Brian Jungen

ArtSeen

Following his 2004 installation at Triple Candie of a life size basketball court made of 224 sweatshop tables, Brian Jungen revisits New York with an extensive survey of works from 1993 to 2005. A leading member of a new generation of Vancouver artists, Jungen covers the entire ground floor at the New Museum’s transitional location in Chelsea, a thorough presentation that reveals Jungen’s impressive range of expression.

Joan Jonas
The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things

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Conceived and directed by performance artist Joan Jonas with original piano score by Jason Moran, the central narrative focus of The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things is the unprecedented life and work of art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929). Warburg has only recently come to recognition in the U.S. with the translations of his ground breaking Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America (Philippe 1995), of Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion by Phillipe-Alain Michaud (Zone Books, 2004); and with Doris von Drathen’s Vortex of Silence (Charta, 2005).

El Museo’s Bienal: The (S) Files/The Selected Files
El Museo del Barrio

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The difficulties of El Museo del Barrio’s mission are reflected in the conflicting statements and provocative questions raised by The (S) Files/The Selected Files, the museum’s first attempt at a biennial of contemporary art. The institution’s founder, Rafael Montañez Ortiz, strongly believed that education was crucial for the Puerto Rican immigrant population in New York to transcend poverty and integrate and assert themselves in a larger American culture. As a working artist and public school teacher, Ortiz felt that art exhibitions would play a major role in strengthening cultural identity during this assimilation. Further, El Museo works to present and preserve the art and culture of Puerto Ricans and all Latin Americans in the United States, lest it be lost during this assimilation. Yet developments in identity politics elevate a certain pride in “difference,” a celebration of ethnic uniqueness that annuls the outmoded, idealistic concept of the “melting pot.”

Manufactured Landscapes:
The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky
Brooklyn Museum

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Edward Burtynsky’s show of large scale photographs of the industrial landscape owes more to the photography of Ansel Adams or the paintings of Charles Scheeler than to contemporaries like Andreas Gursky or Gregory Crewdson. Where Gursky explores the visible consumer landscape wrought by modernity, Burtynsky trains his camera with a painter’s eye on the seldom seen industrial landscape of North America, Bangladesh, India, and China. Unlike his contemporaries who explore narrative and illusion, Burtynsky works with a journalistic objectivity and reveals the effects of modernity to inspire awe, dread, and guilt in his viewers.

Marcia Hafif

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Christopher Wilmarth
Sculpture and Drawings

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Chris Wilmarth wrote country music and loved it enough to contemplate giving up sculpture for it. Like his sculpture, his songs are without frills. They’re rough around the edges and wistful, with a strong dose of nostalgia straight out of the blues. His voice is high and nasal and has a bit of Dylan and a bit of Guthrie in it. Hank Williams was his favorite.

Roland Flexner
Nocturne

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If you ask Roland Flexner, he will adamantly deny being anything so categorically limiting as a “process artist,” despite the ingenious mark making events using blown bubbles of soap, ink, and water he has come to be known for. He’s not playing coy about the sexy forms that emerge in his art—these methods are the journey for him, not the destination.

Alex Katz
First Sight: Working Drawings from
1965–2002

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Two years ago, the Peter Blum Gallery held an exhibition called “Alex Katz: Cartoons,” which raised some entertaining questions about the role of intentionality in the creation of a work of art. The drawings on display were essentially by products of the process Katz uses to compose his large-scale paintings. Taking his cue from Renaissance fresco technique, Katz first works out his design with charcoal on paper and then transfers it to canvas by dusting dry pigment through pinholes pricked along the outlines. The resulting accretion of accidental marks—flecks and erasures and tiny explosions of color—created startling and sometimes ravishing dissonances across Katz’s hard-edged contours.

Geoffrey Dorfman
Recent Work

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Paint, the essence of paint, the substance of paint, the materiality of paint, the culture of paint. Geoff Dorfman is an artist who has spent the better part of the last three and a half decades immersed in the implications of what it means to be painting now. He’s an artist for who the flame of the Abstract Expressionists and the New York School still burns hot. These are paintings about painting. There are no ironies, no clever theories, and no subversive aesthetic gambits. The discussion of these paintings requires one to use the language of painting as reference to other things would be mere allusion. A few other painters working today like Scott Richter or Geoff Davis have developed a type of flatfooted pragmatism that makes use of paint as a kind of quasi-sculptural medium, focusing on its mass, its chunkiness, and the bravado of a glob of paint. Dorfman conversely is also committed to the notion of the classic brush stroke, the sensual rebound and multitude of responses possible with bristles rubbing on canvas.

Rick Briggs
Painter Man

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A little “painter man,” brush in hand, strokes away at a broad black line. Following the trail of this line, it doubles back on itself again and again, passing through the doorway at the center of the picture, filling the room behind, then streaks on to fill another, on an endless continuum. This stripe fills not just the walls in the painting but is symbolic of the tedious nature of the house painter’s dilemma, spending their days expertly covering the walls of clients’ homes to finance the personal pursuit of fulfilling their private painterly practice. The above painting, “One Liner,” could be a metaphor for any artist trying to make it in the work-a-day world, but is for Briggs emblematic of a crisis that threw his artistic aspirations into doubt and caused him to question his commitment to art.

Nicolas Carone
A Selection of Works on Paper

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Nicolas Carone, who turned eighty-eight this year, is a painter who has been reluctant to be categorized as a second generation Abstract Expressionist. His work—while leaning towards the same argument for and against de Kooning’s expressiveness of the then controversial synthesis of the figure and abstraction at the first glance—has in fact far greater affinities to wider sources in art history: Greek, Etruscan, Roman, Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, cubist, surrealist, as well as Pollock.

Lordy Rodriquez

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Maps have always served at least two purposes: to get people from point A to point B, and to demonstrate or set claim to domains of power and control. The further you go back in history, the more both of these functions become speculative—California was represented as an island on early maps of North America—and the more maps assumed an air of exploration. Today, satellite imaging allows us to visually depict everything from the coherent shapes of continental landmasses to the streets in a small midwestern town. And with tools like Mapquest and Google Earth only a click away, location—and the act of locating—seems more then ever under our rational control.

Micki Watanabe
Lost and Found in the Stacks

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Above the din of chatter and clinking espresso spoons from the coffee shop in the Brooklyn Public Library’s atrium, several constructions by Micki Watanabe sit quietly and inconspicuously behind glass on the second floor. Most visitors scurry by her understated and thoughtful project, Lost and Found in the Stacks, without a notice on their way to multi-media labs, guest speakers, and other features of the modern library. It seems that the library, that seeming lo-fi stalwart and tranquil sanctuary of analog learning, has itself had to turn the pleasure dial up to meet the rising sensory expectations of the desensitized public.

Shirley Jaffe
Tibor de Nagy

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When you think of the French tradition in painting, you think of Poussin, Delacroix, and Ingres. Monet comes to mind. Braque, Matisse, and Léger follow along with all the foreigners who flocked to Paris at the turn of the twentieth century to help make it the center of the international art world. After that, trying to define a French tradition gets a bit tricky. There are the Nouveaux Realistes, but they seem less homegrown, as much a product of English and American influence as of French savoir-faire. This is also true of the French action painters. We’re prone to thinking of art in an evolutionary sense. Art historians’ emphasis on qualities common to disparate movements can obscure the fact that national traditions can be lost. The attention to touch, subtle awareness of color, and attachment to tradition that characterized French painting from the eighteenth century through the mid twentieth century might have been submerged completely in the waves of foreign aesthetics that swept into the country after 1950.

Jasper Johns
The Flag Drawings

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A fortunate exhibition of Jasper Johns flag drawings at Craig F. Starr Gallery presents mostly early drawings, from 1955 and 1956, in a variety of mediums—graphite wash, pencil, ink, collage, watercolor, and some re-worked lithographs—reflecting the artist’s versatility in creating variations on a theme. This exhibition follows the exhibition of the latest work, Catenary, at Matthew Marks Gallery last spring, and gives us an opportunity to see both old and new works in terms of distance and proximity.

Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon

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Symbolist, member of the Decadence group, and a proto-Surrealist, Odilon Redon (1840–1916) was a native of Bordeaux, a painter and graphic artist, who composed his enigmatic art works sort of “like music.” He used to say: “My drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate…imbued with a melancholy passivity.” This was consistent with the moods of Symbolism: nocturnal, autumnal, and lunar.