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Ghada Amer and Alec Soth
Gagosian Gallery
By Nicollette Ramirez Ghada Amer employs unique, sexual imagery to address a range longstanding issues such as male versus female, East versus West and fine art as differentiated from art craft. Through a combination of drawing, painting and embroidery the work in this show conjures the imagery of fairy tales and pornographic poses reminiscent of adolescent sexual fantasies; and for the first time text figures prominently in her canvases.
The works, Black Longing; Black Pain; Black Torment; Desire; and Black Absence, (all completed in 2005) each have a distinct tinge of black paint that in color and application closely reflects the emotion behind the title. For instance, Torment is represented eerily with a greenish, bronze tinge that mimics the flames of an all consuming hell.
The fairy tale series is done on paper with colored pencil, embroidery, collage, acrylic and watercolor. These works present a range of light-hearted themes with repeated images of castles, Snow Whites, autumn leaves and black birds, interspersed with girls romping and kissing.
Among the larger works in the show, The Big Black Kansas City Painting RFGA (2005) and Knotty But Nice (2005) face each other at a right angle, and the juxtaposition of color and composition creates a curious balance. The Big Black Kansas City Painting is almost like a tapestry of embroidery glued to the surface of the black canvas by gel. The imagery of sexy shoes and legs are all but lost except upon close inspection. Knotty But Nice is rendered in pastel colors (green, yellow, blue) utilizing cartoony shapes which compliment the embroidery that "drips" down the canvas in unison with the drips of paint. The repeated imagery of spread legs, dildos, mating tongues, fingers and faces in ecstacy contribute to the sense of being part of a wild orgy. But the feeling is frustrated by the abstract nature of the imagery, buried as it is under matted, knotty embroidery; this is perhaps a fitting metaphor for the state of the union between sexes and the world in general.
Alec Soth’s photographs come out of a tradition of photography that is at once dated and contemporary. Soth’s skill is in capturing the nature of people and a place. In Niagra he explores romantic love from the vantage point of motels, couples, families, individuals, letters and the odd landscape that defines Niagra Falls.
Fairway Motor Inn (2005) is a scene of harmonious shapes and color. Against the backdrop of a gray winter sky, the rectangular coral red doors pop out from the façade of a white two story motel. This color combination extends down into the parking lot where a red Cadillac with a white back roof stands next to a pile of dirty melting snow.
Soth describes a candid view of the inhabitants in prints like Christina and Jonathan (2005), which shows a close-up of a black couple lying on a sofa-like Odalisques. The texture and striation of color on their skin mimics that of the leopard print cloth that covers the sofa. There is dignity in their pose and in the expression on the couple’s face, despite the vulnerable situation in which they are depicted.
Soth’s shots of the Falls are some of the most stirring works in the show, capturing the monumental grace and power of this natural phenomena. Seen together, in the context of Amer’s introspective works, the two artists complement one another in ways that give greater depth and meaning to the respective works as a whole.
Through 2/25.
E-Mail This Article Homage to Seymour Boardman
Anita Shapolsky Gallery
By Joel Simpson
Seymour Boardman, who died last October at the age of 84, is the subject of this retrospective exhibition at the gallery owned by his long-time friend and artistic representative, Anita Shapolsky. Although the number of works in the show is not large, they well represent the range of styles in which he painted over his lifetime, and as such included here are some of his most significant paintings. The show also includes interesting works by Boardman's friends, Lawrence Calcagno, Perez Celis, John Hultberg, Burt Hasen, Richards Ruben, Robert Ryman and Nassos Daphnis.
Boardman was a New York abstract expressionist who studied in Paris from 1946 to 1948, including a stint in the studio of Fernand Leger. He began to acquire recognition in the 1950s with his paintings of griddled facets seen as if through a frosted glass, without any crisp lines, and in bright colors favoring reds. He received various awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim award in 1973.
What is striking about Boardman, though, is his abrupt changes of style. He would paint in one particular style for a time, then make an oblique turn in a seemingly quite unrelated direction. For example, from those rich facetted paintings of the 1950s that seem to celebrate abundance and diversity, he segued during the early 1960s into simpler two or three-color paintings dominated by a sweeping parabolic arc where the two colors meet. The colors are always deep, often saturated, such as dark green and black, or maroon and cobalt blue. The gestures of these paintings convey a simple certitude.
Then in the late 1960s Boardman made another abrupt about-face and began producing black paintings with single jagged lines of raw canvas running from an upper corner to a lower edge; one might call them paths through invisible labyrinths, or perhaps through seas of troubles. Starkly pessimistic, they seem to have nothing to do with his earlier work.
Although the artist was purportedly apolitical, one can’t help but assign valences from the Zeitgeist to these stylistic shifts. It would seem logical that someone growing up in the Great Depression, who is welcomed into adulthood by World War II, would feel exhilarated with the possibilities for growth and self-expression during the 1950s, a decade that, for all its suburban conformism, still spawned the Beat movement, saw the birth of radical breakaway movements in contemporary jazz, and nourished an array of practitioners of his own abstract art. The early 1960s was an even more hopeful time, in this regard. With a youthful John Kennedy as President and solid progress in the Civil Rights movement, Boardman’s style shifts to one of great assurance, one might even say optimism, with his simple colors and sweeps.
Once the Vietnam war begins to dampen the national mood, to put it mildly, and a paranoiac Nixon era begins to unfold, Boardman’s work seems to speak of despair, of a narrow, jagged path through anxiety and dread. In another part of the art world post-modernism is being born, mocking the duplicity of public discourse and image. Abstract expressionist Boardman, however, whose paintings had hitherto celebrated energy, abundance, diversity and conviction, abruptly eliminated the image.
But true to form, he doesn’t stay there either. Ever restless, he shifts in the 1970s to utilizing rectangles, framed by linear ones against a contrasting colored background. Think of Rothko taking off on a Mondrian. Then in the 1980s we see a return to the jagged pathways; bright solid colors replace the black, and the pathways are cut off from exiting at the edges of his canvas.
Of course, it is a matter of conjecture to suggest the degree to which an artist’s work reflects a given social political environment. The breadth and sophistication of Boardman’s oeuvre as presented here, however, is rife with hidden labyrinths and nuance of meaning.
Through 3/4.
E-Mail This Article Kim Levin
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
By E.K. Clark This show, by Village Voice art critic Kim Levin, presents an unusual premise for an exhibition. Dubbed Notes and Itineraries, the show tracks Levin’s daily work routine as a well known art critic, in the form of lists and coded comments she has scribbled on accumulated gallery invitations and promotional materials, dating back to 1976.
The exhibition is installed and organized by John Salvest, an artist from Arkansas who is interested in such accumulations as an art form. In the front room of the gallery, we follow this nostalgic itinerary by way of hundreds of cards projecting from the walls; while in the back, the walls are covered with a collection of press releases and check lists, all reminiscent of a1970s conceptual display. Here the question arises: How were the cards and press releases chosen? Were the choices driven by esthetic concerns or by favored artists and or galleries? That certain galleries and artists are excluded from Ms. Levin’s itineraries is inevitable, yet intriguing in terms of guessing about the process of elimination.
In a time when it seems like everyone is an art critic and an artist too, Ms. Levin, who championed Appropriation as an art practice in the 1980s, goes one step further with the premise of this show in challenging the definition of the artist as original author of an artwork. Has art and art criticism finally been joined here in a marriage of convenience? In this regard, perhaps it is worth recalling that the great filmmaker artist, Francois Truffout, was once a critic before changing sides too.
through 2/4.
E-Mail This Article Russia 2 / Bad News from Russia
Bad News From Russia at White Box
By E.K. Clark When it opened in the exhibition hall of the Central House of Artists, in Moscow in January, 2005, Russia 2 caused a huge controversy. A group unaffiliated with the exhibition from the Central House of Artists filed a civil suit against Mr. Marat Guelman, the curator of the show and the owner of the first post-Soviet gallery in Rusia. The complaint cited provisions in Russia’s criminal code against inciting ethnic and religious hatred and asked for compensation for “moral injury” in the sum of $175,000. So far the court has rejected these charges, but the case has not yet been resolved. A selection of works from Russia 2 is presented here at White Box, Magnan Projects Annex in Chelsea, and this work will also be shown later this month at the Ethan Cohen Gallery (see Soho - Tribeca listings).
According to Mr. Guelman, Russia 1 depicts the repressive state created by President Putin; while Russia 2 is intended as a platform for all creative and freedom loving people, not only for artists but for journalists and even small businesses. So how does this “confrontational, provocative and scandalous show” read in the context of New York?
It is said that raw caviar, local politics and satirical humor don’t travel well; something gets lost in translation. Russian satire was sharpened as a defensive tactic in the face of Soviet oppression, and now that President Putin has in effect reinstated the old guard by crushing civil liberties to consolidate his ever growing czar-like powers (even the mayor of Moscow is no longer elected, but appointed by the president, while Putin’s judicial appointees deftly persecute his political opponents), once again, artists in Russia 2 respond with biting satire and absurdist humor against an authoritarian state. However, the impact of such an exhibition in an open society, such as New York, is not exactly earth shaking.
Bad News From Russia might raise some hackles elsewhere, but in New York’s trendy Chelsea art district the show mostly provoked mild chuckles. For example, Alexander Kosalapov’s This Is My Blood, a painting showing an image of Jesus Christ side by side with the Coca Cola logo and the caption, “This Is My Blood” equates American consumerism with Russian Orthodox consumption of religion. Most Americans would find this conceit puzzling or even bizarre. Then, there are the Constructivist inspired posters by Avder Ter-Oganyan, central in the civil suit launched by the Orthodox “believers” in Moscow. One must admire an artist who, so cleverly, managed to create such a huge fuss with so little material. At the bottom of the work entitled Pure Abstraction is a caption in Russian which reads “This work is intended to kindle religious animosity.” Apparently It doesn’t take much to set off a storm in an authoritarian state.
The Blue Noses stand out both for their acuity, satirical humor and sheer fun. Their two video loops, The Little Men Series are brilliant. One, Lenin Turning In His Grave (2005) shows a little man, Lenin, squirming comically; it refers to the present post-socialist society.
The second, Reality Show, presents three characters in a room with a toilet; we see a naked woman and two men in boxer shorts running in an endless cycle of eating, defecating and taking turns fornicating with a passive female. Life is stripped down to the basics; this is Russian black humor at its best.
Another work, a color photograph from a series called Mask-Show (Political Dances) features three men, again in their silly boxer shorts, wearing the masks of President Vladimir Putin, Osama Bin Laden and President George Bush. Instead of a black eye, President Bush sports a cast on one of his legs, possibly an allusion to his convoluted Iraqi campaign.
The AES group in their chilling digital print Liberty 2006 from the series Witnesses of the Future Islamic Project, depicts the statue of Liberty shrouded with a burkah holding the tablets of Islamic law (shariat).
In Inspiration 2006 Vladimir Dubosarsky and Alexander Vinogradov depict handsome male brutes battling in a supremely peaceful field, full of colorful flowers. Executed in a mock heroic painterly realist style, this work is an apparent riff on former Soviet Social-Realist paintings which depict happy peasants and workers going about their chores in socialist bliss.
Oleg Kulik, perhaps the best known artist in this exhibition, presents a highly romantic view of resistance, and this in itself is provocative. In Bus Stop he depicts a beautiful woman as a female suicide bomber, with explosives strapped around her waist, sleeping at the foot of a crumbling monument to Stalin. In Moscow, this work was shown on the street, outside the exhibition hall, which must have made an impact on the general population, given the context of Putin’s Chechnya fiasco.
With their characteristic Russian boisterousness, the artists in Russia 2 /Bad News From Russia touch upon all of the topics banned from the Moscow Biennale, such as any reference to religion, politics and sex, proving once again that that the personal is political. As such, Russia 2 suggests a parallel cultural system that provides a free, uncensored space in an open society for voices deemd too independent for Putin’s Russia.
Through 1/11.
E-Mail This Article Thomas Hirschhorn
Barbara Gladstone Gallery >>
By Nicollette Ramirez Hirschhorn’s Superficial Engagement brings the topics of war, art and media in collision with each other. The crowded platforms throughout the gallery hardly leave space for an audience to maneuver; this is a physical metaphor for the show. The sensory overload of words and images (sculpture, geometric drawings, paintings, video, photographs and text gleaned from newspapers and magazines) evokes the information overload of today’s global communication age in which our minds scurry around with little space to maneuver.
Hirschhorn begins with the surface and then plumbs the depths of his subject. Using everyday materials such as cardboard,
tape, foil paper and screws he creates a world in which the
spoils of war are made disturbingly real. Large blown up photographs
show us what mainstream media does not; the cavity of a man’s
chest, brains spilling out of a crushed head, a body burnt
beyond recognition. One has the sense of walking among the
dead, with all its associations of repulsion and reverence.
Several photographs are repeated over and over again, like
images from a nightmare. The superficial gore is not presented
for shock value, rather for reflection on a topic that the
public seems to have become blasé about, and accept
as normal.
Screws over the head and body of truncated mannequins recall
a time when Christianity was new and martyrs ended their lives
in the most torturous of ways. These beautiful, hard, inanimate
specimens are a reminder of the protective shells we may build
up to block out the pain of such universal experiences as
war.
Hirschhorn cites one of his influences as Emma Kunz. Her work
as a healer is invoked here almost as a balm to salve the
pain of the modern world of war. Her influence on Hirschhorn’s
geometric drawings are pleasantly obvious; the order behind
these works contrasts with the chaos of the installation and
the subject matter that inspired it. But even in the contrasts
one can feel the harmony of the juxtaposition of these works;
order cannot exist without chaos.
While the artist may be aiming to "engage the emphatic
reasoning of the viewer" it is safe to say that the Western
concept of reason cannot, unto itself, solve all the ills
of the world. Perhaps some solutions lie outside of reason,
in a realm accessible to artists such as Emma Kunz and Thomas
Hirschhorn, beyond rational thinking, buried somewhere in
the creative process.
Through 2/11.
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Riding the Second Wave
Art Miami 2006
By
Michael MacInnis
The contrast between this year’s installment of Miami’s
oldest art fair, Art Miami 2006 and last year’s is remarkable.
In 2005 conventional wisdom held that the enourmous success
of Art Basel Miami Beach, which preceedes Art Miami by one
month and utilizes the same exhibition venue, the Miami Beach
Convention Center, would take the wind out of Art Miami. Some
even predicted the fair’s early demise. Today, however,
the fair’s renewed focuss on actracting international
dealers, together with Miami’s enhanced stature as a
world class art destination, has produced an entirely new
dynamic. The quality of the fair has risen to meet the demands
of an increasingly sophisticated urban population, while at
the same time the city’s home-grown art neighborhoods,
notably the Wynwood Art District, the Design District and
Coral Gables have come into their own.
Where once people had wondered aloud if Miami could sustain
two major art fairs, today the question is more likely to
be this: Are these two fairs really enough to fill the demand
for culture in today’s Miami?
1/6 Through 1/9.
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