• I have decided to review a wide variety of cultural products, in addition to art gallery offerings.
• books
• films
• and anything else I stumble into.

I shall see my readers shortly.

Aziz + Cucher at ClampArt

One is unswayed by Messr.s Aziz and Cucher’s re-processing of digital photographs. Essentially, what they do is reprocess large images such that they become in a manner of speaking, pixelated, or even pointillized, composed of little segments of color generated by some algorithm or other. But, who cares.

Little is done to the images that was not present before (they were large and highly detailed), and the images themselves are of humdrum pastorality, of a sort of stock-photo level of professionalism. Additionally this critic tires of photography being manipulated, as if mastery of Photoshop were some creative achievement. I daresay such an approach is flimsy and crummy, and requires a strong hand to transcend the shabbiness of the approach; but no such conceptual heft is to be found here.

“In these works,” goes the PR, “the pixel is highly pronounced [...] to point to the fact that the world, like the body, is constructed of tiny particles and elements.” As you wish, however, this critic found the result lazy and unsuccessful in inducing in one an awareness of such digital existence. Persons of culture shall only become aware of yet another display predicated on wan conceptuality.

A-

Robert Therrien at Gagosian on 24th

Robert Therrien presents sculptures modeled after everyday objects (folding chairs, dishes, pots and pans), but in a scale several times that of the originals.

This critic judges it an intriguing and overall enjoyable display. My old enemy, spectacle, that well-dressed crook, makes sort of an appearance at Robert Therrien’s present work at Gagosian on 24th st. But he stays not long, and one forgets he was ever there, one’s mind being too busy noticing all the wonderful little surface and function details that the artist, in his fidelity, almost a purity of spirit, has rendered in his sculptures: the wear on the pots, the folding mechanisms of the chairs, et cetera.

Indeed the only works of indifferent consequence were sculptures modeled after kitchen plates. These I found too clean and plastic; at the very least, in comparison with the almost narrative, dramatic details of wear in the others.

C-

Justin Craun at Fredricks & Freiser

A talented young man who has yet to mature, one feels.

A dissatisfactory display. There is a certain amount of ingenuity of expression to Mr Craun’s work, but an amount largely annoyed by missteps: color is unscrupulous and lacking control, a tastelessness of pallette that shall not age well. Impasto is used to a fault, geometrical additions to the visual plane become excessive to the point of detritus. The apparent source for Mr Craun’s images, class photos and personal snaps, are not used to much advantage. On the bright side, the artist has an admirable control of technique, even a rigorous one, as evidenced by his (too) many gradient fields.

Mr Craun has a taste for satire, but here (as so often in painting) the result is purely simple: crazed expressions (as in Fresh, 2008, above) and the like. Moreover one laments a minimal level of readability, in the sense that the highly graphic composition of the artist’s works prevent much psychological intercourse with the viewer; instead, a kind of prosaic imagism is relied upon too greatly, to uncertain effect.

C

Till Gerhard
Stellan Holm 

Much light, not much heat. Mr Gerhard presents a bunch of paintings, some cruddy little collages, and a great large dark box, in his latest show.

The work is of mildly interesting chracter. I as a critic and man am not an undying partisan of particular rules or suggestions; nevertheless I have sympathy in short supply (and all ways have and may always) for the technique or idea, whosever it first was (Richter? Discuss!), to “paint” photographs — you know, paintings from photos, it’s all the rage. Images that de rigeur seem to need to come from low-end consumer one-shots. Mr Gerhard, da er ist Deutscher, uses the approach, but alas, to the usual limited advantage.

The show’s focus is “light,” thank you press release. Indeed, some of the canvases, such as Inneres Licht (2008, pictured) present an intruiging image, one presumes wrought from such a source, an average photo, a scene unknown, “prosaic.” The scene is otherwordly. The painting technique is usefully inept. One wonders: where did it happen? Where is that forest? Since it is a photo, was a photo, the things in the painting must really “be” somewhere, no?

Overall however the paintings I found generally dumpy and uncomitted, which does Mr Gerhard no favors, being already burdened by a fussy intellectual conceit (that of reused imagery, yawn): canvas after canvas of unspecific scenes of “people” in “places” doing “things” (and in washed out lighting). Plenty of that, but the artist must remember next time to use more of the pigment made out of that rare mineral, insight.

The great large dark box as I call it, a sculpture called Dark Star I believe, was intriguing as well — the artist is undoubtedly knacky at mixing bright and dark to unsettle one, here with simple things like mirrors, a disco ball and a strong light — but developmentally speaking, stands here orphaned. I should like to see a show only of Mr Gerhard’s light sculptures.

D

Stuart Hawkins
Zach Feuer 

A certain tact compels me ab initio to clear my leftist credentials: I myself, a European, am left-wing as they come.  Notwithstanding, I have not, do not now, nor will I ever acquiesce to praising softheaded presentations that agreeably caress my ideology, and neither should you.  

In her exhibition, Stuart Hawkins presents a variety of materials, mostly digital montages but also videos and a sculpture or two, the running theme of which is her interaction with the various (what used to be called) natives in your standard dusty third-world locales (in this case, that old standby, India).  Care to look at the snaps, what what?

Experienced and intelligent connoisseurs will the bemoan the presentation, consisting of little more than yet another pampered white woman befriending the subalterns so as to critique in some vague way, which really means perform a gesture of what might be some kind of critique of (and which is in the present exhibition dearly undeveloped), the usual cadre of left-wing bugaboos, environmental destruction, pasty fat Westerners staying in resorts while the nearby benighted earnest primitives live in destitution, etc.  Persons of sufficient intellectual insecurity such as those who enjoy reviewing the details of their ideologies portrayed before them in an uncritical and reassuring light, not to mention a light totally bereft of any kind of aesthetic force (because it seems that aesthetic qualities are incriminating items of western privilege) may get something out of the show, and may purchase a piece if they are sufficiently privileged to do so (many are).  

Being a person of culture and discernment (such as your dashing critic) does not mean that one has no political conscience, but it does mean that one’s taste in political culture must meet the same high standards one expects in all culture; standards not least of which include an honest approximation of the subject to the point of entering the realm of uncertainty and paradox, territories which so often politics abhors.

It’s not all bad, just middling. A few cute pieces stand out, such as a sculpture of a doughy white woman with a water bottle, a fountain that runs forever, executed in a kind of low-rent plaster.  Large props created by the numberless heathens (Untitled, 2008, pictured) are entertaining to a point, if passing spectacle.

But then there are silly things like a looping video of a low-key resort employee making animal sounds. “He entertains a vacation audience that seeks to enjoy the authentic sounds of nature,” goes the press release, “while distracting them from the reality that many of these sounds can no longer be heard.” Oh, please. This critic should rejoice, should graduate-student-type work be no longer heard from again.

D

Tom Sanford 
Leo Koenig

An exhibition that fails to amount to any level of consequence.  

In his latest exhibition at Leo Koenig, Mr. Sanford presents us with an array of his usual pop cultural imagery, executed in a kind of faux naïve children’s acrylics style, one rather queasy on the eyes.  But it’s nothing that you can’t imagine it will be and nothing new, and does not strive to contend to any appreciable degree with the difficult subjects upon which he focuses.

Popular culture is a deadly difficult animal to hunt and kill.  Very easily in such pursuits does, shall one say, the hunter become the hunted.  In other words, attempting to contend or somehow reason with “shallow” phenomena broadcast all over the world, one very easily finds oneself complicit with such phenomena.  Art these days is no different; without even trying, a successful young artist finds himself the focus of a very similar machine of media hype.  The artist might conceivably succeed against such forces-that-be, but he must travel equipped with an intellectual brashness, not to mention vast sense of humor, that Mr. Sanford fails to possess any real degree.  

The usual strategy, as sadly displayed by the artist here, is to affect a pose of utter cynicism. (You don’t fool me, Mr. Sanford; forced cynicism is itself a kind of naiveté.) Furthermore, aesthetically the artist has little to contribute: how many times in recent painting have we seen gold surfaces, garish colors, large breasts, intimations of lesbianism, references to hip-hop, rewarmed Pop-art (pictured), and the like?  Is the daring of Andy Warhol really dead?, or just very sick indeed?  I don’t buy such academicism, though it appears Leo Koenig’s clients do.

Louise Lawler
Metro Pictures

Unconvincing. The geniuses of Metro Pictures present an exhibition of digital photographs taken by Ms Lawler of a lot of other artists’ work mounted on museum boxes.

Ho-hum, I say. While one detects a certain element of satire in the repetitive presentation of the same works several times, the whole business is to this critic far too dry to justify itself. One is unconvinced Ms Lawler is putting in any sort of effort beyond phoning, or since these are digital, emailing, her work in. Further, one is not swayed by the gallery’s aperçus, from Ann Goldstein, regarding the works’ awareness of the contingency of meaning oh there I go again I just yawned.

There is some sort of gesture in that the pieces photographed are located in auction houses and museums and some such nonsense, but nothing comes of it. In sum, cultured persons are directed to walk past the entrance.

B-

“Evolution” at Max Lang
May 8 – June 7, 2008

Intriguing and vague.

This is a group show that calls itself a “biology and the body in contemporary sculptural practices.” Since that can mean just about any blasted thing, one knows what level of rigor and focus one is in for.

You have your obligatory witty items, such as in John Isaacs’ Further uses of the dead for the living (2008), above, a huge slab of wax dressed to look gory; or trompe l’oeil bronze vegetation by Tony Matelli.  The price of the presentation is too bookish and limp in its concerns and examinations.  The press release is full of wandering questions like, “how does a piece of art to enter one’s life?”  The curator purports to “examine questions” later on “address” them to.  Good for him.  Yawn.

There are intriguing pieces on display. Ms Dieker creates of sort of monstrous muppet with flesh-toned pieces of discarded clothing and fabric. Go, I encourage. But as a group show, the rationale is too inchoate and tenuous. In today’s world with so many narratives, group shows are hard to pull, and impossible when the “curator”, one Marc Wellman, that’s Dr Wellman to you, is so vague and uncritical in his purpose.

Still, the artists are not really to blame. Go, and send back thoughts.