: Kerouac stalled somewhere in Kansas.

Burt Barr

Sikkema Jenkins

May21-July2

The projected films and flat images are an assemblage of some known and some unidentified fragments and clips from deep within, though necessarily narrowly focused, sources from the cinematic cannon. Kuhle Wampe, the film written and partially directed by Bert Brecht in the early 1930’s plays strong in the flat images. Kuhle Wampe is a strangely un-Brechtian film in that it is so formally not strange. (Saunders installation is for sure more Brechtian than Brecht’s film). But Saunder’s show also creates a circumstance where one is sure one knows the images but cannot quite place them. Walther Ruttmann’s, Berlin Symphony of a great city, is, I swear, mined for some footage. And even if I am wrong and it is not Ruttmann’s great film that is quoted directly then that is still the neighborhood of cinema history being explored by Saunders.

Ruttmann’s film, and the genre it helped spawn, were of the historical moment wherein urban modernity and its various machine corollaries were sung about and too in tones of elaborate praise. Much ink as well as celluloid was spilled on this project and Saunders assuredly alludes to a cut-up of Benjamin and Krackauer’s work wherein modernity is a flicker show of fragments and moments. Indeed Saunders, somewhat lazily it could be thought, titles one of the pieces Passagework.

The projected films are a flicker-scape of often hard to decipher images that drift toward being unintelligible.  In that, the flickering, the indecipherability, they are highly evocative of the specific historical moment I am referring to above. This is because in large part this is how that historical moment has come down to us; the flicker itself characterizes the experience of visual culture from the given moment.  With this formal devise in hand, or in quotation marks, with the gallery space deployed as it is, and with the allusion to but non-identification of historical moments there is an inevitable sliding between dream, memory, history and fantasy. If film, in its predominant form, is transitive, i.e. it works to generate an end, a conclusion, then Suanders steers a course closer to cinema before the moment when that was its realized mission. Like Brecht and Ruttman Saunders is closer to avant-garde film. Closer to, in Tom Gunning’s term, a “cinema of attractions”, that is a cinema more kin to the midway attraction than to the novelistic tale. The urban corollary of this is, of course, the city itself as a pandemonium of attractions.

That Saunders wants to pore over history’s debris, albeit the well pored over debris of mid century Germany is exciting in its way. It is a glance, a long glance, given by much literature and cinema but far less so in the fine arts. In this Saunders has his nostalgic moments, fair enough; nostalgia is a tone or tense of memory. Strangely what is remembered, held nostalgically, is, of course, not Wiemar Germany (Saunders is a 30-something American living in Berlin in 2010) but Critical-Theory classes. The tone is one of cherishing Benjamin’s, Brecht’s, Krackauer’s or Ruttmann’s work. And this extends to the somewhat curious hand held out by Saunders across time to Herthe Theile. Theile, a German stage and screen actor of the Weimar period starred in Kuhle Wampe, from wherein Saunders borrows her image. But what is strange is the transformation she undergoes in the screening and filtering processes that Saunders uses to render her. There is something about the mannish, boyish military yet androgynous look of the shirt and tie. It evokes a Kit Kat club patron yes. (And Thielle was known for her lesbian roles and as being of the left.) But it is also in its way a Brownshirt image and as such a historical shorthand for German modernity’s collapse.

Part of what is happening here is that the formal strategies of Saunders, the old flickering silver screen, the new hybrid photograph-as-painting, add so many layers of gauze, so much Vaseline to the lens. They do not so much romanticize, as said devices have been coded to do, more they beget ambiguities. Slathering of this or that formal trick across the image imposes a haze which is also a –hmm, perhaps Brechtian– space for arguing the meaning. If one is going to gaze at the past’s images one must allow that there is a haze imposed upon us by history.

Old Brecht said it well!
Fog envelopes
The road
The poplars
The farms and
The artillery

Matt Saunders at Harris Lieberman
89 Vandam Street
NY NY 10013
212 206 1290

Nutt seems less of an outsider these days. Perhaps it is that the inside has had to come part way to meet him. By which I mean he has his context of which we have all become aware:  Pashke, Spero, Green, Nilson and all those Midwestern Hairy Whoists and imagists. And also because the aforementioned inside has fawned over so many certified “outsiders” in the forty plus years since Nutt et all mounted their insider-outsider shows of rage in Chicago.

I for one hold a fond memory of Nutt’s youthful embrace of impolite imagery culled from vernacular sources. He –they, I suppose, i.e. most of the Chicago imagists– were open to the influence of self taught artists and popular images well before the latter were Pop images. I am not sure that being the first past the post in and of itself should get you the prize.  But with Nutt the prize should be offered because one was compelled to look (or look away) by the crazed vulgarity of weirdly rendered genitals; by the ghastly comic bodies that were at once wounded, often in pieces, often leaking fluids but also brought into being as elaborately textured surfaces of paint.  Often the compartmentalized rectangles, of comic book rote, were there to help us connect the dots of a proto narrative; the Damoclean axe rendered above the central image of  “I’m all a twit” (1969) was just the right clue as to what is going on.

And what was going on? Well, George Grosz without the rise of European fascism as context is one take. The willful havoc of Grosz’s or Dix’s murdered prostitutes and generals echoed throughout Nutt’s work in the sixties and seventies.  Strolling around David Nolan’s sparely hung front room I pined for the above version of Nutt.  The work presented here, dating from 2003 through 2010, is more somber, less flamboyant, less bloody and messy. Without doubt mayhem, albeit in a lesser register, has still been visited upon the figures.  The work here is all portraits of women. A series he has apparently been employed upon since the early 1980’s. The show is dominated –at least numerically– by drawings. Drawings that are extremely precise. Spot on. No second chance in their execution. Nothing erased nothing redrawn. A line is a line, period. But in this –and this is a problem I think– they are also resilient to the sort of pleasure long associated with Nutt’s work. (They are resilient to pleasure in the way only a 9h pencil can be). In the drawing of the hair and the features Nutt evolves what must be a painstaking and labor intensive catalogue of marks. Beautifully fetishized graphite hair amplifying the texture of the paper, sits atop Cubist distortions of noses and ears. Perfectly shaded nipples peek a boo through linear (the 9h pencil) garments. In the end they are very subtle. Arguably too subtle. Subtle was always there in Nutt’s work. It was there in many ways, in craft, in the many layers of text and subtext, in insider jokes and references. But the work always relied on a pretty direct punch line. So Nutt is taking a risk in departing from that stand-up format.

However, the paintings in the current show reach out to the drawings. They offer a helping hand .The paintings deploy a repertoire of beautifully crafted devices within each canvas, and beyond, to the painted frames that allow a seamless drift from image to border and back again. Over the years Nutt has demonstrated his facility to invent paint marks that rend and suture bodies. Here the line of the drawings is almost reprised in the paintings as flat planar areas define cheeks, necks and background territories. And yet the elaborate textures of a dress rendered as an optically dizzying textile, or a nose as busy, colorful and contoured as an orangutan’s butt check the territorial ambitions of the two dimensional surface. She –they, there are three women/characters in the paintings– evoke Frankenstein’s monster (well, probably Elsa Lanchester) cross-bred with Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earring. Idealizing portraits quietly, though not smugly, waiting in guileless silence.  These three paintings, also quietly, kin to the anime fancies of hybrid bodies and synthetic figures, offer a robot ophthalmologist’s array of eyes. All of which are the wrong size and all are mismatched as pairs. And all, uncannily, do not follow the viewer around the room.

Nutt’s recent work is less indebted to, or celebratory of, vernacular visual styles than it once was. If you want that in this show you can get it too. The gallery is also showing a group of Nutt’s work from the late 1960’s through the 70’s. This work, sequestered in the back room, allows a perhaps nostalgic moment of profane genuflection to the more raucous Nutt of  before.

David Nolan

527 West 29th Street
New York, NY 10001

Wait a minute.  No plinth — no greasepaint and no getup and she’s seated at one of two opposing chairs at a plain wood table about in the center of the atrium — not standing in front of the building — lit by the kind of lights behind scrim you might see on a movie set.  There are people standing and walking in the space — the event space.1  One by one someone sits in the chair she is not sitting in and looks at her — what — make her blink — crack up.  Something juvenile going on in their heads — faint hope — or some nominally higher delusion.  Some kind of transmission says the Museum.  Shit you not.  Check the site.

Check the photo stories high — looks like cinema — you got to see passing into the balance of the show.  We know she looks to sources.  She hears back in Belgrade about Chris Burden driven up and down the streets of Los Angeles nailed to a VW bug and hauled in by the cops.2  Well one hears what one wants to hear and knows what what wants to know and uses those things as one chooses.

From Belgrade in 1974 she for sure knows Volkswagens but what does she know of the alleys of Venice and Santa Monica then or the sound of the bug – engine redlining without a doubt –  pushed out into that light in front of the garages and in back of the storefronts — or the artists and other sorts of garage tinkerers inside about to mess with your head.3  Guy nailed to a car.  Process the image.  Dude — did I really see that — not dude — did he really do that.

Misreadings are what they are.  So from her we get all that meaning — all that blood and guts and pain and tears and its all so heavy.  What she does is just absent those southern California artists’ spectacular indifference to those — what — themes — institutional fodder really.  More.  If someone’s supplicating here damn straight its not her.4  The implementation of hierarchies is staggering.  Scary scene.5  Title of the whole show might read like a bad joke if things didn’t matter.

1. Robert Smithson, Some Void Thoughts on Museums, 1967:  “Museums are tombs, and looks like everything is turning into a museum.  Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit remains.  Art settles into stupendous inertia.  Silence supplies the dominant chord.  Bright colors conceal the abyss that holds the museum together.  Every solid is a bit of clogged air or space.  Things flatten and fade.  The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.”

2.  Marina Abromovic interviewed by Janet Kaplan in The Art Journal, 1999

3. Mostly post-war  LA enthusiast.  Heard described in conversation with  non-native former LA critic now relocated to London.  Burden, Robert Irwin, Michael Asher, Maria Nordman on to Charles Ray, Jason Rhodes, others.

4. Michael Asher on his work in Spaces, the Museum of Modern Art, 1969 / 1970: “The various constituent elements and functions on the space were made accessible to the viewer’s experience.  This was in contradistinction to an installation that would insert a predetermined object between the viewers and their perception of the space, while, at the same time, attempt to control the viewers’ perception, eventually creating a hierarchy between the object and the viewers where the viewers subsequently become subservient to the object.”

5. Lawrence Wiener, 1989: “Art that imposes conditions, human or otherwise, upon the receiver for its appreciation in my eyes constitutes aesthetic fascism.”

Tom Wolfe told the tale perhaps not first and perhaps not best –but it was concise– in The Pump House Gang. Bob the working class boy from the Bronx/lower east side (his provenance is never clear) meets and marries the rich girl Ethel. Thereafter versions of the story differ in detail but, all take route through the parties of chic 5^th avenue New York in the 1960’s, as the Sculls climb from rank outsiders of the WASP cultural elite to being hosts to scenes where Walter Di Maria and Larry Poons slug back the Champagne with Dean Acheson and Prince Michael of Greece. Along the way an enormously important achievement of the Sculls was to recognize, usually with an uncanny prescience, the work of people who came to be the important figures of Pop Art, earth art and kindred developments of the New York art world. They bought Jasper Johns in bulk before anyone else knew who he was. They sponsored Di Maria, and Michael Heizer in improbable sculpture projects. They commissioned work by Warhol, Segal and others. They gave artists stipends and developed relationships with dealers who would shape careers for many of the artists the Sculls anointed. Whoever is writing the story it always seems to stumble badly in 1973 with the auction of 50 pieces from their collection (the Sotheby’s catalog famously calling it his collection -you can see where this is going) that hauled in more than $2 million. Said auction and the stratospheric profits are frequently seen to herald the art-as-loot reveries of today. The train wreck is complete with an acrimonious divorce in 1975 and a brawl between the Sculls played out in the courts and in the press –who owned what art? – well into the 1980’s. The whole grisly affair is finally laid to rest with a court ruling in 1986 a short few months after Robert Scull’s death and about the same number of months before Gordon Gekko’s pronouncement on greed and America.

The exhibition space for Robert & Ethel Scull: Portrait of a Collection is itself is a paradigm of opulence. Acquavella’s townhouse galleries, a stones throw from the Sculls old pad at 1010, 5^th feature a dramatic curved staircase, high molding adorned ceilings, tiled hallways and posh neighbors. It also tends to jumbles questions of fiscal value and intellectual or cultural worth by showing the work, with its given history, in the given real estate.

The dying shadow of, and I suppose the dying but didn’t yet know it art movement of, abstract expressionism is still there in this rendering of the Sculls collection. De Kooning’s, ‘Police Gazette’ (recently sold by David Geffen for between $63.5 and $135 million -depends who you read– to hedge fund manager Steven Cohen), Clifford Still’s ‘Untitled 1951-T, No. 2’, and a smallish Guston hold court in the front room of the townhouse. But fairly soon the installation gives over to what has come to define both the Scull’s collection and the relationship of the newly rich, at a particular historical juncture, to the art world: Pop Art.

John’s Target and map paintings hover not far from their abstract precursors reciting the history lesson of one brilliant mid century rupture in American art following close upon another. The Johns’ are iconic by now, the stuff of posters; a recognized shorthand for Pop Art. Iconic and popular in a way the particular De Kooning in question –unlike say the woman series- never was, and Clifford Still never would be.

It has always been the case that the subject matter of pop art –perhaps also that it in fact had subject matter– implied the possibility of a particular audience. It courted a certain visual literacy if you will. Here part of the Sculls story is relevant. That Bob Scull brought this particular artwork to the specific social milieu through which he was climbing is made much of by Wolfe and others. The climb, accompanied by such art, has Scull as a self propelled Trojan Horse travestying, in one moment, the tastes of Saville Row tailors (see Wolfe on this) and the cultural knowledge of the ruling class the next. In a way this is the story of Pop Art’s assault on culture writ small. It is that assault dragged very personally by the Sculls through the drawing rooms of 5^th avenue. There are numerous reasons for the popularizing of culture from a historical juncture near mid century. But that the images could be so readily known is part of the deal. The images have currency. They circulate in a known catalog of points of reference. The Sculls just helped circulate them that little bit further up the economic ladder.

In the collection as a whole there is one artist/assailant who trumps Johns, in this regard of exploiting the recognizable. Unsurprisingly it is Warhol. There is a large, all but overwhelming flower painting of his. Two large –one pink, one red– very flat flowers (impatiens I beleive) grotesquely enlarged on a black and green scratchy ground; Pop icons that Warhol invented rather than borrowed. But Warhol is there most famously, and gratuitously, perhaps, with “Ethel Scull 36 times”. The artist and collectors were friends and Robert Scull, so the story goes, commissioned Warhol to do a portrait of Ethel. James E. Breslin, in his Rothko biography, tells how Warhol called to say he was coming over. “Upon arrival artist and subject hailed a cab” –they taxied no less– “to Times Square where Warhol put Mrs. Scull into an automatic photo machine and began feeding quarters into the machine”. More than one hundred images later Warhol is back at the factory generating a signature painting of 1960’s New York. It was the perfect date, the artist who was obsessed with celebrity and the collector who pined for it.

In an over the top show of excess, with a historical and gossip baggage of the same burdensome weight, Warhol’s air mail stamps catch the eye. The modesty of the work is the hook, and perhaps the modesty is all the more attractive in the immodest setting. It is work that is not trying to compete in size with abstract expressionism or Times Square hoardings (Rosenquist is here too). Modest in image because you cannot accuse it of cow towing to any celebrity thrill. It comes wrapped in what is in many ways a lost romance, that of travel and the mails. It hails from a time when air travel was still exotic and the missive home was an intimate relationship staged through yearning space and immutable time. Rather than the very brief tagging born of texting’s hurried truncations. It is the shows masterpiece because it refuses to be implicated in the grandiose dramas of the Sculls rise and fall. (OK, Oldenburg’s ray guns ar the other masterpiece.)

I’m not sure who is being rehabilitated here at Acquavella. I’m not sure who needs to be rehabilitated here at Acquavella. The snarky gossip mongering of the period up until the final divorce and Robert Sculls death in 1986, reads as a sad tale of what it meant to climb the class ladder in mid century New York. While the gossip column attention bespeaks an adoration of inequality overcome, even though that is largely a lie.

The Sculls, or at least their reputations, are easy to not like. And their paradigm of collecting as it pertains to today’s practices is not endearing. (Buy low sell high; ask Robert Rauschenberg’s ghost what he thinks about it all.). The title of the show – Robert & Ethel Scull: Portrait of a Collection– inevitably invites an appraisal of the Sculls as much as of their art. It, the title, wants to court a displacement of focus for the portrait away from the Sculls (and all the gossip) to their art. That the art will presumably give the more complex portrait of its era than the gossip will is perhaps the hope. But I think not. The complexity of the cultural moment is far more available in the relationship of the art to its moments of class antagonism, its moments of economic history, its moments of conspicuous consumption and its very many moments of narcissism. The show panders to the notion that to collect art is to enable culture and that culture, returned thus to the public viewer as spectacle, will mask the conditions of its production, consumption and circulation. It will not.

ROBERT & ETHEL SCULL: PORTRAIT OF A COLLECTION

April 13 – May 27, 2010

Acquavella Galleries, Inc
18 East 79th Street (between Madison and Fifth Avenues)
New York, NY 10075
212-734-6300 Phone 212-794-9394 Fax

This exhibition proposes to examine a different nexus of video and sculpture, one in which the making and/or history of the object is intimately connected to the video, as documentary or commentary.  Although the videos in “Video>Sculpture” are formally and conceptually engaged with the precedents and issues of video, and the sculptures are immersed in the phenomenal world, emphatically objects down to their metaphorical fingertips, in all these pairings there is a strong suggestion of cause and effect.  Yet, ultimately, that effect goes just off register, slightly askew.  Perhaps a documentary intention is derailed into the uncanny, or ironic reversals are instigated to create some kind of displacement, or cause and effect draw so close together,  have so little breathing space between them, that tautology emerges.  Whatever the procedure, in these video/sculpture couplings the if-then proposition is unseated, or at least made to wobble.

Apparently, ballet originated as a dance interpretation of fencing. And Jennifer Cohen’s clever merging of ballet imagery (she has a background in dance) and sculptural tropes is indeed a series of feints and parries. At first glance, this body of work seems simply to valorize and memorialize, with “souvenirs” such as ballet slippers as lovingly preserved as bronzed baby shoes. Or, more ambitiously, it seems to attempt to capture motion: the long thin abridgments which travel through the space, horizontal, vertical, bent—ending in a foot or delicately drooping hand—might be a variety of labanotation, one of several “languages” invented to preserve in shorthand the choreography that is otherwise stored only in human memory. Those planks are obvious “limbs” but they may also be the barre, the warm-up rail so ubiquitous and necessary for a dancer that it can come to feel like a prosthesis. Some of the arrangements of these two-by-fours are as contorted as Pilobolus tableaux.
Yet this is no straightforward valediction after all. The long horizontal of a glissade here or a vertical elevee there, in between a break in continuity suggestive of a grand jete, can as easily illustrate failure: they enact a sort of domino effect, one gravity-induced collapse after another, a series of “if-then” collisions. And gravity, of course, is the enemy of dance. Then there is the royal patronage associated with this art form, perhaps slyly alluded to in the gilded surfaces of parts of the sculptures. But Cohen punctuates the flow of her installation, literally, with rude thumbing gestures, and the “silver” and “gold” is dulled out to an overall lead gray. Finally, the perennial objection to classical ballet—that it is as unnatural as foot binding—finds expression in the hard-bittened and flattened shoes.

Which brings us to the parry. There are so many art allusions here that have nothing to do with ballet, starting with the shoes. From Van Gogh’s Heidegger-enshrined boots to Rona Pondick’s ball of high heels to Robert Gober’s single, sinister child’s sandal, the shoe in art has left a Friday print in the sand perennially re-discovered by artist Crusoes. It seems to be able to address everything from existence itself to gender and perversion. Cohen’s shoes are “on pointe” for all these topics. Likewise the conflation of lumber with limb is everywhere in sculpture. Joel Shapiro’s metal stick figures come to mind, but also Barbara Zucker’s elongated legs on anthropomorphized Adirondack chairs, Jon Kessler’s mechanized foot on a yardstick, and Georg Herold’s lumberyard men and women, his boxing-gloved arms. In all this there is more than a hint of satire and the same is true of Cohen’s effigies. It may be in fact that Cohen is operating around a pun about the “hollow leg” of both art forms, about neither “having a leg to stand on.” Dance, it seems, is a rather slapstick affair after all, a bid for transcendence, a resistance to limits that must eventually end in defeat. Sculpture is shown to be just as contingent—not so much immortal bronze and no real silver but wood and celluclay, a kind of papier mache—theatrically “fake.”

There is a fine facility in the way Cohen takes charge of the exhibition space, using her sculptural dots and dashes to move us fluidly through it, much as we move through a sentence, thus adding a temporal experience to the spatial one. This feels like a homage to Anthony Caro’s innovative linear metal works which challenged a holistic comprehension of sculpture by insisting on an extended, time-based one, forcing a beginning, middle, and end on the viewer. Still, one feels a certain intelligent and affectionate skepticism in Cohen’s skill—as if she cannot bring herself to fully buy in to either of her areas of expertise—she knows too much, Nor, it seems, is she willing to reject them entirely. Instead, she keeps moving—she thrusts, she parries. It’s a dance; it’s a fight. She is warily “engage.” She says to herself, ”Feet, don’t fail me now.”

Ephraim Birnbnaum

Not to automatically diminish the work of anyone else in this smart show, but the credentials of having been there and of having invented the wheel in the 1970’s shine very, very brightly.  Not everyone is lost in the glare. Robert Gober is here too. No slouch he, he stumps us (well me) with a glibly authentic looking sheet of plywood.  It is an old piece, 1987, that I had heard about but never seen before. Gober’s plywood is, as is his way, a hand made replica of that industrially produced dronewood that is distributed by the thousand-truck load each day across the nation.  The hand made board leans against the gallery wall staking out a territory between artisanal virtuosity and Home Depot delivery.  Gober’s work has several registers. Here there is none of the fascination with surrealist devices and comic sexuality, none of the dioramas that allude to narrative heft. Plywood –that’s the title– is Gober’s blank verse mode.  As such one is astonished that plywood can be so un-prosaic and thus so uncanny, indeed that the emotional stakes can be so high.  The 4×8 foot board (slightly off size because it is hand made) moonlights as the metaphysician, pondering its own banal, mournful existence.  Gober has struggled often with the rites of mourning. In truth it has never been far from his musings.  Whether it be the mournful survivors of Catholicism or prison, or the mournful politics of his work during the AIDS crisis of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, which is exactly the period Plywood dates from.  Oblique though it is, mourning of some inevitably imprecise quality is in the tone of Plywood.

(Meanwhile a much more easily seductive piece of Gober’s, a paean to mourning’s sibling, longing  –a single red shoe, probable provenance, Dorothy– is in another smart group show at Anna Kustera)

John McCracken’s leaning slab (UFO 2002) is also made of plywood, though you’d never know it. McCracken as usual works up the super-duper, resilient, gleaning surface of his resined slab. The piece reflects back a softened version of the works behind the viewer. When I was there Mary Heilman’s Sculpture of Night shimmered in and out of reflected view, on McCracken shiny surface, spinning formal riffs of color and shape. If Gober’s Plywood will not sit still and be a bland minimalist object, inversely McCracken’s sheened plywood will valiantly pretend to be a minimalist sculpture. And yet McCracken has long mused upon the esoteric, the extra terrestrial and the metaphysical as they pertain to his work. In a 1997 interview with Dike Blair he offered, “I’m after a physical object that appears to be nonphysical, hallucinatory or holographic. Otherworldly, in other words”.   It is an ambiguous territory to hike. The nonspecificity of the ‘otherworldly’ I mean. More accurately perhaps we could think of it as the not-this-worldly. Heilman’s aforementioned Sculpture of Night does the trick to some extent, calling through its dark rayon flock coating toward a perch in the nightscape of a dream world. She even provides the perch come shelf atop the leaning rickety, stick support. And once there one dreams of what? Well other worlds might be McCracken’s answer.  That this Occultist tendency shades his project needs to be repeated –mantra like– in order to maintain a distance between his work and the gravitational lure of minimalism. Or perhaps if one does not intone the mantra the minimalist orbit itself goes out of whack, which just could be the most important aspect of a body of work that quacks like a duck but is really out to cook the goose.

Richard Tuttle has a chunk of painted Styrofoam leaning against his piece of wall.  Maybe two feet high, if it evokes anything it is a junked piece of an automobile. The work restates a title Tuttle has frequented over the years, Source of Imagery, 11, no.12.  More blatantly than his peers in the show Tuttle reminds us of the lack of –or at least the elusiveness of– images, of grounding map points or clarion references in much art practice. Like some other artists in the show Tuttle stretches out to grab at the fleeting. He pulls back, as he has been doing for decades now, scraps of bric a brac that twisted, turned or tied may open onto a source of imagery.   And as casual as Tuttle’s relation to an image is, so too in Lean, is the relation of all the work to the gallery space.  What might it mean to just prop your art up somewhere rather than ‘install’ it, to brag about your ran-out-of-nails aesthetic that pushes showing itself into the foreground? Does it shift some order of dependence?  Well I’m not sure about that. But it does foreground the mode of address in a way that most static, gallery bound art does not. Because this mostly flat art work leans, the focal point is shifted from the picture plane to the relation between work and the gesture of showing the work. This, in turn, takes us one step back from conventional conditions of aesthetic pleasure.

Leaning was very important for Freud. That the erotic impulses should lean upon bodily needs was his epiphany. Nourishment + pleasure for the infant at the breast was his moment of recognition. That erotic pleasure goes, thus, from being a side effect of functional need to being a drive in itself was his conclusion.  And that aesthetics is merely –if that is the word– the sublimation of the erotic was his pronouncement.

The work in the show leans heavily upon this probably odd calculus of pleasure. The pleasures of shiny surfaces imbued with the allure of concocted utopian other worlds; the pleasures of metaphysical solutions to mournful yearnings; the pleasures of recycling the trash into cultural gee gaws.  Or, with Jan Ader, the mirthful pleasures of telling everyone what they maybe did not want to hear, “I’m gong down!” (See videotape above). “I’m actually going to fall over.” (See videotape below).

And so it seems to all beg the question, if you lean too much, lean too far, what happens? Well, duh, you fall over.  Jan Ader knew this.  He literalized it to darkly comic effect. Andre Cadere knew it too in a slightly skewed way; he knew  (well I’d like to think he wanted to toy with knowing) that you can take it with you when you go. It was the fact that you have to go (that there is nothing worth staying for?) that perhaps shaped his pole accompanied derive through Europe and North America.

I saw him once. In London, ambling down Gower Street near the University College buildings. Some art-event had just occurred. He had probably been at it. I saw him walk with a pole into a pub, the same pub where everyone headed post ‘event’.  He leant the pole against the bar while he took a drink.  It was way too crowded to really see more than that. (And way too long ago to remember vividly). But I like to imagine him later strolling off with his pole, slightly inebriated and leaning into his drunkenness.  And maybe this is where Freud missed the point: inebriated leaning, drunkenness, short-circuits the need for sublimation. One of the strengths of the show at Klagsbrun is the sense of drunken artworks using the gallery cube to stop them from falling flat on their face.

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery

526 WEST 26TH STREET NO. 213
NEW YORK, NY 10001
T. 212.243.3335   F.212.243.1059

Marilyn Lerner

As in the paintings by Marilyn Lerner, there is more to her meticulously painted structures than the manipulation of color and motif. Her exacting and almost mathematical organization of color relationships are collected from her interest in the geometric patterns of Indian and Jain painting. She manages to float pigments on slick, hard surfaces, creating a kind of transcendent geometry that seems to illustrate other worldly puzzles.  Her paintings aspire to the transcendent with the intent to elevate the viewer’s predilections and aspirations for a pleasurable state of mind although she offers no code to her personal symbols; only a small window into an east/west dream…the viewer is an Alice in Wonderland down a very problematic rabbit hole.

John Monti

John Monti’s work is altogether another matter, however seemingly jolly. In his material world, the plastic substances he chooses for his objects reference a darker side to his comic imagery. His works communicate an ironic confidence in an un-changing synthetic utopian world where brightly colored things, of which there is no short supply, will be sustainable and where a “happy” future is facilitated by seductive illusions to prosperity. The longevity of his plastic objects is, by the very nature of the material, resistant to change. The metaphor is: Society’s desires equal its possible demise.

Barbara Schwartz

Barbara Schwartz was one of several artists who sought to vitalize abstract painting by making it more dimensional and like Marilyn Lerner, tried to link it to non-Western traditions. Her constructions from handmade paper with areas of brightly colored dabbles build a complicated visual uncertainly about the object’s shape and structure even though they are balanced organic and geometric forms.


Schwartz’s objects encourage physical movement as the viewer’s vision moves across the object’s frontal planes to the sides with other flat surfaces. Schwartz was inspired by the gestures and costumes of Thai dancing that she has rendered in her objects with a sense of elegance and gracefulness. However, there is oddness about these objects. The expressionistic quality of the roughly textured surfaces is oddly cartoonish. They appear as caricatures of something unrecognizable.

Daniel Wiener

Engaging with Daniel Wiener’s work is like daydreaming or partaking in the spirit of a child’s fairy tale -things coming out of nowhere and then taking an imaginative leap. His objects hang from the ceiling from filament, conveying the feeling that they are floating, like islands hovering in the air. But the daydream also has a dark side as there is always something unsatisfying and disappointing about a daydream. It consistently contains an unfulfilled wish, something ultimately vacant for the dreamer. Wiener says he is interested in this absence, or sense of loss, that for him is at the heart of daydreaming.  Wiener is looking for truth or answers through in his work but he also seems to be looking for an exit. His objects are, to some degree, that escape hatch. But escape from what?  Guilt, worry, anxiety, shame, self-hatred, an inability to communicate, boredom, fear?  These are the emotions hidden beneath the “whimsical” exterior in his work.

In Jolly Matters there is no manic state of mind expressed, only a more complex reading of visual objects that beguile us with eye candy that happens to have a chewy center.

Curated by Romanov Grave

So the Ugly brute is here to stay. Given that what can we say about it? Ken Johnson has already said many a wise thing apropos this year’s iteration. With good humor and grace he identifies Peter Coffin’s giant (9ft high?), shiny pirate as the event’s should-be logo. I couldn’t agree more. Have all the interns drag Coffin’s piece out to the parking lot to greet the hedge fund collectors gliding in for the preview. Pirate ahoy! Catches the parasitical zeitgeist of many walks (or limo rides) of our current cultural life.

And yet it must be acknowledged that there is a great deal of good work to be seen in the trawl through two piers. There is Louise Bourgeois at Carolina Nitsch with a series of spirals. There is Chris Marker revisiting his 1950’s photographs of North Korea at Peter Blum. Olafur Eliasson at i8 gallery with the least over-dazzle I have ever seen from him. A photograph by Alan Sekulla of the Guggenheim Bilbao that refuses to genuflect to Gehry. A Marina Abramovitch video posing as a painting at Sean Kelley. A small Lesley Wayne painting come sculpture at Jack Shainman. A couple of expectedly creepy Loretta Lux photographs at Yosi Milo and Tony Fehr’s full room installation of nick knacks and trash at Pace Wildenstein, to name just the most cursory list of personal favorites. And perhaps most beguilingly attractive, –because its blinding opacity surely induced a pause between first sighting and flutter of check book– was Adam Mcewan’s installation at Nicole Klagsbrun. Where a yellow swastika flag shared space with an obituary, hued in Yellow, for Caster Semenya the not dead South African athlete whose gender (or lack of) caused much anguish in the sporting world last year. For more musings upon the work in the show I urge a return to Johnson (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/arts/design/05armory.html?scp=3&sq=&st=nyt ) who gives as comprehensive an accounting as can be hoped for in ‘reviewing’ a show of approximately eight thousand works of art.

Myself? Sucker! I became intrigued by the event itself.

If one Googles the Armory show one is led to two Wikipedia entries. One for the “legendary” 1913 show at the Lexington Avenue armory whereat a reasonably thorough encyclopedia entry gives the orthodox tale and provides a useful list –Wikipedia being so good at lists– of all the participants. (I for one did not know that Jack Yeats, W.B.’s brother, had been in the Armory Show, the legendary one I mean).

The other Wikipedia “Armory show” entry is for the art fair. It is a much shorter entry. In a bullet point, lets-not-waste-time-with-reading tone it does provide a history lesson of the show’s beginnings at the Gramercy hotel and its evolution from there. The entry says naught about the ad hoc, home made feel of those early years. And if my memory serves me it skips a year when the show moved from the Gramercy, before it ended up in the Lexington Avenue armory. The entry also passes over the year –or two? Memory again– when the show was housed in back of the Javits center. Instead the entry rushes eagerly toward the crucial nugget which is that “The fair quickly outgrew its location and became The Armory Show in February 1999. It was first held at the 69th Regiment Armory, the site of the legendary Armory Show of 1913 that introduced Modern art to America” –sounds like they read the other Wikipedia entry for Armory show– “and for which it was named, and is now held annually in Pier 94 on New York City’s west side. In 2007, The Armory Show was bought by Merchandise Mart Properties, Inc.”

In one of those endearing, slightly coy Wikipedia moments of reflexive earnestness the entire entry for this not so legendary armory show is prefaced by a boxed text addressed to the Wikipedia community of writers and editors:

“This article is written like an advertisement. Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view. For blatant advertising that would require a fundamental rewrite to become encyclopedic,”

Now please, lets not carp about the shaky grammar of the boxed text. (One can picture the mise-en-abyme of endless boxed texts commenting upon preceding boxed texts.)

Call me a fool, but I took the bait, bit the hook. I was reeled in and I and went Googling for who was behind the “blatant advertising”. Merchandise Mart Properties, Inc. is already well enough known because they own the Merchandise Mart (sic) building in Chicago where Art Chicago venues. So MMPI, as it seems colloquially to be known, has a portfolio of art fairs and kindred events. Indeed at MMPI’s web site, written, I could not help but feel, in a strangely similar tone of abundant superlatives as the Wikipedia entry, we learn that they organize more than 300 trade shows. They specialize In “eleven key industries”, including “home furnishings, casual furnishings, gift and home, and contemporary art”. In this mart, marketing field the company has an impressive footprint nationally controlling in addition to the Merchandise Mart building in Chicago, the Boston Design Center and the LA Mart, as well Piers 92 and 94 where, under an agreement with the New York City Economic Development Corporation, MMPI has officially taken over management.

On MMPI’s website, snuggled away in mid side bar menu, is the seductively stormy, single word: “Vornado”. Did I click on it? Yup, I clicked on it. Less stormy than one might imagine but here is what I got. ” MMPI is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vornado Realty Trust. Vornado Realty Trust (VNO) is a fully integrated, publicly owned, real estate investment trust. Headquartered in New York City, Vornado is one of the largest owners and managers of real estate in the United States with a portfolio of approximately 60 million square feet in its major platforms, primarily located in the New York and Washington, D.C. metro areas.”

And then chairman of the Vornado board is the “colorful” Steven Roth who paid $9.4 million for Bernie Madoff’s four-bedroom, three-bath Montauk home (much less than Warhol’s much larger Montauk real estate moved for I would curiously note). Vornado also built the Cesar Peli designed, Bloomberg tower on the site of the old Alexander’s department store. I do not know if Mr. Roth attended the opening of the Armory show. If so he had a busy Wednesday evening because that same night he shed some light on how real estate development works in New York when he delivered a lecture at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (the last word is ironic, right?):

“Mr. Roth, who bought Alexander’s in large part for its real estate holdings, offered his take on his reticence to build, and why he let the site sit empty for so long: The New York newspapers, he complained, said “I couldn’t make a decision; I didn’t know what I wanted to do. “Bullshit. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted the price to go up. A lot. And I was willing to wait because I had almost no basis in the land.” There was another plus to waiting, he noted, offering a refreshingly candid developer’s take on one way to pursue government subsidies: “My mother called me and said [of the site], ‘It’s dirty. There are bums sleeping in the sidewalks of this now closed, decrepit building. They’re urinating in the corners. It’s terrible. You have to fix it.’ “And what did I do? Nothing. “Why did I do nothing? Because I was thinking in my own awkward way, that the more the building was a blight, the more the governments would want this to be redeveloped; the more help they would give us when the time came. “And they did.” Laughter followed.” (New York Observer March, 4, 2010)

I have a hunch that Mr Roth, and probably the people who laugh at his jokes, vote for smaller governemnt. But, that aside, what can you say about a man who won’t listen to his own mother? I am not sure. I am not sure where any of this leads us. There are no secrets here. No blackmail material. Michael Corleone does not seem to be involved. Perhaps there are areas of willful not-knowing, or willful not speculating (poor word choice) on what it means when you hold hands with someone. A sort of not wanting to know what it might mean that “one of the largest owners and managers of real estate in the United States” holds some quarter of New York cultural life in its embrace. But this not wanting to know leads us where? To despair? To the far end of pier 94 some dark evening perhaps. Worse I fear. We might end up with synergy. Synergy the catch word where real estate developers, Ivy League Universities, mothers and weekly newspapers all “work together toward the same goal”. Though you have to admit an interesting problem could crop up if we did not all have the same the goal?

But wait, wait! Stop! I’m having a flashback. There was this really good Vito Acconci piece. The one where he arranged to be at the end of pier 17 from 1am each night. Remember this? It was back in the early 1970’s. Back when going to a New York pier after dark was, in the short run, more dangerous than holding Vornado’s hand might be in the long run. Back when a Columbia audience might not have laughed at Mr Roth’s anecdotes. (Hey, who knows?). In Aconcci’s piece the point was that he would tell you a secret if you came to see him at the far end of the pier. So, make your way across West St, weave through the drug dealers, the undercover cops, those bums urinating in the corners, the rats, the muggers, underneath the collapsing remains of the West Side highway as it then was and Vito would tell you a secret. He’d tell you something you could, if you wanted, “blackmail” him with. And the point was perhaps in the risk, very real as it was, of walking out the pier in the darkness to find his secrets. A sort of poem about the New York of the moment evolved, a poem sung between Scorseses’ Taxi Driver and Aconcci’s prowling a pier in lower Manhattan. But the real point behind that point was what artists made art with and about. Real estate had a different cultural value we could say. Acres of derelict New York begging to be rescued but if not –and it was very much not– turned into a figuration of the time. Deployed in an artwork it –real estate– came to be about the urban collapse and the economic disaster of 1970’s capitalism. Aconcci was asking us to really take a chance. To really take a risk by going out on the pier for culture. To sort of lie down with the dogs and risk getting up with who knows what. Oh? What do you know? Maybe not so much has changed on the waterfront.