Review Roundup

This week... Holland Cotter returns! And rare face-off between art-crit power couple Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith as they take in the views of Olafur Eliasson's East River "waterfalls."

Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim Museum (-Sept. 28)

"Spirals abound in Louise Bourgeois’s art. She says they make her think of control and freedom, and of strangling someone. So it’s perfect that her retrospective, seen in London and Paris, is now in the looping rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. It looks great there, clean but organic — fecund, tumid, enwrapping — and unclassically classical. ... She is a restless and inventive maker. She has said that she works in response to emotions: fury at the past and fear of the present among them. But on the evidence of the survey, she is equally impelled by formal options — what she can do with her hands. ... The big one for me is the story of how one artist figured out that by staying personal and getting messy with opposites — exquisiteness and grossness, Bernini and bathroom jokes — and being willing to go 'too far' without being reckless, she could make art that was the equivalent of a certain kind of diary writing: purgative, but rigorously poetic. ... Many artists since have taken notice of what she did. If you squint, the Guggenheim survey can start to look like a big group show, a Louise Bourgeois homage. There’s a Bruce Nauman, a Carl Andre, a Kiki Smith... Your daily life is propelled by fear? Draw fear. You can. Impossible to sleep at night? Make night your studio, the cloth you embroider with needs and dreams. The past is an obsession you can neither embrace nor release? Make an image of obsession, any image will do. And you’ll feel better for a while. Ms. Bourgeois has made many such images." - Holland Cotter/NYTimes


"'I do, I undo, I redo,' is her motto. The phrase also describes the relentless drive behind the decidedly Oedipal retrospective... ...challenging, pendulous, protuberant biomorphs and claustrophobic environments designed not just to exorcise but to love her demons. ...this unsettling show shifts constantly between opposites: repulsion and desire, masculine and feminine, release and confinement, humiliation and salvation." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg


"...intense, difficult, uncomfortable, bad and quite beautiful. ... The mediums change - the 1940s oil to 1960s wood sculpture to marble and metal, found objects, installation pieces, fabric - but the message stays consistent, somewhat redundant and extremely blatant. ...the themes that still pervade her work today - male and female, sexuality, violence, entrapment, anger, architecture and creation." -Canadian Press

"...shows us not just the angry woman with violently bloody dreams of revenge, but the middle-class French Madeleine who loves her family, loves her dad and mom and sibs, even as they try to force her to conform to whatever it is they want from her. She loves even, in fact, as she watches her dad, on a visit to New York, dismiss four prostitutes in a row only to light up at the sight of the last, as she writes in the catalogue. It's a strange, tangled web we all weave through life. Do whatever a spider can." -Dan Bischoff/NJ Star-Ledger


Olafur Eliasson’s The New York City Waterfalls

"...the waterfalls seem dinkier than you’d think. And they’re not spectacular. ...don’t go to The New York City Waterfalls wanting to be wowed. ... For all the effort that went into making them, Eliasson’s falls aren’t about spectacle. They’re like still centers that put you in touch with the physical world around you. They magically stretch the space of lower Manhattan, making the city seem as grand and amazing as it really is. ... Unlike Christo's gates, which came on in a whoosh, then faded fast, Eliasson’s works dawn on you slowly, then produce a stirring calm. ... By zeroing in on something as temporal as running water — the falls flow at 35,000 gallons per minute — Eliasson lifts you out of the moment and places you in a continuum. Whether you like the falls or not, you can't help but smile at the clever twist Eliasson's put on Beatrice Wood's 1917 defense of another piece of abstract plumbing, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, a found sculpture of a urinal. 'The only works of art America has given,' wrote Wood, 'are her plumbing and her bridges.'" -Jerry Saltz/NY Mag.

"Whitman imagined an essence of city life that is still palpable — and intoxicating — no matter how many changes we lament. But I doubt he could have conjured one thing that we can see for the next three and a half months: the waterfalls in our midst. ... It is at night that you have the greatest chance of hearing them from a distance, otherwise the rush of water is drowned out by the city. But their quiet heightens their strangeness, day or night. It is as if they were in their own movie, a silent one. And in a way they are. They could almost fool King Kong into thinking he is back home. They are the remnants of a primordial Eden, beautiful, uncanny signs of a natural nonurban past that the city never had. ... The falls don’t bowl you over or dwarf you until you get close to them, and even then not always. Mostly they accumulate in a way art purists may welcome with buzzwords like 'de-centering' and 'discursive.' ... They fake natural history with basic plumbing, making little rips in the urban fabric through which you glimpse hints of lost paradise and get a sharpened sense of Whitman’s, the one you already inhabit." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes


"...outline for us the historic pathways along which — and as a result of which — this city grew. ... The locations aren't random. Each answers the dual needs of environmental feasibility and of calling attention to ambitious projects promoted by the administration of Mayor Bloomberg: the East River Waterfront Park in Manhattan, Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn, and the reclamation of Governors Island." -Francis Morrone/NY Sun

"...industrial strength art project... ...The Waterfalls are almost comically thin and humble. ...a spectacle that doesn't amount to an aesthetic experience, at least not if we mean by that an intimate encounter between you and a work of art. ...the works are hard to engage as anything other than spectacle. They invite but don't allow the immersion that people experienced with Eliasson's own most famous work, The weather project, his hugely popular artificial sun installation five years ago at Tate Modern in London. ...at the end of the day you can't evaluate a work of art in terms of its economic impact or its moral utility." -Richard Lacayo/TIME


Dalí: Painting and Film at the MoMA (-Sept. 15)

"...strangely piecemeal, open-ended and inspiring... Nicely, the show at MoMA doesn’t sequester the films in pitch-black rooms. Their grainy or silvery grisailles flicker in full sight of Dalí’s often small, intensely colored paintings, which sit on the walls like brilliant boxed jewels. ... For all its violence, the razor scene in 'Un Chien Andalou' announced an intention not only to shock but to 'open' the eye to a new way of seeing. MoMA’s fragmentary yet haunting show provides a fresh view of how Dalí, for all his outrageousness, never stopped trying to live according to the ambition he so brutally visualized." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"The exhibit aptly displays a side of Dalí that is less talked about, and it does it well. The rooms of the exhibit are easy to navigate and the rich content sticks with the theme while enhancing the films. As an avid Dalí fan, I have been to dozens of museums and shows highlighting his career, and it was nice to go to a show that I felt I hadn’t been to before." -Linnea Covington/NYPress


Paul McCarthy at the Whitney (-Oct. 12)

"No psychotic clowning, no scatological food play, no pornographic vaudeville, no raunchy political satire, no gross self-abnegation. ...a smart, tightly focused study of the formal and conceptual underpinnings of Mr. McCarthy’s art... ...a trippy, kinetic Cubism reflecting a distinctively modern delirium of perceptual and cognitive overload. ...a bewildering fun house. ... Over and over Mr. McCarthy returns to the human fact that we are inescapably at the mercy of what our senses tell us about the world and what our brains manage to make of that information. We may go out of our minds, but we can never get out of our heads." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


J.M.W. Turner at the Met (-Sept. 21)

"And while in reproduction these paintings may often seem to foretell Impressionism or even, especially among the late works, Abstract Expressionism, seeing them all together here tells a different story. Turner was indeed a Romantic painter, tied all his life to the Thames or the sea. He did his rocky Alpine crags, but it was water, light and fire he loved, and the way these things rhymed with his own era of Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the way the omnipresent atmospheric pollution of unrestrained capitalist development colored the sunsets and rises of his day lends his work a poetry he himself probably never imagined." -Dan Bischoff/NJ Star-Ledger


Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney (-Sept. 21)

"Nothing is as old as yesterday's future, and the Whitney Museum's 'retrospective' devoted to 'Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe' which opened yesterday, definitely bears the stretch marks of its 1930s origins. ... has the look and feel of an ironic installation, a send-up of Utopian fantasies (particularly Bucky's visualization of 'floating cities' in giant spheres that kiss the clouds above rocky peaks). ... Fuller did often seem to transcend not just architectural forces but quotidian demands of political and economic forces. That has become the basis of his claims to being a prophet. Whether or not the specific notions he put forward for modern life are ever realized, one aspect of his thought has certainly become a pillar of our current world: Fuller pushed his thought out to global scale long before that was at all common." -Dan Bischoff/NJ Star-Ledger

"Bucky, as he was known to everybody, was an authentic American visionary, the kind who could seem at first glance--and not just at first glance--like a bit of a crackpot, something between a panoramic intellect and one of those 'outsider' artists who manically fill in every free space of their drawings. There were too many ideas in his teeming brain, most of them system-wide and cosmic in scale." -Richard Lacayo/TIME


Brett Weston and Richard Diebenkorn at the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.) (-Sept. 7)

"Both grapple with the idea of artistic heritage and the struggle to break away from your forebears. In the first case, it's explicit, down to the show's title. The son of a famous father, photographer Brett Weston (1911-93) is often thought of as a lesser light to Edward Weston (1886-1958)... What we see in 'Diebenkorn in New Mexico' is that process of artistic discovery." - Michael O'Sullivan/Washington Post


Whistler, Inness and the Art of Painting Softly at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA) (-Oct. 19)

"...a fine idea beautifully presented. But from the thinking behind the show something is missing: a healthy dose, I would suggest, of skepticism. ... The kind of painting the organizers dwell upon, then, eschewed detail in favor of suggestion, encouraged soulful and swooning responses, and tried to rid painting of evidence that it had been created by human hands. ...there was no mention of the problems inherent in Whistler's notoriously ad hoc techniques. It was as if the curators were too wrapped up in the genius of their hero even to raise the question. ... Personally I have reservations about the aesthetic philosophy of these 'soft painters.' By the end of the show, having seen so many blurred and hazy landscapes, my reservations were only enhanced. ...but historically the show is fascinating, and there are many works of considerable beauty." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe


Winslow Homer at the MFA (Boston) (-Dec. 7)

"Sentimental, anecdotal, and occasionally trite: On all three counts, Winslow Homer was guilty. And yet he was the greatest American artist of the 19th century - and not only because his imagery was the most 'American.' ... it has a quality of rightness - what John Updike called 'a morning sense of the world grasped afresh'... Again and again, one marvels at Homer's ability to distill the complications of context into natty and robust designs, almost mythic moments of decisiveness." - Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe


Carroll Dunham Prints at the Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover, MA) (-July 13)

"If you recoil instinctively from images littered with phallic shapes spurting gooey drips, banana-shaped breasts, and sundry hairy orifices, I recommend you stick to the glossary at the back of the catalogue raisonné of Dunham's prints - an impressive tome released by the Addison and Yale University Press to coincide with the show. ... He came to prominence in the 1980s and '90s with exuberant paintings and drawings that drew inspiration from a pedigreed combination of Abstract Expressionism, cartoon imagery, Art Brut, and Surrealism. ... Everything about these works - the colors, the embossing, the dumb graphic simplicity of the style - is tacky, and I've no doubt Dunham wants it that way. It's kitsch, but knowing kitsch. And as such, it's hard not to like." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe


Philip-Lorca diCorcia at LACMA (Los Angeles) (-Sept. 14)

"This quiet little show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art efficiently surveys the New York photographer's heart-wrenching pictures of ordinary people doing their damnedest to keep their dreams alive in circumstances so difficult that less seasoned folks -- or reality-toughened citizens -- might see them as desperate, even hopeless. ...reacquaints old fans with the 54-year-old photographer's uncanny talent for making strangers (and their strangeness) intimate -- without transforming them into two-bit players in clichéd fantasies." -David Pagel/LATimes


Florence Knoll at the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decoration (Denver) (-July 13)

"To understand the essence of modernism, one need look no further than the clean, economical and thoroughly functional design of Florence Knoll's influential, still-contemporary 20th century furniture. The Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art is celebrating the accomplishments of the design giant with a compact, high-powered exhibition that a few other institutions worldwide might potentially equal but none could top." -Kyle MacMillan/Denver Post


Trevor Paglen at the Berkeley Art Museum (-Sept. 14. )

"...a dozen large-scale and midsize photographs, as well as a darkened room that houses a computer simulation and sound re-creation of the satellites, broadcast onto a globe. Shot from Paglen's East Bay rooftop and at a base in the desert near Mono Lake, the photos capture sweeping fields of stars or the glowing haze of the Milky Way. The images seem little different from the usual lush astral photography seen in National Geographic or Cosmos magazine, except that every photo harbors an extra scratch or streak of light. That blemish is a spy satellite in motion. ...Paglen created numerous art pieces. One involved documenting the fake signatures of fictive CEOs who headed CIA-front companies. Another proffered an exhaustive list of code names for active but classified military programs. More recently, Paglen published "I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems From the Pentagon's Black World," an art book that presents peculiar shoulder patches created for the weird and top secret programs funded by the Pentagon's black budget (an achievement that landed him on "The Colbert Report" and in the New York Times)." -Timothy Buckwalter/SF Chronicle


Richard Prince at the Serpentine Gallery (London) (-Sept. 7)

"The 'I'm not sexist, I'm commenting on sexism' argument doesn't hold, because there simply isn't enough self-reflexivity in the work. It's not deep enough to sustain a double meaning. It can barely support a single meaning. But taken together with all the other demeaning images of women in art and culture, and viewed in conjunction with the reality of the abuse of women, it actively reinforces a world in which women are nothing more than objects. ... But then, interestingly, there emerges from all this flim-flam a Great American Photographer Richard. Prince is at his most complex, mature and interesting when shooting the detritus of small-town America, nowheresville: the reality that punctures the myth he's immaturely fascinated by. His photographs are the only thing of any technical, artistic or social merit in the show and they are genuinely affecting." -Bidista/Guardian U.K.

"Trying to read the tone of the work, for instance, is a mug's game since it always glances free of tone; trying to pin it down by subject isn't fruitful either, although it is fair to say that Prince is less interested in the sublime than the low, filthy and corrupted. Nor is it obvious that there is anything to be gained from seeing the works en masse, since they almost all thrive better as one-liners. The best one can say of this show may also be the worst, depending on your expectations of art: that everything in it declares itself to be the work of Richard Prince." -Laura Cumming/Guardian U.K.

In the Time of Cholera

Plague in Gotham! Cholera in Nineteenth-Century New York
New York Historical Society
April 4 - Nov. 2

If you're lacking a summer getaway in the Hamptons or the Catskills at least console yourself that while you might have to deal with a blackout or garbage strike, at least there's no worry of deadly diarrhea.

A compact exhibition at the New York Historical Society, "Plague in Gotham! Cholera in Nineteenth-Century New York," recounts a couple of really bad summers in the rapidly growing city, showing how New Yorkers of all stripes responded to the outbreak in an age before modern epidemiology.

First identified on the Indian subcontinent in 1817, cholera made its way to New York in the summer of 1832, returning again in warm months of 1849 and 1866. Causing severe diarrhea with the loss of a about a liter of water per hour, its victims were often dead within hours. The disease spread through contaminated drinking water, disproportionately affecting poor African-Americans and Irish Catholic immigrants.

Especially hard hit was the Five Points, the rough-and-ready neighborhood made famous in Scorcese's "Gangs of New York." Its streets were built on top of Collect Pond, which had been inadequately filled in after getting nasty from the wastewater of breweries, tanneries and slaughterhouses. The result was marshy — and smelly.

Guess what, it was these very odors, the "miasmas" of organic matter, that were blamed when cholera struck. We see an 1849 broadside from Order of the Sanitary Committee and Medical Council that warns New Yorkers to "avoid raw vegetables and ripe fruit." But the advice was more than dietary. Cholera was also thought to arise from immoral behavior, including excessive consumption of "ardent spirits" (a.k.a. alcohol.)

But not everyone followed these doctors’ orders. In the 1849 outbreak, homeopathic cures were the rage. We see a small case from Smith's Pharmacy holds several glass vials of ingredients like camphor and belladonna. And an 1852 letter describes one man's home remedy, including a flannel "belly band" said to be a popular cure in France, a half pint of brandy mixed with honey, and, presumably when things got really bad, application of a mustard plaster to the bowels.

The most popular preventive measure for those with money was to leave town. Some headed north to a place called Greenwich Village. The painter Asher Brown Durand took his family to New Jersey, where he painted a canvas depicting his three young children assembled outside their country home comfortably consuming fruit. (See image above.)

One who stayed downtown was John Pintard, none other than the founder of the New York Historical Society. But just as you might think how self-congratulating this is, there's a formal oil portrait of the man depicted with his Bible open to the 90th Psalm, which it turns out says something along the lines of only the pious survive a plague. Reinforcing this notion, we’re told that Pintard had little sympathy for poor, calling them "intemperate, dissolute and filthy people … the very scum of the city."

This outlook is also seen in an 1853 oil by George Yewell. Called "Doing Nothing," it depicts a grim-faced young street urchin on a Five Points street corner together with the recently built city prison known as the Tombs looming behind him like a vision of his destiny. From around the same time, an illustration in a municipal manual imagines the neighborhood as it was in the 20s, its vices in full bloom. We see few fistfights in progress (perhaps including members of the Bowery Boys), grocery stores (where liquor was sold) and unaccompanied women (probably prostitutes). Pigs, both a food source and a primitive sanitation department, run free on the streets (more on the porkers later).

While the treatments advocated by city officials were clearly wrong-headed, they had it together in other ways. In the summer of '32, they issued daily reports on the disease’s progress, distributing a broadside called the "Health Reporter" at City Hall. A July 24 paper from the height of the outbreak details 296 new cases and 96 deaths. By August 15, the disease has nearly run its course with only 75 symptomatic and 26 dead.

If you were poor and one of those sick, there were few options. Private hospitals would not see you. For the most part, Protestants had left town. It was Catholic churches, especially the Church of the Transfiguration (which still stands today on Mott Street), that helped minister to the sick, especially at the Cholera Hospital on Rivington Street, where more than two thousand were treated in the first outbreak. On the scene was Horatio Bartley, who published an incredible book with only slighly exagerated illustrations of patients, their skin shockingly blue, their agony-filled eyes sunken and rolling. Along with each portrait is a short summary of their case. One Irish-born laborer with initials of E.W. who lived on Stanton Street presented with diarrhea, vomiting and cramps. He received a rubdown of camphorated mercurial ointment (the smell of camphor was thought to counteract the malodorous miasmas), but expired a mere seven-and-a-half hours later.

That summer 3,514 died out of a population of 250,000. By 1849, the post-Potato Famine-immigration City was twice as large, and nearly twice as many died. But by the third cholera wave in ’66, only 591 died out of a population of 850,000.

The difference was clever sleuthing by a Londoner named John Snow. As cholera ravaged his city in 1854, he made the key link between one baby’s dirty diapers, which were dropped near a drinking source, and the disease’s spread. As soon as a year later, Snow's ideas were adopted in New York, where a quarantine hospital. was opened. Other New York advances included the construction of the Croton Reservoir in 1843, and the banning of private wells. And, in 1849, more than 20,000 pigs were chased by bat-wielding youths further uptown (an image of an earlier chase can be seen in another Durrand painting).

Come to think of it, a pig chase might have been something fun to do for those unable to jump on the equivalent of the Hampton Jitney.

Bonus: Check out the exhibition blog and Google Map.

Review Roundup

This week... Don't miss Peter Schjeldahl's breathless beatifying hyperbole on Philip Guston ("His climactic style now appears canonical, lording over other art of the late twentieth century as a consummation ... of modern art."), John Haber's classifications of age-appropriateness ("Damien Hirst is the eternal eighteen-year-old—proud of his independence and awe-struck at his discovery of mortality..."), Blake Gopnik's diagnosis of Koons as a Martian with a neurological disorder (a step up from Schjeldahl's nightmare), Richard Lacayo's likening of an Anish Kapour sculpture to the "Wagnerian" creation of a planet, and, best of all, Blake Gopnik's insightful comparison of Martin Puryear's "late abstraction" to a quadrille ("a dance that had military origins, but went on to be cherished for its well-ordered graces.") Also, check out James Kalm's rooftop interview with Jeff Koons on the art market.


Philip Guston at the Morgan Library (-Aug. 31)

"...packs a punch as ostensibly rough and actually exquisite as any one of the renegade Abstract Expressionist’s late, cartoonish images: slovenly still-lifes, geeky characters, chiliastic floods. Something has happened to those pictures lately—they’ve grown steadily, stealthily greater since Guston’s death, in 1980. His climactic style now appears canonical, lording over other art of the late twentieth century as a consummation (and consumption, bonfire-fashion) of modern art. ... His great subject turned out to be the collision of his masochistically vaulting artistic ambition (Piero della Francesca was his ideal) and his life as a doubt-ridden, suffering man. ...a marriage of high and low, reason and squalor, which amounts to a beautiful joke that’s as big as the world." - Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"This terrific show concisely charts how concentrated bouts of drawing re-energized the artist's broadly influential paintings. ... Guston filtered the classics through America's rough-and-ready culture and distilled 600 years of pictorial invention into an ever-intoxicating brew." - R.C. Baker/Village Voice


Heavy Light and Bill Wood’s Business at the ICP (-Sept. 7)

"Taken together, though, the two shows demonstrate how photography can survey society in ways that are at once panoramic and telescopic. ... Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video From Japan gathers the newest talent to hatch from the Japanese incubator - 13 artists in all, some focused on their nation's landscape, others on the idiosyncrasies of its people. The smaller but more fascinating Bill Wood's Business contains samples from the more than 20,000 pictures taken in the 1950s and 1960s by a professional photographer dedicated to serving clients in the provincial city of Fort Worth. ...the dirty secret of slice-of-life photography is that when life is sliced with too blunt a knife, the banal transcends its time and place. A cliché is for ever." - Ariella Budick/Financial Times

Bill Wood’s Business at the ICP (-Sept. 7)

"...Wood's photographs are striking, and a large part of what makes them so is that they contain both vestiges and prescient glimmers of art photography from the last century. ... Unlike the vast population of art photographs, what Wood's work offers is the insider's view. ... Wood's subjects, posed carefully in front of the camera—unlike straight photography's ostensibly unposed aesthetic—gaze tentatively, sometimes almost sheepishly, into the lens, as if to ask: "Am I doing it right?" Spend some time with these pictures and you'll begin to wonder: Is it fair to look back with the arrogance of historical hindsight and say no?" - Martha Schwendener/Village Voice


The Ideal Cloud at the ISE Cultural Foundation (-June 27)

"...the works offered by three contemporary artists ... are sprawling, mechanized sculptures. These pieces depart from the formalist foundations of art and technology by engaging with sentimentality. Ordinarily this would spell trouble, but whatever maudlin qualities the show might have had are offset by either the materials employed or the opportunity for audience participation." - Paddy Johnson/TONY


Paul Chan: The 7 Lights at the New Museum (-June 29)

"...the artist imbues the digital—that most affectless of mediums—with visceral and touching content. ...perhaps the artist is hinting at a moral cause and effect, portraying man and his achievements as deserving the random backlash of larger forces. Chan speaks to both the beauty of nature and the ills of technology, using the latter to show the delicate balance between hope and fear." - T.J. Carlin/TONY


Flow at the Studio Museum of Harlem (June 29)

"Political and cultural nightmares have not gone anywhere, but they hover quietly off-stage. ... As 'Flow' implies, art and lives are in transit, and the flow goes largely in one direction. It does not go easily either. ... Exile appears as a place as well as a journey—and an inhospitable one. ... If post-African identity sounds bleaker than Africa and the West put together, 'Flow' itself is not. All that reliance on indirection shows that people have a few ruses left. By sticking to just twenty artists, all under forty, the museum allows them space, too, including room for ambiguity." - John Haber/Haber Arts


© MURAKAMI at the Brooklyn Museum (-July 13)

"Hate museums? Too many memories of class trips to look at stuffy old art? Look no further than Eastern Parkway. This time, one pretty much gets the point halfway through the revolving doors. ... Murakami's version of the Yellow Brick Road has more colors than Dorothy's, welcomes you, makes the decisions for you, and pockets ten bucks along the way. ... One exaggerates a little in calling this a retrospective, when so much of Murakami's career dates from about five years starting in 1997. Evolution seems as irrelevant as it would to an episode of Loony Tunes. ... In a way, Damien Hirst is the eternal eighteen-year-old—proud of his independence and awe-struck at his discovery of mortality—while the Chapman brothers are always pushing fourteen, unshakably righteous and obsessed with sex. Murakami's art rarely gets past age eight... Eyes may show unalloyed happiness or anxiety, but never any real cause for concern, and a mushroom may evoke a mushroom cloud, but never a devastated or political world. ... Where last year the Brooklyn Museum cloyingly surveyed 'Global Feminisms,' now it has global infantilism." - John Haber/Haber Arts


Jeff Koons at the Met Roofgarden (-Oct. 26)

"...look at that suit... that suit is just about as shiny as his sculpture. ... This guy is really good at this. He's done this a lot. Would you vote for this man? I would. ... this is really flawless casting and polishing... beautiful... very durable... very pretty..." - James Kalm/Kalm Report


Jeff Koons at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) (-Sept. 21)

"...extraterrestrial origins might be the best explanation for his art. It is so compellingly, engrossingly strange that no other account fits. Even though Koons is one of the most famous and popular artists on this planet, familiarity doesn't make his work any easier to get a handle on. ... Where many of even today's best artists risk retreading well-trod ground, Koons takes us somewhere genuinely new. Whether we enjoy being there is almost beside the point. ... Koons, the Stepford Artist, spouts such a quantity of absurd, Pollyanna cliches -- 'the people who are involved in the art world really first and foremost care about people' or 'when someone views a work of art . . . it's always about them, about their potential' -- that it's hard to remember that he's the guy who posed having sex with his wife. ... When people profoundly misapprehend the world around them, neurologists call it 'agnosia' -- mistaking your wife for a hat being the famous example from Oliver Sacks. Koons turns agnosia into an artistic principle. And that has the effect of letting us see our world, and art, as profoundly other than it usually is. ... As reworked by the Martian Koons, 'Bunny' has lost all the good humor of the original toy and now feels like a totem for some sinister rabbit ritual. ... It's as though Duchamp's urinal-become-fountain-become-sculpture were uncovered eons from now, and reused yet again to house a sacred relic. Then buried. Then re-rediscovered and presented as superb ancient art." - Blake Gopnik/Washington Post


Martin Puryear at the National Gallery (Washington, D.C.) (-Sept. 28)

"...the sculptor Martin Puryear can be thought of as a past master of late abstraction. For more than 30 years, he's been making work that is gracious, persuasive and attractive -- if not completely of its time. ... The 46 pieces at the National Gallery are mostly carved or carpentered from wood, and are usually between the size of a pony and an elephant, with a couple reaching brontosaurian scale. ... There's a kind of distillation of heavy-duty function here, without the object actually being able to do anything. ... His sculptures are like found art that has been custom-crafted to be even more cryptic, poetic and potent than your average discarded artifact. ... Stylish, poetic, nostalgic -- Puryear's works are all of those. But very rarely challenging. That puts them right in line with most late-style art. ... Puryear's art can end up seeming more like a quadrille: a dance that had military origins, but went on to be cherished for its well-ordered graces. ... If Puryear's art represents a kind of tapering off for abstract sculpture, for craft it comes close to an apotheosis."- Blake Gopnik/Washington Post

Remix: New Modernities in a Post Indian World at the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, D.C.) (-Sept. 21)

"...argues that for many young artists, being Indian does not necessarily wholly determine who or what they are and does not oblige them to work in a certifiably Indian style. To prove its point, the exhibition presents a mixed bag of works by 15 artists of at least partial American Indian descent. ... On the one hand, Indianness starts to seem nebulous: it becomes unclear what it means for a person to identify him or herself as Indian or as an Indian artist. On the other, the artists seem affiliated to what might be called art-school Postmodernism, relying on the appropriation and manipulation of socially charged signifiers." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist (Washington, D.C.) (-Aug. 3)

"...a peculiar, partial triumph. At its best, in a dozen or so paintings and murals made almost entirely between 1927 and 1935, Douglas is revealed as a quintessential early American modernist, a Harlem Renaissance painter who successfully fused lessons from the American and European avant-gardes with American content and a lot of old-fashioned allegory. But the exhibition, curated by Susan Earle, also reveals Douglas (1899-1979) as a not-particularly-interesting traditionalist, a painter of shockingly dull landscapes and portraits. Finally, the biggest mystery is what happened to Douglas and his production after World War II. ... But those works from the Douglas peak decade are gripping. In painting after mural after painting there is optimism, triumph, achievement, promise and an insistence on arrival." - Tyler Green/MAN


Anish Kapoor at the ICA Boston (-Sept. 7)

"...an indispensable show... ...14 Kapoors dating from 1980 to the present into a single long gallery that's also something of a fun house, assuming that a fun house can be smart, subtle and even a little haunting. ...almost always playing with the threshold between the solid and the immaterial, the point at which a thing comes into being or dematerializes... ...it has debts to the blunt boxes of minimalists like Donald Judd and Robert Morris as well as to the weightless atmospheres of James Turrell. But the blend of heavy and vaporous, declaring and beckoning--that's all Kapoor's. ... It's art as metaphysical jujitsu. ... Wagnerian, mythic and muddy, it's something vast and strange being born, like a planet being fashioned out of primal elements and impersonal forces." - Richard Lacayo/Time


Personal Protocols and Other Preferences and I’ve Got Something in My Eye at the Center for Curatorial Studies/Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College (Annandale-on- Hudson, NY) (-Sept. 7)

"The latest form of artists’ scrutiny of museums — widely known as institutional critique — seems to be congenial entertainment. Turn museums into places where fun happens, and where making art as well as looking at it is a form of play, not much skill required. It may not get to the roots of things, but it undermines art’s pretensions to seriousness, personal expression and permanence. Sort of. There’s quite a bit of fun to be had in the two summer shows... ...feature five little-known, often interesting artists from Europe and deftly float some ideas about collaboration, irreverence and artists as curators. Luckily there is just enough seriousness to go around." - Roberta Smith/NYTimes

Whistler, Inness and the Art of Painting Softly at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA) (-Oct. 19)

"...a blissful exhibition of late-19th- and early-20th-century paintings and a serene new building by the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando. ... Quiet, blurrily luminous scenes of natural calm by Whistler, George Inness, John Twachtman and Thomas Wilmer Dewing, among others, appear like mirages, as though they’d magically materialized on canvas. ... Many of the show’s paintings give the impression of under- or overexposed and poorly focused photographs. Were the soft painters influenced by photography? ... Built on a grassy hillside a short hike through the woods from the Clark’s main buildings, it is a two-story, 32,000-square-foot gray box of steel, cedar and glass. ...a blessed departure from the kind of showy architectural statements many art museums have been prone to in recent years." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art (-Jan. 11, 2009)

"...very small list of engaging and on-message works. It seemed to me that this International couldn't make up its mind whether it was a survey of well-known and recognized current art or a biennial on a particular curatorial theme. In either case, I was dismayed at how little of the work seemed new, 'important' (a problematic term , I know), or communicative. ... One spectacular piece was Thomas Hirschhorn's 'Cavemanman' - a post-apocolyptic view of where we might live if society reduces us all to living like street people. ... Also impressive was Phil Collins video about the relationship between language and power." - Evan Mirapaul/Fugitive Vision


Women Impressionists at the Legion of Honor (San Francisco) (-Sept. 21)

"The collation of some 140 paintings, drawings and prints is the museum equivalent of a holiday from dark and troubling matters. ...this exhibition devotes the dominant portion of its real estate to name-draws Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. The expected is here in abundance - an entire room largely given over to Cassatt's mother-and-child paintings and familiar prints and a generous display of Morisot's alluring, brushily painted women. ...invites a certain kind of inquiry in the viewer. Gender is the inevitable open-ended question. Did these female artists paint in a certain way because they were women?... Choice of subject is one clearly unifying factor. To an overwhelming degree, the pictures on display depict women, mostly at home or in garden settings." - Steven Winn/SF Chronicle


Frida Kahlo at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (-Sept. 28)

"...stunningly emotional and visionary work. ...permitting shockingly personal depictions of her physical and psychological pain to bleed into the iconography of Mexico’s Aztec, colonial, and revolutionary history. ...a courageous eloquence all her own, and that deserves mad respect." - Juxtapoz


Inspiring Impressionism at the Seattle Art Museum (-Sept. 21)

'There's nothing new in the premise of art coming from art, but given flesh as an exhibit, it's a window on a wider world. Instead of one more show featuring paintings with bulletproof crowd appeal, Seattle Art Museum's 'Inspiring Impressionism' offers a respectable if not entirely major sample of that work within the contexts that gave it root. ... Impressionists compete with the power and glory of 17th-century Spanish and Dutch art, as well as the somber still lifes and silky romance of 18th- century France. ... Edouard Manet could not have envisioned that his slapdash, unfinished 'Portrait of Isabelle Lemonnier' from 1879 would one day hang beside El Greco's "Lady in a Fur Wrap" from 1577- 80. ... The Monets in this show are fine, especially in the context of Dutch landscapes. Next to him, these Dutch seem fussy." - Regina Hackett/Seattle PI


Mundaneum (Mons, Belgium)

"...a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet. In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or 'electric telescopes,' as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a 'réseau,' which might be translated as 'network' — or arguably, 'web.' ... Although the museum has consistently managed to secure financing, it struggles to attract visitors." - Alex Wright/NYTimes

Mundane and Strange

"Half Awake and Half Asleep in the
Water" (2001) by Asako Narahashi

Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan
Bill Wood's Business
International Center of Photography
May 16-Sept. 7

Photography -- it's big in Japan. Seriously. Think Canon, Nikon, Minolta. The country loves to shoot. And in the last 20 years, fine-art photography has received increased attention with the opening of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the first public museum there devoted to the medium.

Now, the ICP has organized a survey of 13 contemporary Japanese photographers, amazingly the first show of its kind in nearly 30 years (since the museum's last survey in 1979). Uneven but eye-opening, "Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan" illuminates aspects of Japanese culture and approaches to photography, from the traditional to the cutting-edge.

On the time-tested end of the spectrum, is the show's standout artist, Naoya Hatakeyama, whose stunning photos highlight human manipulation of nature. Reminiscent of the environmentally minded images of Edward Burtynsky, Hatakeyama's photos look at the link between the surreal landscape of a limestone quarry, the texture of Tokyo's buildings seen from above and that city's odd concrete-lined rivers.

The work of Asako Narahashi is equally preoccupied with nature, although from the other side -- namely its lethal power over us. His unique photos of the urban skyline taken from offshore and a partially submerged perspective bring to mind unsettling thoughts of a tsunami or drowning. (See image above.)

Equally disturbing are Yukio Nakagawa's photos of ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging, transform the petals and stems into menacing representations of violence and gore. Traditional or transgressive or both? A more upbeat and goofy take on organic arrangements can be seen in Tsuyoshi Ozawa's "vegetable weapons" project: photos and video that document his friends making and holding rifle-shaped constructions made of corn, peppers, cauliflower, etc. -- all which end up as a meal.

Some of the work functions like a travelogue (and a lot cheaper than a round-trip to Tokyo). Masayuki Yoshinaga documents the subcultures of "Goth-Lolis," teens who dress in outlandish hybrid of babydoll Lolita and goth black (see image at right), and bosozuku motorcycle gangs, whose embroidered robes and headbands pay homage to the samurai. And Hiroh Kikai's street portraits show a more individualistic and humanistic side, with images of a tattoo artist and his son, a dancer and a kimono-wearing man watching horse racing on a portable TV. The elegant monochromatic prints are reminiscent of both Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus.

Indebted to Cindy Sherman is Tomoko Sawada, whose post-Photoshop "School Days" series constructs a formal school portrait using herself as a model for each of the students, all eerily similar with slight variations of height, hairstyle and facial expression. (As an aside, I happened to see Sherman at the museum; she was with her beau David Byrne; but much to my regret, I didn't witness her reaction to Swada's work. Ms. Museum Hours and I imagined that Byrne would have said something like "it's another one, Cindy honey!")

Also in back-to-school fashion is Midori Komatsubara, whose "Sanctury" photos and video sketch a story of romance between classmates inspired by Japanese "boy's love" comics that are popular with young women. Komatsubara ups the sexual ambiguity by using female models for her schoolyard fantasies. The result is perplexing the viewer not familiar with the genre. In a similar vein, Makoto Aida fashions and photographs surreal hybrid sculptures of bonsai trees with the heads of doe-eyed girls. A less ambiguous exploration of gender are the gothic fairytale photos of Miwa Yanagi, which invert the outcome of classics like Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, imagining the victim as victor.

Less successful are the sloppy and dull grouping of Naoki Kajitani, who takes scattershot images of seedy neighborhoods, and Risaku Suzuki, who takes sequences documenting his daily comings and goings. More perplexing is the inclusion Kenji Yanobe, whose creepy video installation — a kind children's theater about atomic disaster — opens the show.

Supplementing the show is a room with four videos, including mini documentaries on Hatakeyama and Suzuki (both produced by the Joy of Giving Foundation) alongside a captivating portrait of bosozuku motorcycle gangs and an childish animation by Yanobe.

While not quite the Telectroscope, "Heavy Water" offers a unique peek into Japan. And even if all its offerings aren't captivating, the show may leave you with a better understanding of the intriguing and sometimes bizarre push-pull between the traditional and the contemporary, both in Japan and, more generally, in photography.

For more weirdness, check out the smaller exhibition "Bill Wood's Business," which presents 210 photos taken by the Fort Worth-based commercial photographer. The show is curated by actress and photo collector Diane Keaton, who culled the images from vast archive of photos by Wood — some 20,000 large format negatives she purchased in the 1970s and has promised to the museum.

Woods is no genius, and despite the success of his photo business, few of his images stand on their own. But this isn't about beautiful compositions, but rather a host of strange and sometimes uproarious juxtapositions, simultaneously mundane and surreal.

Cleverly arranged in two dense grids, the eyes naturally jump photo to photo, taking in a surfeit of goofy and weird Mid-century Americana: a team photo of middle-aged basketball team wearing sailor outfits; a magic show at a bingo parlor; a clown cop arrests two blackface prisoners; Miss Lion Lightbulb poses in her swimsuit, holding two large bulbs; a store display of Roach Destroyer; a businessman wears a crown; Santa waves from a powerboat; a bacon billboard; dead bodies in caskets; large gears; a TV-slash-record player console; a smiling man prepares to cut a cake with an axe; a candy-striped playground in a drive-in movie theater; a lawn furniture showroom; an Indian chief in feather headdress holds bowling ball. And so much more!

Review Roundup

In writing about art, it's hard to avoid the cliché of the "visual feast." For some reason, there was a lot of eating with the eyes this week (only a few examples included here). Best variation was by Michael Glover of the London Times, who writes of François Boucher and Jean-Siméon Chardin that they are "as different from each other as a wedge of Dover chalk from a slice of good, creamy Camembert." More creative food analogies. And please pass the Picasso!


Heavy Light: Japanese Photography and Video at the ICP (-Sept. 6)

"...just average, or a little less, by the center’s own standards. ...feels a bit phoned in. ...the first large museum survey of Japanese photography in this country in decades. It contains some names that are new and worth knowing and others that are familiar and worth remembering. And when all else fails, it provides, at times inadvertently, some valuable glimpses of Japanese life and culture today, including a tendency to prolong adolescence." - Roberta Smith/NYTimes

Heavy Light and Bill Wood’s Business at the ICP (-Sept. 7)

"Taken together, though, the two shows demonstrate how photography can survey society in ways that are at once panoramic and telescopic. ... The smaller but more fascinating Bill Wood’s Business... Wood’s pictures aren’t critical, artistic or even remotely expressive, yet they sum up a peculiar moment in the US, when unparalleled prosperity and nuclear nightmares coexisted with the unchanging rituals of birthdays, weddings and funerals. ... This is the same country that Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand observed in their caustic images of smug provincialism and alienation. Wood’s version is irony-free. ...the dirty secret of slice-of-life photography is that when life is sliced with too blunt a knife, the banal transcends its time and place. A cliché is for ever." - Ariella Budick/Financial Times


Eminent Domain at the New York Public Library (-Aug 29)

"...about the photographer’s proprietary claim to the urban landscape. ...highlights recent work by five New York artists. None of them are street photographers in the conventional sense. Broadly speaking, “Eminent Domain” is a series of responses to change in the city (the source of which might be anything from gentrification to globalization). ... Day by day or block by block, the artists in “Eminent Domain” seize their own pieces of the city. The Fifth Avenue branch of the New York Public Library, soon to be renamed for the financier Stephen A. Schwarzman, is the perfect site for this meditation on the nature of public and private urban space." - Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s at the SculptureCenter (-July 28)

"To judge from the museum calendars of the last few seasons, the ’70s were segregated by gender: large surveys of Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark at the Whitney and Richard Serra at the Museum of Modern Art; equally hefty exhibitions of feminist art across the river at P.S. 1 and the Brooklyn Museum. What’s missing is a sense of the decade as radical for male and female sculptors alike. ...highlights female artists who overlapped with the movements of Land Art and Post-Minimalism. ...50 works by 10 artists... There’s a good chance that you’ve never heard of any of them (with the possible exceptions of Nancy Holt, who was married to and often collaborated with Smithson, and Lynda Benglis, who exhibits regularly in Chelsea). ... Presenting Land Art in a gallery is always a problem. (A catalog would have helped.) ...suggests that the ’70s are far from exhausted, especially where works by women are concerned. An exhibition that placed Ms. Holt side by side with Smithson, or united Ms. Aycock with her mentor Robert Morris, would go even further." - Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


183rd Annual at the National Academy Museum (-Sept. 7)

"There's a whole lot of small stuff out there, and that has been increasingly true in recent years. Out of the 130 artists chosen for this show (from more than 400 nominations, all nonmembers, selected by a seven-person panel of academicians), at least one-third present work not much bigger than Steve Novick's toy-like woodblock sculptures, which are about the size of a Thomas the Tank Engine accessory. There are tiny train-set-like dioramas (by Donna Dennis), itsy-bitsy Arp-like abstractions (by Elizabeth Marran), and Tinkertoy sculptures extrapolated from maps (by Matthew Northridge). ...the Academy has taken great pains this year to foreground contemporary artists, which are the rage." - Dan Bischoff/Newark Star-Ledger


Eloquent Vistas: The Art of Nineteenth Century American Landscape Photography at the Montclair Art Museum (-Sept 14)

"... some 60 photographs taken by everybody from early motion-shooter Eadweard Muybridge to the first snapshot enthusiasts (George Eastman started selling cameras for amateurs in 1888, less than 50 years after photography was invented). The unifying theme of this show is the American landscape -- but we might just as well say it is awe. Without the shock, of course. Or, maybe, with it, since many of the images collected by the Eastman company, which put this traveling show together, were a shocking update of the small coterie of paintings by New Jersey Intimist George Inness and Western painter Thomas Moran from Montclair's permanent collection that accompany this show." - Dan Bischoff/Newark Star-Ledger


Action/Abstraction at the Jewish Museum (-Sept. 21)

"The plot could almost recap West Side Story. In the first room the stars of the rival gangs show off. ...one can see Greenberg as extending Cubism but disdaining its identification with nature. Rosenberg's action takes up the spontaneity of Surrealism without its mysticism... ... The show begins in 1940, with Gorky's Garden of Sochi, and it ends with Guston's 1976 conversion to a claustrophobic realism, two year's before Rosenberg's death (although Greenberg lived into the 1990s). ... In the years since, the divisions have only multiplied, into pluralism. Maybe history has not been kind to Rosenberg. Yet his anxious catholicity looks downright prescient. The installations in the 2008 Whitney Biennial really do abandon painting for the problems. ...the critics and the art they so admired look better than ever. They can hardly help it. The museum has borrowed classics not often seen in New York, such as four paintings from the Albright-Knox in Buffalo and three of Gorky's greatest." - John Haber


Paul Chan at the New Museum (-June 29)

"When Kara Walker visibly manipulates silhouettes, she makes her art an act of violence, but Chan brings the soothing charm of the handmade. ... I still do not know for sure how to react to Chan's insouciance, and yet I wandered in fascination through the pools of light on a museum floor. The artist lightens disaster to the point of trivializing it, but he also invites a wider circle of empathy. ... In blog-speak, a more truthful statement would follow the strikeout, and here nothing follows. Perhaps the title has no word after the strikeout because only darkness follows or only a spot of light." - John Haber


Olafur Eliasson at MoMA and P.S. 1 (-June 30)

"...Eliasson dwells on time and space, but not on history. ...Eliasson has found a way to update a high-toned Minimalism for an era of museum blockbusters and mass entertainment, without simply landing on either side of the equation. ... Eliasson's breadth of interests, then, makes him easy to know but hard to pin down. ... In the end, his interdisciplinary flair makes him worthwhile, even when he skims a little too quickly over one discipline after another." - John Haber

"...instructs the viewer to stay a little longer with the work, probably to make sure it isn’t mistaken as a collection of expensive party lights and other favors. ...successful are the works that speak to our natural desire to see forms line up nicely, or the palpable anticipation a person feels watching color and shape shift and transform a room... We engage in these works not only because they transform the way we see a room but because our bodies are physically implicated in a work that often demands little interaction." - Paddy Johnson/L Magazine


Illuminating the Medieval Hunt at The Morgan Library (-Aug. 10)

"If ever one wanted to know how to flay and dismember a stag, one had better seize the day. After conservation, the Morgan will rebind one of its great treasures, and one will never see so many of its pages again. ...this art shows the stirrings of a more secular age. The very fact of a hunting treatise rather than a prayer book says something." - John Haber


Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum (-July 13)

"...might have done better with the more than 90 works on view had the entry point of the show been better put together. With an initial explosion of Vuitton logos on canvas, jellyfish screens, slick commercial animations and transformer anime characters, the context given to the work certainly runs closer to commerce than it does fine art. ...standouts include the sparkling Vuitton logo-heavy painting Eye Love Superflat, evocative of Andy Warhol’s diamond dust paintings, along with his manga-esque collectible toy figures, which call to mind Marcel Duchamp’s green box filled with miniature replicas of his work. ...blurs the difference between the art objects and the architectural forms they’re situated within. This, much more than any synergy among art, pop culture and commerce, is where the real innovation lies." - Paddy Johnson/L Magazine

Alexis Rockman at the Rose Art Museum (Waltham, MA) (-July 27)

"Impressive in so many ways, Alexis Rockman's recent large-scale paintings nevertheless feel somehow rote. ...they create an atmosphere that is instantly seductive. ...this recent work makes you want to grope for words like 'bravura' and 'tour-de-force.' But in emotional tenor, these paintings - referred to by the artist as his 'weather series' - are almost impossible to tell apart. ...recalls both the painterly vigor of Abstract Expressionism and the feeling for the sublime in J.M.W. Turner's late work. ... But Rockman's attempts to marry this gutsy, semi-abstract idiom with more traditional representation don't quite come off. ...They register on the mind as vamped-up illustrations of TV-news disasters rather than a direct response to reality - even the psychological reality of an imagination gone wild, a fear given free rein. ...more ambitious but, in the end, not as convincing." - Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe


Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space at the M.I.T. List Visual Arts Center (Boston) (-July 6)

"Chantal Akerman is a hero of the avant-garde cinema. ... Now a traveling exhibition at M.I.T.’s List Visual Arts Center offers a good opportunity to assess what she has been up to over the last decade. ...two films and three multichannel video installations... ...demands a lot of her viewers. At least three hours are needed to take in the exhibition fully, and the time does not fly by. With their excruciatingly long, mostly silent scenes and minimalist storytelling, her films can feel like exercises in deprivation. On the whole, it is worth the effort. Not just a formalist, Ms. Akerman also takes on hot-button themes like racism in the American South, illegal immigration in the Southwest and a terrorism in the Mideast. As a political artist she can be heavy-handedly predictable or unexpectedly illuminating." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Georgia O'Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle at the San Diego Museum of Art (-Sept. 28)

"Long before Hillary, there was Georgia -- another woman of formidable talents whose charismatic, powerful husband afforded her substantial opportunities, even as he influenced the shaping of her public identity. ... With 27 paintings and drawings by O'Keeffe among more than 50 works by others, the show is a feast for fans of the artist as well as an abbreviated but still provocative art history lesson. ... If O'Keeffe's initial reception owed heavily to Stieglitz's interventions, her work endures because of its integrity and elemental purity. This stirring show allows truths about both Georgia and Alfred to come forth." - Leah Ollman/LA Times


Frida Kahlo at the SFMOMA (San Francisco) (-Sept. 28)

"...beautifully presented retrospective... It's not only the unflinching sincerity of Frida's pictures that makes them appealing today but the sense they give en bloc of a self defined by multiple, perpetually conflicting loyalties, passions, needs and sufferings. We recognize, at least emotionally, something of our own historical position as individuals." - Kenneth Baker/SF Chronicle


Boucher and Chardin at the Wallace Collection (London) (-Sept. 7)

"Sometimes two painters can look at the same scene and find in it two quite different realities. This is the case with the genre paintings of François Boucher and Jean-Siméon Chardin, two of the greatest artists of 18th-century France. This week a new show opens at the Wallace Collection in London that documents the development of genre painting in France... In many respects, Boucher and Chardin are as different from each other as a wedge of Dover chalk from a slice of good, creamy Camembert." - Michael Glover/Times of London

The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting at Tate Britain (London) (-Aug. 31)

"...more than 100 paintings and drawings of the Ottoman empire by British artists and ranges them by theme (religion, gender and genre, portraits). The pictures range from the eye-rolling to the outstanding, but it's a visual feast and the lure is much in evidence: harems, bazaars, camels, mosques and turbans abound. ...this is the period when British artists began to record their own responses to the Ottoman world; earlier painters had merely plundered the dressing-up box." - Jason Goodwin/Times of London

Action Reaction

"Convergence" (1952) by Jackson Pollack

Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976
The Jewish Museum
May 4 - Sept. 21, 2008

In "The Painted Word," Tom Wolfe's 1975 reactionary screed against postwar art, he famously predicts that the disproportionate influence of art critics is such that someday a museum will exhibit prominent examples of their "protean passages" annotated by small reproductions of art.

Thirty-some years later, this has come to pass in a show about the influence of two of Wolfe's reviled "Kings of Cultureburg" — Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, whose influential writings helped define Abstract Expressionism. But, it turns out, this isn't a bad thing at all.

Wisely "Action/Abstraction," the Jewish Museum's instructive time capsule of an exhibit, is organized around an impressive ensemble of works from many of the heavyweights of the era — including top-notch works by Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Clifford Still, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky and others.

While its possible to see better collections of these works on permanent display at the MoMA or the Met, the show's context helps reanimate them by putting them in their time period. This is accomplished by tastefully interspersed items, including magazine articles, letters, film clips and stills of various seminal exhibitions, charting the style's rise both in the U.S. and abroad. And information on individual works and facets of the critics response allows us experience the works anew.

And by looking at the works through the critics' eyes, we can also better understand their divergent philosophies (action vs. abstraction), and decide which we like best, or if we like either.

Pretending we're Greenberg looking at Pollack's "Convergence," a stunning large splatter canvas from 1952, we see a bold spray of orange and yellow as a celebration of physicality paint and the flatness of the painting. Then, trying on Rosenberg's hat, we witness a defiant document of the Pollack's practice, conjuring the artist in action, dripping and slinging in existential struggle against society.

Their over-sized outlooks match the audacity of the artwork. But do the critics' words hold their own?

On the whole, the answer is no. The show is decidedly non-reverential, even downright critical of the two critics, who are shown to be bigoted, self-contradictory, pompous and overly rigid. One section of the show highlights works by artists in their “blind spots” — women and African-Americans — with the work Lee Krasner (better known then as Pollack's wife) and Norman Lewis. We’re also shown how Greenberg, even with his absolutist pronouncements about the way art should be, defends his favorites even when they don’t hone true to his orthodoxy -- as with Pollack when he returned to figurative painting in’48, and David Smith, when he used paint in one of his sculptures. And both critics engage in heated debates with artists about the meanings of their art.

In what might be the most interesting part of the exhibit, we’re shown how the two critics try to adapt to the changing aesthetics of the 50s and 60s. Greenberg raised the flag of what came to be known as the color field painters — artists like Helen Frankenthaler (her "Mountain and Sea" at above) and Morris Lewis who stain their canvases, thereby upping the flatness ante. Rosenberg was named critic at the New Yorker, where he championed a diverse group of work that he lumped under the rubrick of “anxious objects.” While this included the “hand-painted pop” of Claes Oldenburg and the work of Jasper Johns, neither critic was ever comfortable with Pop Art and everything that followed.

The show’s finale presents us with a sad irony. While the work of Frank Stella and other minimalists could be called the epitome or embodiment of Greenberg’s philosophy of flatness, we’re told that the critic was indifferent. Likewise with the participatory “actions” of Allan Kaprow and other performative artists, who for Rosenberg crossed some invisible line about what was and wasn’t art.

It’s tempting to wonder what the two critics would think of the show. One imagines that they both would have hated it — ironically, for giving space to their words. Because, despite their shared radical sympathies, they both espoused an aesthetic outlook that was ahistorical and apolitical, prizing art on its own terms. Nevertheless, "Action/Abstraction" makes a good case that their writings were actually very much a product of their time. And in hindsight, we see that Abstract Expressionism was not the ultimate in art, but rather one of the last salvos of modernism.

It's also curious what the two ‘Bergs would think of being shown in the Jewish Musuem? While it's observant enough to close their gift shop on Saturday, the museum downplays the role of their religious background, suggesting that the assimilated critics themselves felt it unimportant. (Although Greenberg is quoted as saying there is a particularly “Jewish bias towards the abstract.” )

In the end, maybe Tom Wolfe was only half wrong. The word may have won, but not the writings of these two critics.

Review Roundup

This week... new shows at P.S. 1 (Arctic Fever), the Met (Master Photographers). Leslie Camhi agrees with me and others that the first half of the Cooper-Hewitt's rococo show is very good, and the rest not so much. Plus Ben Genocchio reports his periodic dispatches from smaller NYC-area museums. And much much more!...


Arctic Hysteria at P.S. 1 (-Sept. 15)

"On the surface, at least, all the works in this 16-artist show at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center are coolly controlled. Nevertheless, something hot runs through them: urgent emotions and irrational fantasies. Whether or not this cool-hot dichotomy reflects a split between the flinty and the mystical in the Finnish sensibility, it makes for a transporting show." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Polaroids: Mapplethorpe at the Whitney (-Sept. 7)

"They represent a kind of "coming out," artistically speaking. The mature themes of this intensely neoclassical photographer's art are all there: still lives and self-portraiture, pictures of the demimonde and the mondaine—downtown personages, uptown celebrities, artists, socialites, and creatures of the night, who crawled before his camera from who knows where. ... The Polaroids, of which he took more than 1,500, are on the whole more casual and intimate—certainly not diaristic (since there's nothing confessional about Mapplethorpe's art), but closer to life, in that one senses the push and pull, the continuous dialogue, between the image and its subject. ... In fact, the Polaroid's status as a unique print (much like the daguerreotype a century earlier) infuses it with the aura of a precious relic—this despite its cheesy pop-cultural connotations." - Leslie Camhi/Village Voice


Rococo at the Cooper-Hewitt (-July 6)

"...a rich banquet of an exhibition exploring the curvilinear, organicist impulse in design... rococo style rarely depends for its effect on a mere surfeit of luxury. Its 'trivial,' sensual delights are often rimmed with the unruly forces of nature and the unconscious. ...their argument—that echoes of rococo style may be found in the streamlined forms of Art Nouveau or 1950s biomorphic furniture—seems overly broad. ... In contemporary art, at least, heirs to the rococo sensibility are legion. ... In their work and that of many others, frivolity takes a stab at eternity." - Leslie Camhi/Village Voice


Olafur Eliasson at the MoMA and P.S. 1 (-June 30)

"The artist has said he wants his viewers to 'see themselves seeing,' and in the best cases, a nuanced self-consciousness emerges... ...the influence of the pure and indifferent northern landscape pulses through his work as a raw energy. ... This pairing of simple ideas with impeccably engineered solutions lends these installations a rare eloquence. ... Mystical but never arcane, the work beckons with its inclusiveness, hinting at the utopian promises of science. A comparison with Buckminster Fuller, a figure whose interests bridged similar realms of science, aesthetics and social theory, is apt. ... Compared to [James Turrell], Eliasson’s work is painfully maximal—we have no choice but to ratchet our sensibilities upward to meet the high volume of his spectacle. ... And if the exhibition’s host of pleasurable sensations and clever metaphysical gags leaves little room for a deeper point to emerge, then we can at least enjoy the show for what it is—dazzling on a simple level, and a small gift for anybody interested in recapturing the wonder of childhood." - Josh Morgenthau/Brooklyn Rail


Paul Chan at the New Museum (-June 29)

"...The 7 Lights evince a heightened sensitivity to the surrounding space as they track the contradictory relations and fraught imperatives between religion, enlightened consumerism and American politics. ... One reference for such readings would be Michel Foucault, who had more proximate settings in which to locate the play of shadows and spectatorship. ... Rather than referring vaguely to Biblical events, or pointedly and repetitively to the trauma of 9/11, perhaps The 7 Lights articulate the more specific but widespread disintegration of modern civil society." - William McManus/Brooklyn Rail


Master Photographers, 1840-1940 at the Met (-Sept. 1)

"It presents the history of a medium as well as history itself. ...recounts the medium’s 100 years with a succinct cavalcade of big names, substantial bodies of work and significant historical impact. ...the show — like photography itself — proceeds from stillness to motion, from landscape and ruin to city, from people frozen in studio poses to people on the move." - Roberta Smith/NYTimes


Chinese Stone Sculpture at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery at Columbia University (-June 21)

"...an eye-opening show... 22 works of Chinese Buddhist sculpture... ...shifting styles, techniques and levels of skill on display at this show. The carving alone ranges from fully in the round to deep relief to a shallow intaglio relief with fantastic incising of several kinds." - Roberta Smith/NYTimes


Halsey Burgund at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, Conn.) (-July 27)

"Halsey Burgund’s exhibition 'Round,' at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, takes on this subject, offering up a museum audio tour that solicits contributions from viewers and gives them equal voice in the discussion of art. ...unlike a traditional guide, it allows visitors to select from a wide range of voices sharing their views and perspectives — including those of curators, educators, artists and other visitors — and to add their own responses, which can, in turn, be retrieved by others. ... With voices stomping on each other, it is hard to learn anything at all — at least that was my experience..." - Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Sprawl at the Jersey City Museum (-Aug. 24)

"The exhibition “Sprawl” at the Jersey City Museum does not set out to prove that parts of the New Jersey landscape are ugly. But it is hard to escape that conclusion after seeing the show. ...both pertinent and engrossing. ... The artists present a humorous, at times melancholy, but always faithful vision of industrial landscapes, housing projects, roadside motels, interstates and abandoned buildings. ...the show is overstuffed... A catalog provides basic caption information and images but little in the way of commentary on the artworks." - Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Mathematics in Contemporary Art at the Heckscher Museum of Art (Huntington, NY) (-June 22)

"...résumé of contemporary and modern art inspired by mathematics, geometry, statistics, number systems, computer codes and the like. ... This was a good show for the Heckscher’s reopening, promising more breadth and variety to the exhibition program, coupled with an increasing focus on contemporary art. ... While mathematical art has long had an academic following, this show is likely to give it a popular audience it may not have had before." - Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Museum at Bethel Woods (Bethel, NY)

"No drugs or sex memorabilia are on, but otherwise my Woodstock's all there and then some. ... Everything about the museum—and the Bethel Woods Art Center of which it's a part—is precisely worked out to the last detail, right down to the Technicolor- green grass, lush flower borders, and even the man-made wandering brook with tiny footbridge. You could say it's antithetical to the sloppy soul of the '60s, but this is high-tech perfectionism with a higher purpose..." - Elena Oumano/Village Voice


Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco)

"...while other identity museums celebrate the particular, this one actively avoids anything that might seem too particular, seeking instead to leap into aesthetic or cultural realms in which Judaism is an element or influence. The museum, like its audience, is interested in assimilation, even in the ways in which the larger culture assimilates Jewish ideas and associations. ... [The Daniel Libeskind building's] skewed geometries are unsettling; the effect is more vertiginous than harmonious. Alienation rather than stability is suggested, despite the self-conscious symbols being grasped at. ... for all the institution’s considerable appeal, Judaism’s fundamental, literal meanings — texts and laws and beliefs and history — are left outside the gates of paradise." - Edward Rothstein/NYTimes


Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University (Dallas) (-July 27)

"If a picture is worth the proverbial thousand words, taking a peek under the paint using infrared reflectography surely adds a few thousand more — especially when it comes to a work as detailed as the enormous 15th-century altarpiece from the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Ascension in Ciudad Rodrigo, Spain." - J.D. Biersdorfer/NYTimes


Gerhard Richter's "Cage" paintings at the Tate Modern

"...as shimmering an exhibition of paintings as any London has seen this century. Go at once... if it is about anything, is about painting's future, a theme of particular resonance at Tate Modern. At the moment, the museum's permanent collection is far outstripped by those of its global rivals, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Paris' Pompidou Centre. ... The Richter room is not only stunning, it gives new resonance to familiar highlights in the collection, which is why acquiring top contemporary pieces is essential to the entire Tate Modern project." - Jackie Wullschlager/Financial Times