Installation View, Greater LA.

Is this a throwdown? It’s tempting to think so, since the title, Greater LA, is obviously a riff on the seminal P.S.1 survey Greater New York, and is installed in the same type of beat-up SoHo loft where major New York art history went down in the 1960s and ‘70s. But don’t get too excited. Any sense of bi-coastal competition erodes  quickly when you realize that many of the artists on view are already well-represented and accepted commodities here in New York.  Also, unlike Greater New York, which was a wild, not-for-profit showcase of up-and-comers, Greater LA is a commercial show and there really isn’t too much here that can’t be seen during a typical afternoon in Chelsea or the Lower East Side. So stop frontin’, y’all.

Alex Israel, Property, 2011.

If it were a throwdown, however, Sterling Ruby would be in the heavyweight class. With a group of stacked rectilinear forms, he adds color, a sense of the handmade, and illusion to minimalism’s airtight vocabulary.  Lofts like these have always been the perfect setting for minimal forms, and Ruby’s piece dominates a show that suffers from too many freestanding walls and too large a roster of artists. Token appearances by highly saleable artists (Mark Grotjahn works on paper, anyone?) give the show an art fair vibe that renders the whole “snapshot of exciting new LA art right now” thing nearly laughable.  A handful of great pieces amidst acres of empty loft space would have been way more effective.

Installation View, Greater LA.

Alex Israel’s Property, however, provides a sophisticated moment. A Grecian figure stands in front of a group of lockers, as if you had accidently stumbled into the employee lounge at the Getty. This pairs well with Jonas Wood’s chunky paintings of Grecian urns.  Wood, who lives in Los Angeles but grew up in Boston, went to school in St. Louis, and already has a strong presence in New York, also seems out of place here. He represents the sort of omni-local artist who pervades today’s scene, the type that makes it hard to discern any real conceptual or aesthetic differences between Los Angeles and New York.

Personally, I would have loved to see more space devoted to artists who are not represented by New York galleries, to get at what, if anything, really distinguishes the two cities’ art ideologies. But I suppose you can’t blame the curators for playing it a little safe and including their bankable stars. Their kitchen sink approach and all-over-the-place-career-wise roster seems to say that no matter where you set up your studio, every artist stills wants and needs to show in New York. We throw down harder, and Los Angeles knows it. Otherwise, they would have just had the show there.

FOLKERT DE JONG The Balance: Trader's Deal 9, (detail) 2010 Styrofoam, pigmented polyurethane foam Photo: Jason Mandella Copyright the artist Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai

Michael Tomeo: I’m really into the Trader’s Deal pieces. From the moment we learn about it in grade school, Americans laugh at how foolish native people were to sell the island of Manhattan for a bunch of beads. You make the pitch made to the native people seem goofily transparent and demeaning, like some sort of song and dance.  But there’s also an oddly hypnotic quality in the stares of the offerers. It’s like they’re half street hustler, half visionary. Could you elaborate on these?

Folkert de Jong: The Trader’s Deal pieces are about unfair deals, profiteering, colonialism and imperialism. I based the character on the monument for Peter de Minuit, the Dutchman who purchased Manhattan for beads and mirrors. The figures in the artwork are all copies from one character…a 16th/17th century trader, that I created out of many figures from history: The painting “The Nightwatch” by the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn, and characters such as Pedro de Alvarado, Peter de Minuit and Hernan Cortes. All the figures in the artwork are copies made from one mould, from one single character. The clones are trading with themselves, their own kind, ripping off each other and facing their destiny; self-destruction.

FOLKERT DE JONG: Operation Harmony, James Cohan Gallery, 2011 (exhibition view) Photo: Jason Mandella Copyright the artist Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai

MT: Coming from the Netherlands, were you taught a different view on the di Minuit transaction than children in the U.S. are?

FdJ: Well, if you look at the propaganda machine that promoted the 400 years Dutch-New York connection, I would say that still not much has changed. The Dutch seem to be very proud of their historical conquests. For me as a kid growing up here, they are like adventurous stories, with costumed characters as in Hook and Peter Pan. What disturbs me most is the interference of governments and the Royal Families in the manipulation of the historical myths. But I guess that is what happens with all nations, if you can change the cause of history into your own advantage, it simply becomes more profitable.

MT: What’s the symbolism behind the cubes and other polygons in your work? The people in the Trader’s Deal pieces offer strings of them and the half figure in Hail the One is sort of crushed by one.

FdJ: The shapes are references to dices, or mathematical forms. I am interested in the element of chance. How science has been always trying to simplify natural processes, and how uncontrollable nature actually can be.

FOLKERT DE JONG: Operation Harmony, James Cohan Gallery, 2011 (exhibition view) Photo: Jason Mandella Copyright the artist Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai

MT: You often mix colonial imagery with contemporary objects and you combine traditional sculptural techniques with industrial materials. Is there a “those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it” sense of moralism at play here?

FdJ: In a way, yes. I believe that there are timeless natural cycles. The costumes and setting looks different every time, but the people and their behavior remains the same.

FOLKERT DE JONG Operation Harmony, 2008 Styrofoam, pigmented polyurethane foam, pearls 340 X 700 X 230 cm Photo: Jason Mandella Copyright the artist Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai

MT: What inspired Operation Harmony? In part, I’m getting a Goya’s Los Caprichos for the 21st century vibe…

FdJ: Yes, I am fascinated about the role of Goya as an artist reflecting upon his own time. There is a timelessness in his work that reflects upon the fear, and fascination for human nature at work.

MT: I love the works on paper in this show. Often incorporating text, they have more of an unburdened sense of humor than the sculptures.  How does your mindset change when making the drawings?

FdJ: Thank you. The drawings are coming more out of an uncontrolled stream of thoughts, flowing out on the paper, telling thing about my fascinations…more uncut maybe?

FOLKERT DE JONG The DeWitt Bodies, 2007 Marker on paper 16 1/2 X 23 1/2 inches Photo: Jason Mandella Copyright the artist Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai

MT: Do you see your sculptures as monuments of sorts?

FdJ: Not deliberately, but there is a strong reference to the powerful meaning and function of monuments in my work for sure. Maybe they’re monuments for the moral subjects that are unspoken around the glory and heroic and fame of our history and time?

Folkert de Jong’s work can also be seen in Cryptic: The Use of Allegory in Contemporary Art with a Master Class from Goya, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, from May 20^th to August 14^th, and Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture, The Saatchi Gallery, London from May 27^th to October 16^th.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

This show reminds me of the time I danced for hours at a club in Cologne, caught part of an arthouse film next door, and then somehow ended up at a bar where a bunch of people I didn’t know were drinking like it was the end of the earth. Ok, so that never happened. But I feel like Cosima von Bonin’s current show, The Juxtaposition of Nothings at Friedrich Petzel is a close approximation of that experience.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

Von Bonin has always balanced her killer soft sculptures and fabric wall pieces with a deep investment in context and place-making. At Petzel, in collaboration with musician Moritz von Oswald, the focus is less on individual works and more on a sort of behind the stage/back alley voyeuristic adventure where the spectators are exhausted and drunk with cultural consumption. A puppy lies limp, arms laid out flat, staring at a video on loop. A floppy eared pimp-like bunny character with an eye patch appears to have found a friend in a bright red dog.  Even the light post is out for a smoke, as this show is at once chuckle-worthy and noir.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

Viewers accustomed to the almost clinical reimagining of minimalist form in Von Bonin’s previous work might be put off by the glut of audio and video equipment on display here. But the sound is sharp and deployed with precision.  Each tightly contained audio zone adds a different layer to the show as pulsating dance beats blend into more spaced out jams. Moving around the gallery, you become part of the orchestration, as most of the animal sculptures are either on a sound stage, absorbing a video, or emitting a sound track of their own.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

The back room seems to unwind from the activity of the main gallery like a club that lets out into the street at the end of the night. Sophisticated cardboard sculptures of a mailbox, café signage and a street lamp hang on the wall. A slumped over bloodied bird sits alone on a bleacher—here, the alienation of today’s technological self-absorption sets in.  While this theme isn’t terribly new (think Kraftwerk, Radiohead, or Kanye), von Bonin and von Oswald play the space between the handmade and the machined perfectly. While a lot of technological collaborations seem to blast off with an über-corny futuristic vision, the artists here spare us the space travel allusions.  The characters in this little drama are too busy livin’ to know that they don’t have a future anyway.

Karen Kilimnik, Installation view at 303 Gallery, New York 2011.

Karen Kilimnik’s current show at 303 Gallery in Chelsea is refreshingly spare and conceptually tight. Centered on a multimedia installation from 1989 titled The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers, the show also includes a few drawings from the late ‘80s and a handful of paintings and photographs from 2011. The disparate elements on view gel to create a sort of mini-opera, complete with a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Right before you can scream “kitsch!” the show stakes the claim that performing arts-style drama is relevant in contemporary fine art, and it’s utterly convincing (unless you hate Sofia Coppola and Black Swan, then don’t bother, and p.s. you’re boring).

Karen Kilimnik, Master Hare, 3rd Lord Grantham 2011.

Carrying much of the dramatic weight here is the audio track in the Avengers installation. Re-mastered to be louder and clearer than the original, the track includes snippets of Madonna, Haydn, and the Rolling Stones, among others. It weaves its way into your experience, tying it in with a mood that could be described as “retro-sinister.” Apparently, the installation is based on a particularly saucy and controversial episode of the British cult classic spy TV series by the same name — but you don’t really need to know that to be drawn into the work. Unlike many installations that still feature the stultifying Bill Viola “art hum,” (a.k.a. pretentiously creepy mouth breathing sounds), Kilimnik understands the power of a good soundtrack. The audio, which is at turns catchy, ambient and suspenseful, lends a bit of drama to a trio of fairly pedestrian full moon photos, and overall imbues the show with a dynamic narrative that would otherwise be absent.

Karen Kilimnik, The Hellfire Club episode of the Avengers, 1989, mixed media Installation view at 303 Gallery, New York, 2011

The simplistic term “Scatter Art”, for which Kilimnik became known at the outset of her career, fails to describe how varied and formally acute The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers really is. Despite the staging and use of prop-like materials, Kilimnik knows how to throw stuff around in a way that feels way more considered than clusterfucked.  For instance, a faint white chalk drawing of an Edwardian manor on black paper ever-so-gently peels away from the black wall. A black velvet curtain on the same wall leads to nowhere, casually adding an unseen dimension.  Plastic axes and Halloween-grade cobwebs are manipulated in a way that transcends a haunted house aesthetic without stripping them of their store-bought oomph.  Although it might sound corny, a group of photos, Xeroxes, empty picture frames and shards of glass flesh out what is an immersive theatrical experience.

Karen Kilimnik, The Family in Scotland, 2011.

Few artists assimilate such disparate personal fetishes into their art as seamlessly as Kilimnik does.  In any given piece, she implicates widespread historical eras, painterly techniques, and psychological states.  The Ragamuffin of Kiddington Hall is as fey and dashing as any Fragonard, but with a touch of Brit rock attitude. Her drawings, which take their cues from advertising and employ a speedy illustrative touch, are impossible to date. They have a ‘60s vibe that looks simultaneously current, yet they were actually made in 1989.  Kilimnik’s signature knack for turning animal portraits into fetching character studies is also present in dog and cat paintings that are both fragile and endearing.

Karen Kilimnik, entre acte photo, 2011.

In essence, this show seems to be about the fleeting nature of… well, nature. It’s almost like if you were to stare at some of the works too long, they might dash off the wall or fade away like a passing trend. Kilimnik can be equally hard to pin down. According to the current issue of Interview magazine, she recently relocated to Montana from her longtime home in the Philadelphia suburbs. Who knows, maybe this accounts for the spaciousness of the installation. A full moon photo called My Walk in the Woods at Night underscores the noir vibe that prevails in this show, in lieu of her usual regally saccharine interior worlds. This time we’re outside, sort of… under the chandelier-lit night sky.

FORCE OF FAILURE: DailyServing’s latest week-long series

Lynda Benglis, Phantom, 1971.

Lynda Benglis is a fearless artist. She added a much-needed sense of humor to first-generation feminism and imbued late 1960s/early ‘70s Post-Minimal sculpture with an even more needed sense of color. But a lot of her work is kind of awful. Her legendary status as an artist who went toe-to-toe with the biggest male egos in the New York art world is well deserved, and I’ll take her slumping blobs of polyurethane as examples of entropy in sculpture over Robert Smithson’s lame mirrors stuck in dirt any day. The nearly uniform praise for her current retrospective at the New Museum, however, feels like it’s based more on her historical status than on the work itself.

Lynda Benglis, Installation View, New Museum, 2011. Photo by Benoit Pailley.

The Fallen Paintings (Benglis’ signature poured latex floor pieces) are by far the best in show. Slabs of poured paint yield to gravity as they diffuse Minimalism’s rigid structure with Colorfield’s floating orbs and Jackson Pollock’s subconscious process. These works call to mind a sophisticated sense of order, like Merce Cunningham’s low center of gravity choreography.  However, the chicken wire, glitter, paint and plaster construction of the wall pieces, which was probably shocking in the ‘70s, just seems amateurish now. They don’t extend the properties of the material to anywhere near the same degree that the floor works do. They look good in reproduction, but in person they disappoint.

Lynda Benglis, Sparkle Knot V, 1972

As you move forward chronologically, Benglis’ work begins to reference the body in increasingly flat-footed ways and her forms get more cheesily symbolic. The Peacock Series from the late ‘70s/early ‘80s consists of vaguely vaginal decorated fans hung on the wall. Chiron, from 2009, is a big glowing pink egg. Even Phantom, five dramatic glow-in-the-dark dripping mountains (shown here for the first time since 1971) give off a distinct Led Zeppelin “Houses of the Holy” vibe. They’re cool in a geeky sort of way, but by the time I got to Primary Structures, (Paula’s Props), a room-sized installation of blue velvet drapes, some fake trees and Greek columns, I began to question Benglis’ taste for real.

Lynda Benglis, Installation View of Primary Structures, (Paula’s Props), New Museum, 2011. Photo by Benoit Pailley.

Where she completely kicks ass, however, is in her randy sense of iconic self-promotion. The photos of her at work on her floor pieces are classics, and the notorious advertisement from the November 1974 issue of Artforum, where she appears nude with slicked back hair holding a dildo between her legs, is still shockingly strong. Even though it’s been written about ad nauseum and reproduced a zillion times, it still packs a punch in person. Shot from below, Benglis appears as monumental as Michelangelo’s David and her image turns about 2,000 years of male-dominated Western Art History on its head. Set against a stark black rectangle, it’s as if Benglis is literally turning the page on Minimalism’s colorless form and gender hierarchy in the most in-your-face way possible. So what if feminists at the time hated it—Benglis was likely the first female artist to consciously construct a heroic artistic persona, and that took bigger balls than just throwing a vaginal reference or two into her work.

Centerfold by Lynda Benglis published in Artforum magazine, 1974.

If many of her wall sculptures don’t quite live up to her outsized rep, there are videos and Polaroids on display that certainly do. The Amazing Bow-Wow, 1976, is an uncannily watchable short film about a hermaphroditic human-sized dog that enters into a fateful love triangle full of jealousy and lust. It’s as unflinchingly gutsy as any Paul McCarthy, but with way more heart. Displayed next to the video is a series of Polaroids called Secrets that combine pornish images of Benglis and Robert Morris with close-ups of flowers. Here, the collusion between nature, sex and overlapping bodies is as palpable as it is in the floor sculptures. Rarely exhibited, the photos’ old wooden frames have the vibe of pre-boutique-era SoHo. Nostalgic art relic nerds, get ready.

Lynda Benglis, Advertisement from Artforum magazine, April 1974.

All of Benglis’ work might not stand the test of time. She’s like a classic rock band that put out three or four great albums with timeless cover art. Like a lot of those bands, Benglis synthed out in the ‘80s and never quite recovered, but it doesn’t matter. The lesson here is that she full-on embraced failure in her work, through both an entropic use of materials and by taking risks that few artists today would even consider. For all of her posturing and dildo-ing around, she still feels human and extremely relatable, and she’s more than paid her dues. Every New Yorker knows that she’s one of ours, so if she makes criminally bad art, it’s cool. We just look the other way.

Josh Smith, Installation View.

If, on some level, art really is about what you can get away with, then Josh Smith, known mainly for painting his name over and over, has been robbing us blind for years.  Perhaps he senses that the gig is up on the name paintings because his current show introduces leaves, fish, bugs and butterflies, as well as an impressive foray into sculpture.  It seems as if his transformation from boy-obsessing-over-his-name to kid-turning-over-rocks-in-search-of-lizards is nearly complete. Watch out, folks! Next thing you know, he’ll be asking to borrow the car.

Josh Smith, Untitled, 2010.

There’s so much natural history museum style art out there—taxadermic specimens, hyper-realistic fake plants, and 19^th-century illustration look-a-likes—yet Smith manages to stay in the realm of, for lack of a better term, art. This is mostly due to his messy mash-up of production techniques like silk screening, ink-jet printing, and direct painting.  None of this is especially new, however, and many of the paintings at Luhring Augustine either juxtapose retro advertising with accidental brushwork à la Albert Oehlen or evoke the swashbuckling bravado of George Baselitz.  But with all of the autumnal decay on view, there’s a somewhat solemn tone to the show. It feels like new territory for Smith and goes well with his trademark sense of experimental play.

Josh Smith, Untitled, 2010.

Ever since his installation/assemblage at the New Museum’s Unmonumental in 2007, it’s been clear that Smith can hold down a large expanse of wall.  And his current show has a fat dose of theatricality to it, which I like. Hung floor-to-ceiling with standard-sized paintings, the back room is awesome. Previous shows of Smith’s were linearly installed, each painting equidistant from the others, making it tough not to focus on weak links in the chain. There’s strength in numbers in the current show, as individual works work together to form a coherent whole. The Stop Sign paintings, for example, probably wouldn’t knock your socks off by themselves (actually, they’d suck), but as resting spots in a vast conglomeration, they do the trick.

Josh Smith, Installation View.

But it’s Smith’s sculptures that really take the cake here. Basically, they’re stages lit with clamp lights and adorned with blunt but effective name paintings as backdrops.  There’s nothing super fancy about them, and like the rest of Smith’s best work, they contain an attractive dose of nonchalance. You feel the urge to clamber aboard, yet I don’t think Smith is going for the performative or relational thing. He knows that’s played out. Their precedents include John Bock’s plywood platforms and basically everything by Rirkrit Tiravanija, but the mindframe of Smith’s sculptures is more photographic than physical. You can’t help but imagine your foto-booth experience with his name as the backdrop. But the intimation of use is much more alluring than actually touching these things. Calling them Stage Paintings, Smith might be toying with the idea of theatrical backdrop or just exploring a painting off the stretcher. Either way, he’s deviating from his norm, which is good.

Josh Smith, Untitled, 2010.

As a matter of fact, this show marks a turning point for Smith, where subject matter might actually have, um… weight. Regardless, what it all comes down to is whether or not you like his style. Obsessiveness is often an excuse for artistic legitimacy, and Smith certainly benefits from this. But it’s good to see that he can dig beneath the surface a bit without losing himself in the process, a.k.a. you can alter, erase, or obliterate it, but as long as you scrawl your name really big on it, it’s still yours.

Ridykeulous, The Advantages of Being a Woman Lesbian Artist, 2007. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

It’s par for the course for blue-chip galleries to mount so-called “museum quality” exhibitions, and hardly a surprise when they coincide with auctions and estate holdings. Readykeulous: The Hurtful Healer: The Correspondance Issue at INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is just as historically potent without being market driven. Founded in 2005 by artists Nicole Eisenman and A. L. Steiner, Ridykeulous has gained consistent momentum, and this is their strongest show yet. Part community action center, part archive, part open can of whoop ass, the show includes about forty artists and runs roughshod past The Venus of Willendorf, David Wojnarowicz and the Guerrilla Girls before landing squarely in the present.

Readykeulous, The Hurtful Healer: The Correspondence Issue. Installation view. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

Even though the show comprises mostly written correspondence, those accustomed to the visual swagger of a typical Ridykeulous affair will not be disappointed. By including work from the 70s forward, it’s almost as if Ridykeulous is upping the ante on a previous generation’s discontent. A rather calm and verbose letter by David Wojnarowicz floridly articulates his disappointment with not getting public funding. A Carolee Schneemann letter from 1978 bluntly asks a foundation to pay her $25 to donate her archive, but she writes in a fairly civil tone. In contrast, Crystal Catastrophe, 2011, a letter/image by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue begins, “DEAR ASSHOLE”.  Eisenman and Steiner pull a bit of one upwomanship on the famed Guerrilla Girls in The Advantages of Being a Woman Lesbian Artist, 2007, which hilariously updates and defaces the Guerrilla Girls’ The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist from 1989. Compared to the self-assured irreverence of many of the artists in this show, Guerrilla Girls, once formidable, now seem kind of cartoonish and tame.

Zoe Leonard, I Want a President (detail), 1992. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

But there’s a lot more to this exhibition than in-your-face rage. Many of the letters on view are potential paradigm shifters. Zoe Leonard’s I Want a President, 1992, in which she hopes for more humane criteria for presidential candidacy is both heartbreaking and poignant. Kara Walker’s writing stares into the core of her artistic intentions without the visual drama of her trademark silhouettes. Nicola Tyson transforms a letter to a male harasser into sculpture by hanging it on a noose. When a passive aggressive audience member writes to Nao Bustamante, feigning concern for a participant in one of her performances, the artist wryly replies, “This is like emailing a magician after an illusion and seeing if the girl died from being sawed in half.”

Kathe Burkhart, Suck My Dick: from the Liz Taylor Series (Candid shot), 2004. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

Admit it—when artists write about their work, its often pretentious, boring and has little to do with the actual art. Thankfully, in this show, the artists’ candid thoughts and impassioned rebuttals are the art. And no one’s trying to hide or act nice for the art market. As K8 Hardy says in Dear Reena Spaulings, “I don’t care if my shit is unprofessional or tacky. My work does not come from a fucking wallet.” Nothing is more direct than Kathe Burkhart’s Suck My Dick: from the Liz Taylor series (candid shot), 2004. Big black dildo protrusion aside, the work is composed of a lifetime’s-worth of partially burned rejection letters, some of which get fairly mean. One from Metro Pictures simply reads, “not our cup of tea.”

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Eva Adolf Braun Hitler, 2002.

Despite the high volume of malcontent on display, the real power behind this show is humor. The exhibition is essentially positive and inclusive, and it maintains a visually dynamic installation amidst all the reading and display cases. Wall scrawls, collages, and tacked-up photocopies create a swift pace that counters the slowed-down experience of reading. Cut outs of ancient goddess figures help punch up a case full of letters. A frieze of book covers from Valerie Solanas’ Scum Manifesto guards the entrance to the video corridor, where a folder labeled “Man Art” (samples include dinosaurs, a Lisa Yuskavage ad, and other offenders) lies on top of a searing video by Genesis Breyer P. Orridge. In the back gallery, a wall case has been punked out with flyers and drawings, like the coolest public library display ever. The gallery is smallish in size, yet this installation manages to pull off a balance of slapdash improv and thoughtful placement.

Ridykeulous Archives 2005 - 2011. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

A lot of shows tiptoe around ideas of protest, but they tend to feature artists who rarely get into the trenches. These days it can even seem like making political art is a mannerism—an excuse to make cool posters and use typography that rarely sacrifices marketability. Ridykeulous doesn’t pull punches. They understand that if you don’t like the art world you’ve been given, you’ve got to make your own. And they don’t fucking apologize for it afterward.

Michaela Eichwald, Pofalla, (willst Du mir jetzt komplett den Garaus machen?) 2010.

It’s not that Michaela Eichwald doesn’t give a crap about her paintings; she just beats the shit out of them. It’s part of a lengthy weathering process that imbues them with the perfect balance of attraction and repulsion.  Before they get to the gallery, they’ve been stepped on, left out in the rain, randomly stained, and often chemically altered. Eichwald decimates boring oil painting clichés (think “fat over lean”) by glopping oil, acrylic and varnish seemingly at random. Yet, despite their abject quality, her work feels uniquely intimate. She stakes a claim somewhere between the automated work of, say, Wade Guyton and the ubiquitous “special moments” abstraction crowd that seems destined to follow the Nozkowski/Tuttle/De Keyser rules in perpetuity.

Thankfully, there’s more than enough personality on view here to keep Eichwald away from the ugly-on-purpose thing. Pofalla, (willst Du mir jetzt komplett den Garaus machen?) is downright epic.  Spanning the entire length of the gallery, it includes photos, posters, packaging, tribal imagery, personal notes, geometric forms, splats of paint and tons of lacquer. The overall effect is like a Rauchenbergian run-on sentence—Eichwald seems to be spilling and organizing her guts right on the paper. And like Rauschenberg, she understands when to let the material do the talking. The yellowed lacquer also performs a rather tawdry version of Sigmar Polke’s experiments with alchemy.

Michaela Eichwald, Auer Dult, leidinde Mangel, 2010.

Unlocking and then encasing both personal and universal mysteries, Eichwald’s work has an authenticity that feels organically unforced.  She combines cave painting motifs with silhouettes in Auer Dult, leidende Mangel, referring to the centuries-old market and folk festival in Munich. Installed behind a pipe in the well-worn “bar” area of the gallery, the unstretched painting has both a nomadic and site-specific feel. The Three Cravings, the most straight ahead painting in the show, could almost pass for a roughed-up riff on U.S. abstraction, like an Amy Sillman painting stripped down to its essence.

Michaela Eichwald, The Three Cravings, 2010.

Eichwald’s powers seem extra concentrated in Peinliche Verhörung mit Tortor (Hand), a horrifying cast resin sculpture of a hand resting on a small plunger. I’ve never been so drawn to something as utterly untouchable as this. The hand oozes and drips and tiny nails stick out of its mangled fingers. A spent gum packet is encased inside, and random bits of trash and dirt float about. Installed on a windowsill, this terrifying talisman becomes oddly beautiful as the sooty light from the Lower East Side shines through it.

Michaela Eichwald, Peinliche Verhörung mit Tortor (Hand), 2010.

Overall, there’s an almost teenage sense of vitality in Eichwald’s work, a tendency that is unfortunately forced out of artists while they are in grad school. Because of this, the show might not live up to the bullshit standards of a typical Chelsea affair (after a while you start to pick apart her repetitive palette, and the dependence on lacquer can be a bit much), but I like to see an artist who believes so strongly in the power of physical presence. As grimy as her work might look, Eichwald seems to be coming from a place that is surprisingly pure.

John Currin, The Women of Franklin Street, 2009.

The biggest snow job in history is how high art in Western culture has largely been about ogling T&A under the guise of mythological allegory. Work by academic art stars like Bouguereau and Cabanel from the Paris Salon look like soft-core porn, and everybody knows that old master subjects like The Three Graces and The Judgement Of Paris are mostly a front for putting the female nude on display. John Currin has been shaking his moneymaker by inverting the relationship between traditional narrative and all-out ecstasy since the 1990s. While a typical 19^th-century “music lesson” scene only suggested that more than a tickling of the ivories was at play, Currin’s version shows clothes ripped off and instruments flying. Some of his paintings leave little to the imagination, but it’s cool. They are a revelation of sorts

John Currin, The Old Fur, 2010.

Besides having flat-out astonishing technical skill, Currin’s gift is making an awkwardly erotic moment feel eternal. The look on the central woman’s face In The Women of Franklin Street is timeless. She is the Mona Lisa of bewildered bemusement, as Currin’s sense of humor is both disarming and accessible. Often, you find yourself totally staring at boobs appreciating the way a bit of drapery falls and then you realize, “this girl has the most screwed-up rotten bunch of teeth I’ve ever seen.” Or in the case of The Old Fur, it takes a while before you notice that the subject is horribly out of proportion. If she stood up she’d look more like a buoy.

I suppose that’s the sad, cruel, and maybe even sexist part of his work. The girl showing off her breasts has no idea how messed up her grill is as she smiles away proudly. The fact that it’s so beautifully painted makes it even more difficult to untangle the sensory implications at play. Not to say that Currin’s work is without real sentiment, but his subjects rarely look up to confront the viewer, and when they do, often all you see is a slightly damaged dolt with great hair.

John Currin, Bea Arthur, 1991.

Currin’s famous painting of a topless Bea Arthur from 1991 remains his strongest Manet’s Olympia moment. At the time, Currin was working as an abstract painter, and I’m under the impression that this painting was mostly a joke. Nevertheless, he clearly respected his no-nonsense subject—Arthur stridently returns the viewer’s gaze in a way that few of his later subjects do.

John Currin, Mademoiselle, 2009.

Even when Currin isn’t messing with you, you end up on a search for things like weird tiny feet or ungainly arms. Thankfully, the masterful/awkward dichotomy seems to disappear in Madamoiselle. Here, a demure woman appears perfectly comfortable in her state of undress. While, in other works, Currin complicates the pictorial space with old master tropes like cut out windows and convex mirrors, all we need here is the interplay of lace, fur, pearls and flesh. Even if this woman is exposed as an object of desire, she’s not powerless or unintelligent.  Like with Bea Arthur, every now and again Currin imbues his subjects with a sense of introspection that is more than skin deep. That’s cool and all, but let’s face it—it’s all about the boobs.

The title of Raymond Pettibon’s current show at David Zwirner, Hard in the Paint, riffs on basketball, art making, the Southern hip-hopper Waka Flocka Flame and maybe even the YouTube parody Baraka Flocka Flame. By signing the gallery wall “Rajon Flocka James,” Pettibon, whose given name is Raymond Ginn and is no stranger to cultivating an artistic persona, is partaking in a little fun. He seems to have relaxed—a tiny bit—from his mad-as-hell 2007 show, Here’s Your Irony Back (The Big Picture), which was the penultimate Fuck Bush show of the ‘00s.

Hard in the Paint mines the American subconscious by mixing political content with Pettibon’s trademark surfing, baseball, and locomotive imagery. The result is a more nuanced critique of nationalism than straight-ahead rage. For instance, a large wall text combines the words “Obama nig,” a phrase based on the famous right-winger Norman Podhoretz, and a personalized take on Regeanomics that reads “rõad ragenomicstrap.” Rather than flirting with a Dr. Laura moment, Pettibon captures all of the undercurrents in the current American scene: the Tea Party’s screams of socialism, the role of religion, free speech and race.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (No Primer No Bondo...) 2010. 56 x 76 inches

Pettibon is no leftist cheerleader however—he distrusts the whole system. The disastrous greed of Imperialism is reflected in works that combine post-WWII iconography with the grim reality of failure. Pettibon’s ball players, trains and Cadillacs call to mind the obsolescence of America’s golden era—his baseball pitchers always seem to screw up a perfect game in the 9^th, trains aren’t nearly as prominent as they once were, and cars just don’t look very forceful anymore. In the same way that the television show M*A*S*H was set in the Korean War but was really meant to portray Vietnam, Pettibon’s fixation on mid-20^th century America translates just as easily to now.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Where's the green...) 2010. 30 x 22 1/8 inches

Global annihilation by threat of the atomic bomb also seems to have a special place in Pettibon’s heart.  Mushroom cloud scenes like No Title (Where’s the Green…) depict a coming-of-age and sexual awakening in the shadow of the bomb. Many of his explosions are seen from cinematic angles—he understands how deeply ingrained the Hollywood version of America, the one where we’re all extras and stunt men in some sort of spectacularly exploding drama, really is. Although he deals in the guilt-ridden imagery of those schlocky booklets that crazy religious people hand to you on the street, Pettibon’s scenes are so convincing that you just can’t turn away. No one combines war, surrealism, and the sublime better.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (That obliging schoolgirl...) 2010. 30 3/4 x 41 7/8 inches

All nostalgia aside, Pettibon’s greatest asset might be his wide-ranging intellectual curiosity.  Works about the fast food industry, advertising, philosophy, history, fashion and pop culture offer up just a few of the things that are on his mind in this ambitious show. Where hardcore punks are supposed to be screw-ups, and comic books were originally thought to be for dummies, Pettibon emerges as the hardest working smart guy in the room. Unlike rappers like Waka Flocka, Pettibon never brags about money, even though he’s got plenty. Unlike classic rock bands when they hit the ‘80s, Pettibon never went synth. Even though his biography gets overplayed, the secret to his success might be that success seemingly never went to his head. Sure, his work often relies on conspiracy theories and an easy sense of pathos, but he always gives his subjects a gravity that makes them seem alive. He doesn’t care about lame art school issues of composition or whatever—he just wants the train to feel like it’s crushing off the paper through bullets of dripping rain.

I love New York but let’s face it—it’s rough around the edges. Chain link fencing is omnipresent, garbage floats in toxic puddles, and plastic bags are permanent residents. Even nice apartments in Brooklyn and Queens usually have untamable back yards. It is as if the second you turn your back, nature starts aggressively reclaiming land from the pavement.  This push/pull of the urban ecosystem serves as a launching point for Ester Partegàs’ More World, her current show at Foxy Production.

Part capitalist critique, part ode to the everyday, Partegàs aims to discover spirituality in the margins of consumer culture, urban abandonment, and industrial decay. As such, the installation feels appropriately vacant. The walls, covered in black and white wallpaper depicting a ratty expanse of chain link fence, turn what should be an eye sore into high design.

While elevating trash is nothing new in art, Partegàs has a knack for knowing when to exercise supreme control and when to recede. In a group of tree sculptures, each titled Overcast, bags are tied over the branches as if to protect from the elements. At first glance, they seem like castoffs from the Home Depot Garden Center. However, the plastic is heavier than that of your average Hefty bag, making them feel more smothered than protected. The leaves are fluorescent pink and orange, so there is no mistaking these for hyper accurate botanical representations.  A similar real/not real dichotomy exists in You Are Here, a light box photograph of a disjointed woodsy scene. The dream-like slippage in continuity, it turns out, comes from the fact that this is actually a pieced together photograph of a construction fence made to look like a forest. Surprise!

Ester Partegàs, Organized Fries, 2010. Inkjet Ultrachrome archival print 35 x 29-1/2 in. Courstey of the artist and Foxy Production, New York. Photo by Mark Woods.

In a series of inkjet prints called Organized Fries, Partegàs classifies and meticulously arranges french fries like a fast-food anthropologist from the future. Realism and abstraction mingle expertly in these, as every bend, wobble and burnt end helps create a rhythmic pattern. Reminiscent of Mondrian’s Pier and Ocean series, there is something elemental going on here that manages to squeeze as much sublime as is possible from an order of fries, regardless of how rewarding they are at 3AM…when you’re drunk and/or stoned.

Studies In Mysticism (Purple Target), 2010. Acrylic and graphite on paper 41 x 31 in. Courstey of the artist and Foxy Production, New York. Photo by Mark Woods.

In the Studies for Mysticism series, Partegàs depicts unfolded candy boxes with the logos removed, revealing the cosmic underpinning behind the consumerist come-on of commercial packaging. This intersection of belief, illusion and reality is the core of the show. The American dream, so full of promise, can be a tough sell in the face of reality. Partegàs knows this, but she doesn’t simply go for the maudlin narrative of a “Don’t Litter” campaign or a pessimistic corporate critique. Reaffirming the power of individuals and artists to make their own reality, it’s as if she lifts the curtain on the American dream, sees it for what it is, and then gently puts it back. In other words, the way we conceal our reality is more poetic, and just as real, as any hard truth.

Bürotisch-Matte, Bali-Mosfellssveit, 1994—1996

When I was in art school, there was a painting professor who would shock new grad students by propping their palettes up next to their paintings and explaining, in great detail, why the palette was aesthetically superior. The students were crushed. How could a perfunctory manipulation of materials possibly be more successful than their über-personal paintings? He’d then rebuild their egos until they painted exactly like him, but I think he had it right the first time—materials are everything.

For Dieter Roth (1930 – 1998) everything in life was potential fodder for work. He brought a kitchen sink approach to the German concept of Gesamtkunstwerk that included rotting food, photographs, paint, crayons, film, sound and all sorts of random crapola. Although it could be considered a bit OCD, Roth saved the gray mat boards that covered his worktables and considered them objects d’art in their own right. Called Tischmatten (German for table mats), these works are currently enjoying their own lofty retrospective at Hauser & Wirth.

Forcierte Matte (Abandonnements=Etüde), 1983—1993

The best Tischmatten seem barely able to contain the avalanche of stuff that came across Roth’s desk. In Bürotisch-Matte, Bali-Mosfellssveit, layers of photos, Q-tips, straws, ribbons and drawings cling impossibly to the surface. Similarly, Forcierte Matte (Abandonnements=Etüde) includes gravity-defying plops of acrylic paint that give the work a visual heft that is lacking in the rest of the show. Although a couple of the early works are daringly spare, the magic is lost when the sheer number of alike works visually reduces them to a few stains, a math problem and a couple of paint squiggles. Unfortunately, and although it goes against Roth’s conceptual ethos, some editing might have worked in his favor.

Table Hegenheimerstrasse, 1980—2010

In the upstairs gallery, entire desk set-ups have been reinstalled as sculptures. Empty chairs and desks make the artist’s absence palpable. I tried to picture the famously reclusive Roth doodling away at these desks while ignoring calls from curators and galleries but somehow the whole thing felt sanitized. They’re way too boring to be good sculptures and way too clean to serve as some sort of studio period piece. Rather, they feel like lonely archival shrines that just scream “dead artist.”

Kaffeetisch-mit-Telefonecken-Matte, Bali/Mosvellsveit (with Björn, Karl, Vera Roth and others), 1990—1993

Despite the dialog surrounding Roth’s work, which tends to focus on its abject qualities, a warm sentiment creeps into the Tischmatten that were family collaborations. Reluctant to play along with conventional art world systems, Roth included his family into his working process. Kaffeetisch-mit-Telefonecken-Matte, Bali/Mosvellsveit (with Björn, Karl, Vera Roth and others) reads like a haphazard scrap booking project as a chessboard mixes collage-like with photos and childlike drawings. Given the long history of male artists isolating themselves in their studios, it’s nice to see that Roth was a dad who didn’t care if the kids spilled stuff in his.

Inside Job, 2010 mixed media 29 3/4 x 21 1/4 inches

Can’t we all just learn to trust Sue Williams? So what if, after all her stylistic shifts, she’s showing a new body of work devoted to 9/11 conspiracy theories? And big deal that these are the exact same theories espoused by President Ahmadinejad of Iran that were publicly denounced by President Obama. For all of the artists who give lip service to taking risks, Williams actually brings it.  She left David Zwirner after only one show and returned to 303 to stage a mini-retrospective called Al-Qaeda is the CIA. Hell Yes.

Curated by artist Nate Lowman, the exhibition spans from Williams’ feminist works of the 1990s to new works that continue patterning techniques visible in her 2008 show at Zwirner. In her review of that show, Roberta Smith said, “The large paintings could almost be printed textile or wall paper…that they are made by Ms. Williams is an impressive feat, but that doesn’t diminish their by-the-yard deadness.”  Weird, since wallpaper has always been a major element in Williams’ work and also figures prominently here.

Giuliani, 2010 mixed media 12 x 16 1/2 inches

New collages expose opulent interior décor as a cheap cover-up for the darker parts of the human psyche. In Inside Job, fringed curtains pull away to reveal the most calligraphic nut sack you’ll ever encounter.  Other works combine drawings of Cheney and Rumsfeld with paint swatches and parlor-style wallpaper that would be a perfectly quaint backdrop for a Condi Rice piano recital.

Whether it’s domestic violence, dripping intestines, group sex, gaping assholes, or just the way a swaying blue line naughtily overlaps a red one, Williams has always been about exposing urge. Her large-scale, intestinal war paintings seem to posit that an inevitable pull toward destruction lives inside all of us. However, her increasingly deft line work and buoyant colors ultimately render the works more humorous than morbid.

With Polka Dots, 2009 Ink and acrylic on acetate 39 1/4 x 50 inches

Whether or not you buy into 9/11 as an inside job doesn’t really matter here—Williams’ all-in commitment to her vision is persuasive enough. It is obvious that she is an artist who despises complacency. In an era where it seems like everyone is trying to be a straight-A student of the world, she is in the back of the classroom carving a very delicately drawn “Fuck You” into her desk.

Rob Pruitt, tbc, 2010 (detail)

Taking up both Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and Maccarone, much of Pattern and Degradation is based on the Amish tradition of Rumspringa, the time when Amish teenagers get to go nuts for a year before deciding whether or not to commit to the whole Amish thing. Admittedly, the Amish are an easy target—they’ll never get through the Holland Tunnel in a horse and buggy to see the show in person, which pretty much leaves things wide open for Pruitt. Hitting closer to home, the show also takes on the tribal nature and herd-like behavior of today’s art world, which at times can seem just as insular as Amish tradition does.

Cementing his reputation as the art world’s premier events planner, Pruitt riffs on three familiar art world occasions: the opening, the auction, and the museum. In one gallery, you can mingle around what he calls “People Feeders,” stacks of tires that serve as lowbrow snack bowls for Oreo’s, (perfectly fresh on both visits I made to the gallery, btw), pretzels, gumballs, and black and white M & M’s. In heavier hands, the tires would have been pain-staking reproductions à la Robert Gober, or machismo car culture symbols à la Richard Prince. Pruitt, however, is much less sentimental than either of those guys. White paint, brushed on the tires Basquiat-style, is refreshingly unfussy. Plus, the snacks made me happy.

The next room loosely resembles an auction house. Dozens of chairs covered with metallic tape face a series of self-portraits, each showing the artist sensorially hindered in some manner—food in his mouth, googly eyes over his real ones, etc…signaling that the works should be experienced viscerally. The shiny chairs faintly echo Warhol’s silver factory and serve as a reminder that Pop Art’s mantra of “liking things” is at a premium here. Conceptual connections can be made to body art or the subjugation of the artist to the market, but over-thinking it seems beside the point.

In the next gallery, Pruitt has installed metallic tape-covered benches and geometric Amish quilt paintings in a museum-style setting. A comment on the enduring and mysterious perseverance of geometry in art, this is not a sarcastic send-up of institutions. Instead, humdrum art-going experiences are made more visually appealing by way of Pruitt’s lively aesthetic.

Questions of taste and quality intermix in this show perfectly. A group of six-legged cardboard box sculptures in Maccarone seem to be marching zombie-like into a giant grid of cinnamon bun paintings. The buns are glazed in a way that hilariously evokes Sol Le Witt, except without Conceptualism’s need for mathematical justification.

Although Pruitt has a penchant for self-mythologizing, this is Dude Art of the lightest kind. While seemingly about getting wild, this show doesn’t glamorize party detritus or bad boy behavior. Where many male artists valorize their fetishes through irony, Pruitt is actually funny. Much like the current trend toward restaurant-quality stoner food that celebrates flavor over pretense, the bar room humor of Pruitt’s work is so rooted in visual satisfaction that it passes as the new high brow.