The Brooklyn Rail

The title curator Alex Glauber bestowed on this terrific show is a line from a 1994 Phish song, “Wolfman’s Brother”:

The telephone was ringing
That’s when I handed it to Liz
She said, “This isn’t who it would be
If it wasn’t who it is”

Liz’s baffling statement is a logic exercise, reductio ad absurdum, that we can translate into ordinary English as “I’m not the person you may think you’re calling,” or, more succinctly, “wrong number.” Here Phish reprised one of Tweedledee’s comebacks in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871): “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.” Both instances posit a hypothetical (“would be” or “might be”) only to refute it—an all-too-appropriate introduction to the forty-one or so objects, dating from the sixteenth, seventeenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, that make up the present exhibition at Casey Kaplan, if I’m going to tell it like it is.

The earliest works, by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Workshop and Pieter Brueghel the Younger, are testimonials to a pre-Romantic notion of originality. Cranach and company’s The Judgement of Paris (1520) and Brueghel’s The Outdoor Wedding Dance (ca. 1615) were so popular they created their own market, which the artists and their crews rushed to satisfy: there are some one hundred versions of the Brueghel produced in the workshop. But the show does not dwell exclusively on the matter of originality.

Like Phish’s song, which could be performed by anyone, the works assembled here include replicas, facsimiles, and parodies of other works. They all bring up the idea of repetition, which can only truly function if the viewer knows it is repetition. Seeing the bricks in a wall is surely an instance of repetition, but seeing an isolated work of art disconnected from any series leaves us stranded in perception. Alex Glauber wants to mitigate our dependence on memory by showing us exactly how repetition interfaces with difference. As such, he juxtaposes Walker Evans’s famous portrait photograph Allie Mae Burroughs, Wife of Cotton Sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama (1936) with Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans: 3 (1981). Allie Mae’s face is simultaneously the same and different in each photo: Sherrie Levine changes the dimensions from 9 by 7 inches to 8 by 10, so she is not replicating Evans but appropriating his image for her own purposes. Repetition yields to replacement as Levine depicts the pathos of Allie Mae’s tragic visage—the new image transmutes the old one into a feminist statement about the status of women living in poverty.

In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning. Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns then placed the sheet in a gold frame with the title (on a separate card) “Erased de Kooning Drawing Robert Rauschenberg 1953.” What Rauschenberg’s act meant—an anti-Abstract Expressionist gesture, an affirmation of American artistic existence—is fundamentally ambiguous. Critics have labored mightily over the work, and forensic scientists have found the ghost of de Kooning’s scribbling in the paper, but none of this explains why Mike Bidlo should in 2005 present Not Robert Rauschenberg: Erased de Kooning Drawing. The same gold frame, the same “traces of graphite on paper,” but with a totally different meaning. That sense of sameness and difference reappears in Bidlo’s Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1964) (2005). Warhol’s audacious Brillo Soap Pads Box (1964) was a silkscreen ink and house paint on plywood construction measuring 17 by 17 by 14 inches, while Bidlo’s version, also in silkscreen ink and house paint on plywood, is 17 by 17 by 14. As with Sherrie Levine, the change in dimensions marks a change in meaning: Warhol’s quintessentially Pop gesture, turning a banal box into art, becomes with Bidlo an identity struggle. He’s not Rauschenberg, not Warhol, and his work is “not by” (Bidlo’s signature tag) them. The work is his, but it only acquires significance when we look at it with our mind’s eye fixed on its usually invisible source.

Christopher Wool’s oeuvre is vast and varied, but he is most famous for the text-based paintings he began showing (in a show with Robert Gober) in 1988. Portentous quotations from the film Apocalypse Now, nonsense phrases, single words in stenciled black letters on a white surface—all the possibilities of word art. Jonathan Monk takes Wool literally by creating Wool Piece VII (2021) a 55 by 38 inch work made of wool, cotton, metal eyelets, and aluminum wall fixing. But where Wool’s works are meant to be read by us, Monk’s piece is seemingly addressed to Wool himself: FO/OL. What is Monk saying? That he’s tired of Wool’s words? Here repetition takes the form of parody, reminding us that this is the way traditions renew themselves.

Simon Starling’s Home-made Castiglioni Lamp (Buffalo) (2020) extends parody into the world of design. The Castiglioni brothers created stunning lamps starting in the 1960s. Most of us can’t afford even the knockoffs, so Starling makes his own out of an oil can, a fishing rod, a car headlamp, and other miscellaneous found materials. The point is not merely to mock the elegance of the Castiglionis, but to mock the idea of commodity possession. It’s not you who owns the object but the object that owns you.

Alex Glauber is to be congratulated for creating a show that serves both the mind and the eye—and for giving us a rare opportunity to see the work of artists like Claude Cahun, Elaine Sturtevant, and David Thorpe, whose work is shown all too infrequently.