Two at the Drawing Center

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Iannis Xenakis

Composer, Architect, Visionary

January 15 – April 8, 2010

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 14, 6-8 pm

Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary will explore the fundamental role of drawing in the work of Greek avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001). A leading figure in twentieth century music, Xenakis was trained as a civil engineer, then became an architect and developed revolutionary designs while working with Le Corbusier. Comprised of over 60 documents created between 1953 and 1984, this will be the first North American exhibition dedicated to Xenakis’s original works on paper. Included will be rarely-seen hand-rendered scores, architectural drawings, conceptual renderings, pre-compositional sketches, and graphic scores. Curated by Sharon Kanach and Carey Lovelace.

DRAWING ROOM

Selections Spring 2010

Sea Marks

January 15 – April 5, 2010

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 14, 6-8 pm

Selections Spring 2010: Sea Marks is comprised of works by Agnes Barley, Jerome Marshak, and Peter Matthews, three artists selected from the Viewing Program who notate, describe, and interpret aspects of the sea. The exhibition examines the capacity of drawing to represent something as dynamic, volatile, and vast as the ocean. All three artists in Sea Marks use distinctly different interpretive strategies that yield a range of unexpected results; in fact, one may not immediately recognize the sea in any of their works. While staying within the material bounds of traditional drawing, the works expand our understanding of how drawing acts as a descriptive system and means of interpretation. This exhibition is curated by Nina Katchadourian, Viewing Program Curator.

Poster Propaganda

Read Michael Kimmelman’s article about populist parties in europe utilizing posters as weapons in their culture wars.

“SWITZERLAND stunned many Europeans, including not a few Swiss, when near the end of last year the country, by referendum, banned the building of minarets. Much predictable tut-tutting ensued about Swiss xenophobia, even though surveys showed similar plebiscites would get pretty much the same results elsewhere.

A poster was widely cited as having galvanized votes for the Swiss measure but was also blamed for exacerbating hostility toward immigrants and instigating a media and legal circus. “We make posters, the other side goes to the judge,” is how Alexander Segert put it when we met here the other day. “I love it when they do that.”

He designed the poster in question. As manager of Goal, the public relations firm for the Swiss People’s Party, Mr. Segert has overseen various campaign posters. This one, for the referendum, used minarets rising from the Swiss flag like missiles (“mushrooms,” Mr. Segert demurred, implausibly). Beside the missiles a woman glowers from inside a niqab. “Stop” is written below in big, black letters.

The obvious message: Minarets lead to Sharia law. Never mind that there are only four minarets in Switzerland to begin with, and that Muslims, some 340,000 of them, or 4 percent of the population, mostly from the Balkans and Turkey, have never been notably zealous.

In this heavily immigrant country the ultranationalist Swiss People’s Party is now the leading political party, aided at the polls by incidents like the New Year’s Day attack by a Somali Muslim immigrant in Denmark on Kurt Westergaard, the artist whose caricature of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb in his turban was among the cartoons published in 2005 in a Danish newspaper that provoked violent protests around the world. All across Europe populist parties are growing, capitalizing, to an extent unknown across the Atlantic, on a very old-fashioned brand of propaganda art. The dominance in America today of the 24-hour cable news networks and the Internet, the sheer size of the country, the basic conventions of public discourse, not to mention that the only two major parties have, or at least feign having, a desire to court the political center, all tend to mitigate against the sort of propaganda that one can now find in Europe.

It manages, if often just barely, to skirt racism laws. In Italy, where attacks on immigrant workers in the Calabrian town of Rosarno this month incited the country’s worst riots in years, the Lega Nord, part of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition, has circulated various anti-immigrant posters. One, mimicked by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front Party in France, showed an American Indian to make the point that immigrants will soon turn Europeans into embattled minorities stuck on reservations.

The National Front also distributed a poster of Charles de Gaulle alongside a remark he once made (in the context of the Algerian occupation) to suggest that true Gaullists today would vote for Le Pen. “It is good that there are yellow Frenchmen and black Frenchmen and brown Frenchmen,” de Gaulle is quoted as saying. “They prove that France is open to all races,” adding, “on the condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France will no longer be France.”

In Austria the far-right Freedom Party has come up with a poster bearing the slangy slogan: “Daham Statt Islam, Wir Für Euch” (roughly, Home Instead of Islam, or Islam Go Home, We Are for You). And Britain’s neo-Nazi National Party, which, to the great embarrassment of the country’s political leaders, lately won two seats on the European Parliament, swiped the minaret poster by switching the Swiss flag for a Union Jack. Mr. Segert and the Swiss People’s Party weren’t too pleased, populists being one thing, neo-Nazis, another.

It may be hard for Americans to grasp the role these images can play here. In subways and on the streets in America, posters and billboards are eye-catching if sexy or stylish, like Calvin Klein’s advertisements, or if modish and outrageous, like Benetton’s, but they’re basically background noise. By contrast, they’re treated more seriously here, as news, at least when they’re political Molotov cocktails. Cheap to produce compared with television commercials and easy to spread in small countries like Switzerland, where referendums are catnip to populists, they have the capacity to rise above the general noise.” Read the rest here. See a slide show of propaganda posters here.

Ida Applebroog

Randy Kennedy profiles Ida Applebroog for the New York Times on the occassion of her show at Hauser & Wirth New York thru 3/6/2010.

“SEE, you too can do this,” the artist Ida Applebroog said, showing a recent visitor to her SoHo studio a box of Crayola Model Magic, the kind of clay that children use, and then opening a glass cabinet filled with what she had made from it: small, doughy white figures that at first glance seemed like grade-school leftovers but upon closer inspection took on the complexity and creepiness of Giacometti by way of Wes Craven.

Much of the unsettling work that has made Ms. Applebroog a revered, quietly influential figure in the art world over the last three decades has looked this way: deceptively simple, like the trademark cartoonish storyboards she began making in the 1970s; funny in a way that skews toward weird without losing the ha-ha; and ominous, carrying the brutal honesty of one of her early influences, Samuel Beckett, into the nooks and crannies of domestic life. “As others take in vagrant cats,” the critic Max Kozloff once wrote, “Ida Applebroog’s pictures keep home for family alarms and little butcheries.”

In other words, even if you could do it too, as Ms. Applebroog suggests (and you can’t), you probably wouldn’t want to.

As she gets older — she turns 81 this year — her work has become only more uncompromising. And so it seems to delight her no end that much of an installation that she will present in her inaugural exhibition at the new Upper East Side outpost of the gallery Hauser & Wirth on Tuesday cannot be reproduced legibly in a family newspaper, and, in fact, takes a little delicacy even to describe in such a newspaper. That the images forming the installation are now four decades old makes all this even better, in her estimation.

In 1969 Ms. Applebroog, then known by her married name, Ida Horowitz, was a mother of four, a native New Yorker living unhappily in San Diego, where her husband had moved the family to accept an academic position. Ms. Applebroog had been struggling to make a name for herself as an artist and struggling with depression. Her only sanctuary in her chaotic household came at night, when she shut herself in the bathroom and climbed into the tub.

Over a period of several weeks just before her 40th birthday, she took a sketch pad into the bathroom with her too and perched in front of a full-length mirror, making obsessive self-portraits, more than 150 in all, but portraits focused exclusively on her naked crotch. The drawings — like a long series of practice sketches for Courbet’s “Origin of the World,” except in this instance made by the owner of the crotch — were done in India ink with a crow-quill pen, each one an elegant variation, depending on her mood or the state of her body. (When asked recently what was going through her mind as she was making these drawings, she just flashed a defiant smile and wagged a finger at her questioner.)

The drawings were never meant to be shown, and Ms. Applebroog, who moved back to New York in 1974, had long assumed that they were lost. But early last year, at the urging of her friend Barry Rosen, an art adviser, she began trying to unearth some of her older work. Rummaging around in the basement of the building where she lives and works near Broome Street, she and her assistants opened a box. And inside, along with jars of San Diego beach sand and air that her children had saved, was a blue 69-cent Strathmore Alexis drawing pad full of her bathroom sketches.

Some of the pages were water-stained, “but they were beautiful,” said Ms. Applebroog, a small, intensely friendly woman with close-cropped gray hair and little round Freudian glasses. “With all the umber and the staining that happened as a result, they look like something out of the Renaissance.”

The sketches, later scanned into a computer, manipulated and enlarged on Japanese gampi paper, have been transformed by Ms. Applebroog for the show into translucent, skinlike panels that will function not just as drawings but also as architecture, forming the walls of a small house built inside the gallery.”

Read the rest here.

Omer Fast at Postmasters thru 2/11/2010

From the Postmasters‘ press release. Images here.

“OMER FAST

“I don’t deal directly with reality but with representations and stories. The truth basis of what I’m doing is not interesting to me. In an act of storytelling, there is a truth.”
Omer Fast, as quoted in New York Magazine, December 21-28, 2009.

These exact words were never uttered in this order. But, like in Fast’s works, it is precisely in re-telling, editing, interpretation, misunderstanding and subjective recollections that we encounter the kernels of what is real.

Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of two video works by Omer Fast. The show opening on January 9th coincides with Fast’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Take A Deep Breath” (2008)

In the summer of 2002, Martin F. was standing outside a Falafel shop in Jerusalem when it exploded. A trained medic, he went in and discovered the body of a young man on the floor. The young man had lost both legs as well as an arm, but his eyes were open and focused. Hoping for a miracle, Martin F. decided to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. After a few minutes though, the young man’s eyes rolled up into his head and he expired. A crowd of onlookers had gathered outside and the police showed up. They wanted to know how many casualties were inside. When he responded that there was only one, Martin F. realized the young man he had just left inside was the suicide bomber.

In “Take A Deep Breath” extracts from a conversation recorded with Martin F. in Jerusalem alternate with scenes filmed in Los Angeles in which a team of actors attempts to stage his ordeal for the camera. There are two cameras shooting simultaneously. Each shoots a different view.

“De Grote Boodschap” (2007)

Filmed on-location in Mechelen, Belgium, “De Grote Boodschap” presents the stories of paired Flemish characters who appear to be caught in a time-warp: A stewardess and her unemployed husband, an old junkie and her caregiver, a white beatboxer and his black girlfriend, a real-estate agent and a taciturn Arab. As the characters interact, the story of a family’s diamonds is revealed and retracted in an endless loop that mistakes the scatological for the profound.

“Fast is interminably drawn to the figure of “the witness” – the individuals un/officially earmarked to repeat their personal experiences for something like the greater good. And it is precisely in these active, “acted” retellings, in which memory is vocally rehashed, that Fast encourages his protagonists to stumble. Rather than drawing a fine-tooth comb through their dreams agravea la psychoanalysis, Fast surveys their seemingly-scripted public stories, and from stilted syllables and logical missteps excavates flashes of that abstract notion of the “real.” (…)Perhaps because of this interpretive flair, Gideon Lewis-Kraus has called Fast a “reanimator”; in particular, it is his ability to imagine an interviewee’s (beaten, dead) tale as something other than it is (alive). Trafficking in structural manipulation allows Fast to avoid the video artist’s inevitable gambit of camera-as-confessional, leaving critical, and even ethical, space for the viewer to wallow about in.” Kari Rittenbach “Dramatic Witness: The Art of Omer Fast” (Art In America online December 2009)”

New York Times review here.  New York Magazine here.

Joan Jonas at MoMA

Performance 7: Mirage by Joan Jonas

December 18, 2009–May 31, 2010 

The Yoshiko and Akio Morita Media Gallery, second floor

 ”Inspired by a trip the artist took to India, Joan Jonas’s Mirage (1976/2005) was originally conceived as a 1976 performance for the screening room of New York’s Anthology Film Archives. In it, Jonas carried out a series of movements, such as running as a form of percussion and as gestural drawing, while interacting with a variety of sculptural components and video projections. In 1994, the artist repurposed these elements—metal cones suggesting the form of volcanoes, videos of erupting volcanoes, wooden hoops, a mask, photographs, and chalkboards, among other items—as a discrete installation, which was itself reconfigured in 2005. At MoMA, the artist once again reimagines the work in an installation that combines elements of ritual, memory, repetition, and rehearsal with games, drawn actions, and syncopated rhythms.” 

Art Basel Miami Beach

Mary Rosenberg reviews Art Basel Miami Beach 2009. Online catalog here.

“MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Art Basel Miami Beach is a delicate organism. It requires sunlight, optimism and an abundant supply of collectors with open wallets. And while there’s generally plenty of the sun around here, the other two elements were in short supply last December, to the point where some wondered whether this fair could survive. It has, by adapting to the new environment. Crowds are smaller at this year’s fair, which runs through Sunday, and parties more intimate. Discounts are rumored to be larger. The noon stampede on Wednesday, when the fair opened to V.I.P.’s, was an orderly procession. Relief is the prevailing emotion; the irrational exuberance of two or three years ago feels very far away.

The art, however, is big — much of it sized for museums, foundations and private warehouses. And the larger scene surrounding the event, which is now in its eighth year, remains daunting, with upwards of 15 satellite fairs and the usual calendar of dinners, parties, concerts and talks. From the evidence here, the art fair, as a species, is not endangered: collectors are too attached to its convenience and competitive vibe.

At the main event a clever redesign has distracted most visitors from the lower energy level, and has been generally well received. The most drastic change is the new centrality of Art Positions, a section of the fair dedicated to emerging galleries, which has been relocated from a nearby beach to a ring in the middle of the exhibition hall. Collectors seemed a bit disoriented at first, but no one missed the shipping containers that served as oceanfront booths in past years.

Blue-chip art by Americans is everywhere, from vintage work by Joan Mitchell at Cheim & Read and by James Rosenquist at Acquavella to Alex Katz’s new, eye-popping portraits on cheery yellow and orange grounds, which are at Pace and Jablonka. (The presence of so much high-quality work by sought-after artists may have had something to do with the thriving secondary market fed by collectors in need of quick cash.)

Latin American art is just as visible, both at and around the fair. Works from the circle of the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, whose Museum of Modern Art retrospective opens on Dec. 13, seem particularly widespread. And one of Mr. Orozco’s own pieces, a giant oval pool table, is a major element in the most talked-about off-site show, the Bass Museum of Art’s exhibition of works from the Jumex Collection. Based in Mexico City, it is Latin America’s most prominent private collection of contemporary art, and is being shown in the United States for the first time.”

Read the rest here.

Manhattan Galleries

The art critics of the New York Times do neighborhood tours.

The Lower East Side, Home to the Young and Emerging by Ken Johnson

“The Lower East Side is not the new Chelsea and probably never will be. The exhibition spaces are comparatively small, and except for Lehmann Maupin, there are no big-box commercial vendors showing internationally acclaimed talents. Furthermore, the neighborhood is crisscrossed by busy thoroughfares, and the galleries are widely dispersed among all kinds of nonart businesses. There are lots of bars, restaurants and boutiques, and many galleries are open on Sunday, unlike those in other parts of Manhattan. But while this can make gallery hopping fun for casual visitors, the geography can make it a chore for those mainly looking for art.

The gallery scene here is more sober than that of the East Village of the 1980s, and not as hip as Williamsburg was in the ’90s. It is a little like what SoHo was B.C. (Before Chelsea).

The Lower East Side has the gleaming, new New Museum at the north end, and, at the other, Reena Spaulings, a deliberately scruffy place on the edge of Chinatown that specializes in obscure and defiant forms of Conceptualism. (It is between shows now.) Galleries falling in between exhibit mostly young and emerging artists, which means that you see much that is only marginally better than graduate student work. But you can also discover exciting artists you’ve never heard of before. So no serious art follower can afford to overlook the Lower East Side. My own recent tour of the neighborhood’s galleries did not turn up anything likely to rock the art world, but it was not a bust either.” Read the rest here.

Golden Oldies All Over Chelsea by Holland Cotter

“Chelsea is the city’s commercial hub for contemporary art and a savvy one. The art market may be riding out the economic storm, but dealers are taking no chances, which may account for the high percentage of golden-oldie fare this month. Canonical artists no longer with us, like Dan Flavin and Alighiero e Boetti, have gallery showcases. Active blue-chippers — Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Mike Kelley and the Swiss team of Peter Fischli & David Weiss — do too.” Read the rest here.

Yes, Amid the Boutiques, SoHo Is Still Avant-Garde by Karen Rosenberg

“Pity SoHo, the neighborhood that launched a thousand acronyms and, in the process, earned the art world’s collective disdain. Once it had Gordon Matta-Clark, the New Museum and any gallery worth mentioning; now it has Prada, Topshop and the Apple Store.

But there’s avant-garde life in SoHo yet, particularly if you include an area beyond its northern and western fronts, alternately known as the Lower West Side and the Far West Village, to which the gallery district now extends (and which may one day be home to Renzo Piano’s 185,000-square-foot downtown Whitney).

Generally speaking, the galleries in SoHo proper are survivors. They stuck around through the recession of the early ’90s and the Great Migration to Chelsea (though those that could opened branches in other neighborhoods).

But they have some enduring company: Dia’s decades-old installations of Walter de Maria’s “Earth Room” and “Broken Kilometer,” at spaces on Wooster Street and West Broadway; various nonprofit art groups; and alternative spaces .” Read the rest here.

Uptown Art Mingles With Architectural Gems by Roberta Smith

“Uptown galleries differ in crucial ways from many of their counterparts in a certain downtown neighborhood we could mention. Their interiors are neither visible through expanses of plate glass nor notable for their vastness and sameness. Uptown art viewing involves rich parallel narratives concerning architecture and design, public life and private lifestyle, as well as the city’s history.

The routes to certain galleries, especially on 57th Street, take you through the polished lobbies of some of the city’s great Art Deco buildings. Up Madison, many galleries occupy stunningly detailed turn-of-the-century town houses and mansions. One of my favorite indoor sights in New York is the incomparable parquet floor at the Jack Tilton Gallery, a bold weave pattern that frequently trumps the art on view.

Another difference: in the environs of Central Park, contemporary art does not rule. Right now uptown galleries offer a veritable seminar on postwar abstract painting, spiced with figurative dissenters like Philip Guston (whose exhibition of small oils from 1969-73 at the McKee Gallery on Fifth Avenue offers a lexicon of his late work) and the efforts of younger living artists. You’ll find medieval art to rival the Met’s, pockets of older photography and works on paper old and new.” Read the rest here.

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter: Abstract Paintings 2009
November 7, 2009 – January 9, 2010 at Marian Goodman Gallery

“On view will be a major representation of works made by the artist from 2005 to the present, including an important new cycle of paintings titled Sindbad , 2008 as well as individual paintings presenting medium to large format abstractions, and a new group of large scale near-monochrome paintings whose underlying chromatic structures are layered by translucent veils of white paint. The exhibition will be the most recent presentation of the artist’s work in New York since his solo exhibition at Marian Goodman NY in 2005.

During the past two decades Gerhard Richter has made several important cycles of abstract paintings. The current exhibition follows on other recent series of abstract works by Richter, including the Silicate paintings of 2003; the Cage paintings of 2006, conceived as a single coherent group and first displayed in 2007 at the 52nd Venice Biennale curated by Rob Storr; and a recent group of white abstract works exhibited at Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris in 2008.”

Read the New York Magazine review here.

Paul McCarthy

From the New York Times

“THINK of the artist Paul McCarthy, and it’s hard not to imagine him the way he has appeared in countless videos and performances through the years — stuffing a bunch of mayonnaise-and-ketchup-slathered hot dogs in his mouth, as he did, say, in “Hot Dog” (1974), or wearing a clown’s nose and muttering maniacally while sloshing paint on canvas (“Painter,” 1995), or running amok with a gang of elves in a filthy, chocolate-smeared Santa suit (“Santa Chocolate Shop,” 1996-97). Or else doing other things in projects over the years — things involving Barbie dolls, sausages, Vaseline and his own and other people’s bodily orifices — that cannot be described here.

But during a recent interview at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York, the day before the opening of his new show of works on paper there, “White Snow” (through Dec. 24), Mr. McCarthy presented a strikingly different persona.

Surrounded by scores of small framed drawings he has made over the last 18 months or so, the burly, bearded artist was wedged into a rolling desk chair in a second-floor exhibition space, nursing a fractured femur that had announced itself partway through the installation. (A notorious workaholic, he had returned to the studio too soon after hip-replacement surgery in September.) Every so often his wife of 43 years, Karen, looked in to make sure he was still sitting down. His son, Damon, who works closely with Mr. McCarthy in Los Angeles, was hard at work downstairs, finishing up the installation of a dozen large mixed-media works on paper. With his family buzzing around him (he also has a daughter, Mara), Mr. McCarthy himself, at 64, seemed very much the genial, loving patriarch, a strong contrast to the notion of patriarchy as it appears in his work.

Then there were the drawings on the walls: storyboardlike groupings that play off the fairy tale “Snow White,” they are sexual and scatological, to be sure, but also gorgeously made, as though the ribald, pop-culture-obsessed provocateur had suddenly revealed himself to be an old master. Mr. McCarthy, although he is said to dislike interviews, proved to be surprisingly voluble about the works.” Read the rest here.

Leonardo in Times Square

From the New York Times

“Some of the models have the comforting feel of old acquaintance: the twisting, screw-like sail of a flying machine; the armored revolving saucer with cannons protruding through its port holes; the arched bridge that can swing aside for ship traffic. These wood, rope and cloth reproductions, along with glimpses of mirror-reversed Italian script on sheets marked by doodles and sketches — who could miss the distinctive traces left by the artist, inventor and scientist for whom the term Renaissance man seems custom made?

Those distinctive marks of genius are all over the startling, challenging exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci’s Workshop,” which opens at Discovery Times Square Exposition on Friday. The gallery may not look like any workshop Leonardo used, since it offers elaborate touch screens that allow you to dissect and probe his work in ways even he might have had difficulty imagining. And it may also differ from any workshop he had because so many of the machines on display were probably never actually constructed by him but only sketched or imagined, some as future projects, others, perhaps, as exercises on the way to a deeper understanding of some other ideas.

But this show, the creation of the gifted engineers, scholars and designers of Milan’s Leonardo3 — which describes itself as “an innovative research center and media company” devoted to Leonardo — actually brings you closer to understanding the real workshop of Leonardo: his mind. There is something thrilling about the way the exhibition cumulatively assembles the evidence of his robust energy and daring, his scrupulous analysis and care.

You turn from a mechanical lion, whose design has been teased out of allusive skeletal drawings in a notebook, to an enormous display on which you leaf through one of the extraordinary codices, page by page, touching the gnomic text to allow translations and animated machinery to spring from the ink marks. Spend enough time here, and the sensations dazzle: a camel is buoyed by floats to cross a river; a marching musician plays a portable keyboard by knocking a lever with his legs; an ideal city is sketched in tantalizing fragments, including stables in which feed and water for the horses are carefully fed down pipes and waste is washed away through channels in the floor. There is scarcely an aspect of life to which Leonardo didn’t apply a fierce intellectual energy.”