Eggleston (and Six Others)

William Eggleston, "Untitled," c. 1975

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (-Jan. 25)

Whether he's shooting landscape, portraits or still lives, the photos of Memphis-born William Eggleston have a sense of place, and are often labeled with the city they were taken -- "Untitled New Orleans," "Untitled Nashville," etc. He visited New York, meeting contemporaries like Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand, but unlike them he never shot the streets. His is a rural roadside milieu. Born into wealth, he has carried himself like a dandy, affecting capes, driving cars like a Ferrari and a Rolls Royce. In the 70s, he embarked on long road trips, sometimes joined by Dennis Hopper, drinking and shooting photos as they went.

There is a bit of, for lack of a better word, slumming going on: His subjects are mundane in the American vernacular -- drive-ins, grocery stores, strip malls, living rooms. The shots have the casual intimacy of the snapshot, yet there is always something alien or off. He is drawn towards messiness and decay -- exemplified by an early black & white image of a car with one working headlight.

His eye -- and that of his editors (he never culls his own images) -- is drawn toward the freakish in the familiar: the empty stare of the scruffy tie-dye-wearing man sitting in the backseat of a car with a license plate beside him; the old man wearing a suit, sitting on a bed loosely holding a pistol; and the naked man on a sofa, gun rack on the wall. These made me think of Thoreaux's "lives of quiet desperation."

The moments Eggleston captures can be tacky, but without being camp of judgmental: an old woman sitting on a sofa in her untended backyard, her bold dress clashing with bold patterned sofa; the big man with a greased pompadour playing pinball; a young woman wearing a puppy dog t-shirt straddles a fire hydrant, her face contorted, apparently in some kind of religious ecstasy.

This sense of heightened reality also comes from the juxtaposition of bleak scenes with bold color. He was one of the first art photographers to use a dye-transfer printing -- an expensive process theretofore mainly used in advertising that could selectively intensify colors to eye-searing results. This can especially be seen in still lives like a blood red ceiling crisscrossed with a tangle of white electric cords, an open oven door in sickly metallic green and a half-empty bottle of cherry pop on the hood of a car (the latter, a perfect 20th Century American take on the classic still life arrangement).

Eggleston's last major showing in New York, his 1976 debut at the MoMA, launched his career, and kicked opened the door for color photography as serious art -- despite the show getting panned.

In the mid-70s, he experimented with video, modifying a Sony Portapak with infrared tube and documenting the colorful demimonde he encountered in Memphis and on the road. An edited version of this footage called "Stranded in Canton" is included in the retrospective, nicely presented on four CRT monitors paired with stools. There is much drinking, culminating in one scene where a man bites the head off a live chicken. While the video experiments were short-lived, Eggleston's aesthetic has been influential to filmmakers like David Lynch, David Byrne ("True Stories"), Gus Van Sant and Sofia Coppola.

Since the 1980s, Eggleston has been shooting fewer people. The bad news is that his newer work, all tightly-cropped still lives, is suffocating and charmless. The good news is that everything else is sings. At his height, Eggleston had a unique ability to capture the uncanny in the ordinary.


Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Dec. 14)

Giorgio Morandi is thought by many to be the greatest Italian painter of the 20th Century. This is a bit odd considering Morandi's known for contemplative still lives. Brash like Picasso or Pollack, he wasn’t -- on canvas or in his life. Born in Bologna, the shy artist lived with his two sisters for most of his life, rarely traveling outside the city. His style emerged through a friendship with Giorgio de Chirico, and Morandi's early paintings share the metaphysical artist’s proto-surrealist style, down to the bare mannequins. The exhilarating Met survey includes several lovely Cézanne-influenced landscapes and a couple of early self-portraits, but the main attraction is his renderings of objects on a table. He did some traditional arrangements of roses, shells and such, but Morandi's breakthrough idea was fashioning semi-abstracted forms -- bottle, box and cylinder -- painted-over Platonic objects that he grouped as models in his studio and painted. The results often have the deliberately imperfect look of Japanese wabi-sabi ceramics with wavy outlines. The palate is muted, mostly limited to grays and browns. This flattens the image. There is just enough tonal variation and highlights to keep the illusion of three dimensionality and volume. The paintings must be seen in person -- reproductions just don't do them justice. Morandi followed this formula for decades, creating a monomaniacal fugue of still lives. The variations evolved towards abstraction until his final paintings look like Rothkos (although his true artistic beneficiary is Wayne Thiebaud).


theanyspacewhatever at the Guggenheim Museum (-Jan. 7)

Relational aesthetics seems like a good idea -- an arts movement about tweaking the relationship between artist and viewer and even rethinking places like museums, galleries, biennials, etc. Rirkrit Tiravanija was one of its original instigators, best known for cooking meals for gallery goers. Now he's one of 10 artist-friend-collaborators in what is the Gugg's confoundedly awful "anyspacewhatever" show. His main contribution? An Illy-branded coffee stand that resides somewhere near the top of the spiral. The caffeine does little to overcome all the half-baked tackiness. The most memorable object is a rotating bed, which could be reserved at luxe hotel rates for overnights at the museum (a couple critics, including Jerry Saltz, took the bait). Most representative, however, is a tedious video of Tiravanija and his friends, including a few other art luminaries such as Elizabeth Peyton, as they hang out and shoot the shit. Did I metion you have to remove you shoes and sit on pillows to watch? Whatever is right.


The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Feb. 1)

The Met’s farewell to Philippe de Montebello is a microcosm of the museum itself, stuffed with exquisite objects of the most diverse kind. Celebrating the treasures acquired during the museum director's 31-year tenure, the show features remarkable juxtapositions. For instance, Baroque statuary with a Francis Bacon, a Balthus lolita with Guercino's "Sampson Captured by the Philistines," or 15th Century playing cards and a Rothko. The show also reveals visitors' own favorites. With some guilt, I skimmed over much of the non-European objects, although there are amazing examples from the Americas, Asia, Africa and on. My overall favorites were Thomas P. Anshutz's handsome 1907 John Singer Sargent-style oil portrait "A Rose," and Joachim Wtewael's fleshy dayglow "The Golden Age" (see image at left) and Rubens' oil of the painter with his wife and child -- one of de Montibello's favorites. While remarkably inclusive, the show also reveals some gaps in the museum’s collection, particularly the scarcity of any art other than photos from the last 50 years, the Bacon excepted. Thinking about this show, I'm reminded of all the times I've visited the museum, beginning sometime in the mid-70s. While I've never met the man, I have to wonder, how much as my taste been influenced by Philippe de Montebello?


Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (-Jan. 7)

I had always thought of Catherine Opie as a lesbian Mapplethorpe who documents and celebrates the gay, transgender and s&m cultures. One of her best known works is a self-portrait with the word “pervert” carved raw into her chest. But as this seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim shows, she is so much more. Even her most sexually provocative images exude a warmth and vitality missing in Mapplethrope’s brutal black and white formalism. This difference becomes more pronounced in her newer work. Adjacent to the “pervert” photo, is a more recent matching shot of Opie breastfeeding her son. The scar from the self-inflicted wound can still be seen, but the focus is motherhood and domesticity. Her photos documents her family life -- such as with one of her son in a pink tutu (see image at right) -- and other lesbian households with and without kids. My favorite series in her diverse body of work are landscapes that have nothing to do with sexual preference -- such as black & whites of lovely curving highway overpasses and on-ramps. Best of all are her recent images of surfers and ice fishing shacks. Brilliantly installed on opposite walls, the images illustrate how communities pull individuals together.


New York, N. Why?: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937–1940 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Jan. 4)

In 1940, Swiss photographer Rudy Burckhardt and his pal, poet Edwin Denby collaborated on a book celebrating the city where they lived -- New York. The work was created on aimless walks, which they sometimes took with their Chelsea neighbor Willem de Kooning. I didn’t have much patience for Denby’s poetry or for Burckhardt’s dogs-eye-view photos of pedestrian legs, fire hydrants and so on.


George Tooker: A Retrospective at the National Academy Museum (-Jan. 4)

George Tooker was trained at the Art Student’s League by social realist Reginald Marsh, where he developed a style known as American Magical Realism. Taking the psychologically tinted real-life representations of Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, he adds a hallucinogenic and cartoonish quality that is heightened by bright colors of egg tempera painting method of Piero della Francesca. Tooker's work of the 50s and 60s has an element of social critique, taking on broad subjects like alienation. One of his more famous works, which is owned by the Whitney, portrays the fear of a woman on her own in a subway station. Another conveys the bureaucratic oppression of waiting in line for what might be the DMV. A third, a menacing grid of office cubicles with no way out. Tooker's art also increasingly takes on non-political themes. A 1940s painting depicts a group of young men and women under a Coney Island boardwalk that references traditional imagery of Christ's crucifixion (see image at right). Tooker also made paintings of his Puerto Rican and African-American neighbors -- mainly homoerotic images of shirtless men in their windows. While there's nothing earth-shattering about this work, there is something refreshing about his allegiance to representation, like a gay Norman Rockwell.

Spaceship Earth

U.S. Pavilion at the 1967 International

and Universal Exposition, Montreal

Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe
Whitney Museum
June 26 - Sept. 21

One of Buckminster Fuller's first geodesic domes was made of strips from venetian blind. Assembled at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1948 in the company John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Willem de Kooning, it was a flop. They called the Supine Dome. It wasn’t neither Fuller’s first setback, nor his last.

"Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe" at the Whitney presents fifty years of his idiosyncratic designs and ideas for everything from housing to transportation, cartography and globalism. At the same time, it’s a portrait of a single-minded individual who persevered numerous bumps in the road to become an avatar of holistic thinking and hope for humanity.

The visitor is presented with an enticing array of objects – drawings, models, photographs, films and, yes, even sections of that infamous venetian blind. But the lasting impression is the mythic story of the man himself.

Despite five generations of Harvard graduates in his family, Bucky Fuller was kicked out – twice. He lost his first-born daughter to meningitis and pneumonia. Then he was fired from his job in his father-in-law's building supply company. After contemplating suicide in 1927, he had a revelation that his life was not his own, but belonged to the universe. Thereafter, he set out to reinvent housing, and in turn, the world.

In his early sketches from the late 20s, we see he took a global view. The whole planet is the stage for his 4D Tower, a lightweight prefab stackable units arranged around a centralized tower. Each would have an airport at its base, connecting it to similar towers around the world. Construction made use of a zeppelin that would drop a bomb, making a crater for the tower's foundation. Interlaced with these ideas are mystical formulations about the time and the meaning of various colors, giving the whiff of science fiction or outsider art.

These early visions evolved into a practical single-family dwelling, the hexagonal 4D House, soon known as the Dymaxion House. A conflation of dynamic, maximum and ion, the new name was conceived by Chicago’s Marshall Field’s department store where Fuller’s design was briefly exhibited. The aluminum house was to have all the conveniences. In a 1929 promotional film, Fuller discusses how "air breathers" in the structure’s central mast will create such a comfortable interior climate that bed clothes and blankets are unnecessary.

Fuller had a unique way of proposing very sensible ideas that were simultaneously very outlandish.

Next up was the Dymaxion Vehicle. With the help of his drinking buddy Isamo Noguchi and a yacht designer named Starling Burgess, Fuller designed the streamlined 11-passenger three-wheeled vehicle. It was originally intended to float and fly, but the first prototype did well on the road — despite having no rear window (you were supposed to use a periscope). But it crashed on its way to the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Expo, killing the driver, and essentially killing the project. The one remaining car — actually only a non-working shell — is on display in the Whitney's first floor gallery.

Noguchi fans will be happy to see his sleek chrome-plated bust of Fuller on display. Fuller was taken with silver, designing an all silver studio for Noguchi (two decades ahead of Warhol's Silver Factory). He also did a silver redo of Romany Tavern, where Fuller and Noguchi met, and a favorite drinking spot of everyone from E.E. Cummings to Marcel Duchamp (his design wasn't well received) . It’s also possible to see Fuller's telegram to Noguchi explaining Einstein's theory of relativity; Noguchi was in Mexico working on a mural, and shacking up with Frida Kahlo.

The failed Dymaxion Vehicle was followed by the failed Dymaxion Bathroom of 1936, a prefab piece made in partnership with a copper company. Somewhat more successful was his 1941 Dymaxion Deployment Unit, or DDU, which transformed metal grain bins into basic homes and would be used by the military during World War II. Then, correctly anticipating a post-war housing shortage, he collaborated with the Beech Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas to develop the Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, also known as the Wichita House. Despite looking like a giant aluminum hamburger or UFO, tens of thousands of orders came in before Fuller got cold feet and pulled the plug in 1946.

While commercial success remained elusive, he managed to get the attention of the art world. In 1939, the newly opened Museum of Modern Art exhibited the Dymaxion Bathroom along with a model of the Dymaxion. Two years later, two connected DDUs were erected in MoMA's garden, followed by a show at the Cleveland Museum.

Around this time, Fuller began to search for a new geometry, having decided that Euclid’s right angles were unnatural because the planet was round. His solution was the tetrahedron, a three-dimensional figure with four equilateral triangles. He first used this geometry to create a new projection of the world map. The Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map, as it was called, was published as a pull-out page in a 1943 edition of Life magazine. While it dispensed with compass-point orientation, the map’s advantages were minimal distortion and, in one version, the appearance of single, linked continent, or as Fuller put it, "a one-world island in a one-world ocean."

These experiments, including the ventian blind flop at Black Mountain College, led him to the geodesic dome, which he first successfully erected in 1950. His breakthrough happened two years later, when he was commissioned by Ford to design a dome in Detroit. In 1961, Harvard gave him, oddly enough, an honorary poetry chair at Harvard. In 1964, he was profiled in Time Magazine cover story. In 1965, he was invited to design a dome for the 1967 Montreal Expo, which drew 13 million visitors.

Fuller's star was ascendant and he was invited to lecture around the world. His dome was exhibited everywhere from Casablanca to Kabul. He authored seven books in the 60s alone, including "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" (1963). In the late 60s, Fuller was embraced as a countercultural icon. The exhibition makes it possible to watch footage of a 40-minute lecture to a hippie gathering at Golden Gate Park. Tens of thousands of geodesic domes were erected, with more than a few leaky examples surviving today.

During this period, Fuller continued his explorations into geometry, eventually publishing a mamoth and basically unreadable text on his theories called Synergistics. He also pursued ideas related to re-conceptualizing the globe and its resources. In 1956, he developed Minni Earth, a big floating globe with interior lights that would represent the world’s resources. His intention was to moor it in the East River in sight of the United Nations. He also published reports on the global outlook, including the World Energy Map in the 50s, and the World Game Report, in the 60s.

Fuller also returned to bigger, more ambitious designs that, along with his 4D Tower of the 20s, might today be regarded as 60-style visionary architecture in the vein of Archigram or Superstudio. One was a proposal for a dome over a 50-block section of Manhattan (for climate control purposes); another, a 200-story, one million inhabitant pyramid-shaped mega-apartment; and best of all, spherical floating cities that were supposed to float because the air inside was warmer than the air outside.

A visitor might wonder why Bucky? Why now? Is it 60s nostalgia, a reprise to last year’s "Summer of Love" show? Or perhaps, it's that in this age of Peak Oil and Global Warming, we yearn for someone with unflinching optimism, even if it's a lovable dreamer like Bucky and his leaky domes. Or maybe it's because his aesthetic still matters, influencing contemporary artists like Olafur Eliasson, Sarah Sze and Andrea Zittel.

Abject Mess

"Silent Film of a Tree Falling in the Forest" (2005-2006)
by Mungo Thomson (photo courtesy the Whitney Museum)

The Whitney Biennial
March 6 - June 1, 2008 (March 6 - 23 at the Park Ave. Armory)

The dance marathon, tequila bar and zoo raised my hopes that the evil spirits of the '06 Biennial had been cast aside. The '08 edition is a bit better, but darkness prevails again. The zoo has no animals, the bar was closed and I only saw one dancer doing her thing.

The co-curators tout the show's anti-market sensibility, evidenced by its use of humble materials. It's true, there's plenty of cheap stuff, notably unfinished lumber. Also debris and a mess of other random objects. But the overriding aesthetic isn't so much as against the market, as against ideas, beauty and craft. Maybe distrusting is a better word as this art's passionless cool puts it in opposition to nothing.

Exemplifying this nihilist mode is "The Grand Machine/THEAREOLA" (2002), a kind of psychotic radio station or factory by the late Jason Rhodes on prominent view in the museum's first-floor project room. It's littered with items assembled in their own incompressible order -- CDs, desk chairs, and other random things annotated by nonsense scrawled messages like the in-joke graffiti of an addled artist. Sort of like Sarah Sze, but without the fractal beauty.

In a similar vein is Phoebe Washburn's "While Enhancing a Diminishing Deep Down Thirst, The Juice Broke Loose (The Birth of a Soda Shop)" (2008), a bare-wood structure peaked with flowers growing amid golf balls or nourished by Gatorade. This isn't a statement, environmental or otherwise, as much as a ramshackle riddle.

The critic's favorite is Jedediah Caesar's sculptures, which encase studio debris in resin creating a big multicolor block -- "Helium Brick aka Summer Snow" (2006) -- a visual stand-out amdist the otherwise dull offerings. Also above the fray are Charles Long's Giacometti-like sculptures inspired by bird droppings. Made of river sediment, papier-mâché and plaster, they evince a kind of simple poetry.

Another artist referencing poop is Amanda Ross-Ho, whose installation's major feature is an over-sized cat box. (Thankfully, no giant cat.) The piece also features a peg-board wall to which are attached various scrappy images such as could be found in a studio. And artist Fia Backström contributed a wall covered in Whitney-logo wallpaper decorated with cryptic words like "Communal" written in a brown shit script.

Several artists use architectural forms to explore emptiness and incompleteness. Examples include William Cordova’s "House That Frank Lloyd Wright Built 4 Fred Hampton and Mark Clark" (2006), an empty wooden house frame whose title alludes to at the place where two Black Panthers were killed by the Chicago police in 60s. Rubin Ochoa's "Accidental Disjuncture" (2008) is a messy pile of chain-link fence, concrete and rebar -- "construction worker aesthetic," in the Whitney's words. Reading the wall text was mandatory, and more often than not didn't help.

The pied piper of the inscrutable mess aesthetic is Rachael Harrison, who's also now showing at the MoMA and the New Museum (she also contributed to the 2002 Biennial). For this show she has a homely room, juxtaposing a wall of scribbled-on photos of sculptures and a video projection of "Pirates of the Caribbean" staring Johnny Depp. Called "Sops for Cerberus" (2008), it apparently refers to the two-headed Hades guard dog that it's necessary to bripe (sop) with cake. Oblique and abject, the unsettling work relishes unanswered questions and unworkable meanings.

A more playful take on brokenness are Walead Beshly's glass boxes cracked through FexEx shipment. Also enjoyable is Eduardo Sarabia's stockroom of larger-than-life 99-cent store-like objects that may be poking fun at commerce. Sarabia is also the bartender-creator of the aforementioned tequila bar.

The strongest works are videos, including Omar Fast's "The Casting" (2007), a look at psychological fallout of the Iraq War, and Javier Téllez "Letter on the Blind For the Use of Those Who See" (2007), a poetic look at relative truth featuring an encounter between an elephant and several blind persons.

Over at the Park Avenue Armory are a few attempts to bring joy to an otherwise depressed display. These participatory pieces include the tequila and the dance marathon as well as opportunities to sign up for a therapy session or to have your portrait drawn. Most of the installations, including a "chill-out room" done by DJ Olive -- seem designed to mesh with the rave-like series of events, including a wedding/performance by a tacky goth-punk outfit called the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black.

The biggest kick comes from the Armory building itself -- a charming relic replete with wood-paneling, jewel-like chandeliers and a herd of wall-mounted animal heads.

In one of the better rooms, a uniformed collective calling themselves MK Guth work at weaving red ribbons into yards of braided hair. Visitors are invited to write on the ribbons their answer to the question "What is worth preserving?"

Unfortunately, for this Biennial, my answer would be not much. Purportedly anti-market and democratic, the '08 show is in fact decadent and dispiriting.

Feminist Art Is Contemporary Art

"Abakan Red" (1969) by Magdalena Abakanowicz at P.S. 1

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
P.S. 1
Feb. 17 - May 12, 2008

Beth Campbell "Following Room"
Whitney
Dec. 7, 2007 - Feb. 27, 2008

We stopped by P.S. 1 for their must-see feminist show. Unlike last year's "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum, which focused on contemporary feminist art, "WACK!," which first showed at the L.A. MOCA, looks at the fertile period of the late 60s and 70s during which women artists asserted themselves, combining the personal and the political using myriad creative strategies to redefine themselves and reinvent the practice of art.

With 120 artists, including many from outside the U.S., this sprawling and celebratory show gives a wealth of evidence that women and feminist art are central to the the story of contemporary art, with subjects like the body and identity and strategies like media critique, autobiography, video and performance all figuring prominently.

The furthest thing from the equivalent of a nostalgic tie-die and bell bottoms time capsule, this work feels more alive and relevant than most contemporary art today.

In an autobiographical body-focused mode, Adrian Piper's "Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece" (1970). Equally bold and vulnerable, the 22-year-old artist obsessively details her daily health routine, including her vegetarian diet, yoga poses and bowel movements. Each diary entry is accompanied by a black and white self-portrait, sometimes topless. Similar work by the artist is currently showing at the MoMA's "Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now."

Also employing successive self-portraits are Friedl Kubelka, whose "Das erste Jahresportrait" (1972-73) arranges photos on a calendar, and Eleanor Antin, whose "Carving: A Traditional Sculpture" (1972) depicts the transformation of the artist's body during a diet.

Using video and performance are Yoko Ono, whose brilliant and before-its-time "Cut Piece" (1965) famously shows the artist sitting as members of her audience snip away pieces of her clothing. With a room of her own, Anna Mendieta's spooky and symbolic videos depict her preoccupation with death, blood and the body. A more life-affirmative take on blood is Barbara Hammer's video "Menses" (1974).

Particularly enjoyable are the more interactive installations. In "Feed Me" by Barbara T. Smith, you are invited to sit on an oriental carpet with pillows and listen on headphones as the artist recounts a 1973 performance during which she encamped overnight in the women's bathroom of Tom Marioni's Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco, inviting men and women to join her on the rug (there's also fruit, massage oil and marijuana). The artist recalls that "people thought I was here to make love to every man like a power trip..." In fact, she does admit to having sex with one or more visitors, keeping true to the liberated freewheeling spirit of the times.

When your eyeballs are tired out, check out "Soft Gallery" on the second floor. Originally created by Marta Minujin and Richard Squires (a man!) in 1974, this giant womb room made of mattresses bound by rope is designed for jumping around in. So kick off your shoes and bounce off the walls.

In media-critique mode is Martha Rosler, whose "Body Beautiful" series of collage pieces (1966-72) reassembles mainstream media images of women. Her "Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain: Cargo Cult" splices fashion magazine images of women and shipping containers, evoking the commoditification of women as part of the beauty industry.

Since feminism is about gender difference it's natural that images of nekkid laddies are everywhere. But this isn't meant to titillate. An extreme example is the artist Cosey Fanni Tutti, whose one-room installation has a warning in the entryway. The work tells the story of a 1976 exhibition at the London ICA called "Prostitution" in which Tutti sold hard-core pornographic images of herself that she modeled for X-rated magazines (so much more crotch hair back then). We see these images alongside correspondence with the porno rags and press clips from the exhibition's ensuing tabloid firestorm.

Addressing prostitution in a less controversial way is Suzanne Lacy. Her "Prostitution Notes" of 1975 maps a project to learn about the lives of prostitutes.

Another feminist strategy is elevating so-called women's work to high art. A great example is Faith Wilding's "Crocheted Environment" (1972), a cave-like space with spidery stalactite-like formations made of yarn.

There is also some art by women that isn't obviously feminist. This includes a few small drawings by Eva Hesse, painted photos by Helena Almeida and a gorgeous colorful canvas ("Stark Strokes Hope," 1971) by Joan Snyder.

Overall there isn't much in the way of exposition. P.S. 1 lets the the art speak for itself. I like this. Wall text is for lazy people.

The museum sets aside part of the 3rd floor for a performance and lecture space. The day we were there, a group of young women called the Pink Bloque were doing a slide show. It was pretty unrehearsed, and M. and I grew weary quickly. Instead, we paid a visit to our favorite room, James Turrell's "Meeting" and froze our asses off waiting for the sun to go down.

A few days prior, I stopped by the Whitney for a last-chance visit to see Beth Campbell's "Following Room." Arranged in the first-floor space, the installation featured 12 exact copies of a room arranged so that when you look at it you think you're looking at a series of reflections -- an "infinity mirror." Experiencing this space gives you a mega dose of cognitive dissonance, like a 3-D version of op-art. Trompe your mind. You end up looking for difference between the rooms. Lamp, shelf, framed photos, chair, red pillow, open book ("The Other Side of Me"), eyeglasses, bunched sock and cat's toy on carpeted rug. All exactly the same. What does it mean? Multiple realities? In any case, it's not pleasant, nor is it meant to be. Curiously, the artist also does autobiographical flowcharts that project multiple futures showing how life takes cruel, but sometimes happy turns. While it wasn't on display, Campbell created one of these diagrams for the Whitney show and it can be seen in the exhibit's accompanying brochure. Entitled "My Potential Future Based on Present Circumstances (10/1/07)," the flowchart begins "I've been invited to do a project at the Whitney..." I wish the original had been on display. I prefer this warmer, vulnerable autobiographical work to her clinical and cold installation. In a way it's more in the spirit of "WACK."