Thilo Heinzmann
“An Empty Stomach is the Devil’s Playground”
Bortolami
September 5 – October 4, 2008
Pile paintings: Polystyrene, paint pours, pigments, and pelts, under Plexiglas. In 1999, I was bartending at a Berlin club called Roxy. A bionically drunk Thilo Heinzmann came to the bar (I probably served him), and, before long, the bouncers appeared, a scuffle ensued, and Heinzmann was ejected from the premises. Turns out he’d peed on the bar. It wasn’t very attractive, but it wasn’t very offensive either—just a little confounding. Who does that?
The paintings are also confounding. They have a high-production value, low-materials-cost jocularity, but the format gets fixed: for Thilo, it’s all about filling boxes, roughly six feet square, and hanging them at a pleasant height. They’re a little archaic in their approach, and they recall Arman, who would be totally out of place at Bortolami. But Heinzmann’s had a super-repressed palette for at least ten years, he’s cynical about sensuality, and he’s given to insubordination, so he’s safe there.
Paul McCarthy
“Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement”
Whitney Museum of American Art
June 26 –October 12, 2008
Paul McCarthy is even more of a mechanical whiz than a gross-out artist, so it’s exciting to see these machines of exuberant subtlety and sophisticated spatial deception made contemporaneously with his better-known ketchup/scat/doll work, proving, as sometimes happens, that artists are well-rounded human beings with varied interests and do not work exclusively in the style the market has determined is theirs.
Almost everything in the show is infuriating, because things won’t stand still, and when you want them to move, they stop. Madhouse, a totally over-constructed plywood and steel box with three windows and a door, spins, sputters, and lurches while, inside the box, a chair reminiscent of an electric chair whirls in the opposite direction. Adjacently, four cameras rotating on a pole inside a room of screens capture your image, process it into oblivion, and then project it back onto the walls for re-digestion by the still-spinning cameras. By the time you and your image are spun past the mirrored back wall and into Bang Bang Room, its doors and strangely-studded walls snapping open and closed in syncopation, it’s all so disorienting that it would be easy to run into yourself while trying to escape.
Martha Rosler
“Great Power”
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
September 6 – October 11, 2008
There’s a space between hardly trying and trying too hard, and Martha Rosler done found it. The 25-cent turnstile at the entrance was comedic, and so was the Dance Dance Revolution machine, even if that’s a threadbare joke. Her library of clippings was oddly-situated and uncomfortable, and, seeing this after her great Library project in 2005, it seemed like she was almost poking fun at herself. A kinetic prosthetic leg kicked from the ceiling, making sculpture. The photomontages lining the walls recalled Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, but where those had an incisive wit, these, with their Hedi Slimaned armies of guys and glib balls of fire and gas pumps, are vacuous. Maybe she’s trying to shame us, or complain about the lack—ours—of an effective, impassioned culture of resistance and rebellion. It’s hard to tell whose bad it is.
Ivan Witenstein
Derek Eller
September 5 – October 11, 2008
Ok, some of the colors are nice, and the ambition (to “magnify the impact of stagnation in American political thinking”) is respectably cynical, if I understand it correctly, but the Gremlins, the Indians, the basketball player with the gaping mouth, the vulva-headed creature whose breast is being bitten by an alligator, the other extraneous genitalia, the swords, pigs, goat horns, the Air Force Ones, tires, vulva-mouthed snakes, angry black women, dogs, the chainsaw sculptures, horses, dongs, bedrolls, dildos, the billy clubs, the proletariat, and Kim Jong Il, all produced in very quick succession, are going where?
Witenstein is clearly a skilled sculptor, in the sculptors-sculpting-sculpture sense of skilled, but the cognitive engine driving this clown car flooded, or overheated, or just died. A sculpture is not a cartoon; its physical presence demands complete engagement. Throwing a few Gremlins around and slapping pussies on stuff does not an effective political critique make.
Witenstein does get close to the mark with his terracotta busts of Ronald Regan. The trickle-down worked. They clearly recall cartoons, the clay was a smart choice, and the group of them actually speaks through frozen lips.
Jane Hammond
“Photographs”
Gallery Lelong
September 4 – October 11, 2008
Early fall in Chelsea left one with the feeling that not only are there no new ideas, there simply are no ideas, period. It’s nice then to see a mid-career artist with an uneven (to my mind) output, take a really simple, kind of Photo-102-ish idea and turn a 10-point Retton flip on it. The exhibition presents toned silver gelatin prints of absurdly collaged situations and figures, many featuring Hammond’s face planted on bodies. They’re unselfconscious and unusually satisfying—Hammond’s been forcing interactions among loosely-related objects in her paintings and prints for a long time, but in the photographs she achieves, through the “authority” of the medium, a resolution that remained slightly out of reach in the hand-made works. Image transformations repeat throughout the room; she had more than one idea for that bathing suit, and for those corpses, and they’re all worth seeing.
Matthew Day Jackson
“Drawings from Tlön”
Nicole Klagsbrun
September 13 – October 18, 2008
A few years ago, Matthew Day Jackson put a down-payment on a career as an artist. He took talent, craftsmanship, vulnerability, sharp observation, and an awareness of, but not reliance on, youth culture, and he saved. His venture looked so promising that something, or someone, invested. He acquired CAPITAL. This show marked the first time in my life in which I walked into a gallery and thought, Holy shit, this dude got some money and made it gold.
“Gold” short-changes the work, though, which is big, beautiful, bright/dark, and hung strangely, and thoughtfully. It’s believably original. At turns, It’s also really hard to understand, with colorful visual puns and embarrassing moments of “is this cool?” that spill into mystical aggregations of allegory, science, bullshit, self-reference, and even an audacious challenge to viewers to step on the 4’ x 8’ piece of sheet glass on the floor framing his Narcissus’s pond. Listen: Jackson montaged x-rays of his own skeleton with Evel Knievel’s. Entirely life size, obv, because they’re x-rays, but, aggregate, they’re extra-macroscopic, like the show.
“Conceptual Figures”
Deitch Projects
September 4 – 27, 2008
Who decided to leave Tauba Auerbach’s 50/50 Floor in the gallery? Oh, irony—the press release for “Conceptual Figures” declares the show’s work as “refining the position of painting after Photoshop,” and there, competing with the highly refined and very, if invisibly, handmade paintings, is this binary, pixilated, graphic organ of a piece. Compelling as an idea, it’s overly distracting as an experience.
Here, skill and craft are so high as to be unbelabored. Kurt Kauper’s Derek presents an empathetic but inaccessible figure, crystallized like someone who knows they’re on view but can’t see the viewers. Colleen Asper’s depiction of herself in a jury box is rendered with such lucid precision that she must actually have been there, taking an oath to uphold the tenets of conceptual figuration. Differently, Caleb Considine’s tableaus employ a washy, blocky, muted abstraction that creates sophisticated space casually, but powerfully. Much of the work in the show contains information that will not photograph accurately—maybe that hyper-restraint is painting after Photoshop.
Michael Krebber
Greene Naftali
September 18 – October 18, 2008
It seems Michael Krebber has been on a raw foods diet, or maybe some plan of specific separation, Kosher or macrobiotic-style. Here he took a group of mainly German-made (who knew?) windsurfing boards, and made a group photo, seven boards lined up like brahs. Then he made a poster, folded it up, and hid it with the other gallery info. Then he collected a few additional boards and dissected them for the world to see, pwned them, basically, almost like how Mystery did on The Pick-Up Artist, but those were boys, and here Krebber is schooling artistic machismo. So the poster made a funny little “before” shot to the show’s “after.” Speaking of amuses bouche, one problem with the drawings in the show: Justus Köhncke is extremely attractive; one shouldn’t be remiss in depicting that type of thing.
“Wiener Werkstätte Jewelry”
Neue Galerie
March 27 – September 1, 2008
The Vienna Workshops developed a remarkable vocabulary of action within a balanced and still form, and their fluency was clear in nearly all of the objects on view. Josef Hoffmann’s pendants and brooches were simultaneously animal, mineral and vegetable— they used a wide range of colors, textures, and sizes of stones, all bezel-set, that moved and returned your gaze as you tried to understand their balance. It’s notable that many of the pieces were commissioned by Gustav Klimt for Emilie Flöge, a fashion designer who at the time was liberating women’s fashion in a similar way: she loosened constriction on the female form, creating new, naturalized shapes that allowed freer movement. Klimt’s gifts of these large, luxurious pieces may have been anchors of sorts.
Marvin Gates
“Et in Arcadia Ego: Paintings and Drawings”
Bowery Gallery
September 2 – 27, 2008
Brave, delicate, meticulous, and totally invested. With riotously intelligent color, Gates investigates states of space and mind. Death navigates morphing, melting cityscape circuits, and carefully painted edges create halos at the junctures between things. A figure sheltered from a falling encaustic rainbow waits for belonging, or perhaps some handsome and stable Hartley-esque landscapes, before leaving this eclectic and generous microsphere.
“Will Happiness Find Me?”
Marvelli Gallery
July 3 – September 17, 2008
Will it? For answers, let’s refer to the English edition of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s book of the same name.
Daphne Arthur: “Why do we stick to the ground? What do the others know about me?” We stick to the ground because there’s lots of muck and mud. I don’t know what the others know, but you’re brown paper, they know that.
Mary Reid Kelley: “Can I let my wife admire the criminals she sees on television?” Meh, I’d say yes, as I don’t think Camel Toe is terribly interested in fidelity and loyalty. Maybe she’ll see something that will scare her. Then, you can be her hero.
Jason Ledet: “Shouldn’t I be ashamed of things that have nothing to do with me?” No, you shouldn’t be. That horse is most assuredly not like your horse, and for a thing to be actually antique, it’s supposed to be over 100 years old. Your grandmother was probably trying to connect with you, and that’s nice.
Juliana Romano: “What are those gloomy figures doing in the twilight at the end of the street?” Hell if I know. They’re brooding and foreboding, for sure, but they don’t seem to be occupied with much. Maybe with Subjectship, listening to Jefferson Starship.
—Jessica Slaven