The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
April 2008
ArtSeen
Matt Connors Enjambment
by Josh MorgenthauArtSeen
There is nothing spontaneous, however, in the path of references Connors charts. A hodgepodge of modernist sources lurks in the background: in one piece, a bulls-eye shape is reminiscent of Kenneth Noland or Jasper Johns; in another, gauzy layers of thinned paint form a black veil—an unexpected take on stain painting. The lively geometric rigor of Al Held exerts its influence, as does the clunky tenderness of Arthur Dove. Two paintings employ dabs of black paint overlaid onto a gridded blue fabric, which we soon recognize as a preprinted material. Connors has, in an act of witty appropriation, trod the line between Agnes Martin and American Apparel. After spending time with Connors’ work, however, one is most reminded of the work of Alfred Jensen, whose direct form of painting was as ecstatic as it was grounded in calendars and mathematical systems. Rules provided the scaffolding for a vibrant sense of color and the materiality of paint. Connors too uses rules to limit color and shape, affording each work the structured freedom of a visual investigation.
Enantiomorphic Chamber
by Cassandra NeyeneschArtSeen
Enantiomorphic Chamber is not a statement of purpose or a world-changing philosophy, but it does explore a visual idea that seems to open up much wider fields of inquiry all around it, and that’s pretty exciting. An enantiomorph is “a pair of asymmetrical figures that are mirror images of one another.” The title is borrowed from a Robert Smithson work of 1965 in which two mirrors were angled so that when the viewer stood between them, his reflection disappeared.
Tadaaki Kuwayama’s Aesthetics of Infinity
by Robert C. MorganArtSeen
Born in Nagoya, Japan, Kuwayama came with his wife, the artist, Rakuko Naito, to the United States in 1958, roughly the same time as Yayoi Kusama and Yoko Ono. By 1960-61, he had already developed a reputation as a reductivist painter through his association with such important gallerists as Richard Bellamy and Bruno Bischofberger. Over the years, Kuwayama’s work gradually evolved from a singular emblematic style of painting towards a more total installation or environmental sensibility.
Marcel Dzama Even the Ghost of the Past
by Shane McAdamsArtSeen
On March 6, Marcel Dzama’s anticipated exhibition, Even the Ghost of the Past, opened at David Zwirner, marking the cresting of the neo-folk floodwaters. His work, once groundbreaking and as fresh as the air in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he’s from, now looks more familiar than ever. Along with his widely recognized works on paper and sculptures, Dzama offers a darkened room of eight dioramas and Lotus Eaters (2005), a silent film partially shot with a Fisher Price PixelVision toy video camera (transferred to DVD for the exhibition) and accompanied on certain days by live piano music.
Dan Walsh
by Cassandra NeyeneschArtSeen
Paintings by Dan Walsh at Paula Cooper Gallery summon several monumental streams of late twentieth century painting—color field, geometric abstraction, and even the less monumental Op—to the side of an artist who somehow eludes categorization. The works are comprised of regular lines, grids or squares repeated in near-perfect regularity; near-perfect because Walsh paints without the use of tape or projectors, and the almost invisible irregularity of his “hand” gives the work its stamp, a kind of subliminal vitality.
Guglielmo Achille Cavellini: Works from 1960 to 1990
by Valery OisteanuArtSeen
Born into an old Tuscan family in Brescia on September 11, 1914, he began to draw during his military service and made caricatures of his fellow soldiers. After World War II, he began to exhibit the works of Vedova and San Tomaso in his home in Villa Bonomese in Brescia. The town was scandalized by the show, but the works attracted the attention of younger Italian artists, many of whom were to remain in contact with Cavellini throughout his life.
Lori Ellison
by Geoffrey Cruickshank-HagenbuckleArtSeen
The eternal return of the same is not metaphysics; it’s an aesthetic! The obsessive-compulsive busies herself frantically to insure that nothing happens, furiously weaving nets to bind trauma. That “trauma” is real life. Shock, lack, and the abyssal wail remain in force then wrest control, but such discord is not well captured by mere fracture.
Joseph DeLappe Gandhi’s March to Dandi
by Warren FryArtSeen
Is Second Life merely an iconic simulation of commerce, privatization, and exclusivity or could it work as an engine for building social awareness? Attempts to awaken users to the concerns of real life by way of strife-free virtual worlds may seem counterintuitive at best. Joseph DeLappe’s latest attempt at Internet game activism, Gandhi’s March to Dandi, was performed at Chelsea’s Eye Beam Atelier, a recreation in Second Life of Gandhi’s 1930 march in protest of the British salt tax.
Dave Miko
by Craig OlsonArtSeen
Dave Miko offers perplexing painting for perplexed people, unsettling and comforting in the same tentative breath. Suffice it is to add that the paintings are quiet, unostentatious, and unpredictable, with the bulk of the show consisting of recently completed text-based paintings. The shimmering elegance of their surfaces is the result of oil paint on aluminum sheets.
Ruth Root
by Nora GriffinArtSeen
From afar Ruth Root’s painting is not easily recognizable as painting. Its slick surface calls to mind metal, plastic, or some unknown medium of the future. Ultra thin, brightly colored, variably shaped aluminum set flush against the gallery wall creates the impression of an object naturally merging with the wall space; an organic extension that could perhaps rearrange its contours if you turned your back for a moment.
Hungover at Whitney
by David MarkusArtSeen
At the material level, a significant portion of the work featured in the exhibit—from Ruben Ochoa’s uprooted chain link fence to Mika Tajima’s bizarre pageant of shifting mirrors and distorted audio—pursues an aesthetic of fragmentation, disjunction, or, in the case of Walead Beshty’s safety laminate-encased, fractured glass boxes (an allusion to Duchamp’s damaged-in-transit The Large Glass?), just plain brokenness.
America’s Lessness
by Sharon L. ButlerArtSeen
During the twentieth century, while American artists did not generally take the country’s integrity for granted, they did tap the rich vein of its mythic virtue with a tacit understanding that it was not all illusory. In the mid-Fifties, Jasper Johns adopted the American flag as the subject for a series of groundbreaking painterly meditations. The paintings are at once abstract and representational, universal and personal. Johns’ viewpoint is ambiguous, leaving the symbolic message open-ended.
Kalm Before the Storm, Responses to “The Ethics of Aesthetics”
by James KalmArtSeen
It seems my March column “The Ethics of Aesthetics” induced some urgent replies from a couple of the article’s major players. In keeping with the Brooklyn Rail’s tradition of encouraging open discourse, these two letters are being published in their entirety.
Brooklyn Dispatches
by James KalmArtSeen
I’d bumped into this kid after closing time on a Sunday afternoon in the “Killing Room” at a Williamsburg gallery. I’m usually running around looking at shows in the off-hours, trying to get an unobstructed view of the work. Seems young artists on the make have picked up on the idea, since it’s a great time to talk to exhausted gallerists wrapping up the weekend, their defenses down.
Flip: Rachel Beach and Nora Herting
by Hrag VartanianArtSeen
Its latest show, Flip, brings together two artists, Rachel Beach and Nora Herting, who are completely immersed in a world of decoration and design. While they share some commonalities, they diverge in their approach and success. Beach is a sculptor who excels in fashioning art out of the seemingly superficial world of veneers, but shallow her objects are not. Herting shows two-dimensional work that seeks to do for cheerleaders what Warhol did for the soup can, fixating on them until they melt into metaphors for something else.
Catherine Sullivan Triangle of Need
by Thomas MicchelliArtSeen
A work of this scale and audacity necessarily defies the ordinary tools of assessment; perhaps the most straightforward way to approach it is through the sources that Sullivan and her collaborators, composer Sean Griffin and choreographer Dylan Skybrook, have acknowledged in their writings. These include, for starters, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Japanese Butoh and Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen Foster, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body by archeologist Stephen Mithen, and James Merrill’s epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover.
Lydia Dona FROM HEAT TO SUB-ZERO
by John YauArtSeen
Something of that porousness between machine and human is to be found in Lydia Dona’s most recent exhibition, which consists of one large, three-panel painting (seven feet high and sixteen feet wide) and four prints. The ostensible subject is what lies behind the surface of upscale, urban lives, the designer-perfect condos that are part of New York City’s building boom, which, if you have looked up Sixth Avenue recently, doesn’t appear to be slowing down.
Jasper Johns
by John YauArtSeen
Ever since he completed his groundbreaking Flag (1954-55), Jasper Johns has persistently and, for many, annoyingly defined himself as an individual of no special merit, fixed identity, or authorial “I,” who stands outside both the Marxist definition of worker and the romanticized notion of the artist as hero. Instead of letting himself become the center of attention, he has repeatedly stepped aside, so that it is his art that we must experience rather than anything he says about it.
June Leaf Paintings & Sculpture
by John YauArtSeen
These days you would think that the only woman artist over seventy-five is Louise Bourgeois. And yet, even if Leaf didn’t pave anyone’s way, and was in fact a completely isolated figure, as she has been called by some observers, her work—she paints, draws, and makes sculptures—demands far more attention than it has received.
