this week in art

STATE OF MIND: NEW CALIFORNIA ART CIRCA 1970

Paul Kos, “Sound of Ice Melting,” two twenty-five-pound blocks of ice, eight boom microphone stands, mixer, amplifier, two large speakers, and cables, 1970/2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Bronx Museum of the Arts
1040 Grand Concourse at 165th St.
Thursday – Sunday through September 8, free, 11:00 am – 6:00 (8:00 on Fridays)
718-681-6000
www.bronxmuseum.org

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a group of West Coast artists developed an evolving brand of California Conceptualism that incorporated environmental concerns and social interaction into works that explored consumer culture and the changing political landscape with a wry sense of humor while redefining what art is and could be. Originally mounted as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time series, “State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970” continues at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through September 8, comprising approximately 150 paintings, drawings, photographs, video, performances, and installation from 60 artists. Curators Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss have arranged the splendidly designed exhibit into such thematic sections as “The Street,” “Public and Private Space,” “The Body and Performance,” “Language and Wordplay,” and “Feminism and Domestic Space,” offering an exciting, well-paced tour of a California avant-garde immersed in the counterculture revolution of the era.

Visitors are encouraged to walk through Barbara T. Smith’s “Field Piece” and trip the light fantastic (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

For “Hair Transplant,” Nancy Buchanan exchanged body hair with Robert Walker. For “California Map Project,” John Baldessari spelled out the name of the state using geographic formations. Visitors can walk into Bruce Nauman’s immersive “Yellow Room (Triangular)” and prance through Barbara T. Smith’s “Field Piece,” lighting up nine-foot-tall blades of grass made of translucent resin. For her “Sitting Still” series, Bonnie Sherk took a seat in public places as people passed her by. Lowell Darling offers visitors a diploma from the Fat City School of Finds Art. Allen Ruppersberg Sunset Boulevard “Al’s Grand Hotel” is partially re-created, a 1971 project in which people could actually rent rooms and become part of the art. One of the highlights of the exhibit is a trio of video monitors showing cutting-edge, experimental short films by Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, and Nauman that subvert the traditional nature of the creative process. For “Sound of Ice Melting,” Paul Kos surrounds a block of ice with eight microphones, which make the ice a kind of celebrity with not a whole lot to say. Other artists featured in the show are William Wegman, Martha Rosler, Ed Ruscha, Lynn Hershman, David Hammons, Eleanor Antin, Terry Fox, Allan Kaprow, and Bas Jan Ader, who literally died for his art. Although State of Mind” is a snapshot of a very specific period in the history of twentieth-century American art, it also reveals how these conceptualists not only captured the zeitgeist of the times but opened a wide artistic path for the future. The Bronx Museum is open Thursday through Sundays, and admission is always free. This week’s First Fridays program features live performances and special screenings from participants in the “Bronx Calling” Second AIM Biennial, which consists of works by such emerging New York area artists as Allison Wall, Diana Shpungin, Alejandro Guzmán, Daniele Genadry, and Alan and Michael Fleming. The evening will include Katie Cercone’s ritual-based “Queen$ Domin8tin,” Alicia Grullon’s “Cold War Karaoke Night” in which the audience can reenact cold war speeches, and the Flemings’ “Objects and Extensions,” a dance piece in which the brothers integrate their bodies into the architecture of the museum.

SUBLIMING VESSEL: THE DRAWINGS OF MATTHEW BARNEY

Matthew Barney, “Khu: Djed,” brush and ink, gold leaf, iron, and lapis lazuli on black paper in polyethylene frame, 2011 (copyright Matthew Barney / courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels)

Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Daily through September 8, $12-$18 (free Fridays from 7:00 to 9:00)
212-685-0008
www.themorgan.org
www.drawingrestraint.net

No, the banner outside the Morgan Library proclaiming that its Matthew Barney exhibition ends September 2 is not a restraint to stop drawing visitors to the show, which actually closes September 8. For the first-ever museum retrospective of his drawings, the California-born multidisciplinary artist chose two very specific venues, both of which had to be libraries: the Morgan first, followed by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. For “Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney,” the Park Slope-based former college quarterback and premed student combines pieces from the institutions’ holdings with his own works and research paraphernalia to lend new insight into his creative process and influences. Since the late 1980s, Barney has been making drawings that relate to his films, installations, and live performance events, the works serving not only as rehearsals or storyboards but also acting as part of the central focus of the narrative as well as continuing into the aftermath. “I would describe a system that I’ve always visualized as an inverted pyramid, where the narrative is at the widest point, at the top of the structure,” Barney tells artist Isabelle Dervaux in an interview in the exhibition catalog. “The narrative in most projects is film-based, video-based, in some projects performance-based, but it’s the most developed aspect of the project. From there a process of distillation happens. Sculpture comes next in the sense that sculpture often tries to articulate a relationship in the narrative between characters or between places. Drawing is at the bottom of this structure and is the most distilled aspect of it. In that way it’s one of the more rewarding — possible the most rewarding part of the process, to get down to the purest form, the most distilled form of the narrative.”

Matthew Barney, “Cremaster 4: Manx Manual,” graphite, lacquer, and petroleum jelly on paper in cast epoxy, prosthetic plastic, and Manx tartan, 1994-95 (copyright Matthew Barney / courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels)

Hanging on the walls are fully realized ink and pencil drawings, several incorporating one of Barney’s signature materials, petroleum jelly, in self-lubricating plastic frames, that relate to such ambitious projects as the five-part Cremaster Cycle film series, which explores the ascending and descending muscle that determines gender; his Drawing Restraint performances, in which he creates art while limiting his physical mobility, one of which was recently held at the Morgan (the result of which can be seen in the Clare Eddy Thaw Gallery); the OTTOshaft trilogy, in which Barney uses Oakland Raiders center Jim Otto, who wore number 00, as the impetus for an exploration of athletic endurance that also involves Harry Houdini and the Hubris Pill; De Lama Lâmina (“From Mud, a Blade”), a collaboration with musician Arto Lindsay about environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill; and River of Fundament, inspired by Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evening, which delves into the Egyptian belief of the soul’s death and rebirth as experienced by a 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperial. Barney’s most accomplished drawings are those done in red, comprising the “River Rouge” series, while his pieces on black are the most mysterious, the details visible from only certain angles.

Matthew Barney, “River Rouge: Crown Victoria,” ink on paper in painted steel frame, 2011 (copyright Matthew Barney / Courtesy Gladstone Gallery)

The show also includes vitrines filled with objects chosen specifically by Barney from his own collection as well as the Morgan’s that relate to his work, from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to a Diane Arbus photo of Mailer, from a third-century papyrus copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead to a page from a thirteenth-century book depicting sailors on the back of a whale, from the Goya drawing “Locura (Madness)” to Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon. In addition to adding insight into Barney’s ever-evolving narrative, they reveal his endless fascination with the human body. “The first pieces I made of Vaseline were about wanting to moisten something,” he told Gerald Matt in a 2008 interview. (The quote is included in the wall text for the 1991 drawing “Delay of Game [manual] C.”) “I was thinking of all things that I was making at the time as literally extensions of my body somehow, and I wanted these objects to feel like they had just come out of me or could be put into me.” In many ways, that gets to the heart of Barney’s intense creative process and intriguing, confusing, highly abstract, and extremely stylized output. While Barney might often physically restrain himself, the worlds he has brought to life, which have oozed out of him and into him, on paper, on film, and in live performance, seem to have no limits.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

Timothy O’Sullivan, “A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,” albumen silver print from glass negative, 1863 (Gilman Collection, Museum Purchase, 2005)

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through August September 2, $25 adults, children under twelve free
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

“First, a warning shot from the battlefield,” curator Jeff L. Rosenheim begins in the “Shadows of Ourselves” prologue to the catalog that accompanies the expansive exhibition “Photography and the American Civil War,” which continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through September 2. “This book is not a history of the Civil War, but rather an exploration of the role of the camera at a watershed moment in American culture.” Held in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the wide-ranging show features more than two hundred images taken at the dawn of the art of photography, by such early camera enthusiasts as Timothy H. O’Sullivan, soldier A. J. Russell, Mathew B. Brady, George N. Barnard, and Alexander Gardner. The works include tintype studio portraits, battlefield scenes, a close-up of a runaway slave’s flayed skin, medical procedures including amputation, a haunting “Burial Party” of skeletons, a shocking photo of an “Emaciated Union Soldier Liberated from Andersonville Prison,” and shots of such key figures as Sojourner Truth, Robert E. Lee, and Abraham Lincoln.

Unknown, “[Captain Charles A. and Sergeant John M. Hawkins, Company E, ‘Tom Cobb Infantry,’ Thirty-eighth Regiment, Georgia Volunteer Infantry],” ambrotype, 1861-62 (David Wynn Vaughan Collection)

Combining pure reportage with an artistic bent, the photographs changed the way the public saw the war, and themselves. As printer and photographer Andrew Gardner wrote in a caption for O’Sullivan’s “A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,” which depicts a field of fallen solders, “Such a picture conveys a useful moral: It shows the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry. Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing such another calamity falling upon the nation.” These images also went on to influence such twentieth-century social realist photojournalists as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. In addition, the availability of cameras and portrait studios allowed the soldiers to pose for a kind of ID card that could be used to both identify them and show to their families, in full dress regalia. “Photography and the American Civil War” provides a gripping view of the war itself as well as the new ways it was being portrayed. The companion exhibition, “The Civil War and American Art,” comprising approximately sixty paintings (and another eighteen photographs) made between 1852 and 1877 by such artists as Frederic E. Church, Sanford R. Gifford, Winslow Homer, and Eastman Johnson, also runs through September 2.

EXPO 1: NEW YORK

“ProBio” looks at the future with “dark optimism” at MoMA PS 1 (photo by Matthew Septimus)

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Thursday – Monday through September 2, suggested admission $10 (free with paid MoMA ticket within fourteen days), 12 noon – 6:00
718-784-2084
www.momaps1.org

The presentation of MoMA PS1’s summer exhibition, “Expo 1: New York,” smartly echoes how climate change, technology, and evolution have impacted the progression and devastation of the natural world in the twenty-first century. The show began in May with a series of modules in various locations, with some of those individual parts, including “Rain Room” at MoMA, Olafur Eliasson’s Icelandic glacier installation “Your waste of time” at PS1, Adrián Villar Rojas’s “La inocencia de los animales (The innocence of animals)” PS 1 lecture hall, and the VW Dome on Rockaway Beach, now having gone extinct, disappearing like the melting ice caps. But the show, which promotes Triple Canopy’s concept of a “dark optimism” for the future of humanity and the planet, still has several worthwhile displays at its primary hub at PS 1, examining its mission statement that “we live in a time that is marked by both the seeming end of the world and its beginning, being on the brink of apocalypse but also at the onset of unprecedented technological transformation.” Curators Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist reach back fifteen years for Meg Webster’s “Pool,” which PS 1 founder Alanna Heiss originally commissioned in 1998, a swampy water environment that could not exist without the coming together of natural materials and man-made electronic elements. Downstairs in the basement, the Cinema is offering up recent film, video games, and online content from the YouTube generation; the upcoming schedule includes the video games “Journey” and “Proteus,” Sterling Ruby’s Transient Trilogy, Althea Thauberger’s Northern, and Khavn de la Cruz’s Kalakala and Mondomanila or: How I Fixed My Hair After a Rather Long Journey, with the director on hand to discuss his work (and provide live piano accompaniment for the former). Organized by Josh Kline, “ProBio” takes a futuristic look at the intersection of technology and the human body, with intriguing cutting-edge works by such artists as Alisa Baremboym, Antoine Catala, Carissa Rodriguez, and Georgia Sagri; watch out for those Roomba-like robots scouring the floor. One offsite project still remains, Marie Lorenz’s “The Tide and Current Taxi,” which visitors can hail in New York harbor. As always at MoMA PS 1, the many rooms hold little surprises, so be sure to explore so you can also catch pieces by Charles Ray, Matthew Barney, Zoe Leonard, Steve McQueen, Mark Dion, Chris Burden, Pierre Huyghe, Agnes Denes, Ugo Rondinone, and others. And for the final week of “Expo 1,” a77’s communal courtyard installation “Colony” is taken over by Glenn O’Brien, who will be hosting “TV Party Goes to Camp.”

ROBERT IRWIN — SCRIM VEIL — BLACK RECTANGLE — NATURAL LIGHT, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK (1977)

Robert Irwin’s site-specific “Scrim veil” invites visitors into its many charms and mysteries (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through September 1, $16-$20 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays, 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org
robert irwin photo set

As the Whitney prepares for its move to the Meatpacking District in 2015, it has been combing through its holdings, mounting exhibitions (“Sinister Pop,” “Signs & Symbols,” “Real/Surreal”) that offer new ways to experience works, both familiar and not, from its collection. One significant piece is being brought back for the first and last time, as it was designed specifically for the fourth floor of Marcel Breuer’s building and cannot be shown anywhere else. In 1977, California-based artist Robert Irwin installed “Scrim veil — Black rectangle — Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,” a deceptively simple project made of cloth, metal, black paint, and wood. At one end of the rectangular room is Breuer’s trapezoidal window, streaming in oddly shaped light. A translucent scrim runs the length of the room, hanging from the ceiling, with five and a half feet from the floor to its black metal base, allowing people to easily walk under it. In addition, a black line has been painted along the wall at the same five-and-a-half-foot height, parallel to the base of the scrim. Upon exiting the elevators, visitors are instantly transported into the compelling space, which takes a bit of time to adjust to. “Scrim veil” is something that can’t just be seen but needs to be experienced; it seems to shift with changes in the outside light and as other people make their way around it. The black metal base of the scrim and the black painted line on the walls meld together then break apart, appearing to create morphing physical elements.

Robert Irwin, “Scrim veil — Black rectangle — Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,” cloth, metal, and wood, 1977 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In the original exhibition catalog — “Scrim veil” was part of a larger show — Irwin, who is now eighty-four and still making challenging, fascinating new work, contributed the complex essay “Notes Toward a Model,” in which he explored the nature of form, context, content, perception, abstraction, conception, experience, and response. “There is probably no such thing as a pure naïve perception of the world,” he writes in the heavily illustrated discussion. “As noted earlier, we do not begin at the beginning in such matters but already somewhere in the middle. For example: Conceive in your mind the idea of a straight line (which has only a limited actuality in nature). In extended time consider our ‘straight line’ as the basis for the compounded abstraction known as Euclidean geometry. Again in extended time, consider a world developed and structured in line with our concept — i.e., grid to city; frame and plane to painting — point-to-point as a way of procedure through life. Now, place yourself in the middle of this milieu as the actual (physical) frame of your experiential reference, your reality, and ask yourself, ‘What can I know?’” (The full catalog can be read here.) Indeed, as one travels around the room, losing track of time and space, “Scrim veil” provides personal questions and answers that explore just what it is we might know about our individual and shared environment, both physically and psychologically. Interestingly, although Irwin was against the taking of photographs during the piece’s initial 1977 run, the Whitney is allowing pictures this time around, but don’t get too caught up in trying to snap a good photo and instead just allow yourself to be enveloped in this unique and involving experience, one that will never happen again.

ARTWORK OF THE DAY: “DWARF AND RHINOCEROS (WITH LARGE BLACK SHAPE)” BY JOHN BALDESSARI

John Baldessari, “Dwarf and Rhinoceros (with Large Black Shape),” detail, archival inkjet prints mounted on Lexan with inset aluminum frame, latex paint, archival inkjet print mounted on plexiglass, 1989/2013 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“I’ve got to say, I don’t like being labeled a California artist, or a Los Angeles artist, or a Conceptual artist,” John Baldessari told us last year in a wide-ranging twi-ny talk. “I just like it to be artist.” The artist is back at Marian Goodman with a solo show that reinstalls a trio of works first seen in 1987-89, three rooms that feature Baldessari’s unique way of combining painting, photography, and sculpture; words, image, and meaning; the real world and its cinematic equivalent; and humanity and the animal kingdom. “Dwarf and Rhinoceros (with Large Black Shape)” (“Ni por Esas/ Not Even So: John Baldessari,” Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1989) focuses on a black-and-white photo of a little man, seemingly squeezed into a rectangular frame, looking up and pointing at a rhino in the wild. “Two Stories (Yellow and Blue) and Commentary (with Giraffe)” (“Magiciens de la Terre,” Centre Georges Pompidou and Grande Halle La Villette, Paris, 1989) includes a giraffe emerging from a corner, facing a cross of pop-culture images. And “The Difference Between Fête and Fate” (“John Baldessari,” Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli, Italy, 1987) consists of striking photographs of people and animals, including polar bears, an owl, and a burning man. The eponymously titled exhibition continues in Midtown through August 23.

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN: THE HEDGE

John Chamberlain, “The Hedge,” painted and chromium-plated steel, sixteen elements, 1997 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Lever House Art Collection
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through August 31, free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
the hedge photo set

Indiana-born sculptor John Chamberlain has seemingly been omnipresent since his death in December 2011 at the age of eighty-four. Sadly, the longtime Shelter Island resident passed away shortly before his wonderful career retrospective, “Choices,” last year at the Guggenheim, which showed off the surprising breadth of his work, which went well beyond car chrome and steel assemblages. Then the Gagosian put together a small outdoor sculpture installation on Seagram Plaza in Midtown last summer and fall, allowing such recent biomorphic aluminum pieces as “FROSTYDICKFANTASY,” “MERMAIDSMISCHIEF,” and “ROBUSTFAGOTTO” to glitter in the sun. Now Lever House is presenting one of Chamberlain’s largest sculptures, 1997’s “The Hedge,” which consists of a forty-six-foot-long row of sixteen evenly spaced forty-four-inch-high squares composed of painted chromium-plated steel from automobiles. A kind of three-dimensional Abstract Expressionist canvas come to life, “The Hedge” cuts through the mostly black-and-gray glassed-in Lever House lobby, where it can be seen residing next to a row of live green plantings. Each piece has a square hole in the middle, allowing visitors to look through them all, directly out onto Park Ave., where more colors pass by with the traffic, adding sly commentary on America’s consumerist car culture. Using such tools as a sledgehammer, a compactor, an acetylene torch, a band saw, and a steel cutter on automobile parts, Chamberlain is able to evoke the natural world with “The Hedge,” which features an array of bright, bold colors in a unique kind of metallic topiary. Each piece is a work of art in its own right, but together they invite viewers into a multifaceted, multidimensional space that seems to morph as seen from different angles.