The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
February 2006
ArtSeen
Carolee Schneemann
by Stephanie BuhmannArtSeen
Since her staged body performances of the early 1960s, Carolee Schneemann has been known to challenge emotional boundaries and unmask, if not attack, taboos wherever society might have safely stored them. Over four decades, her multimedia work has remained a mirror of worldly disasters, in particular of wars led or caused in reaction to Western politics. A current survey, entitled Corporeal, proves that rather than a witty comment on our times, Schneemann’s oeuvre manifests as passionate and physically felt outcry against all the repeating pain and wrongs stirred by societies that fail to learn from the catastrophes of the past.
Merlin James
by Roger WhiteArtSeen
1985 was a bad time for painters of a certain sensibility. One had, on one side, the rhetorical bombast and dubious values of neo-expressionism, and on the other, something much smarter but distressingly cold called Neo-Geo. To top it off, some lunatic took a knife and a liter of sulfuric acid to Rembrandt’s “Danae”in The Hermitage. What was a humanist to do? Merlin James’ survey of paintings at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. describes one escape route from the postmodern impasse.
Yuliya Lanina
by James KalmArtSeen
Much ink has been spilled and many voices have become hoarse in recent discussions on the current state of “feminist art,” and intentionally or not, Transfigurations of Queen Butterfly places Yuliya Lanina firmly within this contentious dialogue. Composed of five large, mostly wall-mounted pieces, Lanina’s recent show combines elements of cast body parts, fabric constructions, and painting and collage on paper into a narrative cycle, a kind of feminine Stations of the Cross.
Cordy Ryman
by Tomassio LonghiArtSeen
In mediating the on-going dialogue between painting, sculpture, and site-specific installation, Cordy Ryman’s latest exhibit at the Carol Shen, the Packer Collegiate Institute, seems to reveal a certain degree of natural responsiveness to and acceptance of the nature of this rather difficult and unconventional terrain, which very few artists in the last few decades were able to negotiate, namely Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth, Mario Merz, and Richard Tuttle.
Ten New Paintings
by William PowhidaArtSeen
The curatorial proposition for Ten New Paintings at Parker’s Box notes that the selection of the artists, not the work, was the basis for inclusion in this survey of contemporary painting. The departure point for each artist appears to be figuration, and the canvases arrive at a range of aesthetic and conceptual possibilities. Though each painting is quite different, there is a common thread of expectations defied. From the joyous phenomenology of Andrew James glittery, liquid pools in “Indian Summer Again”(2006) to Stefan Sehler’s exquisite gold-enamel masks over a luminescent abstract ground in “Gold Foilage” (2006), the resulting show is a flat-footed celebration of the medium. (Flat-footed, as in an intentional awkwardness to the handling of the medium best exemplified by Philip Guston’s return to figurative abstraction—his thick, deliberate marks forced critics to talk about things like ‘the speed’ of his paint as they tried to understand his aesthetic decisions.)
Cheryl Molnar
by Hrag VartanianArtSeen
Over the last twenty years, north Brooklyn has endured one crisis after another: crack, gentrification, homesteading dot-comers, more gentrification, destination restaurants, luxury lofts, the closing of Engine 212, a new power station and now development of the Greenpoint/Williamsburg waterfront. Cheryl Molnar’s new show at McCaig-Welles examines this latest crisis to grip New York’s epicenter of creativity through thoughtful geometric abstractions that look at the graphic beauty of a place not use to artistic scrutiny.
Gordon Moore
by Ben LaRoccoArtSeen
Betty Cuningham is currently exhibiting a painter named Gordon Moore. His canvases are all vertical. Each is cut horizontally in two by a lightly rendered grid that serves as backdrop to the slashing and meandering brushwork taking place over its surface. The deployment of the grid could be understood on occasion as a foil to the looser brushwork or as a structural device, but its imposition in each and every painting suggests something deeper that I choose to identify with the field of vision. With his extraordinary brushwork, Moore attempts to glean form from his underlying armature while he manipulates and generally readjusts his surfaces.
Deborah Roan
by Stephanie BuhmannArtSeen
In vibrantly saturated photographs of panoramic largesse, Deborah Roan portrays contemporary urban textures with a sensibility that is as musical as it is poetic. On the surface, rhythmic interplays of color and form characterize each composition, while the loose narrative established by the imagery of various neighborhoods offers depth. Despite its highly futuristic look, Roan’s work defies digital media and is simply based on the multiple exposure of film, which is repeatedly rewound in the camera. It is this element of surprise that Roan consciously employs to dramatize the re-discovery of what she sought to document during the shoot. Printed and displayed in its Plexiglas-mounted splendor, each photograph manifests as enchanting retrospective of both the actual environment and Roan’s experience of it.
K. K. Kozik and Sook Jin Jo
by James KalmArtSeen
Domestic bliss—an all enveloping cushion of comfort, security, and household good taste rendered within the pages of Martha Stuart Living or Good Housekeeping—is a pictorial theme that unites many of the paintings in K.K. Kozik’s latest exhibition, Shelter. Also present is a mood of aloofness, a state in which, though the characters are present in urban settings, they exist in their own private reality, a realm somehow isolated from the threats, grime, and worries of modern city life. A creeping sense of paranoia and an unprecedented climate of vulnerability have struck New York since 9/11. We also face the voracious real estate development that has displaced swaths of our local community. These attacks on the stability of our homes and home lives have rendered the thoughts of our former mundane lives a fantasy, a golden past. In this environment it’s little wonder that Kozik’s depictions of residential solace resonate with viewers.
Mike Schall
by Shane McAdamsArtSeen
Visitors squirm and maneuver through the bottlenecked interior of Dam Stuhltrager’s cavernous, irregular galleries. It’s cold outside, crowded and stuffy inside. You can smell the person next to you and see the places they missed shaving. In the back room among the crowd is a suite of graphite on paper drawings by Brooklyn-based artist Mike Schall, which look at first to simply facilitate a demonstration of the artist’s technical virtuosity. My initial prejudice is that these odd landscapes are pulled off with the help of complex maquettes or computer-generated images, but, as it turns out, Schall’s environments aren’t so easy to peg. After most of the crowd dispersed and I saw the work unobstructed, something else occurred to me. Mike Schall’s drawn world, like this social setting, has much more interior than exterior logic.
Sandy Litchfield
by Ben LaRoccoArtSeen
There is a spot on Atlantic Avenue, well known to Brooklyn art lovers, where a great deal of excellent art is exhibited at two fine galleries: Bruno Marina and Metaphor. I would have been as well served to visit Stephen Westfall’s exhibition of drawings at the former, but I strayed first toward the latter and became entangled in the work of a young Massachusetts native named Sandy Litchfield.
Kim Levin
by Lauren RossArtSeen
The artworld is a complex apparatus in which artwork is but a single component. Spaces that show it, dealers that sell it, and critics that gauge and interpret it play as essential a role in establishing success and writing history. This exhibition in many ways is about those systems that are simultaneously ancillary to and crucially embedded in the experience of looking at art. There is no artwork per se on view. Instead we are presented with printed materials related to exhibitions spanning the past thirty years, collected and annotated by critic Kim Levin, and organized for presentation here by artist John Salvest.
Santiago Calatrava
by Cynthia EardleyArtSeen
The unusual and illuminating Santiago Calatrava exhibit at the Met, Sculpture into Architecture, offers a lively array of work by the contemporary Spanish architect who is also a lyrical draftsman and a sculptor. Calatrava’s sculpture and architecture are sometimes connected by a nearly one-to-one formal correlation and always by a distinct sensibility. Connections are still more apparent in the drawings; his skillful transformations from one form of expression to another reveal differences in scale, function, materials, and intent.
