AC
AC is a Public Service Project for the Documentation of All Art
Fall-Winter 2004, 1.2
Holly Crawford, Founder and Editor
New York
“Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Kara Walker”
Brent Sikkema, 530 W. 22 St., Sept. 7-Oct.2
Energetic, loose works on paper of modest size involving the figure. Yellow and black/gray ink washed hands and faces by Schutz, bright colored wash and pencil pieces by Sillman, and black paper cut-out silhouettes of sprightly characters paper-fastened at their joints by Walker. –Barbara Rosenthal
Todd Hido, “Roaming”
Julie Saul Gallery, 535 W. 22 St., Sept. 9-Oct. 6
In conjunction with new book of same title (Nazraeli Press), are soft-focus low-intensity bleak color landscapes shot from a moving car in inclement weather, at the gallery which has become the butt of many jokes for its policy, now advertised by a sign, regarding No Public Access to its Restrooms. –BR
Street Art
W. 22 St. between 10th and 11th Aves.
On sidewalk in front of Sonnabend at # 536: 4” red stenciled lettering, repeated vertically 4 times, two rows: “SEXY ALISON/7188546091.”. Glued to mailbox near #535: Unsigned b&w poster 12 of 953 with man’s headshot and “Not Just A Statistic. Stephen Bertolino: Always stopped to help people stopped along the roadside.” –BR
Robin Hill, “Multiplying the Variations,” Lennon, Weinberg, 560 Broadway, Sept.23-Oct. 23
Patterned sculptural installations incorporating everything from pins and mica discs to sand and rusty flotsam and cyanotypes. Obsessive and yet fantastical, workaholic and yet playful, the work perfectly balances intellect and sensuality, and also bespeaks Hill’s multiple homes – New York, the Sacramento Valley, and the Cape Breton shore. – Peter Frank
Judith Murray, “Energies and Equations,” Sundaram Tagore, 137 Greene St., Oct. 6-Nov. 7
Within a simple formal proscription – canvas covered mostly by an actively brushed area with a vertical strip, usually at right edge, left colored but unmarked – Murray lathers up handsome and distinctive, but varied, gestural abstractions. Her mastery of color is so natural as to be offhand. – PF
Phillis Ideal, Rosenberg + Kaufman, 115 Wooster St., Oct. 28-Dec. 24
Intricately interlocked shapes and their vivid colors seethe beneath curiously still and lustrous, almost lacquer-like surfaces. These plastic glazes do not dull movement and texture, however, but bring out the edges – often as sharp as collage – between forms. A stunning meld of the fluid and the brittle. – PF
Patterson Beckwith, “Home”American Fine Arts Co./Colin De Land Fine Art, 530 22nd St. July 22-Sept 4
An anti-commodity participatory performance installation series puppet show summer school might begin to state the nature of this grand funky exhibition, the culmination of which is a 99-cent sale of the various artifacts produced in its impromptu workshops. –Barbara Rosenthal
Liz-n-Val, “After Art”
Street Corner Performance, SW Corner 25 St., 10th Ave, Sept. 9
This couple, who have always caused one to ponder the art/experience connection, stationed themselves in the pouring rain, under a tree with their thumbtacked sign “After Art,” at a shopping cart-turned-desk, to dialogue with passersby about art seen at the zillions of first-of-season openings in this neighborhood that evening. –Barbara Rosenthal
EIDIA, “We Apologize Book Launch”
Printed Matter, 535 W. 22nd St, Sept 18
Like Liz-n-Val, this is a couple concerned with links between art and life. EIDIA = Everything I Do Is Art, and this launch is for a compendium of documentation from their works in many media since 1983. The title is a tongue-in-cheek reference to what they see as the current self-censorship of careerist artists.–Barbara Rosenthal
Theresa Hackett, “More Ground to Cover”
Florence Lynch Gallery, 539 W. 25 St., Sept. 9-Oct. 9
Very thin washes of thalos, ochres and ultramarines over slightly raised bright-white gesso patches, evocative of cross sections of hills and skies, above which lightweight boulders hover as orbitoids. Atop each frame are white stacked paper streamers. –Barbara Rosenthal
Jeanne Susplugas, “Ordinary Landscapes”
Florence Lynch Gallery Project Space, 539 W. 25 St., Sept. 9-Oct. 9
Elegant soft-edged, bubble-like forms rise into brown-purple atmospheres from black liquid surfaces in these three high-gloss 40 x 60 horizontal C-prints. This work shows promise that more runs beneath the surface of this artist, a promise borne out by her book of 15 glossy photo-postcards with cryptic remarks about art. –Barbara Rosenthal
Richard Deacon, sculpture, Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 W. 57th, Sept 8-Oct 7, “Red Sea Crossing,” “Individual,” and “Couple,” three sculptures of curving, twisting strips of polished wood, inviting one to peer through the slats and enjoy the spaces, are placed around the floor, and one set of flatter stainless steel pieces, grandly entitled “Infinity,” is on the wall. –Barbara Rosenthal
Bill Barminski, “Is This Important /East,” Ricco Maresca, 529 West 20th St., Sept. 9-Oct. 30
Barminski’s best known for his surrealistically tinged, “dirtied-down” pop art, but with that corny combo he goes in hunt of social and political targets. Here he aims his visual invective not just at the usual Michael-Moorish targets, but at art world pretensions, including his own. These barbs come in the form of cartoons mounted as if they were wall texts to a scientific display. – PF
William Willis, “Embracing Failure,” Howard Scott, 529 West 20th St., Oct. 7-30
The veteran Washington-based abstractionist remains a master of forthright complexity with his intricately composed, subtly colored, roughly but deftly painted compositions. The merest hints of reference to the outside world – a deeply scalloped shape suggesting a flower, for instance – add humor to an already eccentric, drily witty aesthetic.-- PF
Karen Shaw, “Unraveling,” Susan Conde, 521 West 23rd St., Oct. 2-Nov. 6
Shaw has been interpreting numbers into letters – and thence words – for over thirty years. As this microspective showed, her earlier work translated pop sources like supermarket ads and sport photographs into “found” poetry, while more recently Shaw has applied her “summantics” to things as wonderfully far-fetched as acupuncture anatomy (specifically the numbered points along the meridian lines). – PF
John Evans, “As Days Go By,” Pavel Zoubok, 533 West 23rd St., Oct. 14-Nov. 13
One of New York art’s most prodigious diarists (this marks the fortieth year of his daily devotion), John Evans is also one of its least readable. His quotidian notations are dense combinations of painting, drawing, and collage, modernist illuminations in which the most readable things are the arcane references. – PF
Raphael Montañez Ortiz, “Stargate Vision,” Mitchell Algus, 511 West 25th St., Oct. 16-Nov. 13
Several early-`60s “destruction-art” objects – and one from this year – mix in with recent digital prints inspired by sources both historical (Shay’s Rebellion) and mystical (Angel Path Tree of Life), plus a hypnotic computer-manipulated video of musicians. Once a happenings artist – i.e., melder of art and life, to the benefit of both – always a happenings artist. -- PF
Rainer Gross, “Contact Paintings/on canvas and paper,” Axel Raben, 526 West 26th St., Oct. 14-Nov. 27
Gross has employed many styles and techniques in his career, but his sensibility remains one that finds endless beauty in a visual field made dense with conceptual play. Here, he comes up with sensuously decayed surfaces, like weatherbeaten walls, resulting from the separation of two painted surfaces that had been adhere to one another. – PF
Cildo Meireles, “Descalas and Strictu,” Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th St., Oct. 23-Dec. 4
The Brazilian conceptualist, one of the most affectingly clever artists alive, presents two elegant installations. Descalas plays with permutations on a ladder-like formation, a kind of mental opening-up, while Strictu grimly closes down its space, indicting the contemporary geopolitical condition, by literalizing an Orwellian quote actually said by a Ku Klux Klanner in the 1960s. – PF
Varujan Boghosian, Constructions, Washburn, 20 West 57th St., Sept. 9-Oct. 23
Dark, poetic whimsy combines with either exquisite woodcraft or a Cornellian sense of the inanimate-object-absurd, and sometimes both. Boghosian is better known for the craft, so the funky, neo-surrealist low-relief assemblages always come as a surprise, especially as they strip away just about everything but his deeply poetic sensibility. – PF
Howard Daum, David Findlay Jr., 41 East 57th St., Oct. 4-28
A key member of the mid-`40s Indian Space group (he coined the term), Daum applied the movement’s geometric-symbolic aesthetic, if not their pictographic thinking, to his work for the rest of his career. This tantalizing microspective shows that Daum could do just about anything with Indian Space’s rolling rhythms and irregular forms, from neo-Synchromist abstraction to stylized landscape. – PF
Cora Cohen, Recent Paintings, Jason McCoy, 41 East 57th St., Sept.-Oct.
Cohen’s new work is ferociously, exhilaratingly hard to look at, both rationally and sensually. She employs a kind of painterly jolie laide, where streaks and strokes, trails and entrails, clots and blobs conform into what feels like pure accident, untouched by human hands. Instead of a Pollockian unconscious, Cohen paints with the super-consciousness of nature. – PF
Lester Johnson, “Four Decades of Painting,” James Goodman, 41 East 57th St., Sept. 28-Oct. 30
Johnson has always limited his subject matter to the human figure, stylized and anonymous yet personable and vulnerable. Earlier, he painted single or paired figures in rough, runny ab-ex strokes. Since the 1960s his people have peopled the streets, taking on a more naturalistic cast, but his painting is no less rich, his palette no less gritty. – PF
Esphyr Slobodkina, “Journey into Abstraction,” Kraushaar, 724 Fifth Avenue, Oct. 1-30
One of the stronger prewar American abstractionists, Slobodkina had a postwar career, too, and this show traced the connection between earlier and later work. It focused on the paintings of the 1940s and `50s, emphasizing Slobodkina’s Stuart Davis-esque, but no less lively or distinctive, geometric manner. – PF
Francesca Woodman, Photographs 1975-1980, Marian Goodman, 24 West 57th St., Oct. 12-Nov. 13
Woodman, a suicide at 22, has become the very paradigm for tragic artistic precocity, but the emphasis should be on the precocity, not the tragedy. Her black and white, delicately photographed fantasies, shot in decaying interiors, resuscitate the opulent reverie of the symbolists and surrealists. But the images speak of magic more than melancholy. – PF
Kathy Butterly, “Fall into Spring,” and Altoon Sultan, Egg Tempera Paintings, Ibor De Nagy, 724 Fifth Avenue, Oct. 21-Nov. 27
The ceramic medium is far more supple than most of us suppose, and Kathy Butterly’s improbable, even frightening little porcelains demonstrate this emphatically. They might be best described as mutant knickknacks, morphing from well-behaved banality into object-creatures who seem toxic and friendly by turns. Altoon Sultan’s luminous egg-tempera renditions of machine parts and the like share Butterly’s amped color sense and love of formal peculiarity. – PF
Jane Wilson, DC Moore, 724 5th Avenue, Oct. 26-Nov. 27
After half a century of painting the low-slung eastern Long Island landscape, Wilson has turned it into a visual meditation, a mantra of atmosphere whose “om” is the horizon line. She can paint in any direction, at any time of day (including nighttime) and envelop the viewer, even though her paintings stay paintings. – PF
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Prints, curated by Pia Maria Simig with Ann Uppington, UBS Gallery, 1285 Ave. Americas, Sept. 23-Dec. 3
The brilliantly inventive, immensely scholarly, and notoriously feisty Scotsman is one of the pioneers of concrete poetry. His contribution to the visualization of the word, however, has been less typographic than hypergraphic, elaborated fabulously with diagrams, archaisms, and visual puns. This rich retrospective should be in major museums. – PF
Hans Richter, “Early Works from the Estate,” Janos Gat, 1100 Madison Ave., Sept. 21-Nov. 6
One of the Zeligs of modern art, Cubist-Dadaist-Surrealist-proto-Abstract Expressionist Richter began as an expressionist, one of the younger angst-flingers in Berlin who rode out the First World War in a state of ecstatic fury. Still, the best works here were the most abstract, the “Dada Heads” and the geometric studies for his non-objective film animations. – PF
VO MOMA Re-Opening, November 2004, New York.
There’s a lot of art…I have to see it six more times…I have to work the show…nice to meet you… right…so, you’re from Ohio…I had no idea…you have the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame…spread the good word…it’s fabulous …who’s the artist? ...he’s speaking at the MET…what about New Year’s…looks British …yes, yes…it’s a new acquisition…I like this better…it’s crass and sophomoric…excellent, excellent…I know, perfect…yes, yes… that reads, ‘paint on wall,’ look what it says ‘paint on the wall’... I don’t know…this is …not compared to the stuff upstairs………………………………………. ….I’ve only been in New York for six weeks …and then...did you …did you see this … they’re projecting right in the room …what … let’s go down a level …that’s the membership that gets you in free…I don’t know why I got it, honestly…most have something to do with … yes, yes…you have to schedule…the Europeans do it …did you get it…out of the blue…maybe because I’ve been a member for years…I go the movies …if you go nine times …I joined because of the films, not the art…where do you live? ...Union Square … Hoboken…I’ve moved …57…I had no idea…………….……..what this is…no wait …it’s like…oh, your kidding …she does wonderful work… this space is perfect … camera … exposures …three years…that’s right … you’re right here…what do you want to do?...I don’t know …it’s that or white on white…the sad thing is I was waiting for you ... I’m at the eye, Magritte …where are you? I think …is Paloma a painter …on the floor…no,… not yet………………… …………………………downstairs…………….. ………………..……… …this Friday… maybe we’ll see you…we have a dinner engagement …Greg loves Klee … Brancusi…yes, Brancusi …keep going…then you reach the end …………. and he was starving …right…so it may be a dream…that might explain it…all these things…that have been hidden for all these years………………………..This room is almost exactly the same…I’m living out of boxes…I didn’t know …I don’t remember this, do you?...there’s some movement…you see that…who’s the kid that did Mercury…that’s true, so he’s old school …it seems so…if you look at it…the reason …it may be original, but it was like…let me research…what’s your cell number?...two Gris and three Picasso’s …overwhelming…you just look at this one and then let’s go…I think it shows…did you see that room?...I was just going to say…I need the ladies room….…………………...........……giving it the once over…this makes the Whitney look like ……would you like some of these? I wonder…you’re not leaving until I’m done…they like catalogue every single thing… actually I wish I could have seen it…it has steel walls…it was basically like …oh … been there…there was an internal stairs…you want to go up………… ………………………………………………………… there is something warm about this…I want to meet…meet us on two…you can always come back ........… … ……… do you want to look at photography? ……………………..I went on a date with her and nothing happened … we need your input… ‘burn off the hairs around my nipple….’ …her parents love me …all of a sudden …each and every time …as opposed to? ... would you like some more wine? He tries to make it easy for me. I don’t know how to make it all work… I’ll do it a couple of times… I love it… It’s like ….it’s hard …I think this is pretty cool…I don’t think it sucks…I think it vastly overrated… I like it…I know…Should we get into the coat line? –Holly Crawford
Catherine Lee, “Hebrides to Alabama”, Gallery Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, September 9-October 16
Always attentive to materials and surfaces, Lee negotiates between the minimalism of Alabama, a 110-piece wall installation, and the monumentality of Hebrides, seven bronze monoliths that circle the gallery like the Burghers of Calais. In between are engagingly intimate raku-fired sculptures that resemble objects from a Philip Guston painting. –Hearne Pardee
Brian Conley, “The Decipherment of Linear X,” Pierogi, 177 North 9th St., Williamsburg, Oct. 15-Nov. 15
Replete with a faux scholarly journal, Conley’s exhibition purported to document the origins of human writing in the trails left by worms in the sand. Everything else was elaborate spin, hilarious in its pose of meticulous research, on biology, geology, and cryptography. Worms don’t have feet, they have footnotes. – PF
Marsha Pels, “Booty,” Schroeder Romero, 173A North 3rd St., Williamsburg, Oct. 15-Nov. 15
Inspired, or agitated, by the looting of the Iraqi Museum, Pels concocted a huge, elaborate sculptural installation that crammed together references to the ancient and (post-)modern worlds. Above all, she critiqued the spoiling of war – the lure of its spoils, and the results of its spoil. – PF
Woodstock NY
Valerie Bogdan, Paintings, Eric Erickson, Drawings, curated by Jefferson Snider, wfg gallery, 31 Mill Hill Road, Sept. 11-Oct. 29
Both artists work at the point where gesture becomes image. Bogdan’s dense webs of paint open up vistas of indistinct but inviting space. Still, they retain the quality of the mark. That quality is at the basis of Eric Erickson’s ruminations, mostly charcoal notations of strange but lucidly described shapes made on blotched vellum. – PF
Tom Freund, “Keep on truckin’,” Leonard Schulman, 39 Tinker St., Sept. 3-Nov. 23
Freund extends the Cornellian universe, both opening it up further into the cosmos with old star and planet diagrams and bringing it in closer with passages (doors, tables) from miniature interiors. The show also included more overtly collage-y boxes and a cascade of small stripe paintings. – PF
Los Angeles, CA
“The Dark Side of The Sun” UCLA Wight Galleries,
Los Angeles, Oct. 7-Nov. 4, 2004.
Bi-annually a group of Art department students curate a show that exhibits work from other southern California art schools. The spatial situation doesn’t do justice to the single pieces’ high quality. Depictions of decay, and alienation seem to breath off each other’s trauma, as they suffocate in too much (non-dramatic) air.
–Lillian Fellmann
Laurie Anderson, “The End of the Moon,” UCLA live series at Royce Hall, Nov. 5-6
Anderson alternates solo “chamber” works with larger, more technologically involved spectacles. As this piece resulted from her artist-in-residency at NASA, we were primed for the latter but got the former. Anderson’s poignant, lyric wit was as keen as ever, but her music was too perfunctory, her violin passages bridging her stories like an avant-garde Henny Youngman. – PF
“Showdown!” Schindler House, 835 North Kings Road, Los Angeles, September 15 through December 5, 2004,
On October 30, the art-band My Barbarian, and the designer/performers Feral Childe provided a day of fashion shows on specially designed runways and ramps, and multi-sensory "happening" performance. A wild, at times disturbing feast coming in tasty bites.– LF
“DITCH” AKBAR, 4356 W Sunset Blvd Los Angeles, CA, November 14, 2004
Artist Emily Roysdon and J.D. Samson from the band LeTigre are talking about fame, and lesbian icon’s everyday jobs while standing in the non-stage theatrical frame of a dimmed hell-red club doorway. Adoration more than information is pouring from the mic, a pleasure to conceive. DITCH’s premier in LA.– LF
Maurice Sievan, “From Expressionism to Abstraction: Paintings from 1935-1965,” MB Fine Art, 612 N. Almont Dr., West Hollywood, Sept. 11-Nov. 5
Sievan began as an impressionistic American Scene painter – his American scene being New York. Friendly with Mark Rothko and other abstract expressionists, Sievan then evolved into gestural non-objectivity. Somber but luminous, Sievan’s abstractions atomized Rothko’s grave veils into bursts, clouds and eddys – moods turning back into weather. – Peter Frank
"How Can You Resist?" LA FREEWAVES 9th Biennial Festival of Film, Video and New Media: Various Los Angeles Venues November 5-27, curated by Anne Bray
http://www.freewaves.org/programs/index.htm
Retinal and audio saturation ensues with the first weekend of this rich array of video & new media. Week 1 at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary was cacophonic but worth it (what to do with sound?). Jeanne Finley and John Muse’s compelling installation turned heads all night, while Subodh Gupta’s Pure haunted with its burial/cleansing duality. Multinational welter continues, see site for more. –Kerry Kugelman
Nicola L, “Body Cuts: Functional Art 1966-2004,” Twentieth, 8057 Beverly Blvd., Oct. 14-Nov. 19
After honoring Los Angeles with her “Blue Cape of Cinema” performance at Bergamot Station, New York-based French artist Nicola L displayed a forty-year selection of her jauntily popish furniture, tableware, and miscellaneous objects. Two leitmotifs running through everything: the human head, in simplified silhouette, and the snail-shell spiral. – PF
Ceres Madoo, “Danglers,” AndrewShire Gallery, 3850 Wilshire Blvd., Oct. 23-Nov. 20
Madoo’s latest concoctions hang from the ceiling like chandeliers. They’re every bit as elaborate, but a lot more barren and bony-seeming – perhaps because they’re made from taxidermists’ putty resin. Drawings and prints augmented the seven sculptures. – PF
Edgar Arceneaux, “Borrowed Sun,” Susanne Vielmetter, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Sept- 11-Oct. 9
Arceneaux’s installation, including film projection, sculpture, and diagrams, riffed on a “sun” theme. The diagrams are of sun’s surface, highlighting sun spots; the sculpture upended a Sol [get it?] LeWitt drawing, and the spirit of avant-jazz great Sun Ra coursed throughout, not least in Arceneaux’s improvisatory approach. – PF
Abraham Cruzvillegas, New Sculpture, Roberts & Tilton, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Sept. 10-Oct. 16
Mexico City-based Cruzvillegas bricolages a wide variety of objects into – well, compound objects that hover between dumb facticity and elliptical metaphor. What these combos of things mean, however, seems secondary as to how they hang together, formally and surrealistically. Cruzvillegas clearly remembers Lautréamont’s exaltation of the beauty of chance meetings. – PF
Keith Sklar, “Actual Size,” Carl Berg, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., Oct. 16-Nov. 13
Sklar presented some of his smallest, and one of his largest, paintings ever. Monument and miniature alike brim with painterly detail coagulating, almost literally, into feverish cartoons. What seem to be crowd scenes or even battles blow apart or melt down amidst ironically tranquil landscapes. – PF
Portland OR
“Northwest Matriarchs of Modernism: 12 Proto-feminists from Oregon and Washington,” curated by Terri Hopkins and Lois Allen, The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, 17600 Pacific Highway, Marylhurst, Sept. 26-Nov. 20
The Northwest’s notable modernist legacy included a proportionally large number of women artists. This often surprising show documented the range of styles and media practiced by a distaff dozen, including Mary Henry, Hilda Morris, Eunice Parsons, Ruth Penington, Amanda Snyder, Margaret Tomkins, Kathleen Gemberling Adkison, Doris Chase, Sally Haley, Maude Kerns, LaVerne Krause, and Viola Patterson. – PF
Melody Owen, “Torch Song,” Elizabeth Leach, 207 SW Pine St., Nov. 4-27
Owen’s almost jeweler-like precision enhances the precious, glistery quality of her often breathtakingly precise line drawings and clever, language-centered collages. At the center of the show was a little film collage of the MGM lion belching up incongruously pretty things. – PF
Michihiro Kosuge, “Organic-Geometric and In Between,” and Fay Jones, Recent Paintings, Laura Russo, 805 NW 21st Ave., Nov. 4-27
Kosuge has marble down pat, and out of it can conjure strict geometric matrices based on the triangle, more irregular abstract forms vaguely suggestive of plant forms, and heavy one-piece “stones” with scooped-out portions, reminiscent of Mayusuki Nagare. Jones’ new canvases and works on paper choreograph her figurative fantasies ever more formally without making them any less cartoon-like or dreamlike. – PF
Tad Savinar, “Humankind,” Savage Art Resources, 1430 SE Third Ave., Nov. 4-30
Savinar’s comments on contemporary American society get more and more pointed. As rendered in digital media, they seem that much more of a piece with what they critique. Savinar is currently in something of an elegiac mode, as certain titles attest: Concept for A Memorial to Integrity, The Last Moments Preceding the Death of Civility. – PF
Barcelona, Spain
“Proposta,” organized by Untitled Poetic Projects, CCCB (Centre de Cultura Contemparània de Barcelona) | c/ Montalegre, 5 Barcelona, Barcelona Spain November 3 – 6 , 2004
Experimental poetry “Proposta” closed its 2004 edition with the performance Streaptease cardiovascular by Mastretta + Ajo. Ajo Martin, one of Barcelona´s best regarded underground characters and micro poet with a punk rock background, delivered one liners with a special sense of irreverence and seductive grace while accompanied by Mastretta and his band.–Victoria del Carmen Perez
Contributors’ biographies of writers and additional information on AC maybe found on our website: artcircles.org
Correspondence:
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I apologize for any errors or omissions.
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