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