ArtSeen
Bush League Roebling Hall

Bush League wades the well-swum waters of expressly political art with a group of paintings, sculptures, and videos that levy a critique of current politics and policy in America. The work is acerbic, as art of this sort tends to be, and suffers from the tunnel vision characteristic of its breed. Explicit political messages do not give art meaning. They merely constrain its potential content to a narrow frame of reference.
Bush League sounds a note of deep discontent with the status quo in varying cadences. Rather strident is Michael St. John’s close-up photo of a woman penetrated anally and vaginally surrounded by images of various pop icons and flanked by little American flags. Wayne Gonzales’s tight, monochromatic images of the president and his cabinet as they might be seen on a surveillance monitor are understated to the point of invisibility. In subservience to his depiction of alienation, his flawless craftsmanship is barely noticeable. Ivan Navarro’s "You Sit, You Die" is discordant. If his sculpture of fluorescent tubes, electric cables, and list of people who got the chair in Florida is meant to evoke an electric chair, why does it look like a lawn chair? An appropriately literal question for an extremely literal piece.
Most of the work in the show suffers from a compromise similar to Navarro’s. The problem is, when work relies on communicating specific information, the form in which it is expressed needs to be transparent. The degree to which it isn’t is the degree of the piece’s failure. Why, for example, did Dan Ford choose to depict his burning of the National Library in Baghdad as an oil on canvas in romantic swirling color reminiscent of Turner? Wouldn’t it have been more practical as an inkjet print pulled from a documentary photo? Doesn’t the romanticism of the swirling line and color get in the way? One might say intuition led the artist to do it, but intuition is out of place when a painting’s message is not intuitively gleaned but literally read. Probably in recognition of this, Ford’s coloring and drawing seem somewhat forced. As for Navarro, he could have made his sculpture look exactly like an electric chair. He probably could have found some old defunct chair, dragged it into the gallery, and tacked the list on it.
Painting and sculpture, when pushed through intuition to their limits as media, can take radical form far more evocative as image and more efficient as critique. When artists such as those in Bush League are willing to settle for less powerful statements, the indication is that they themselves have ceased to believe in radical form springing from profound exploration of a medium. Instead they opt for imposed content and, by extension, imposed form.
Not surprisingly, those artists in Bush League who go the farthest in disregard of their respective mediums make the most forceful work. Jane Benson need not bother about modeling in her sculpture, a solid wood door of dada parentage impotently installed against a gallery wall. Its message of unease and frustration is implicit, not illustrated. The form of David Opdyke’s sculpture "Oil Empire" is entirely dictated by its function—to detail the movement and storage of oil in America on a manageable scale. Its medium is a product of, not a compromise with, the constraints of the information conveyed. Deborah Grant’s contribution, a frieze-like collage, adopts the language of pulp fiction and comic books, as opposed to classical draftsmanship, to send its angry message.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

James Brooks: Rendez-vous Paintings 1972–1983
By Robert C. MorganJUL-AUG 2022 | ArtSeen
Although I have encountered the paintings of James Brooks sporadically in various group exhibitions focused on Abstract Expressionism, it has been relatively rare to encounter his works shown together in a context all their own. As such, the collection of works included in the current exhibition from the 1970s and early eighties suggest a somewhat timely occasion, providing the uncommon opportunity to understand Brooks solely through his own work and ideas.

Guillermo Kuitca: Graphite Paintings from The Tablada Suite (1992) and Poema Pedagógico (1996)
By Alfred Mac AdamDEC 22–JAN 23 | ArtSeen
The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once quipped, We Mexicans, you know, descend from the Aztecs. The Argentines, well, they descend from boats. A facetious thought with serious consequences for the eight graphite paintings from the Tablada Suite and Poema Pedagógico, series by Guillermo Kuitca, currently on view at Sperone Westwater. Mexicans can feel autochthonous, linked to their land by blood, but Argentines, a nation of immigrants like the United States, rarely have the same experience. Where Americans generally feel bonded by their Constitution, a document that holds their nation together, that commonality, if it exists in Argentina, is attenuated by political and economic catastrophe.
Jeff Koons: Lost in America
By Phyllis TuchmanFEB 2022 | ArtSeen
Its an illuminating show. Instead of confronting lots of sculptures lite, as some would have it, this retrospective illuminates the changing role objects have played in Koonss career. Digging deeper, youll notice, too, that the terms statues and sculpture are not interchangeable. Though paintings and prints are on display here, the large, three-dimensional works primarily draw our attention.
David Novros: Paintings
By David RhodesNOV 2022 | ArtSeen
Altogether, architectural features are recalled and a connection between the painting and the room is activated. This is what is at stake. Moving among the paintings the gallery becomes an active environment, like a chapel with frescoes.