Ryan McGinley, Ann (Windy Truck), 2007, c-print, 72 x 110 inches. Image copyright of Team Gallery
I have an online exclusive at the L Magazine this week; Ryan McGinley at Team Gallery. A teaser from the review below:

Ryan McGinley critics describe the narrative behind his photographs something like this, “My friends are pretty. And we get naked in the country. Usually there are drugs. Rad! So subversive.” That his 30 plus photographs of nudes in undeveloped landscapes currently on display at Team Gallery might be as vapid as the lifestyle they depict certainly hold weight as a criticism, even if McGinley’s acclaim comes from his ability to transcend the documentary youth culture genre. Earlier photographs, including a picture of a young man riding his bike taken from above in 2000, a 2004 image of a nude woman named Dakota, sipping a drink from a straw in the back of a moving truck, and a number of silhouetted figures captured in the midst of falling evade the cry of overly narcissistic photography frequently attached to like minded photographer Nan Goldin, and at least some of the moral depravity for which Larry Clark has been criticized. At their best, McGinley’s flat, unassuming representation of friends and models exhibit a rare honesty and contemporary uniqueness updating the lexicon of gay photography.

Of course, part of the excitement to these photographs comes from the fact that their attributes are seemingly at odds with a slightly staged look. As former Whitney curator of photography Sylvia Wolf, wisely explained last year to the New York Times, “His subjects are performing for the camera and exploring themselves with an acute self-awareness that is decidedly contemporary. They are savvy about visual culture, acutely aware of how identity can be not communicated but created”.

Given the fact that many of these photographs were partly arranged to begin with, it’s not too surprising that McGinley might grow tired of waiting for a picture to happen, a change in process he noted in the same Times article quoted above. The question of how much the artist gains from staging his work however, plays out rather negatively since much of the narrative remains the same, and many photos now look overly contrived. Even the most successful shots, Ann (Windy Truck), Brennan (Clear Poncho), and Coley (injured), feel a little too posed, the models taking on a strange contemplative sadness overly familiar within the genre. The latter two do a reasonable job at juxtaposing alluring textures such as that of skin with unexpected synthetic and natural materials respectively, but it’s a small success. The weakest works, Together Running, an obscured nudes in mountain Where’s Waldo photograph, and virtually anything from this cliché round of naked hipster women surrounded by fireworks leaves a viewer wondering why so much plotting should be required for such poorly conceived shots.

The rest of the review here.

Brian Jungen, Blanket no. 3, 2008, Image copyright Casey Kaplan

My latest review at the L Magazine is up.  The teaser below.

Brian Jungen’s 2006 exhibition at Casey Kaplan wasn’t much to talk about. I’ve never cared for skull art — I can’t keep myself from thinking about pirates and acid trips, no matter the intended metaphor. In that show, presumably, the skull iconography referenced the Wild West, as the entrance featured a number of rear-view mirrors with hanging feathered ornaments, and in the main gallery and back room, respectively, multiple baseball skins were molded into human skulls that lay in a flatfooted arrangement on the floor, and sofa chairs were turned into saddles and mounted on stools. The work in the exhibition was laid too low to the ground and failed to fill out the space enough, making it difficult for most viewers to even catch the theme of the show.

Two years later, the sculptures have gone from bad to worse. Jungen’s current exhibition at Casey Kaplan suffers from both conceptual and aesthetic flaws, though it basically follows along themes he’s been exploring for the last eight years. Jungen, a Dunne-za, First Nations Indian, creates sculptures that reference his heritage, transforming various mass-produced objects into art: this exhibition opens with a plastic gasoline can perforated with small holes forming the shapes of dragonflies. It’s unclear what significance the viewer should glean from the use of a motif popular among college freshmen, though one might infer that the can likely points to gas-huffing, a problem on First Nation reserves in Canada. It may be that the imprinted design is simply meant to create a female counterpart to the other pieces in the show, though such gender oppositions don’t add anything to the interpretation of the work.

The rest of the gallery is filled with woven ceremonial robes made from sports jerseys. Hanging flatly on the wall, and neutered of any meaning past the dull objects they were and have become, the work is surely a low point relative to Jungen’s past successes.  Just last year, the artist created a series of impressive totem poles constructed from hiking backpacks for a show at Catriona Jeffries gallery in Vancouver. In that work, both the materials and the object they represent are as successful in their craft, as they are in concept, each privileging social status, referencing a type of vacation that typically involves a fair bit of work. Admittedly, the artist brings some virtuosity to the actual textile weaving of his newest work — some of the patterns verging on beautiful — but the shirt still looks like a shirt, and a boring one at that.

To read the full review click here.

Byron Kim, Synecdoche, dimensions variable, 1991-present. Image courtesy of MoMA.

My latest piece at the L magazine is up. The teaser below.

Who doesn’t enjoy a pie chart, a pretty colored graph, or any of the array of data visualizations available on the web? I suppose at some point I’ll grow tired of the endless endeavors in information aesthetics we see today, but I haven’t hit my threshold yet, which makes MoMA’s Color Chart particularly topical. Curated by Ann Tempkin, the exhibition showcases art work which assigns color through arbitrary systems, chance, and readymade source — all the stuff we see on the internet now, but largely in old-school, fine-art form. Which is to say, count on seeing a number of familiar works from canonical artists: Dan Flavin’s Untitled 1-5 (to Donald Judd, colorist), a series to incandescent colored bulbs in T formation, Ellsworth Kelly’s painted grid of colors on a large wall, and an excellent series of paint by numbers by Andy Warhol. There are, however, a few disappointing contemporary choices: two nondescript works from Damien Hirst’s limitless pit of dot paintings for example, and Byron Kim’s frequently acclaimed Synecdoche, a grid of paintings based on the skin tones of models, which to my tastes are far too heavily indebted to process-based conceptual painters like Garry Neill Kennedy.

While the exhibition’s contemporary content might be disappointing, the curatorial expertise demonstrated for the 60s and 70s yields fantastic results. Basically, the older the work in Color Chart, the greater likelihood the piece will present a surprise. For example, John Chamberlain, an artist well known for his gaudy crushed automobile sculptures, has an underappreciated series on display from the brief period in which he was a painter. Deriving minimal images from the scrap he found in the junkyard, Chamberlain would build up the shapes and color with translucent paint, creating elegant simplicity and a stunning light. Probably the most impressive work in the show comes from Robert Rauchenberg’s Rebus, a giant collaged painting in his signature loose style, incorporating color chips in the center of the piece. Among a crowd of calculated and predictably cool work, this moving painting provides an unexpected take on the many approaches artists have taken to charting color.

To continue reading click here.

“I’ve seen seven art fairs in the space of four days, so the ‘current state of the art world’ is making my brain explode,” I told grad students at Rutgers recently, when asked to assess the contemporary field of fine art. Not that art fairs should necessarily affect our ability to see art, the issue is just that they increasingly do. Certainly the fact that the Armory Show raised its entrance fee 33% and nobody said a word speaks to the value people place on shopping. Let’s keep in mind that the already steep $20 MoMA admission is now $10 cheaper than a $30 day pass at this fair.

Three years ago, when MoMA first increased its entrance fee, critics claimed the expansion would be lost to lower-income classes due to the prohibitive price. Sadly, no such debate transpired when the Armory hiked its rates, presumably because commercial enterprises claim no responsibility in making salable art available to the public. This isn’t to say they don’t, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that this year’s increase in admission was a calculated decision to thin non-buyers from the giant crowds experienced in 2007. After all, the move facilitates sales, benefiting everyone involved but the poor.

The whittling away of the public’s ability to view art, however, doesn’t stop here. One aspect of art fair dominance I have yet to see addressed by critics is the fact that every time a series of works is exhibited for the first time at an art fair, its sale shrinks the public viewing time, while charging us for something we’d have previously seen for free. Sure, this art may be seen again on the secondary market or in exhibition, but tracking down a complete suite of works that may have been sold to a number of different clients often requires more resources than a space has at its disposal.

To read the whole piece click here. 

Leslie Hewitt, Make It Plain (2 of 5), 2006.

My review of the Whitney Biennial now online at the L Magazine. I’ve pasted a large portion of it below.

Between the Whitney Biennial’s two exhibition spaces, one sprawling through four floors of the museum and the other at the Park Armory building, the institution’s survey of American contemporary art feels unusually familiar. This can be attributed in part to the space itself, which resembles commercial exhibition sites more than ever before. Though there has been much speculation over the last six months about whether the Chelsea gallery expansions have reached their limit, the increased number of gigantic institution-like venues such as Gagosian and David Zwirner make the walls of the Whitney feel less impressive and unique. Perhaps more importantly, however, the growing visibility of art fairs (and their mish-mash of new art) that privilege the salable while providing auxiliary spaces for “supplemental programming” (art made without the goal of commercial viability), make those art fairs seem awfully close to the Whitney’s two-tiered exhibition program. This is particularly apparent at the Park Armory space, which is no doubt meant to mimic the off-site locations for the larger works at the Venice Bienniele. Instead, it comes off resembling the look of hotel fairs that simply repurpose rooms for art without considering how the work might function once installed.

Given the opportunity to see a lot of art at once, and the fact that more than 30 of the 80 artists included were plucked directly from Chelsea, many New Yorkers won’t need to look to this exhibition to reveal any trends. Still, it never hurts to have curators like Shamim M. Momin and Henriette Huldisch rearticulate them for us, which is why so many of us are still interested in the Biennial. Viewers can look forward to a lot of found materials, a return to a 60s and 70s fine art aesthetic, and a resurgence of appropriation, archive and eco art. Those who like painting, printmaking and traditional photography will have very little to look at this year, whereas assemblage sculpture and installation art dominate the show, as does a strong collection of video art. Notably, not one internet artist was included, an oversight to be sure, given the wealth of activity within the field.

With the large amount of montage and other fractured work, this biennial resembles a more diverse Unmonumental, the New Museum’s current exhibition exploring fragmented forms. With it, however, come all the standard biennial woes and caveats, plus a few new ones for good measure: as in years past, the exhibition consists of far more insubstantial art than needed. More often than not, the art chosen is the problem, as opposed to a weak or underdeveloped artist. Olivier Mosset, for example, a member of New York’s Radical Painting Group, who has made a great number of compelling large-scale textured paintings, had the misfortune of exhibiting two of his most drab, over-sized beige canvases. Similarly established conceptual artist John Baldessarri couldn’t be more relevant to contemporary art-makers today, but his garish three-dimensional wall works, juxtaposing colored body parts with banal black-and-white objects, represent the artist poorly. Others, however, such as Patrick Hill, I just don’t like: his collages of wood, glass, granite, concrete and canvas are so cleanly constructed they seem readymade for a corporate lobby.

Other problems pervade the exhibition. As I said earlier, the Armory architecture almost always overshadows the art, with a few exceptions. William Cordova and Leslie Hewitt’s archive of bootleg independent films and donated artist videos representing black and Latino awareness made perfect sense in a cave-like room that felt as if it were designed for clandestine viewing experiences; Dexter Sinister’s collections of texts reflecting on the show were placed appropriately in an office; and Gretchen Skogerson’s tattered neon tubes effectively communicate a sense of bleakness, in tune with the Hurrican Ivan wreckage to which her piece responds. Garder Eide Einarsson’s framed suit, however, looks ill-placed in its ornate interior, the only object in a room much too large to display it effectively. The same thing happened to the vitrines of Mario Ybarra Jr., which contain paraphernalia he made as an homage to 80s gangster flick Scarface. Meanwhile, Karen Kilimnik, a painter who incorporates the kind of chandeliers hanging at the armory into her installations, and makes art about the type of rooms in that space, managed to secure a place at the museum. For all the talk of painting taking a back seat to film, installation and humble assemblage at the Whitney, you’d think a few more painters might have ended up on Park Avenue.

To read the full piece click here.

“Looks like it’s Whitney Biennial Day”, I decreed this morning, though I think I’ll be revising that to Schizophrenia Day due to a few scheduling mishaps. As such, my Whitney Biennial review will come out next week at the L Magazine, and today, you read about WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. This will be followed by what couldn’t be a more unexpectedly themed post if I tried. That surprise later today.

About a year and a half ago I named Judy Chicago as an artist sure to discredit anyone with the bad judgment to cite her as an influence. She’s still the only person I can definitively place on that list. On some level, the reasons to dislike her are obvious: her paintings borrow too much from Georgia O’Keeffe but are less skilled, her installations are typically simple in concept and boring in person, and worst of all, her work drips of hippy free-spirited goodness, a quality sure to turn off most of today’s proudly cynical artists.

With that said, even if there is no less fashionable combination than feminism and the dirty hippy — and certainly most of her work in the 80s and 90s matches this criteria — it’s hard to understand why this particular artist’s projects have come to be so universally disliked. And one of the reasons the traveling exhibition WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution has seen so much positive press is that curator Connie Butler has included work likely to inspire such questions. The exhibition, now at P.S.1, includes Judy Chicago’s Through the Flower, a reasonably well executed painting of a blossom, which certainly provides a more positive entry point to her art than anything she made after 1980.

Mind you, the later work was never likely to make it into the show anyway; the exhibition focuses on art made by 120 artists between 1965 and 1980. Organized thematically, WACK! includes categories such as “Knowledge as Power”, “Body as Medium”, “Auto-photography” and more [Editors note: I didn’t find it mattered too much since there was a real sense of flow to the exhibition, but after viewing the exhibition three times, that these themes may have been based on the organization of the catalog and lost somewhere along the way since they were largely unapparent to me - why were there no signs in the exhibition indicating the rationale for the groupings?]. As a whole, the exhibition means to show the diversity of practice within the community of artists during that time who identified as feminists. The work of Joan Semmel, for example, speaks to this range, an artist retroactively included in the feminist canon for her photograph-based paintings. Picturing only what she could see of her and her lover’s body, though the artist’s outspoken feminist ideologies probably provide a clearer picture of her politics than the painting Intimacy/Autonomy. There is an eerie silence to the indisputably strong piece, but it isn’t among the bolder statements women made during that era.

To read the full piece click here.

Seth Price, Installation view, Image copyright Friedrich Petzel Gallery

Those who are aware of Seth Price’s work and success prior to viewing his latest exhibition, at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, will certainly find familiar his fixation with creating archives and channels of distribution, even if it isn’t his most successful investigation. Composed almost entirely of laser-cut wall-mounted positives derived from the enlarged negative spaces of jpegs, the exhibition shows work that transforms freely circulated digital files from the annals of Google into industrially produced gallery-ready objects.

Initially culled by plugging verbs into a search engine, at first glance these works look largely abstract, and seem to owe a little too much to the cast negative spaces of Bruce Nauman and Rachel Whiteread. Best known for their 3-D sculptures of areas beneath chairs, Nauman and Whiteread produced works whose success lay not only in cleverness but in the form’s retention of mystery and ambiguity, even after the viewer was informed of its origins. By contrast, Price chooses the two-dimensional space framing an action as his subject, a project that quickly comes to mimic the perceptual illusion drawings of the vase and faces (looked at one way, the drawing appears to be two faces in profile, another, it’s a vase). Naturally, any elegance within the seemingly abstract shapes made of faux wood grain disappears once the subject is recognized.

Notably, most of the negative spaces depict hands in the process of doing something, be it eating, writing, holding a microphone, etc. The only literally depicted image in the show hangs in the back room: a drawing copied from a book on shadow puppetry. Here, and throughout the show, Price points to the invisible hand of the artist, a reasonable subject, albeit banal, when reduced to a series of literalized actions that simply remove them from the production of the object itself, or their depiction.

In conjunction with the show, Price also provides a book titled How to Disappear in America, and an 8-hour long continuous mix of dance music from the last three decades. Again, the text also lacks the strength of earlier writing, his 2002 essay Dispersions now generative. This latest work however certainly displays more dexterity in purpose than its aesthetized exhibition partner; the detailed guide providing specific instructions on how best to destroy objects affirming the status quo. I do however feel compelled to point out the flaw in the suggestion that disappearing might also be achieved by moving up north. I’m sure Canada would love to have him – as a citizen I should know – but we’d probably ask that he at least acknowledge the inconsistency in publishing a book with the title How to Disappear in America and then simply jumping ship.

Related:  Tom Moody on Seth Price

Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, Screengrab

My review of the New Museum’s Unmonumental Online is up at the L Magazine.  I asked the magazine to let me do a larger piece for the show, which they were kind enough to oblige, though even with the expanded space, I could have easily written more.   The teaser below.

Major New York museums have been reluctant to invest in new-media art, despite the fact that artists working in a variety of disciplines increasingly use the medium. Since the Whitney’s disastrous 2001 Bitstreams exhibition, only Rhizome’s 2005 show, Artbase 101, at the temporary New Museum space and MoMA’s Automatic Update in 2007 have attempted to take on the subject. However, neither the former, a survey show of internet art, nor the latter, a small acquisitions-inspired show, seemed to escape the enormous shadow cast by Bitstreams. While Rhizome arguably fared better, only two years later the paltry MoMA exhibition received almost no attention, except for a few blogger complaints and some pop-rally coverage from The Voice.

Difficult to execute and low in attendance payoffs, such shows don’t seem appealing to launch. Rhizome, the online veteran focused on technology-based work, should, however, offer a lower-risk investment for institutions wishing to put together new media exhibitions. Unsurprisingly, Unmonumental Online, the final installment of the New Museum’s inaugural exhibition, offers a significant improvement upon Bitstreams and Automatic Update, even if the results are mixed.

Assuming it’s possible to ignore the museum’s decision to install the exhibition in stages, a process creating unnecessary hierarchy among mediums, the final stage to Unmonumental integrates seamlessly into the larger show. Sure, it’s a bit of a scavenger hunt to find all the work — it is, after all, scattered across several floors of the museum — but I like that, for once, the new media portion of the exhibition hasn’t simply been displayed on the gallery’s public computers in the education center. The display also adds a unique dimension to pre-existing work, which is high in humble materials and, until now, low in wall-mounted flatscreens.

Displayed on one such monitor, Michael Bell- Smith’s deeply depressing Subterranean House (Oonce Oonce) loops a modified excerpt of one of Bob Dylan’s first ‘electric’ pieces, in which the musician holds up song lyrics to for the camera. Replacing the 60s counterculture verse with the empty echo of nostalgic late-90s house beats, and a single repeating card with the onomatopoetic “Oonce” eliminates the political message and the sound of technology dominates the new cultural landscape. Next to this work, John Michael Boling’s Three Guitar Solo loops three YouTube videos of teenagers rocking out. The dancers were chosen for their similarities, and the artist draws from a virtually bottomless pool of performance reiterating itself, much like the hollow sound of Bell-Smith’s looping video.

While the dialog created between these two works is brilliant, the choice to include the video Subterranean House (Oonce Oonce) as opposed to the artist’s internet art pieces raises a number of questions about Unmonumental Online as a whole; most obviously, why the number of projects included, that either by virtue of medium (as in the case of Bell-Smith) or mode of display, don’t meet the basic thematic criteria of the exhibition. Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, creator of the site www.11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111.com, and new-media artist Petra Cortright undoubtedly fare the worst in regard to the latter issue. Hung’s provocative, loud and kitschy political collages work brilliantly on his site — the web inspiring, at times demanding, this kind of bombastic communication style — while similar images become ham-fisted animated slam poetry in the medium of video now displayed in the gallery. Similarly, a relatively successful landscape made by Cortright, once framed by the scrolling bars of a browser, and now removed and placed on an ill-fitted flatscreen monitor, feels utterly stale, an attribute exacerbated by Paul Slocum’s fast moving Time-Lapse Homepage (2003) hanging directly to the left of the piece.

To read the full piece click here.

Mornings and me; we aren’t the best of friends, so you’ll have to forgive a few errors prone to occur during that time. The latest example of this: Art Fag City at the L Magazine was not posted prior to leaving the house yesterday. For those of you who have missed the piece in the mag, a teaser below.

Apparently glue-gun glue comes in a variety of colors, ranging from bark brown to neon green. I know this because I probably saw the range of available stock appear within Dave Choi’s monster sculptures at Hogar Collection. By layering hot glue over wire mesh and expandable foam, a green worm-like creature with plastic fur wraps itself around a tree, a pinkish horny beast humps the leg of a mannequin, and a multicolored animal with numerous heads opens all its mouths at once.

While none of these characters appears overly frightening — their viciousness more a parody of extreme thirst than aggression — they represent the seedy underbelly of the American psyche. Evoking Charlie White’s Understanding Joshua, 2001, a photographic series using an alien to represent male self loathing, Choi’s Littleman similarly literalizes cast-off feelings we don’t act upon. Clinging desperately to a pair of mannequin legs, as if he might at any moment lose the woman, the sculpture speaks to a culture with an unquenchable desire for sex, the synthetic and anything remotely feminine.

While such hunger may not necessarily represent the malevolencethat bared teeth and drool typically suggest, the subject of morality isn’t entirely avoided either. Aptly, in Untitled (Tree Dragon) a snake wraps itself around a tree with fiber-optic fruit, eliminating any temptation to harvest its plastic bounties. In this landscape, if the Garden of Eden ever existed, it has long been taken over by manmade materials and animals with oversized eyes and mouths. The result might make a viewer laugh, but it should also be reason for some reflection. After all, every common material Choi gets his hands on seems to mutate into some kind of ravenous creature.

To read the full piece click here.

Successive Approximation installation view.  Artists from left to right: Robin Rhode, Mike Quinn, and Sol Lewitt.

This week at the L Magazine I take a look at Perry Rubenstein Gallery’s Successive Approximation.  The teaser below:

“It’s jock art, but it looks good,” one gallery-goer told me recently, aptly describing the work of Mike Quinn now on display at Perry Rubenstein Gallery. Part of Successive Approximation, a five-person show including Tauba Auerback, Daniel Buren, Sol Lewitt and Robin Rhode, Quinn’s March Mad Addiction Descent may best meet the exhibition’s theme: repeated comparison of form to derive visual resolution, even if it lacks any significant content. As the art connoisseur above seemed to suggest, success in aesthetics may neutralize its lack of conceptual depth — a familiar argument, though frequently without merit.

One of seemingly countless emerging artists taking cues from Robert Rauschenberg and the arte de povera movement, Quinn adds and removes elongated triangle forms from segments in the New York Times about basketball’s March Madness to create his work. The artist collages sports pendants and various drugs he consumed during that time into the pieces as well, hanging the 31 framed objects in a long beautiful arc across the east wall of the gallery. The rainbow-like form gently suggests the pleasure and excess the artist experienced, and his use of a variable pharmacy of crushed drugs literalizes it.

Unfortunately, one of the more interesting aspects of this work appears in its failures. Exhibiting similar characteristics to the amateurish painting that looks great from far away but reveals its clumsy self up close, March Mad Addiction Descent appears to have poetic meaning only at a distance. Upon inspection, the individual pieces take the most obvious route to document a run-of-the-mill narrative about drug abuse. Had the piece invested some perceivable personal response apart from the experience itself, these complaints probably wouldn’t exist. In fact, the adjacent Pyramide MH 13, by Sol Lewitt, may keep many from remarking on its problems by providing an enormous, white, abstract 3-dimensional form that mimics the angular shapes within Quinn’s work. As a vessel of ambiguous meaning, Lewitt’s sculpture mitigates many of the more pedestrian aspects of March Mad Addiction’s narrative. Also nearby, Tauba Auerbach’s The Answer / Wasn’t Here (Anagram VII) seems to speak well both in color and unintentional meaning as applied to Quinn’s piece.

To read the full piece click here.

I decided to take a slightly different track at The L Magazine this week, and revisit the popular topic here of gender representation. The teaser below:

“Museums can’t deaccession work they own,” well known conceptual artist Fia Backström told me at an E-Flux Pawnshop discussion panel earlier this year. Backström presumably drew this conclusion from a story she told the crowd about an unnamed museum in the EU that had not been allowed to sell any of the work in its collection. The institution was used as an example of how attempts to equalize the ratio of male to female artists can easily be neutered, though it did more to illuminate the perceived inflexibility of museums and canonical structures than it did to illuminate gender representation. Most of these organizations can in fact deaccession art if the artist is no longer alive.

The assumption that change often meets strong opposition within museums and other fine art establishments may have its place in the conversation about gender representation not because museum officials are busy hindering the efforts of female artists, but because we’ve had so much trouble identifying unconscious behavior and unwitting mistakes that led to inaccurate evaluations of art made by women, as well as their disproportionate representation.

For the most part, the discussion about male and female exhibition records follows a familiar history of head-counting, which has a very important place but does little to reveal how the evaluation of work necessarily follows gender biases. For example, while male abstract expressionists are often credited for their aggressive brushwork, careful examination reveals that artists like Willem de Kooning applied paint with incredible delicacy, while painters such as Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner worked with greater abandon. The fact that art made by men and women more than 50 years ago is characterized by pejorative misplaced descriptions, yet still accrues value disproportionately, suggests a collective preference for work made by men.

Such statements come as no surprise given that we trust what we know, and certainly a much richer history of greatly talented male artists has been documented. Today, while the fact that women see less success than men in the field of fine art remains consistent, it’s an idea that’s frequently applied too broadly, leaving fields that have seen significant leveling in the evaluation of talent uncredited, and effectively removing women whose success might help correct disproportionate numbers in other fields from the conversation. Even in a superficial evaluation of today’s most prominent painters, more female artists come to mind than men. Jenny Saville, Cecily Brown, Lisa Yuskavage, Inka Essenhigh, Julie Mehretu, Elizabeth Peyton, Dana Schutz and Nicole Eisenman are easily considered among the top artists working today, yet I almost never hear about their accomplishments in conversations of gender representation.

To read the full piece click here.

Photo AFC

I wrote the following Miami round up for the L Magazine this week. I’m traveling for most of the day, so please forgive the slow comment moderation.

Miami art fairs took the shape of pre-existing NYC real estate pretty quickly. Although Art Basel is only six years old, its center aisle in the convention center this year hosted the heavyweight contemporary galleries Yvon-Lambert, Gagosian, Gladstone, Metropictures and Marian Goodman, all of which have ground-floor spaces in Chelsea or distinguished locations in Midtown. Neighbors in both Chelsea and at Basel, Gladstone Gallery and Metropictures transplanted their offices with surprising precision.

In fact, with the increase of satellite fairs like NADA, PULSE and INK, to name a few, so striking is the similarity to the larger gallery scene that one has to question the benefits for an art audience. As gallerist Bert Green wisely pointed out on artfagcity.com early this December, “…the saturation point is being reached, the fair phenomenon is suffering from the same thing that it meant to be an alternative to: browsing the galleries to find the gems buried among the large number of mediocre offerings.”

Indeed, the only people I met during my stay in Miami who weren’t bothered by copious amounts of average-to-bad art watering down the fairs were non-participating dealers researching venues for the following year. Even Art Basel, the most prestigious of these outfits, suffers from being larger than it needs to be: it takes several hours to just walk through the convention center, let alone absorb it all. The fact that there are 23 additional fairs for a gallery-hopper to see, in addition to Basel, can be a little overwhelming, to say the least.

To read the full piece click here.

Unmonumental at The New Museum, Installation view via the NYtimes

My review of the New Museum show appears in the L magazine today. A preview of those thoughts below:

It’s not a particularly good moment for contemporary art at New York institutions, what with the stale series of exhibitions currently at PS1 and MoMA’s growing interest in hosting block buster shows like Georges Seurat, The Drawings. Other museums have performed better than this mind you, but as far as contemporary art in the city goes, many of us were looking to the New Museum’s inaugural opening this month to breathe some life into an otherwise lack luster scene.

Needless to say, their first installment of a show in four parts, misses that mark. Don’t get me wrong, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, investigates a worthy if familiar topic — the renewed interest in sculptural assemblage — but I can’t help feeling uneasy about the museum’s choice to explore a genre known for calculated grittiness and use of recycled materials, when it seems to so neatly match the ideology behind the new building itself. “The museum serves as a hinge” says the New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff speaking to the function of the mesh that covers the façade of building, evoking the glitze of soho from afar, and toughness of a now softening Bowery up close. Maybe the sculptures aren’t meant to speak to this same set of ideas, but after seeing three floors of seemingly endless pretty/ugly collage, and spending days reading about the bridginess of a museum on the edge of two similarly contrasting neighborhoods, I couldn’t shake the connection. By the end of it, I felt like the virtues of working humbly had been beaten over my head by Richard Flood, and his curatorial team.

Monolithic curatorial vision may contribute to such a feeling, though I suspect the problem lies more in an unwillingness to take certain kinds of risks. For example, in the three floors of sculptural work presented, not one oversized piece was exhibited. With only 10,000 feet to play with, a curator might not want to chance a sculpture dominating the entire show, but the result is an exhibition that feels more like a marathon viewing experience, as opposed to one full of variation and life. It’s a real shame because the content within great pairings like Carol Bove’s, Experiment in Total Freedom, a stacked table night stand featuring a wire sculpture on one table, and a book with its page open to a reclining nude on another, and Nate Lowman’s aggressively bullet ridden teller window simply get lost within the mish mash of sculptures. While both Bove’s exploration of domesticated political movements and Lowman’s deadpan reconstitution of violent acts on some level explore the idea of neutered social movements, I don’t think it was their intention to also have the work function that way.

To continue reading click here.

Ian Baguskas, Kamping Kabins, archival pigment print, 8.5 x 11 inches, $20.00, Edition 200. Image copyright 20×200.com

My piece on where to find cheap art in the city, went up today in the L Magazine’s holiday survival guide. I’ve pasted a portion of the story below, but as always, you’ll need to click through to read the full piece.

The vast majority of us work with the understanding that objects hanging on gallery walls cost more than we have. This assumption isn’t entirely accurate, as there’s always some piece of garbage inaccurately adorned with an “inexpensive” price tag, but finding good art that doesn’t require a small loan to purchase can be a largely unrewarding task.

Thankfully, Christmas tends to inspire bounty not just in knickknack displays but art ephemera. Andreas Grimm, for example, sells one-of-a-kind, nonfunctioning objects at a temporary museum store located inside a larger installation by Jonathan Berger. An ashtray made out of paper, a ski mask too small to wear, and a shirt dyed with impermanent inks typically run anywhere from 7 to 50 dollars per piece and will last, well, probably about as long as you’d think.

Also in the ephemeral vein, BravinLee’s group show, “Ornament: Ho Hum All Ye Faithful,” brings together 65 artists working in a variety of media. Ranging from less than 10 dollars to the low thousands, “Ornament” speaks to the idea of the Christmas trimmings inspiring such personal favorites as Jim Butler’s gorgeous glowing glass boot and Joan Linder’s nude paper dolls depicting large-breasted women and hard-penised men. Those wishing for their own nudie ornaments will need to act fast; the line for penile Christmas cheer is bound to be long, and as a one-of-a-kind work, it’s not likely to stick around.

For those who are working with a very limited budget, online art remains the best place to get a deal. Gallerist Jen Bekman’s newest project, “20×200”, introduces new artwork twice weekly for only 20 bucks a pop. Admittedly, the works are humble — 8 ½ x 11 inches for the edition of 200 — but Bekman offers a few more size and pricing options than are immediately apparent from the site’s name. For $200, art lovers can purchase a 17 x 22 inch work in an edition of 20, or, for $1,800 more, a 30 x 40 inch print with an edition size of only two. All of this is a steal, especially when you consider the gallerist represents many of these artists and actively promotes their work offline.

To read the full piece click here.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Atair, installation view, Image copyright Andrea Rosen

Anyone else notice hanging art anywhere but eye level is in fashion? I’ve written a piece for The L Magazine this week which discusses this Chelsea trend. You’ll find the teaser below, but will have to click through to read the full piece.

From the look of Chelsea I gather we’re giving a half hearted good-bye to exhibitions hung at standardized viewing heights. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still seeing traditionally installed painting shows, but I increasingly find myself looking at art on the highest or lowest spots of a wall, searching the gallery for hidden objects as though their discovery were a testament to my astuteness as a viewer. Citing only a few of countless recent exhibitions that come to mind, Jules De Balincourt’s Unknowning Man’s Nature at Zach Feuer featured more than one painting near the ceiling of the gallery, mid career artist Wolfgang Tillmans currently shows an array of photographs at various heights at Andrea Rosen Gallery, as did Matt Keegan earlier this fall at D’Amelio Terras.

These artists do a reasonable job of hanging their shows in this manner, but those who have a true gift for this kind of installation easily separate themselves from the crowd. 36 year old mixed media artist Ian Kiaer tackles this set of problems with the greatest degree of success I’ve seen in years (his last exhibition in May at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery not with standing) gracefully balancing the most unexpected pairings of objects and paintings. A masterpiece of spatial arrangement, Kiaer’s homage to architects Claude-Nicholas Ledoux and Frederick Kiesler, in Endless Theatre Project / Ledoux: House of Agricultural Guards (white), 2003 beautifully marries an unstretched Korean landscape hung low to the ground, polystyrene in four parts on the floor in front, and a ping-pong ball placed to its side.

To read the full article click here.

Kris Martin, Mandi VIII, 2006, Plaster, 86 2/3 x 59 x 39 1/3 inches, Rachofsky Collection, Dallas.  Image copyright PS1

This week at The L Magazine I discuss a few pieces currently on display at PS1.  I’ve posted a teaser below, but as always, you’ll need to click through to read the whole piece.

After leaving PS1 Contemporary Art Center’s mass of recent openings with a mental count of three skulls, two hanging knight helmets, one room-sized sword, an installation of knife clusters and a carpet made of tar, I decided it safe to identify Gothic as an underlying theme at the institution this fall. Artists find the western world barbarous, crude and decaying, and with multiple shows making specific reference to the seedy underbelly of mass culture and the corrosion of authorship, there’s little wonder why.

But despite the gravity of the message, I must say that very little made me care. I’m not saying I think art should be responsible for educating or eliciting tangible viewer reactions, but I do wish more of the work I experienced significantly moved me one way or the other. Adel Abdessemed’s lukewarm exhibition Dead or Alive perfectly exemplifies this: The artist’s luxury cruise liner made out of trash reveals a raw, ugly energy within the act of destruction, but is stymied by the installation’s singularity in tone. A video of a cat eating a rat, a freestanding collection of large marble screws and several circular knife clusters each speak with similar pitch and volume. I can only assume that’s part of the artist’s point — that we live in a culture of both dread and frenzy — but literal representations of concepts like this tend to prohibit deeper intellectual investigations.

To read the full piece click here.

Chris Ofili, Iscariot Blues , (detail), 2007 , Oil on linen, 110 5/8 x 76 inches

I lead with Iscariot Blues [above] because I think it amongst the strongest paintings in the show, but set up the largely positive review that follows with the observation that the first works of art a viewer sees when entering David Zwirner Gallery — bronze clotial figures — provide an unfortunate framework to the show, since they are materially ostentatious and laden with the most obvious of religious themes.  Assuming you can forget the sculptures exist, the paintings are pretty good.

In my first year of undergrad, an art history professor wisely observed the obvious: great painters frequently steal the best moments from master artworks and incorporate them into their own. The artist’s ability to gracefully quote another remains among the most important in his or her skill set, namely because it’s much more difficult than it appears. A fine evocation requires not only the eye and intelligence to identify work worth the investigation but the technical ability to execute it well.

Among the better examples of this within the contemporary fine art scene, Chris Ofili’s current show at David Zwirner, “Devil’s Pie”, brings to mind the best figure work of Henri Matisse. Similarly interested in primitivism, Ofili paints flat shapes with a fauve-inspired palette, and even his surfaces, which were once thickly adorned with paint and resins, now more closely resemble the spare canvases of the great Modern master. Coincidently, Matisse offers a particularly apt reference point, as he also drew heavily from Eastern art. Is it an irony informed with a sense of play of revenge: a black artist seeks to reimagine black artmaking through the lens of a privileged white artist, who himself pilfered Eastern forms?

To read the full piece at the L Magazine click here.

Installation view, Stalking with Stories at apexart.

My latest review is up at the L magazine.  It can be viewed in full on their site, but I’ve placed a teaser for you below.

I hate to sound boorish, but I don’t always enjoy seeing the words “intellectually rich” attached to shows about conceptual art. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for challenging work, but I am not consistently interested in reading a press release to understand the art I’m looking at.

With that said, a thin but fairly consistent stream of challenging shows inspire attentive wall- and press release-reading every year, the most recent currently on display at apexart. Inspired by the desire for an imagined past or future, Stalking with Stories: The Pioneers of the Immemborable, an exhibition curated by Antonia Marjaca and Ivana Bago, brings together the macabre investigations of eight international artists.

Among the more visually dominant works in the show, Sanja Ivekovic’s Ponos (Pride), a red neon sign from a former Yugoslavian textile shop, hangs near the entrance of the gallery. On its own, the piece reads as an empty mass- culture relic, though, as history documents, socialist-era banners such as this frequently employed words such as Freedom, Victory and Knowledge; politically charged words with emotionally invested ideology. In the post-communist economy these names were replaced with international counterparts; “Ponos,” or Pride, for example, might become the X Nation, Eldi International or Terranova. While these new signs do not appear in the exhibition, the historical reference coupled with the ambiguity of aesthetic interpretation underscore the uneasy transitional state of the country.

To read the full piece click here.

Paul Henry Ramirez, Image via The L Magazine

I’m all for wheelchair accessible galleries, but the long slanted ramps at places like White Box seem more like left overs from the previous industrial space than a slope designed to facilitate entry. This week’s review at the L Magazine details their aesthetic effects on exhibitions.  I’ve posted a portion of the piece below, but as always, click through to read the full piece.

I’ve decided that ramps constitute art’s slow death when placed inside a gallery. The presence of these inclined planes generally indicate quite a few problems, not the least of which are awkwardly divided exhibition space and decreased hanging area.

Having fewer places for artists to put their work on a wall tends not to be a good thing, but interiors without the proper feng shui ultimately prove much more problematic. Take Paul Henry Ramirez’s latest exhibition, “Chunk”, at Caren Golden: an average show, but almost impossible to evaluate as such because you can’t get enough distance from the work. Not that Ramirez’s paintings offer much for a viewer to contemplate — his abstracted playing card-esque iconography offers only mild satisfaction by way of soft curves meeting sharp corners — but had the gallery not been split in two by a ramp and storage space, this formal pairing might have carried the work further.

By contrast, Ward Davenny’s cloud photographs at Mary Ryan Gallery look passable in the newly renovated, ramp-removed space Team used to occupy, a real feat considering the gimmicky storm-chasing aspect of the work. Coincidentally, Team’s profile has risen considerably since leaving its ramped space behind. I’m not about to draw any connections between the financial success of a gallery and a slope in the floor, but I will note that strong architectural presentation at least puts forth an accomplished image.

To read the full piece click here.

Ugo Rondinone, No. 249 Einundzwanzigster-Septemberzweitausenundeins, 2001, ink on paper, 6 feet 7 1/2 inches x 9 feet 10 inches, work featured in Moma’s Drawing Now, via artnet.

Art Fag City put together a feature for The L Magazine’s fall art preview, now available across the city. If you happen to be around Williamsburg or the Lower East in particular, you’ll be sure to find it, but in lieu of this, the magazine has also made the section available in full on their website. I’ve posted my feature below since the text is available only in scan form on their site, but you should visit it non the less, as there is a not to be missed feature on the Brooklyn Musuem’s director Arnold Lehman.

If the first week of September’s 100 plus contemporary gallery openings doesn’t signal the commencement of the fall art season I don’t know what does. Save February’s New York art fairs, no other time in the year will the city see more activity in the field of contemporary art. Such enterprise can be really exciting, but at this point it’s also too overwhelming to keep track of; even if you wanted to you couldn’t attend all the receptions scheduled for Chelsea’s opening week.

One of the nicer aspects of the fall season however, is that it gives art professionals such as myself an excuse to reflect upon the art they’ve seen over the last year, make a few predictions, and select shows to look forward to. Speaking to the former, I hope to see even a small disruption to the current obsession over representation and narrative, though if this month’s shows are any indication, we won’t be experiencing that any time soon. Of course, probably the most visible sign that artists were losing interest in abstraction occurred well over five years ago. MoMA’s hugely successful exhibition Drawing Now featured only one marginally abstract painter [Julie Mehretu] of 26 participating artists, and if any one in the press noticed, they certainly didn’t remark upon it. Today you can almost count the number of abstract painters making relevant work on your hands; Tom Nozkowski, Jonathan Lasker, and Mark Grotjahn immediately come to mind.

Matt Keegan, Work From Home 2007, collaged c-print, 8.5 x 9 inches, Image via D’Amelio Terras

Given the importance of narrative and representation to emerging and mid-career artists, we can expect to see text continue to play a more dominant role in art. For example, growing art star Matt Keegan’s Any Day Now at D’Amelio Terras this month (through September 29th) includes a number of intellectually rigorous text based works inserted into gallery walls. Known for pairing words and images as method of investigating the experiential, the artists manipulates personal snapshots voiding the subject’s identity, while creating drawings that employ nouns and pronouns as a point of figurative reference. Saul Chernick similarly investigates identity in his exhibition Protosapia at Max Protetch (through November 3). The treat in this work lies in part, in his virtuosity with line, evoking masters such as Albrecht Durer, Goya, and Rembrant, but his exploration of creation myths, masculine identity, and pictorial narrative give the work weight and depth. Titled after the artist’s name for a breeding ground of a new human species, Protosapia, examines sexual politics while asking the basic questions about our existence.

Without a doubt these two shows represent an incredibly rigorous intellectual studio practice, setting Chernick and Keegan apart from many of their contemporaries. While most artists need not be held to the kind of intellectual standards these two artists maintain, irony permeates the art world in such a way that it seems to keep artists from taking a stand on anything. Try naming even a few emerging artists who make overtly political work. Even professionals will have a hard time calling out those names. Feminist artists such as A.L Steiner, The Brainstormers, and Nicole Eisenman for example, are a rare breed in the contemporary art world, and suffer scrutiny for it. I know it sounds horribly unfashionable, but I’d really like to see a little more didacticism in art, particularly since a climate where this kind of expression is discouraged can be very harmful.

Deborah Kass, Big Funk, 2007, enamel and acrylic on canvas, 78 x 102 inches, Image via: Paul Kasmin Gallery

As a result, one of the shows I am most looking forward to this fall comes from the generative conceptual artist Deborah Kass at Paul Kasmin (through October ). Amongst the dearth of political work this year, Kass represents what might be the most astute critique of the contemporary culture this fall. “These are feel good paintings for feel bad times.” says Kass, introducing her paintings in the gallery press release “Redolent, nostalgic, longing for post war high times, when anything was possible. Hollywood, Broadway, even art was democratic.” She’s right naturally; the press image for this show uses a yellow bulls-eye as its centerpiece and the text Nobody Puts Baby In The Corner, a mildly obscure quote from the entertaining 1987 movie by Emile Ardolin, Dirty Dancing. Underneath Ardolino’s thinly constructed gloss veneer, the movie makes reference to the darker issues of Judeo and Christian traditions including religious exclusivity and class conscious society, a kind of social critique Kass misses today.