The Brooklyn Rail

A Glance Backward While Driving Over the Edge

Owning a car is an American birthright. It is the personalization of American power, prosperity, and autonomy.

In Conversation

RITA ACKERMANN with Anne Sherwood Pundyk

Late in October, when I entered painter Rita Ackermann’s studio in Brooklyn’s Navy Hill, she was working on three works on paper on the floor, pouring thinned cerulean blue paint, stopping, looking, working the paint into forms with a wide brush, then stopping and looking again.

In Conversation

JOAN SIMON with Anne Sherwood Pundyk

Joan Simon has worked as a writer, editor, and curator over the past 30 years. Of her approach to researching subjects, Simon observes, “I take a bath in it. Get immersed in it. And then see, feel, sense, think about, what’s there, the details as well as emerging patterns, and follow-up with further research.”

Powders, a Phial, and a Paper Book

Looking beyond the literal connection between the materials utilized in Powders, a Phial, and a Paper Book, a group show at Marlborough, Chelsea, and the exhibition’s titular references to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it is the dated milieu of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel that most clearly resonates with the odd feel of this exhibition.

MARI EASTMAN Objects, Decorative and Functional

Cherry and Martin is spelled out in compact, white neon letters centered in a long, narrow window set above eye level in a painted brick façade. Driving by the building on South La Cienega Boulevard in West Los Angeles, I think fleetingly that it might be a bar

TATZU NISHI Discovering Columbus

Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi’s temporary modern “tree house”—encasing the marble statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle—shows how much we ignore in plain sight, even when it is set directly in front of us.

BUSHWICK OPEN STUDIOS
June 1–3, 2012
JUNG AH KIM’s Studio
56 Bogart Street

The studio of mixed-media artist Jung ah Kim is located on the second floor of 56 Bogart Street in Bushwick. Just opposite the Morgan stop on the L train, her building is one of the area’s original artists’ studio buildings, now numbering in the hundreds.

Unconsciousness Raising

Her eyes are closed and her mouth smiles quietly. Pulsing slightly, she is silent for several seconds, then her mouth pops open. She cries out in a sharp, barking moan. As if surprised from sleep, but not yet awake, her eyes open wide and the camera catches a glint in the whites of her eyes. With her eyes and mouth still open, her head rolls slowly back, dropping below the camera frame.

BARRY X BALL Matthew Barney / Barry X Ball Dual-Dual Portrait

Here the audience has an opportunity to view, as a whole, his assembly of incongruous materials, which have been transformed with meticulous devotion into objects deformed by genetics and depraved acts.

A ‘Womanhouse’ or a Roaming House? ‘A Room of One’s Own’ Today

A.I.R. Gallery in Dumbo kicked off 2014 with a large women-only group exhibition, curated by celebrated feminist artist and writer Mira Schor.

CY TWOMBLY Sculpture

Just over a month after the opening of Cy Twombly’s exhibition of sculpture at MoMA, the artist died at age 83. Located in the museum’s fourth floor foyer gallery, the collection overlooks the lush, bustling sculpture garden beyond the exterior glass wall.

UNTITLED FRIEZE FAIR 2007 Installation by Gert and Uwe Tobias

To coincide with the inclusion of the artists’ work in MoMA’s current “Print/Out” exhibition, the typed, printed, molded, and designed room-sized installation by Romanian identical twins Gert and Uwe Tobias (originally shown at Frieze Fair in 2007), has been reinstalled at Team Gallery’s Wooster Street location.

This is what sculpture looks like

To counter perceived favoritism toward the medium of painting at the expense of sculpture in the marketplace and in critical discourse, this entertaining show intends to even the score. Bluster is good for business, but the underdog stance of the work doesn’t come as much from it being sculpture as it does from being subversive. An equally good title would be This Is What Activist Art Looks Like.

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN Savage Beauty

Savage Beauty, the lush, theatrically presented retrospective of Alexander McQueen’s couture design in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Contemporary Art Wing, feels heavy with mourning.

ALAN SHIELDS
Something Goin' On & On

Alan Shields’s operative medium is pure color. His passive, infused, or diluted application of paint through tints, prints, stains, and stencils leaves his work vulnerable to the conditions under which it is viewed, bringing to mind the seacoast or a broad expanse of field where the light and weather are in perpetual flux.

BERNADETTE CORPORATION 2000 Wasted Years

BC uses the methods and materials associated with industries adjacent to the art world—including fashion, publishing, and filmmaking—to challenge suspect, high-minded, commercial, or subversive impulses within both the realm of fine art and the real world beyond.

179 Canal/Anyways

There’s the party and then there’s the day after—eating leftovers and talking about the party with friends who couldn’t make it. 179 Canal/Anyways has a little of that next-day feel. Margaret Lee organized 179 Canal/Anyways at White Columns as a “non-retrospective” look at 179 Canal, a collaborative wellspring of art invention she nurtured during a 15-month span starting in March 2009.

ADAM MARNIE, TOM THAYER, and RUBY SKY STILER

The beating heart of the three-person exhibit at Derek Eller is Adam Marnie’s larger-than-life, floral bouquet collaged and carved directly into the entrance foyer’s sheetrock. Color Xerox enlargements cut, torn, and glued; flower shapes, negative space, and shadow edges traced and carved out of the wall; and drips of adhesive all form elements of the rhythmic composition.

Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap, a group exhibition at Kent Fine Art, is rife with framed, cream and gray, rectangular works which anchor unruly neighboring pieces displaying buckled textures, blurred resolution, or smoky graphite diffusion.

Achieving Authentic Equality

A white T-shirt I have reads in hand-written black marker, “NAME 10 FEMALE ARTISTS & WILL GIVE YOU A KISS.” Artist Nicole Nadeau made the shirt for the “Clitney Perennial,” a rogue art intervention I initiated at the Whitney Biennial this year.