The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
June 2008
ArtSeen
Gert & Uwe Tobias: der osten im norden des westens
by Stephanie BuhmannArtSeen
A few months after their much-discussed exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Gert and Uwe Tobias now make their New York commercial gallery solo debut. As odd as it might seem that these collaborating twins found their entry into the local art scene via one of its most prominent institutions, it fits with the overall mystique of their work.
Mel Bochner
by David MarkusArtSeen
In the forward to the new Mel Bochner book, Solar Systems and Restrooms: Writings and Interviews 1965-2007 (MIT Press), Yves-Alain Bois tells us that “the job” of a work of art, as Bochner conceives of it, is to “question, abolish, or expand boundaries.”
David Ford: White Like Me
by Jillian SteinhauerArtSeen
I came to see the show, but I missed the militia. They were here at the opening, dressed like revolutionary war soldiers, guarding the artwork. This seems only appropriate for a show titled White Like Me. White like the artist, David Ford. White like the men who founded this country and fought the revolutionary war. White like the face of politics and state-sponsored patriotism in America today.
We Are The Seahorses
by Warren FryArtSeen
“Lactose Intolerance Acceptance Revolution!” We Are The Seahorses front man Darren chanted while pumping a glittered fist towards the basement crowd at Courtlandt-land, part of Three Day Weekend, a festival of basement shows that took place across New Brunswick, NJ, April 25th-27th. A torrent of flashing guitars, prerecorded beats, and fleshy antics, the Seahorses’ boisterous show of trailer-park bacchanalia surfaced somewhere between the Ultimate Warrior and Viennese Actionism, with 80’s Americana and political incorrectness on the side.
Le Radeau: Bruce High Quality Foundation Lands in Chelsea
by Maxwell HellerArtSeen
On either side of the entrance to Bruce High Quality Foundation’s retrospective at Sarah Inglett Gallery, two C-prints appear in modest steel frames. At right hangs an image of the New Museum’s lauded façade, with its rainbow-loud “HELL YES” motto, here reduced to unassuming silver-grays; at left is Bruce High Quality Foundation’s response: a picture of a brick building across the street from the museum, festooned with the phrase “HEAVEN FORBID” and patrolled by a tall figure peering with binoculars directly at the viewer.
Milton Resnick: A Question of Seeing
by Thomas MicchelliArtSeen
You don’t so much look at a Milton Resnick painting as step into it, like an elevator shaft. Unmoored from the formal constraints of space and form, Resnick’s picture plane vaporizes into an arena of agitated indeterminacy—a nebulous interlacing of strokes darting with the incessant motion of acute anxiety.
Notes from Underground
by Geoffrey Cruickshank-HagenbuckleArtSeen
he Brooklyn Rail has broadened its map and its definition. Once designating solely the L and G trains it now runs west to burgeoning Chelsea, and includes the JMZ to Bushwick. Beyond the trains, it means also to rail against the foe, affords a balustrade on which to lean when staring into hell below—and stands as the one sure hold we seize in heavy weather.
Prefabricated Art, Undesirable Surreality
by Valery OisteanuArtSeen
Collage and assemblage are the rebellious twins of the modern revolution, challenging the primacy of painting, provoking elusive experimentation, open to all and revealing to few. Started a century ago as a proletarian cubist-dada technique, it is now used and abused across a broad spectrum, exploited in print media as advertising, illustration, political cartooning, and book covers, and succeeding in the multimedia world as digital collage.
Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson
by Josh MorgenthauArtSeen
The piece leading into Take Your Time, the first major U.S. retrospective of Olafur Eliasson’s work, consists of nothing more than some fluorescent lights hung in a hallway. They emit a sickly, single-frequency mustard-yellow that suppresses every other color in the spectrum. The world is revealed to us in monochrome, and we walk through it, stunned, like actors in a black-and-white movie. “Room for One Color” provides a baptism of sorts—preparing us for the series of installations to follow, environments that can be severe and meditative, often at the same time.
Tomory Dodge
by Shane McAdamsArtSeen
He’s gone a bit more abstract this time, but Tomory Dodge’s six large-scale paintings at CRG will be immediately recognizable to those familiar with his work. There are no rock outcroppings, cacti, or icebergs, but his painterly trademarks are all over: gradated, sky-colored backgrounds traversed by rainbow thatches of striated oil paint. They thrive on contrast, pairing flat, monochromatic backgrounds against networks of directional strokes of variegated color. The resulting figure/ground relationship simulates space so deftly that it borders on the manipulative; the visual allure is so impressive that it almost seems calculated. But then again, painting is inherently manipulative; it affects emotions even at its most abstract, and I wouldn’t be surprised if even Richard Tuttle calculates sometimes. So should it bother us that Tomory Dodge’s handling of paint is so thoroughly seductive?
Catherine Murphy
by Greg LindquistArtSeen
Painting at its strongest melds the slowly unfolding process of seeing, both externally and internally, with the distinctive vision of its creator. Taking on a life of its own, painting stands outside of any temporal moment. Yet to depict any such moment paradoxically requires significantly more time for it to be visually parsed and understood. One almost has to live with a painting to fully experience it. Catherine Murphy’s paintings at Knoedler and Company exemplify this kind of deep seeing in her complex depictions of seemingly simple and everyday subjects.
Rebecca Horn: Cosmic Maps
by Joan WaltemathArtSeen
The Snake’s Ghost, the kind of kinetic sculpture for which Rebecca Horn has become known, sits on the floor in the front room at Sean Kelly. It consists of a pool of gray water in a circular steel pan and a finely fabricated apparatus with a spiraling copper rod. The rod agitates the liquid from time to time as it nudges a dark form barely visible on the water’s surface. Spot lit from across the room, a circle of light is reflected onto the adjacent wall, projecting the ripples radiating from the rod’s point of entry into the water. As the ripples meet the edge of the pool, they return to create a complex of interference patterns; at the same time the motion of the apparatus calls attention to itself, pulling the eye back and forth between the generated and the generator.
Paul Chan
by William McManusArtSeen
Paul Chan has suggested that The 7 Lights signal a turn in his objectives as an artist. While his previous wide-screen video animations could be perceived as limited in their specificity of format, indifference to location and consistency of logistics and materials, 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. Dispersed throughout the entire third floor of the New Museum, the “Lights” (comprised of six projections and a score for the seventh) are perhaps best seen as comprising a tactical fold within that space.
Weltanschauung and Abstract Painting
by Robert C. MorganArtSeen
While we may speak about the common factor between these two exhibitions as being abstraction or, more precisely, abstract painting, there are some interesting differences between the two. The exhibition at Metaphor Contemporary art, titled Spectrum, consists of four artists, each dealing preeminently with color in relation to variations of shape and form.
Steve DiBenedetto Chaoticus
by John YauArtSeen
Best known for his symbolic paintings—encrusted surfaces jam-packed with lattices, neural networks, cracked TV screens, helicopters, Ferris wheels, and octopi pushing against the painting’s physical edges—Steve DiBenedetto first gained larger attention when his work was included in an eight-artist survey, Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing, at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2005).
Nicolas Carone: Recent Paintings
by John YauArtSeen
In the past few years, we have gotten tantalizing indications of Nicolas Carone’s achievement as a draftsman, as a sculptor, and as a painter. But the full extent of what he has done remains hidden, like an iceberg. Whatever the backstory, the reason for this is simple. From 1954 until 1962, Carone, who was born in 1917, regularly exhibited his work in New York, first at the Stable Gallery and then at Staempfli.
