this week in art

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: AMONG FRIENDS

“Mud Muse” is one of many collaborations in MoMA exhibit “Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through September 17
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

“Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends” is almost too much of a good thing, a massive MoMA retrospective of the interdisciplinary artist who died in 2008 at the age of eighty-two. The exhausting exhibition consists of more than 250 works, highlighting his collaborations while celebrating the vast nature of his practice. “Oh, I love collaborating, because art can be a really lonely business, if you’re really just working from your ego,” he says in an old interview on the audio guide. The show follows the Texas native from his Black Mountain College years through his time in Italy and North Africa, from his early combines and classical-influenced pieces to performances, silkscreens, objects, “Experiments in Art and Technology” (E.A.T.), and more. Many of his greatest hits are here, including “Bed,” “Monogram,” “Canyon,” “Gift for Apollo,” and his illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, alongside collaborations with Jasper Johns, John Cage, Jean Tinguely, Willem de Kooning, Susan Weil, Brice Marden, Sturtevant, Alex Hay, and more. Among the most unusual works is the bubbling “Mud Muse” created with Carl Adams, George Carr, Lewis Ellmore, Frank Lahaye, and Jim Wilkinson. And most entertaining is Rauschenberg’s involvement in the dance world, making sets for and even performing in pieces by Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Laurie Anderson, Harry Shunk and Janos Kender, and others, some filmed by Charles Atlas. The exhibition is supplemented with works by such Rauschenberg contemporaries as Aaron Siskind, Cy Twombly, Lucinda Childs, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Robert Whitman. Meanwhile, the audio guide includes contributions from Yvonne Rainer, Calvin Tompkins, Weil, Marden, Brown, Virginia Dwan, Atlas, Julie Martin, and Rauschenberg’s son, Christopher. So how does one make sense of it all? MoMA is hosting a series of talks and performances to help sort everything out. The exhibition continues through September 17; the below “gallery experiences” are free with museum admission, with no advance RSVP required. (Only the September 12 “Dante Among Friends” performance requires paid ticketing.)

Peter Moore, “Performance view of Robert Rauschenberg’s Pelican (1963),” 1965 (© Barbara Moore/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

Wednesday, September 6, 11:30 & 3:30
“Dance among Friends: Robert Rauschenberg’s Collaborations with Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, and Paul Taylor,” featuring Changeling, Three Epitaphs, Tracer, You Can See Us, and excerpts from other works, Sculpture Garden

“Robert Rauschenberg’s Process,” with Lauren Kaplan

Wednesday, September 6, 11:30
Thursday, September 7, 1:30
Wednesday, September 13, 1:30
Thursday, September 14, 11:30 & 1:30
“No One Is an Island,” with Kerry Downey

Thursday, September 7, 1:30
“Rauschenberg Among Friends,” with Elisabeth Bardt-Pellerin

Saturday, September 9, 11:30
Sunday, September 17, 1:30
“100 Ways to Make a Picture,” with Petra Pankow

Sunday, September 10, 11:30
Monday, September 11, 11:30
“A Bit of This and That: Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines,” with Jane Royal

Tuesday, September 12
“Collaborators, Friends, Lovers,” with Tamara Kostianovsky, 11:30

“Dante among Friends,” with Robin Coste Lewis and Kevin Young responding in music and poetry to Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, curated and hosted by Terrance McKnight, $5-$15, 7:00

ALEXANDRA PIRICI: THRESHOLD

Bucharest-based artist Alexandra Pirici re-created Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” in 2014 (photo courtesy of the artist)

On the High Line at 30th Street between 11th & 12th Aves.
September 5-7, free, 4:00 – 7:00
art.thehighline.org

Donald Trump might be seeking to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, but a very different kind of wall is going up on the High Line this week. On September 5-7 from 4:00 to 7:00, Romanian dancer, choreographer, and performance artist Alexandra Pirici will construct “Threshold” at the gate that separates the eastern and western rail yards at Thirtieth St. The architectural boundary is not made of wire, concrete, or wood but performers who will move about and transform the public space. Among the participants lining the flexible human wall — which visitors can interact with — will be Marissa Brown, Catherine Cabeen, Miguel Angel Guzmán, Samuel Hanson, Casey Hess, Jordan Isadore, Jhia Louise Jackson, Annie Kloppenberger, Elizabeth Mulkey, Candace Tabbs, and Jessica Weinstein. In such pieces as “Leaking Territories,” “Aggregate,” “Monument to Work,” and “If You Don’t Want Us, We Want You,” Pirici, who cites Tino Sehgal, Jérôme Bel, and La Ribot as influences, mixes in the political in both clear and subtle ways. Admission is free, and no advance RSVP is required.

KAARI UPSON: GOOD THING YOU ARE NOT ALONE

Kaari Upson invites visitors into her strange world of consumption and reproduction at the New Museum (photo by tw-ny/mdr)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Through Sunday, September 10, $16
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org
good thing you are not alone slideshow

In Kaari Upson’s first solo New York museum show, “Good thing you are not alone,” the California native goes in search of the perfect double as it relates to consumption, mass production, the ideal of America, and her relationship with her mother. Consisting of drawing, painting, sculpture, and video, the exhibition is centered by “Hers” and “Idiot’s Guide Womb Room,” an interactive installation, constructed of steel Costco shelves, urethane foam, aluminum, plastic, and wood, in which visitors can take a seat, watch videos of Upson dressed as her mother and performing rituals, read various Complete Idiot’s Guide books, and check out piles of life-size replicas of her mother made of latex, synthetic hair, fabric, foam, duct tape, and debris. Upson, who has portrayed her mother in more than thirty videos, sees it as an “amalgamation of it being not just my own real mom but a multiplicity of a type of woman that’s transitioning from being objectified, like a certain particular age where she almost becomes invisible,” she tells curator Margot Norton on the audio guide. “So that idea that she can almost have agency through her invisibility allowed me to go up in spaces and do very strange things.”

Kaari Upson, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue,” urethane, pigment, and aluminum, 2014 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Upson references her mother’s fondness for soda in “Teeth on Pepsi Plinth,” rows of fossilized aluminum-cast cans (“Lifetime Supply”) with crystalline teeth (“Crocodile Mother”) on top of them, part of her ongoing “MMDP (My Mother Drinks Pepsi)” project. She recasts discarded furniture into drooping wall pieces that recall the work of Lynda Benglis and Claes Oldenburg, in “Brown Recluse,” “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue,” and “You Don’t Need a Rope to Pinch a Stranger’s Butt.” In the intense video Split Eye, Upson films her eye in close-up, using glass and mirrors to create intriguing, often disturbing effects. And in her latest body of work, a series of graphic drawings explores a family living in a Las Vegas tract house, incorporating such phrases as “Where all autonomy is lost” in “home’” and “Caught in a pattern of endless reproduction” in “event horizon.” In “Good thing you are not alone,” Upson makes the private public, and the public private, delving into the subconscious of contemporary American culture with a forensic approach, uncovering a repetitive world from which there appears to be no escape.

CROSSING THE LINE — RYOJI IKEDA: SUPERCODEX [LIVE SET]

Supercodex [live set], 2013, © Ryoji Ikeda photo by Ryo Mitamura

Ryoji Ikeda’s Supercodex [live set] makes its New York premiere at the Met as part of Crossing the Line Festival (photo by Ryo Mitamura / © Ryoji Ikeda)

MetLiveArts
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
September 6-7, $45-$60 (including same-day museum admission), 7:00
212-570-3949
crossingthelinefestival.org
www.metmuseum.org

At FIAF’s 2014 Crossing the Line Festival, Japanese multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda dazzled audiences at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the sold-out U.S. premiere of superposition, an audiovisual marvel that explored technology, philosophy, probability, and the future of existence. He’s now back with the follow-up, supercodex [live set], which kicks off the 2017 festival, again at the Met. (Ikeda’s gallery show, “the transcendental,” was part of the 2010 festival, at FIAF.) The piece, which was conceived and composed by Ikeda and features computer graphics and programming by Tomonaga Tokuyama, is the culmination of Ikeda’s Raster-Norton trilogy of albums that began with Dataplex and continued with Test Pattern, as Ikeda investigates the limits of technological-human connection. Viewers will be enveloped in black-and-white digital imagery while experimental music blasts throughout the space. Ikeda, who lives and works in Japan and Paris and also blew people’s minds with the immersive, site-specific the transfinite at the Park Avenue Armory in 2011, mines the “data of sound” and the “sound of data” in his work, incorporating scientific and mathematical elements, and the New York premiere of supercodex [live set] should bring that to a whole new level. (Tickets include museum admission, so be sure to go early and check out such exhibits as “The Theater of Disappearance,” “Talking Pictures: Camera-Phone Conversations Between Artists,” “Sara Barman’s Closet,” and “Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection.”)

MAUREEN GALLACE: CLEAR DAY

Maureen Gallace, “Summer House/Dunes,” oil on panel, 2009

Maureen Gallace, “Beach Shack, Door,” oil on panel, 2015 (courtesy 303 Gallery)

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Thursday – Monday through September 10, suggested donation $5-$10 (free for New York City residents), 12 noon – 6:00 pm
718-784-2084
www.moma.org

For more than twenty-five years, painter Maureen Gallace has let her work do her talking for her. The Stamford-born, New York-based artist gives very few interviews, and the only monograph about her seems to be a thirty-two-page accompaniment to a small 2004 gallery show, with text by Rick Moody, who was born in New York City but also grew up primarily in Connecticut. For Gallace’s first major survey, the gorgeous “Clear Day,” continuing at MoMA PS1 through September 10, MoMA has provided very only the most basic of information; there is no catalog, no extensive wall or label text, and very spare press materials about the nearly seventy works. But that goes hand in hand with the wonderful aura and mystery that surround her small canvases, mostly exquisitely rendered paintings of homes on Cape Cod, each much more than it first appears. In 2016, as part of the Met’s “Artist Project,” Gallace made a short video discussing the still lifes of Paul Cézanne, concentrating on his paintings of apples. It’s a fascinating analysis of the painter and the painting; in fact, change just a few words here and there and Gallace could have just as easily been referring to her own creative process and output.

Maureen Gallace, “Surf Road,” oil on panel, 2015 (courtesy 303 Gallery)

“[Cézanne] was taking this simple, naïve everyday object that we’re all familiar with, but the paintings don’t ever feel about copying the apples. The paintings are about painting; you can see the canvas. Everything points back at what it took to make the painting,” she says over shots of some of Cézanne’s works. “Every single mark is laid bare, so he really wanted everybody to know the experience of the painter, and he took forever to make the paintings. . . . I’m someone who often takes an hour to make a brushmark; painting is a lot of thinking, a lot of staring. The emotion comes from the way paint is handled. The forms seem kind of crude because they’re built up from the marks. They’re so solid, the apples, they almost become sculpture. It’s like you could feel those apples in your hand. . . . There is an uneasiness to these paintings, and I think that comes from the shifting perspective. There’s no horizon line . . . and the tilting can be a little claustrophobic and destabilizing. There’s perfectionism in there; it’s so Type B, controlled, but also, it wasn’t about the one painting that was going to be the masterpiece. I mean, I think that was the point, to keep going, keep going, keep going and getting better and better and better, and so it was okay to fail. There’s less pressure on the painting because you’ll just get it right the next time. I think he was trying to put everything that he knew about painting into each object. . . . It’s a type of experience that some painters have; they need to distill things down to get at the essence of what painting is, even if it’s just choosing an apple.”

Maureen Gallace, “Clear Day,” oil on panel, 2012 (courtesy 303 Gallery)

In Gallace’s case, the apples have been replaced by cottages along the water on the Cape. Each house is different, but nearly every structure is not quite a true representation of reality, with compelling flourishes of abstraction. Gallace, who works from sketches and photographs rather than en plein air, often leaves out doors and windows, or paints roads that twist in impossible ways, or depicts a house that seems to be built right on top of the water. There are no interiors; in some works, you can see right through windows and across the ocean, as if there is no furniture inside, and there are no people anywhere. Gallace’s use of line, light, and color is breathtaking, much more complex than one might initially notice. The horizontal and angled lines of “Cape Cod, Winter” make the work resemble a Dali-esque faceless double portrait. The blue and white of the structure in “Blue Beach Shack” nearly disappears into the blue and white of the sky. Lush greenery surrounds a gray house in “September 1.” “Surf Road” consists of a patch of flowers in the left foreground, a windowless white and gray barn in the right background, and a deserted roadway through the middle, a pair of telephone poles standing like ghosts, with no wires connecting them to anything. There are no cars to be seen on “Merritt Parkway, Winter,” one of Connecticut’s busiest thoroughfares, a curious overpass awaiting in the distance. The “Clear Day” show seems to falter only in a series of flower still lifes, which are more direct, lacking the deft sense of otherworldliness and isolation that can be found in the cottage canvases.

Maureen Gallace, “Summer House/Dunes,” oil on panel, 2009 (courtesy 303 Gallery)

Arranged at eye level across several galleries at PS1, one after another in a nearly endless display that disorients visitors’ sense of place, the paintings evoke the phenomenal still lifes of Italian master Giorgio Morandi, which featured bottles, pitchers, bowls, and other common objects. In addition to Morandi, Gallace has also cited Fairfield Porter, Edward Hopper, Jane Freilicher, Albert York, Agnes Martin, and Robert Ryman as influences. In a short 2009 piece for Travel & Leisure magazine, “An Artist’s New England,” Gallace wrote of Truro, in Cape Cod, “Part of the reason I love Truro is that Edward Hopper lived here. His work has been a big influence on mine. His landscapes are so beautifully painted and are so much about the essence of the places he depicts.” As with her description of Cézanne’s works, she could be talking about her own paintings, which are beautiful indeed, and transport viewers to another place. “The house doesn’t mean anything per se. It’s an empty vessel,” she told Elle Décor in 2010, when she was part of the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Gallace skillfully imbues these empty vessels with a kind of psychological mystery, leaving it up to each viewer to come up with their own private narrative.

LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE: UNDER-SONG FOR A CIPHER

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s site-specific “Under-Song for a Cipher” speaks volumes at New Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Through Sunday, September 3, $16
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

Upon entering the fourth floor of the New Museum, visitors join a fascinating gathering already taking place, sixteen figures in stunning canvases, beautifully arranged across three walls as if the black and brown men and women in the paintings are in conversation with one another, the chatter nearly audible, each with a different story to tell. But it turns out that British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s site-specific “Under-Song for a Cipher,” created specifically for this space, is a completely fictional world. Despite their realistic nature, none of the figures is based on real people; instead, 2013 Turner Prize finalist Yiadom-Boakye, who was born in London in 1977, works from her imagination, making each composite canvas in one day, finishing it before the paint dries (and discarding paintings she doesn’t like). “The term ‘imaginary’ is perhaps a little misleading. It suggests I pull everything out of the air. I don’t,” she tells curators Natalie Bell and Massimiliano Gioni in a catalog interview. “By composite I mean that they’re a combination of different sources: scrapbooks, drawings, photographs, etc. In many ways, I think less about the figures than I do about how they are painted. I ceased to see the paintings as portraits a long time ago. Thus, I don’t really see them as ‘characters’ in the individual sense, as personalities or people with specific traits. I always think of them as somehow beyond these things. They exist entirely in paint.” Yiadom-Boakye, who is of Ghanaian descent and is inspired by such masters as Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, and Walter Sickert, boasts a bold, firm brushstroke, including just enough abstraction to place her figures in an indefinable time and space, evoking but not specifically referencing art history, in which classic portraiture is heavily associated with white people.

Installation view. “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Under-Song For A Cipher,” 2017. New Museum, New York. Photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio

“Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Under-Song for a Cipher” places paintings in dialogue with one another as well as with viewers at the New Museum (photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio)

In “Medicine at Playtime,” a man sits on a chair in the middle of a room, the floor composed of black and white square tiles, his left elbow on his knee, his left hand on his head. In “The Much-Vaunted Air,” a woman stands in front of a window, facing off to the left, in a sly way the mirror image of Edward Hopper’s “A Woman in the Sun.” Yiadom-Boakye references Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” in “8am Cadiz,” but instead of a white girl looking across a grassy yellow field, her back to us, a black man in a green field faces the viewer. The gaze of both the viewer and the figures are central to Yiadom-Boakye’s process; earlier in life, she even considered becoming an optician. In “The Women Watchful,” a tall woman looks through binoculars, as if peering at a painting off to the right, “Of All the Seasons,” in which a woman with penetrating white eyes stares back suspiciously. Yiadom-Boakye, who had her first solo museum show, “Any Number of Preoccupations,” at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2010-11, is also a voracious writer of essays, poems, and short stories, but she leaves it up to the viewer to determine what tale her figures have to tell, even seeing her titles as another stroke on the canvas rather than an informational description. “It’s all there, thoughts about race, masculinity, femininity, what is to be human and in the world alongside everyone else,” she says in the interview. “But it is complex, joyful, miserable, infuriating, and overwhelming — so not easily put into words. That is why it is painted. The marks, the light, the dark, the color, the composition, the form, the scale: All of these things take on meanings to me, like a language to speak. And beauty is there too, unabashed and brazen.” One of her most unabashed and brazen works is “Light of the Lit Wick,” a lush, sensual depiction of a dancer in a white top and black leggings stretching her torso, arms raised, large light and dark circles on the back wall, mimicking her clothing. It’s a magisterial piece, demanding of extended viewing to absorb its subtle immensity. But don’t get lost in the beauty of the individual canvases, which also include the triptych “Vigil for a Horseman,” of a man in black and red posing on a red-and-white bed. They are in dialogue with one another as much as they are speaking to us. “As I’m working on a painting, I’m looking at and responding to whatever else is hanging near it in the studio,” Yiadom-Boakye tells Bell and Gioni. “That’s inevitable. It’s an immersive process with precious little logical planning, but plenty of magic, rumination, and deviation. Madness can take on a logic of its own sometimes.” It would be madness to miss this ecstatic show, one of the most involving and dynamic of the year.

REI KAWAKUBO / COMMES DES GARÇONS: ART OF THE IN-BETWEEN

Red rayon coats from “Flowering Dresses” collection are among highlights of “Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between” at the Met (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Met Fifth Avenue
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through September 4, $12-$25
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

Many art lovers have accidentally wandered into the Comme des Garçons flagship store in Chelsea, thinking it was a gallery. So in turn, the Met Costume Institute exhibition “Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between” comes complete with a fashion counter with items available for purchase. The show itself, celebrating the unique and innovative design sense of Tokyo-born designer and Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo, is utterly delightful, fancifully arranged in geometric white “closets” that offer colorful treats throughout its winding path, evoking her concepts of emptiness (mu) and space (ma). Many of the pieces are more objet d’art than wearable outfit, and that dichotomy is reflected in the organization of the exhibit, which is divided into “Absence/Presence,” “Design/Not Design,” “Fashion/Antifashion,” “Model/Multiple,” “High/Low,” “Then/Now,” “Self/Other,” “Object/Subject,” and “Clothes/Not Clothes.” Kawakubo, who recently turned seventy-five, notes, “My clothes and the spaces they inhabit are inseparable — they are one and the same. They convey the same message, and the same sense of values.” Pieces from the 1997 ready-to-wear collection “Body Meets Dress — Dress Meets Body” stand out in a dazzling red. One dress from “The Future of Silhouette” is made of brown paper, two others of white synthetic wadding in an unusual shape, with the mannequins sporting Brillo-y silver hairstyles. (The faceless heads and wild wigs are by Julien d’Ys.) A black polyester lace and net dress from “Ceremony of Separation” seems to have escaped from a horror movie. And a group of “Ballerina Motorbike” jackets and skirts are, per Kawakubo, “Harley-Davidson loves Margot Fonteyn.” The show also features clothes from such other collections as “Bad Taste,” “Clustering Beauty,” “Adult Punk,” “Round Rubbber,” “Abstract Excellence,” and “Not Making Clothing.” In 2012, Kawakubo said, “Personally, I don’t care about function at all. . . . When I hear ‘where could you wear that?’ or ‘it’s not very wearable’ or ‘who would wear that?’ to me it’s just a sign that someone missed the point.” Don’t miss the point at this rad show, which continues at the Met through September 4. In addition, on September 1 from 5:00 to 9:00, “MetFridays: In-Between Fashion” features a fashion design contest involving undergrad and graduate students, a panel discussion with Greg Foley, Phil Oh, and Shelley Fox, a photo booth, drop-in art workshops, and a party with music by DJ Reborn.