Lower Manhattan

Lester Rapaport, Works on Canvas and Paper, Verlaine, 110 Rivington St., July 27-Aug. 28

This show falls into the spunky tradition of eateries displaying art. Linear forms and drips, loopily linear, geometric, and symbolic by turn, are layered over gold or silver grounds in powerful 6-1/2 foot squares. The impetus for Rapaport’s work is his practice of meditation. – Barbara Rosenthal

Ryman’s intense and influential exploration of facture – of the physical and optical realities of paint and other media as affixed to a surface – begins in these concentrated, tentative but powerful concatenations of marks and strokes. Their notational quality bespeaks their experimental condition, and they reveal the intimate, contemplative side to Ryman’s daunting oeuvre. – Peter Frank

Heide Hatry, “Skin Treatments,” Volume, 530 W. 24^th St. July 16-27

Experimentations with pigskin. Though initially off-putting, interesting relationships emerge between Hatry’s grotesque medium and other elements such as wood panels and classical artwork. – Nicole Haroutunian

Eyebeam, a media-arts proving ground in Chelsea, hosted an evening’s slide and DVD retrospective talk with this highly original audiocentric installation artist. Sometimes works stray to the overly literal, such as his early smashed records piece and recent city of Philadelphia commission, but others are brilliant: Tape Fall (1989), Footsteps (1990), and the Video Quartet (2002) (not reprised at Eyebeam, but which the Philadelphia piece borrows from). His diffident audience interaction, however, tensed the discussion period, and when his repeated annoyance with a visual artifact of his DVD was noted as just as serendipitous as any found audio he professed to embrace, he nearly spat.– BR

Marepe, Anton Kern Gallery, 532 W 20^th St., June 3-July 30, and P. S. 1, Long Island City, May 11-September

Brazilian artist Marepe introduces his hometown Sinho with five compelling installations. His Sangue de Novela (Soap Opera Blood) shows some kind of a torture table made of metal, tiles, plastic and ketchup. The blood reference works on many levels – heart blood shed in TV hospital dramas, a film industry that bluntly floods our eyes with blood/brain drainage, the exploitation of hospital workers, etc. P.S.1 presents more of Marepe: Arca Azul de Noé, a work that acts as a metaphor for everyday life. – Lillian Fellmann

“Tango,” Mike Weiss Gallery, 520 W. 24^th St.. June 17-Aug. 6

Other works fade in comparison to Hermann Nitsch’s enrapturing C-Prints; covering a full wall, they vibrantly document a mysterious ritual involving animal sacrifice, crucifixes, and copious amounts of blood. – NH

Karel Funk, 303 Gallery, 525 West 22nd St., July 1-Aug. 12

Funk’s wonderful portraits provoke historical and sociological confusions; reviewers have praised it as the revival of Renaissance portraiture, this time aimed at frat boys. The men Funk paints differ in age, and they seem to belong to quite different contexts. The way in which these almost life-sized, neo-photo-realist portraits are arranged in circles does provoke associations with mystical gatherings of some kind. – LF

Group exhibition, Sandra Gering Gallery, 534 West 22^nd St., July 9-Aug. 13

Jane Simpson’s wall installation Sunday Best stands out like a citation of Siegfried Kracauer in a New Age Bible. Differently shaped empty white vases are orchestrated on a carelessly painted white shelf enmeshed in fake and natural shadows, like a memory that comes from the future. – LF

“Relentless Prostelytizers,” curated by David Hunt, Feigen Contemporary, 535 W. 20^th St. July 1-August 14

A show about radical worldviews and the power of art to make converts. Adam Helms’ foreboding diptych Native Environments is the most effective, exposing man as a natural predator. – NH

“Summer Show,” James Cohan Gallery, 533 W. 26^th St., July 9-Aug. 20

A chance to view works by Richard Long, photo-documentation of the recent A Dead Sheep Circle, A Five Day Walk in Mid Wales and an on-site installation of different colored stones. – NH

Two completely different works meet in a single showcase – not a beneficial circumstance for either of them. In Yoshihiro Suda’s case, the Plexiglas prevents the viewer from experiencing the materiality of his carved and painted Rose, while in Karin Sander’s case the hermetic cube diminishes Sigfried 1:6 exactly where its grandeur lies – in its literally outreaching gesture of humor.

– LF

Yoko Ono, “Editions, Ephemera and Printed Works,” Printed Matter, 535 W. 22^nd St., July 21-Sept. 30

At her best Ono astounds us with the direct expression of profound ideas, as in palm-sized media-variations of her famous Box of Smile and in Water Piece, a natural sponge set next to an eyedropper in small open bottle of water. Water Piece is documented in Have You Seen The Horizon Lately, one of the books on display. – BR

Michael Perez, Michael Perez Gallery, 520 West 23rd St., through the fall

Michael Perez’s middle-sized acrylic paintings mostly portray one type of woman: cover girl, bored, sometimes boring to look at. At their most reductive, Perez’s pictures, with their simple lines, gain a degree of stillness that enhances a flawlessly balanced vigor. –LF

“Reflecting the Mirror,” curated by Karina Daskalov, Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 W. 57^th St., June 14-Aug. 27

Metaphoric, interpretive works in two and three dimensions on the mirror theme by 29 artists. Most notable: John Baldessari’s black and white digital photograph of kitchen objects on Sintra, both a sensual abstraction and suspenseful narrative; Francesca Woodman’s contortionist figure studies in four vintage gelatin-silver photographs; and Lawrence Weiner’s silver wall text. – BR

Franz West, “Recent Sculpture,” Lincoln Center Plaza, 66^th St. and Amsterdam Ave., and Doris Freedman Plaza, 59^th St. and 5^th Ave., July 7-Aug. 31

West’s playful biomorphic cotton candyesque sculptures produce a no-win standoff in Lincoln Center Plaza. The sculptures are forced into a tight alignment at the entrance, rendering them unable to puncture the severe minimalist cool of the Center’s modernist aura. – Holly Crawford

This reconstruction of August Sander’s great indexical project accords it the same forthright, “objective” treatment as it accorded the German people(s): what was there is presented as found. Thus, the show breaks into Sander’s original categories – “The Farmer,” “Sport,” “The Worker – His Life and Work,” etc. – and sub-categories. The vividness of Sander’s subjects nearly tilt the whole thing into a vast narrative, but not at the expense of his formidable documentary zeal, or of the lucid grandeur, poignancy, or even whimsy found in each image.

The Met complements the Sander retrospective by looking at other examples of “image-collecting.” The photograph was a principal tool in the late-19^th-early-20^th-century scientistic tendency to categorize phenomena according to empiric characteristics. Artists, scientists, and forensic analysts alike used the camera to typologize the world. At its best, this tendency yielded spectacular blends of art and science such as Karl Blossfeldt’s exquisite encyclopedia of botanic details. – PF

Charlene Gross, “Woyzeck Series,” WARP Designs, 208 W Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, seen on August 22nd

This prêt-à-porter exhibition space has one wall dedicated to the art of couture design. Gross shows writings and drawings about the war-shaken world of writer Georg Büchner and its effects on people’s wardrobes.

– LF

Nicholas Kuszyk, McCaig-Welles Gallery, 129 Roebling St., Aug. 13-25

A graffiti artist from Virginia, Kuszyk has found his object of affection, a screwed-up, metallic mechanical-looking something with arms and feet, an endearing creature depicted colorfully and inventively in the over 200 works exhibited. – LF

“Bush League,” Roebling Hall, 390 Wythe Ave., July 9 – Sept. 6

Visually as well as politically charged. Ivan Navarro’s You Sit, You Die – an “electric chair” made of fluorescent tubing and a scroll naming Florida’s electrocuted prisoners – is particularly arresting. – NH

Lee Lozano, “Drawn From Life: 1961-71,” curated by Alanna Heiss and Bob Nickas, P.S.1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, Jan. 22- Sept. 13

Lee Lozano’s (1930-1999) writing pieces, framed pages out of probably many notebooks/stacks of paper, convey an unimpeded but controlled horror and disgust against the blindness of everyday obedience and private and political numbness. What to call her texts: Manifestoes? Poetry? Artistic or social critique? – LF

Doug Aitken, “Interiors,” P.S.1, June 27-Sept. 20

Sit with your legs in the hole of Doug Aitken’s donut couch, close your eyes, and give in to the sound track of Interiors (2002). With your eyes open the seating arrangement of this intriguing film installation just drives you mad. – LF

Maja Bajevic, “Step by Step,” P.S.1, June 27-Sept. 27

In Step by Step the viewer triggers and mingles nationalistic songs from all parts of the world just by passing by. Thus Bajevic lets you prove how awful nationalism sounds on a global level. All the CD players and wires lie on the floor like rotten remnants of a vicious, once-glorious conspiracy. – LF

Walead Beshty, P.S.1, June 27-September

Beshty’s Untitled (Emotion Banner) derives from Bas Jan Ader’s 1971 film I Am Too Sad To Tell You, which portrays the artist driven to tears for ambiguous reasons. The McDonalds “M” in Beshty’s flag makes his impulse almost too transparent, but the banner still makes its cultural-political point delightfully. – LF

The most alluring and most vulnerable work Martin she ever did was near the beginning of her career, before she relocated permanently to New Mexico. While in New York Martin lived and worked among artists looking for a non-gestural way into the spirituality that abstract expressionism sought. She realized this by approaching her paintings not as pictures or arenas of action, but as objects, engaging for their presence rather than their imagery, crafted by hand and yet mesmerizing in their anonymity. Four and five decades later, they are more enthralling than ever. – PF

It may cast its stylistic net wide, ranging from academic art and Barbizon to futurism and surrealism. But “European Muses, American Masters” does such a tight job of pairing European (mostly French) modernist paintings with the American works they influenced that the point is driven home with uncanny precision: until mid-century, they were the innovators, we were the followers. Not that we couldn’t run with the ball, and when Eakins is seen with Bazille or Caillebotte or Gorky with Masson, we do get to pat ourselves on the back. But it’s not the competition that’s at issue, it’s the continuity, and seeing Euro-isms jump the Atlantic and land in one piece – or not – is the show’s fun and fascination. – PF

About the length of a football field, MASS MoCA’s Gallery 5 is the mother of all installation spaces. Ann Hamilton’s a natural for the space, not only because she thinks big, but because she answers to memories, personal and institutional. In corpus Hamilton subtly acknowledges the space’s original function as a dyeing room for cotton with cloth on the myriad windowpanes and also with the old-fashioned onionskin paper that drops periodically from dispensers hanging from the ceiling. Other components, including rising and lowering speakers and rotating slide projectors, assure the presence of contemporary audio-visuality. As usual, Hamilton’s metaphorical flourishes are glancing; her emphasis is on the purely visual/experiential. She does not interpret dreams, she simply has them. – PF

Already vaunted as the most visually and intellectually ambitious artist alive, Ritchie pushes his own envelope further with this multipartite installation. “Proposition Player” engages both previously painted canvases and elements fabricated specifically for it. These latter include painting on wall and ceiling, a weblike sculpture several dozen feet long, and a “gambling table” that triggers different projections related to the cosmic game of chance Ritchie has here confabulated. The interfaces fly thick and fast, the poetic voice runs through everything, and we find ourselves in a non-satiric, non-binary Wonderland where the stakes are conceptual – but the more compelling for it. – PF

The infinitely permeable boundary between art and life currently leaks a torrent of engagé activity into the quotidian sphere. Some of it is puerile posturing, some of it is pure hi-jinks, and some of it aims right at the heart of contemporary society. From graffiti-based wall-collaging to the satirical appropriation of marketing methods to the rethinking of domestic design to the creation of unlikely (but necessary) Websites, these “interventionists” import artistic gambits into the social sphere, thus getting their messages across by flying above, below, or right through the radar. Notably, though, most seem to stress equally the artistry of the gambit and the message it bears. Art for life’s sake. – PF

Some are self-contained, others are interactive; some you walk into or through, others you just look at; some contain their own light source, others work off available light; some are like science fair experiments gone nutty, others are about beauty and fascination and spectacle. “Presence of Light” enjoys the presence of myriad approaches to the theme, idea, and/or presence of light per se. Most of the artists are not well established, most are in or near New York, and most require an electrical outlet. But the many exceptions flesh out a broad topic unifying eighteen artists, making it the more engaging. – PF

The exhibition contains mostly letters, flyers, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera, along with a parade of videos, largely in black and white. But that’s what “media art” consisted of back then, and nobody mediated art better than Ant Farm. The San Francisco/ Houston-based art team is now best known for Cadillac Ranch, but they realized any number of similarly outrageous (if quasi-practical) projects, both performative and permanent: live performance, TV performance, architecture, posters, journals, logos, whatever goosed the prevailing mindset. The seeds of contemporary guerrilla media are all here, sprouting like mad in the era of do-your-own-thing. Imagine what these guys could have done with the Internet. – PF

Never look for vulgarity between the designer sheets of museum walls. Robert Storr has reduced his own voluptuous premise to PG13. Not much here gives pause or offense: a fat Jenny Saville nude, Linda Yuskavage’s assembly-line cutie, some Cindy Sherman ersatz pee-pee/ca-ca photos. As it has been for years, Peter Saul’s work is fabulously, hysterically grotesque. Probably the best moments in the show are found in R. Crumb’s cartoon doodles from the 1960’s and 70’s. In more ways than one, Crumb is the big daddy of the American grotesque; without trying, he defines ”grotesque” and wipes the rest of this clean, well-scrubbed crowd off the map. – Kathleen Whitney

“Kickin’ It with Joyce J. Scott,” California African American Museum, June 24-Oct. 20

In Scott’s 1991 Buddha Gives Basketball to the Ghetto a brown-beaded Buddha sits on his knees with his arms outstretched, holding a silver dollar sized ball in one hand and a basket in the other. An African-American male in a slam-dunk pose spills out, followed by a DNA double -helix form rising around the Buddha and ending at his crown. Scott’s other sculptures are similarly jagged, angry, and relentlessly honest in their conveyance of social commentary. – Kai Alexis Smith

Gunther von Hagens, “Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies,” California Science Museum, July 2-Jan. 23 2005

Plastinized people pose inside and out for living spectators. A revealing exhibition showing how the human body functions and can be mutated into sculpture. – KAS

“Speculative Terrain,” curated by Gordon L. Fuglie, Laband Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, 1 LMU Drive, Los Angeles, Sept. 12-Nov. 14

Southern California landscape is the overarching subject of this vigorous group show. There’s a good mix of Neo-Edenic Impressionism and fresh, if often sharp, observations of what our Eden has and might become. The enticement of James Doolin’s incandescent LA-scape plays off Sant Khalsa’s wood-and-photo-on-glass installation depicting a more somber afterglow. Other work in various media asserts the beauty, however troubling, of both nature and industry. – Kerry Kugelman

Joe Davidson, Sculptures, HAUS Gallery, 517 S. Sierra Madre Blvd., Sept. 12-Oct. 22
Plainspun serial casting of various mundane stuff comprises a dry but substantive meditation on the repetitive but redeeming tasks that fill our lives. Negative-space casts of old shoes, urethane flowers, and other household and everyday oddments work together to establish a reassuring quotidian continuity. Secret work: check out the piece in the bathroom. – KK

Misty Cervantes, “Family Connections,” Gallery 825/ LAAA Annex, Bergamot Station #E2, Sept. 11-Oct. 9
Docu-reportage goes Eastside in compelling large-scale photographs depicting non-traditional family groups derived from L.A. gang associations. The subjects all regard the viewer directly, gazes ranging from feral to friendly, suspended in the supersaturated color of the images. – KK

David Florimbi, “Pintura Matadoras,” Off Main Gallery, Bergamot Station #A5, Sept. 10-Oct. 9
Large black-and-white paintings based on a bullfighting film find their intrigue in sequences. The Zapruder-movie quality of the frame-by-frames comes across as an arcane hieroglyph of primal combat. The single paintings are not as strong, looking like black-velvet paintings without the velvet. – KK

Andy Moses, New Paintings, Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station #B7, Sept. 10-Oct. 16
Gently undulating abstract ripples and cosmic eddies glissade across these paintings, lulling and soothing the eye with subtle color and interference patterns. Some of the work goes for a wide-screen effect via a curved panel. Nice work that leaves one feeling pleasantly ungrounded. – KK

”20th Anniversary Celebration,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Bergamot Station #G2, Sept. 11-Oct. 9

A buoyant mix of gallery artists. Mariangeles Soto-Diaz’s stripe painting hums with chromatic buzz. Scott Katano’s untitled sculpture looks ready for a robot’s playroom, while Jimi Gleason’s painting is a shimmering azure icon. Texture and pattern drive Barbara Kerwin’s sensual encaustic and Alex Couwenberg strokes some curves. – KK

Austrian-born and educated and now living Los Angeles, Helnwein employs a hyperrealist manner that will remind Americans of Gerhard Richter but, if anything, works to opposite effect. Rather than re-confirm post-modernist cynicism, Helnwein rekindles post-war anguish. This selection, going back more than three decades, emphasizes his preoccupation with the image of the child, from early Nitsch- and Schwarzkogler-influenced photo-actions (with the requisite bandages) to recent large portrait-like heads and depictions of Christ-child-like babes attracting odd, menacing crowds. A perverse streak runs through the images, but it’s not pederasty: tinged with surrealism, it’s an enduring shame and anger at the Nazi past – and the artist’s suspicion that Naziism hasn’t been eradicated. – PF

Abstract expressionism’s Bay Area incarnation was at once more gestural and more decorous than New York’s. The impulse in San Francisco was aimed at a less demonstrative, more metamorphic spiritualism.

To judge from this selection (which gets a pretty tight hanging in the small Monterey Museum), the Blair Collection seeks more to survey the whole West Coast ab-ex enterprise, including its many also-rans, rather than concentrate on its masterpieces. The method (of the show, at least) is one painting per artist. As a result, we get a better idea of the movement’s meaning and progress, the really good stuff (by James Budd Dixon, Robert McChesney, and Sonia Gechtoff, among others), pops out of the crowd, and early work by the likes of William T. Wiley, Robert Arneson, and Roland Petersen provides background to their mature accomplishments in other modes. – PF

There’s something of a vogue for manipulated taxidermic specimens, but Sacramento-area sculptor Heffernon rides the gimmick past the zoo and the funhouse to the outer limits of the wax-museum freak show. At the same time, he imbues his improbable creatures – junkyard hybrids, feral cats with tapestry-patterned fur, dog-bird fusions, anthropomorphed mega-rabbits – with both an epic humor and an intimate pathos, borne in part by the narratives accompanying them. The spirit is childlike rather than childish – and the creatures are crafted with frightening vividness. – PF

Unsettlingly stark portraits, window-framed domestic clutter peered at through the dark of night. The installation plays on the anonymity of the voyeur-photographer and the awkward submissiveness of the subject. Distance questions the boundaries of the self, the motives of both the viewers and the viewed. – Gillian Whitely

Contributors:

Lillian Fellmann is a culture critic, curator, and artist. From Switzerland, she currently lives in Los Angeles.

Nicole Haroutunian is a Brooklyn-based writer/artist who works in museum education.

Kerry Kugelman is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles.

Barbara Rosenthal is a conceptual artist living and working in Manhattan.

Kai Alexis Smith lives in Brooklyn.

Gillian Whiteley, historian and critic, lives in Sheffield, UK.

Kathleen Whitney is a sculptor and writer living in Albuquerque

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