Stedelijk Museum view of the original building (A.W. Weissman, 1895) and new building designed by Benthem Crouwel Architects, photo John Lewis Marshall.

It’s either complete self-unawareness or ultimate bravery that a museum that has gone through such an awkward moment in time, and which has to deal with the unpleasant consequences of its decisions, chose the current exhibition to start this new era with. The show is, mainly because it was unexpectedly forced into becoming a retrospective after Kelley’s sudden death on the 1st of February last year, the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date. It takes visitors systematically through the stages of Kelley’s development as an artist and thinker, and displays him, rightly, as one of the most diverse and broadly talented visual artists of our time. Above all, it shows him as a master in dissecting memory and digging up awkward historical moments – themes that reoccur especially throughout the artist’s later work.

Mike Kelley – Bird Houses. Photo GJ.van Rooij

Starting in the bath tub’s basement, the first couple of rooms exhibit Kelley’s earliest sketches made while still at CalArts. Also on view are instruments that were used for his Early Performative Sculptures and Objects (1977-79), referencing his immersion in performance art and anti-establishment punk. His bird houses reveal influences from his teachers, conceptual leaders John Baldessari, David Askevold and Douglas Huebler. But as with many artists, Kelley’s work only began to mature after he finished art school and was left to his own devices. The works in the next rooms, including Pay For Your Pleasure (1988), testify this.

Pay For Your Pleasure (1988) Photo GJ.van Rooij

The starting point of what could later be seen as the artist’s main theme are works like Half a Man (1987-92). This series comprises stuffed animals sewn together in compromising, often sexually provocative positions. For Kelley they were a comment on the commodity discourse and gift culture, on the fact people often end up with pointless and unwanted objects and the herewith related guilt. The fierce reaction these works evoked in American society (it was generally assumed that Kelley had experienced a disturbed, utterly fucked up childhood) is what made him, unafraid and unashamedly, delve into subjects like trauma and memory loss.

Educational Complex (1995) Photo GJ. van Rooij

What followed are works like Educational Complex (1995), a large-scale model of every institution Kelley ever attended as well as his parent’s house. The buildings are pristine white, and the spaces between them to be interpreted as memory blanks – empty places where trauma could have happened, and which were – eventually – to be filled. Works like the John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (1968 -1972) touches on a similar, though less personal vein. The giant sculpture covered in mosaics is part of a larger project exploring the history and neglected remnants of Detroit, the city of Kelley’s youth. Things were to get more extreme.

Day is Done (2005) Installation shot Photo GJ. van Rooij

On the first floor of the Stedelijk, where the exhibition continues, the gallery has been made to display Day is Done (2005), which once filled the entire Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street, New York. The multi-faceted multimedia installation brings together Kelley’s ideas in grotesque installations and moving images, which feature sweating barbers that jerk off behind bathroom doors and singing teenagers with a colgate smiles who perform pop songs in cowboy hats – both equally disturbing. Childhood trauma is here brought to the fore, with no white walls or censorship to hide it. It’s an overwhelming, nightmarish experience, which is tantalising and stomach turing all the same.

Kandors (2007) Photo GJ van Rooij

After this overwhelming visual and sonic encounter it’s a pleasant surprise to then walk into a room filled with Kandors – Kelley’s softest and most  aesthetically pleasing works. Based on the Kryptonian city of Superman’s childhood, which was miniaturised by Braniac and captured in a bottle, Kelley created ten different versions that light up the room with an almost magical illumination and peaceful glow. Heart warming sculptures depicting something inherently sad.

A few video works follow in the museum’s surprisingly great theatre, after which the exhibition – rather abruptly – ends. There’s no ‘the end’ sign and before you know it you’re released into the wild where you’re reminded of the harsh reality that is the museum itself. The cold, white spaces that follow make you realise what a pleasure and privilege it was to be immersed in Kelley’s universe, where there was no hesitation, shame or fear, to show us all that life encompasses.

Joel Morrison, Untitled (Meat Tenderizers), 2012. Stainless steel, 30 1/2 x 16 1/2 x 16 inches (77.5 x 41.9 x 40.6 cm), Version 3 of 3. Photo by Erich Koyama.

In his first solo exhibition in Asia at the Gagosian gallery in Hong Kong, Joel Morrison presents a reasonably entertaining series of recent works that challenges formalist sculpture while engaging in a constant critique of art historical directions. Drawing on readily-available objects utilised in daily life, Morrison’s composite sculptures begin as disparate Duchampian readymades: weather balloons, bullets, mannequin busts and shopping carts, just to list a few. Through a process that begins with casting, these found objects are moulded into forms that look oddly familiar and yet not, then cast in stainless steel, and finally subjected to intense polishing. Forced together, these objects don’t sit too well in their new skins, poking and swelling out of their casts with deliberate stubbornness, creating a rolling landscape on shiny surfaces. Consequently, the physical sum of the parts of these flimsy, ephemeral readymades is a permanent, unrecognisable blanketed structure intended to provoke and outrage. If traditional sculpture concentrates on the materialisation of an intangible idea in three-dimensional space, Morrison’s eccentric, amorphous surfaces seem to reverse the process, becoming figurative the moment his readymades take their final forms.

Joel Morrison, The Reaganomic Youth (version 2), 2012. Stainless steel, 28 1/2 x 18 x 22 1/2 inches (72.4 x 45.7 x 57.2 cm), Ed. of 3. Photo by Erich Koyama.

The polished and glitzy Untitled (2012) piece forged frommeat tenderisersis part Greek sculpture, Medusa-myth and part punk-metal (pun not quite intended), exhibiting both the stateliness of Ancient Greek busts and the flamboyance of pop culture. If Greek busts were commissioned to commemorate the heroics of war, or to serve as propaganda, Morrison’s silver work is an amusingly brilliant commemoration of postmodern’s obsession with consumerist excess and pastiche. No less quirky and alluring are the ironic and arresting steel jaws of a crocodile-like predator used to represent the seductive male lover in Romeo (2010) and bulbous The Reaganomic Youth (2011) that features an overturned bottom half of a shopping cart supported by a fused number of round-ish protrusions.

Joel Morrison, Tomb, 2012, Nickel plated aluminum. 58 x 54 x 2 1/2 inches (147.3 x 137.2 x 6.4 cm), Ed. of 3. Photo by Erich Koyama.

By appropriating forms and ideas in the history of western sculpture, Morrison’s oeuvre recalls the naturalism of the classical era,  the futurist emphasis on energy, movement and the dynamic flows in space, and the conceptual Duchampian readymade. Above all, his forms pay tribute to the works of other modernist sculptures, echoing the organic and abstracted shapes of Barbara Hepworth’s, or the deliberately disproportional, undulating and imperfect reclining forms of Henry Moore. In a playful homage to Frank Stella’s Getty Tomb (1959) for instance, Morrison’s large namesake resembles at first glance, a striped T-shirt made with a reflective surface. If Stella’s famed black, unmodulated series of canvas works were intended to contain no meaning other than existing painted objects, Morrison’s peculiarly shaped Tomb (2012) seems to revoke that formalist abstraction through its rippling drapes and stripes, implying a more complex relationship sculpture has to contemporary attitudes and responses.

Joel Morrison was born in Seattle, Washington in 1976. He received a BA in English Literature at Central Washington University, and an MFA in sculpture at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA. Morrison lives and works in Los Angeles. This exhibition will be on show at the Gagosian Hong Kong until 17 November 2012.

Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, from Gagosian Gallery website, 28 January 2012. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

First things first – I despise the premise of the show. But I do respect the audacity it takes to try and pull something like this off. This was never the show intended to ignite respect and admiration for Hirst – that show is slated to open at Tate Modern this spring. The Complete Spot Paintings instead feels more like a scientific experiment, one of Hirst’s macabre vitrine works spun out into real-life testing grounds, intended to divide the camps into those who follow and those who resist.

For a few moments, let’s try and separate the works from the madness that surrounds them.

Damien Hirst, Levorphanol, 1995, household gloss on canvas. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates.

I am willing to admit that I have always had a soft spot for these paintings. As a wide-eyed student, before learning about Hirst and his tyrannical rule over British contemporary art, I found myself lusting after a candy-coloured work in New York, instantly hooked by its simplicity and destabilising aesthetics. On a canvas of undulating colour with nowhere for the eyes to rest, I found the spots both agitating and enlivening. Dabbling in pharmacology at the time, I was determined to make sense of the work by doing what humans do best – comparing it to that which I already knew well. My inherent drive to find meaning in chaos lost out in the end – in this case, the art didn’t have anything groundbreaking to say about science, nor science about the art. The relationship between the colours, the arrangement and the title was simply one of randomness and chance. It was a matter of order being imposed upon disorder – a fundamental truism of both science and art.

The spot paintings are nothing more than colour, calculations, sheer surface and mass production – Hirst’s dissociative attempt at being more like a scientist, in the way that Andy Warhol wanted to be more like a machine. The paintings stand alone as visually intriguing and brutally honest – they do not purport to have any answers or be something they are not. Hirst is not trying to save contemporary art any more than the pharmaceutical companies are trying to cure cancer – it doesn’t suit either of their ends.

The Compete Spot Paintings, as a public spectacle, is positively cringe-worthy. I believe, however, that the paintings, as paintings, are quite good. Yes, perhaps it is a bit of nostalgia that kicks in, but there is something about sitting in front of the work that I still find invigorating.

I, for one, am quite happy to be seeing spots.

Jeff Wall, "The Destroyed Room," 1978, Transparency in lightbox, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © The artist. Discussed in Michael Fried's book.

When essayist Geoff Dyer, whose main goal always seems to be sating his own curiosity, debuted his New York Times book column last week, he did so with a perfectly paced takedown of art historian Michael Fried. Fried famously “exposed” the melodrama of minimalism in the late 1960s, and that’s what he remained known for until he discovered something new a few years ago: photography. The book that heralds this discovery, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, argues the photograph has moved from the valleys to the precipice of contemporary art. It has become cutting edge, and artists like Jeff Wall and Thomas Struth are among its edgiest practitioners.

Why Photography Matters spends a lot of time reflecting on its author’s own critical legacy, announcing the relationship between Fried’s current and previous thinking and making sure readers know exactly which argument the book is about to make before said argument is made. It’s this preemptive announcement-making approach that Dyer dug into, caricaturing Fried’s tone, and ending by saying, bitingly, that someday Fried “will cross the border from criticism to the creation of a real work of art. . . called Kiss Marks on the Mirror: Why Michael Fried Matters as a Writer Even More Than He Did Before.”

I loved Dyer’s column the first, second and third time I read it. Then, a few days after it appeared, I came across this tweet by @bobbybaird (a.k.a. Robert Baird, a Chicago writer): “Dyer’s a great mimic, but I’ve never understood the urge to make reviewees seem less interesting than they are.” The tweet made me feel slightly embarrassed. Swept up by Dyer’s deft parody, I’d overlooked what the column downplayed: that, pompousness aside, Fried’s perpetual self-announcement has led to some pretty memorable criticism. And he made seemingly paradoxical ideas about the indulgences of pared-down art like Donal Judd’s or Carl Andre’s easier for me to articulate on my own. I keep a copy of his 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood,” in my desk drawer.

"Piero Golia: Concrete Cakes and Constellation Paintings," 2011, installation view. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio.

It’s hard to be incisively critical and fair at the same time. It’s definitely possible, though. Zadie Smith, a writer I often associate with Dyer perhaps because she’s his outspoken fan, became a book columnist for Harper’s nearly a year ago. Her inaugural column considered Harlem is Nowhere, a debut essay collection by the young Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. The book’s dreaminess annoyed Smith, and a friend who read the first draft of her review called it contemptuous. The same friend made a suggestion: “come to Harlem and see what she means.” Smith went, and spent a day experiencing Harlem the way she imagined Rhodes-Pitts must have. Then she read the book again. The review that appeared in Harper’s had some reservations but no contempt. “This dreamy atmosphere [Rhodes-Pitts] was trying to conjure up is something real,” Smith said in an interview with Harper’s editor Gemma Sief. “My first reaction to it was in actual fact wrong.”

There’s a place in the world for fast-paced, acerbic criticism. But giving yourself the time to think and, when necessary, double back on your ideas? Far richer in the long term. That said, criticism can be cruelly difficult if you try to meet each work on its own terms, in the visual arts at least as much as in literature. Guys like John Ruskin, who celebrated the Pre-Raphaelites and hated on James McNeill Whistler in 1840s-70s England, or Clement Greenberg, who crusaded for abstraction in 1940s-70s New York, found a way to side-step some of that difficulty: they built up their own value system and moved through the world more or less championing what fit the system and rejecting what didn’t. The efficacy of such dogmatism seems to be waning a bit, however. The writers I trust most speak their minds but readily admit their minds can, or maybe even should, change.

Writer and curator Ed Schad has an L.A. blog, icallitoranges, that takes itself and its subjects seriously; there’s often some sweat and blood behind  its posts. Two weeks ago, Schad grappled with artist Piero Golia’s exhibition at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills space, posting a review of the artist’s concrete cakes and debris-covered paintings, and questioning whether the art lived up to the artist’s ideas. I read the post the morning it went live, and appreciated its self-awareness. However, by mid-day, the review had disappeared. Schad gave no explicit reason for this, but said that, in a week or so, after further consideration, he would repost.

This past Monday, the review indeed reappeared in its original form. This time, it was accompanied by an account of a three-hour conversation between the writer and artist, initiated, I assume, after Golia read what Schad originally wrote.  The two sat on the fire escape behind Gagosian’s Beverly Hills space and tried to understand each other. They didn’t succeed entirely. While Golia set out the terms behind the work in the current show, and Schad tried to wrap his head around them, the critic still ended up dubious. “It is possible that I just don’t get it (very possible),” writes Schad, “but it is also possible that there is something weak going on here, a game of shadows. . . that doesn’t need me, the viewer, to be played.”

"The Rape of Persephone," 1943, Oil on canvas. Both courtesy the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College. The paintings appeared in the 1947 Federation show.

Years ago, in 1943, New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell admitted to being “befuddled” and “non-plussed” by the abstraction he’d seen at a recent Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors show. With some help from Barnett Newman, painters Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, all of whom appeared in the show, responded to Alden, sending a letter to the Times:

It is . . . an event when the worm turns and the critic of the TIMES quietly yet publicly confesses his “befuddlement”, that he is “non-plussed” before our pictures at the Federation Show. We salute this honest, we might say cordial reaction towards our “obscure” paintings, for in other critical quarters we seem to have created a bedlam of hysteria. And we appreciate the gracious opportunity that is being offered us to present our views.

The artists didn’t explain their paintings—that wasn’t their aim, they said—but they put some effort into describing their general beliefs about art. For critics and the public, art’s “explanation must come out of a consummated experience between picture and onlooker,” they wrote. “And in art, as in marriage, lack of consummation is ground for annulment.” Of course, genuine engagement rarely requires a three hour conversation with an artist and not all consummated marriages work out. But annulment seems like the cheap out. Divorce at least means you made a go at it. Then there are those rare married couples who keep at one another’s throats for decades and somehow still manage to make the battle seem worth it.

Diane Arbus, "Woman with Veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C," 1968. © The Estate of Diane Arbus.

“Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child,” Norman Mailer infamously remarked in 1971, less than one year before Arbus died and over nine years after she snapped a photo of a scrawny blond boy who actually did have grenade in hand. Whether Mailer, cavalier to a fault, meant to or not, his quip infantilized Arbus’ savvy, as has much of the opining and homage surrounding her photographic oeuvre in year past. On the cover of the catalogue for her recent retrospective, titled Revelations, you see her face, a hazy and grainy dark-eyed phantom, lurking behind two of her more stoic photographs. In Fur, the “imaginary” movie portrait by Steven Shainberg, you see Arbus, played by Nicole Kidman, as a weak-willed dreamy creative easily seduced by the world’s eccentrics.

Over the three decades since her painstaking suicide (barbiturates and wrist slitting), too much mystique has grown up around the obsessive strangeness of Arbus’s work and she has become, in some ways, as a dark an artist-figure as Sylvia Plath—a tortured soul, claimed Patricia Bosworth’s unauthorized 1984 biography. But  unlike Plath, who wrote of feeling terrified of herself and “incapable of more knowledge,” Arbus would throw herself fully into what scared her. “What’s important to know is that you never know; you’re always sort of feeling your way,” she said, and felt her way deftly.

"Diane Arbus: People and Other Singularities," 2011, Installation View, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. Photograph: the Douglas M. Parker Studio.

You won’t find much that’s new or unexpected in People and Other Singularities, the current exhibition of Arbus’ work on view at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills gallery. The show more or less functions like a retrospective, featuring the iconic photos of aging divas, eccentrics and freaks of nature, among them the famous image of the Jewish giant or the nudist colonies. But from the moment you walk in, you’ll be on an adventure that has less to do with soul-probing and more to do with pushing open the bubble of person-hood. “Do other people exist in the same way I do?” Arbus seems to ask over and over again. “It’s so hard to believe that’s true.”1

The first image you see when you enter the gallery—that mawkishly endearing shot of a grinning,, double-chinned lady in tulle hat and black netted veil—confronts you, aggressively, with its bodiliness. Yet it also has an infectious, quixotic tenderness. Often, that’s what Arbus provides: a body with physical quirks and features so overt they can’t be overlooked, yet a quiet relatability courses through underneath. It’s there in her portrait of the Roselle twins, the debutante Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, or the not quite Barbie-like women trying for the title of Miss Venice Beach. Arbus could climb into a community completely without faking belonging; always, she was looking in on something that wasn’t her.

Diane Arbus, "A young man and his pregnant wife in Washington Square Park, NY," 1965. © The Estate of Diane Arbus.

One summer, she spent her time working in Washington Square Park:

And there were these territories staked out. There were young hippie junkies down one row, lesbians down another—really tough, amazingly hardcore lesbians—and in the middle were winos. They were like the first echelon, and the girls who came from the Bronx to become hippies would have to sleep with the winos to get to sit on the other part with the junkie hippies. It was really remarkable and I found it very scary. I mean, I could become a million things, but I could never become that.

“[When I see] great art,” said novelist Zadie Smith, “when I read a great piece of fiction, what I’m being confronted with is exactly what is radically not me, a consciousness of the world that is so far from my own, it’s a shock.” Arbus shocked in that way, and, right now, in an era where obsession with identity politics, self-discovery and radical self-assertion (Cosey Fanni Tutti’s vagina photographs or Vito Acconci’s masturbation under the stairs play up the “I” of experience in a way that seems far less potent right now, in the era of youtube, file-sharing and self-exposure opportunities galore) has begun to seem stale, her work feels more poignantly, exquisitely relevant than ever. Whatever her personal demons, Arbus understood that other people were the whole point.

1. The above quote–“Do other people exist the way I do?”–also comes from Zadie Smith’s 2006 interview with Michael Silverblatt.

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.

James Turrell, Bindu Shards, 2010. Mixed media, 421 x 653 x 607 cm. Image Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

For decades, the illustrious Californian artist has used light as his medium. His aspirations have never been modest. From transforming the Roden Crater in the Arizona desert into an astronomical observatory for the last thirty years, to the ongoing Perceptual Cells series informed by his studies in experimental psychology, Turrell seeks to transform our perceptions. He constructs environments that allow us to open our eyes and mind, and ‘see‘ in a way we have never before. Part of the Perceptual Cells series, Bindu Shards (2010), is an immersive psychedelic experience concocted by Turrell, who mixes light and sound to create a drug-like potion with all the fervour of a mad scientist.

If you have secured one of the much sought after appointments (Bindu Shards spots filled within 48 hours of opening bookings), you are one of the lucky ones, able to confidently stride up and drop your name with the same prestige of being on the VIP list at a highly exclusive event – while a gallery of observers look on enviously.

James Turrell, Bindu Shards, 2010. Mixed media, 421 x 653 x 607 cm. Image Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

The spaceship-like structure of Bindu Shards seems to have landed straight out of a 1970s futuristic sci-fi film – the present as envisioned in the past. The impossibly chic, labcoat-wearing technician, who herself could have come from the same film, asks you a series of questions – Do you suffer from seizures? No. Have you taken any illicit drugs today? No. Which setting would you like – Hard or Soft? Sign the disclaimer and you’re in.

Leaving all your possessions behind to lie in a small white drawer, the technician rolls you inside. ‘Relax. And Enjoy,’ she says as the door slams shut – ‘And remember – there’s a panic button to your left if you need it…’

Hypnotic colors begin to wash over you in quintessential Turrell-like fashion, accompanied by resonating sonic tones meant to aid your passage into the alpha state of consciousness – somewhere between waking and sleeping. The intensity escalates as the light pulsates and shimmers, approaching you and in an sudden shift, fuses with your eyes. It is extremely disconcerting, however if you relax and ‘turn on, tune in, drop out,’ you will be rewarded.

A visitor entering Bindu Shards, 2010. Photo credit to Johanna. http://www.flickr.com/photos/johanna/

Bindu Shards is truly an immersive experience – and least of all because of the environment. What Bindu Shards does is infiltrate your mind, overtake your synapses and blur the boundaries between what is real and what is not. Vision predicated on what you see in front of you is destroyed in favor of perception that stems from the inside – it is a completely new way of retinal ‘seeing’ based on what the mind produces in response to light and sound – it is in your eyes.

The fifteen minutes spent alone with your visions of light are intense, and most definitely not for the faint of heart. What you create, what you see and what you take away on your ‘trip’ is unique. You emerge with your possibilities for perception infinitely expanded and like a drug, long to go back for more.

With Turrell able to transform our state of consciousness so drastically within this tiny bubble, we can only await with breath that is bated to experience what he has spent the last three decades concocting at the elusive Roden Crater.

DAN COLEN: Poetry, Installation view. Photo by Rob McKeever

The most talked about and controversial show of the New York City Fall season: Dan Colen’s inaugural solo debut at Gagosian titled Poetry. Walking around Chelsea during the opening weeks of the season, it was hard to turn the other cheek to numerous conversations regarding Colen’s show. There was hype, expectation and tons of dissing.

Colen first appeared on the art radar on the pages of Vice Magazine along with longtime friend and roommate Ryan McGinley. The notorious ‘Dash Snow Crew’ was known for heavy drug use and their ‘hamster nests‘, a private performance where they would shred a bunch of phonebooks, do tons of drugs and act like hamsters. He was then catapulted to artist superstardom with the infamous 2007 New York Magazine article “Chasing Dash Snow”. Dubbed as ‘Warhol’s Children,’ Dash Snow, Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen were celebrated as the embodiment of art, drugs and a rampant ‘fuck you’ attitude. Now Colen has cleaned up his act and is ready for art world glorification (or damnation).

DAN COLEN: Poetry, Installation view. Photo by Rob McKeever

DAN COLEN: Poetry, Installation view. Photo by Rob McKeever

Known for his bird shit and gum paintings, Colen’s first formal step into the ‘serious’ art world was in the bathrooms of Gagosian Gallery. Apparently, friend and Gagosian Director San Orlofsky convinced Larry Gagosian to allow him to show his work there and it was quite a financial success. Four years later, Colen has a major show at Gagosian that fills the entire gallery, a risky if not infrequent undertaking. Makes me wonder if it’s an art world fairy tale or a carefully orchestrated publicity stunt.

His show Poetry includes a couple of large-scale ‘candy’ paintings, a ramp, an installation of motorcycles and a propped up brick wall. According to the exhibition’s press release, “drawing from mass media, local environment, and subculture, Colen’s art imbues the ordinary, the disenfranchised, and the tribal with provocative new status.” Actually, skateboarding and bikers are hardly a subculture anymore. These are currently a part of the mainstream and Colen is not the first (nor the last) to use it to inform his work. So what’s with all the hype? Is it the whole mystification of the artist as a rebel/social outcast? Or the reverberating echo left from Snow’s untimely death last year? From ‘bathroom to gallery’ and from art outsider to Gagosian protégé there’s a long stretch, or is there? Regardless, I’m still curious to find out what Colen will come up with next. And I’m sure the art crowd will keep whispering while following his steps.

DAN COLEN: Poetry, Installation view. Photo by Rob McKeever

Dan Colen was born in New Jersey in 1979. He graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Art and Design in 2001. Exhibitions include the 2006 Whitney Biennial, New York; “USA Today,” The Royal Academy, London; “Defamation of Character,” PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island, New York; and “Fantastic Politics,” The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo.

Images and artist bio via Gagosian Gallery

Through the process of documenting America’s foundation through both mythology and quotidian objects, photographer Taryn Simon reflects on the heart of national identity by capturing that which is often obscured. Her recent series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), investigates objects and scenes that are often literally and metaphorically out of visual reach by the average citizen in the United States.

For this series, the artist photographed a wide range of subjects such as nuclear waste encapsulation and storage facilities to a recreational site for death row prisoners. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, is the culmination of a four year project and demonstrates the lengths that the artist will go to photograph her desired subject.

Simon is currently presenting a new body of images titled Contraband at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. For this series, the artist lived in John F. Kennedy International Airport for five days and nights, extensively photographing seized goods from passengers entering the United States. A vast array of items such as counterfeit clothing and electronics, drugs, endangered animals, gold dust, Cuban Cigars, and steroids were commandeered by airport security and then photographed by the artist.

The series includes 1075 photographs of over 1000 items. Photographed and cataloged in a fully objective dead pan aesthetic, similar to that which was pioneered by German photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher, these images are removed from all context and are imaged on a stark white background. By capturing such a vast amount of diverse material in a very short period of time, Simon is able to better understand what drives the underground economy in the United States and what goods Americans desire to own, but which are legally out of grasp.

Contraband was also produced in book form and will be exhibited this year at Lever House in New York and Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels. Simon is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Contraband features a number of taboo products like delta 8 THC products from Area52, which are neatly designed and fit will into the museum display.

Jeff Koons, Couple (Dots) Landscape, 2009, Oil on canvas. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Jeff Koons, November 14-January 9th, Gagosian Gallery

“To live outside the law you must be honest,” sang Bob Dylan in 1966, in his brash classic Absolutely Sweet Marie. It’s a line Dylan presumably appropriated from Don Siegel’s dark 1958 noir, The Lineup, a fact Jonathan Lethem insightfully pointed out in his 2007 essay ‘The Ecstasy of Influence.‘  Siegel’s film used the more unwieldy “When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” No matter which way it’s said, the sentiment rings true. It’s honesty that distinguishes the unlovable, often spineless villain from the law-breaker who nihilistically disregards conventional morality and candidly embraces his renegade status.

For two decades, Jeff Koons’ has been a lovable villain precisely because of his lawless honesty—a certain purity of motive has run through his otherwise amoral oeuvre. His art ads, made in the 1980s—in one, a bathrobe clad Koons surrounded himself with nearly nude models whose perfect skin compliments the brightly colored foliage—were insouciantly crass, so self-contained as to be unaware of the institution they were teasing. Later, the bust of his porn-star/diplomat wife and himself also seemed completely sincere as a floozy: as sultry as a romance novel and as pristine as any classical Greek statuette might have been in its hey-day. Then there were those oversized stainless steel keepsakes, like the Hanging Heart valued at $20 million, and the overstimulating collage-like paintings with surfaces as slick as Vogue’s ad-space.

Jeff Koons, Waterfall Couple (Dots) Blue Swish with Red Stroke, 2009, Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Gagosian.

At its best, Koons makes contrivance brazen; at its worst, he makes a world too carefully executed to question, something that, like a newly made car, is so familiar and commoditized that you feel (though perhaps wrongly) that you know it inside out after only a passing glance. But, up to now, his work has always been straightforward about its own empty audacity, and refreshingly so.

Strangely, Koons new show at Gagosian Gallery falls into neither the “brazenly contrived” nor the “too familiar” category. The ten large paintings maybe recognizable—they cull from a well-established vocabulary of layers and dots and ab-ex eruptions—but they veer out of Koons’ typical territory. Instead of being candidly, banally over-the-top, they indulge in faux complexity and instead of feeling newly minted like the BMWs in the dealer’s showroom, they feel old, as if they’re remakes of a previous model that never quite existed but easily could have.

Jeff Koons, Girl Woods (Dots), 2008, Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Gagosian.

Each of Koons new paintings uses a photorealistic image as its backdrop—sexy, fleshy poses that recall Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris. Over the bodies is a screen of Polke-inspired pixels. Koons calls them dots and they cover whole of each canvas, making the bodies beneath discernible only from certain angles. Next come the Twombly-inspired gestures that sometimes veer into riffs off of Christopher Wool’s characteristic swooshes and smears. Sometimes these swooshes and smears land in the middle of the picture plane, becoming sexualized orifices that could give Georgia O’Keefe, queen of the vaginal, a run for her money. In Girl Woods (Dots), an ovular bouquet of purple, yellow and blue crinkled marks hover over the womb of the pixelized girl who has curled up in a bed of green.  In Waterfall Couple (Dots, Blue Swish, Red Stroke), the images scrawls, blurs, and loops of unbridled paint take over so completely that the couple in the background disappears.

All of the “layers” in Koons’ new paintings are, in fact, not layered at all but flatly and perfectly painted on one continuous plane by the many highly skilled assistants that populate Koons’ studio. A man who employs a specialist in spray painting inflatables, Koons rarely touches his own painting these days. Instead, he digitally designs them and creates the systems for their execution and, even with multiple assistants working, one painting sometimes takes months to finish.

The craft of the work at Gagosian is impeccable. Each element of each image seems part of a calculated symbology, as if Koons said to himself, “A red line here will represent virility and the blue squiggle there will embody the freedom of the soul.” Yet, for an artist who has so long stayed away from such needlessly complex systems of meaning, this new venture into the over-wrought language of expressionistic omniscience seems at first naïve and then exasperatingly dishonest.

Jeff Koons, Waterfall Couple (Dots) Marker, Horizontal, 2009, Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Gagosian.

Koons has been called a charlatan before, usually unfairly, but that label finally fits. In this show, his sampling from his lineage—a little Courbet here, a little Twombly there, a little Polke, a little Oehlen and Wool—is too obvious and dastardly to be provocative. Nothing is wrong with sampling, of course; there are many things right with it. But Koons abandoned the minimalism of his usually overblown contrivance in an effort to borrow his way into the rawer, more emotive and sensual side of art (in his epithet to his press release, he says, romantically, “The gesture that you end up making in the world happens through instinct and all these desires for procreation”).

The need to swish and gesticulate and layer in order to get at instinct and primordial desire not only underestimates Koons’ own artistry—honest contrivance is a skill that Koons mastered so well it became emotionally provocative, repulsive and seductive at once. It also underestimates us, his viewers. We’re smart enough to know that vulnerable, evocative, gut-spilling art doesn’t have to arrive in a neo-expressionist package. And when it does, it feels like a cheap trick.

Artist Cy Twombly has created a new series of sculptures, under the humble title Eight Sculptures. These new objects are currently being presented at Gagosian Gallery‘s 980 Madison Ave location in New York City. The exhibition is a companion to a new series of paintings, titled Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves, on view at Gagoisian’s Athens gallery. In addition to the shows at Gagosian, the acclaimed artist also had two major museum exhibitions on view this fall, Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000-2007‘ that inaugurated the new wing of The Art Institute of Chicago, and Cy Twombly: Sensations of the Moment at Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.

Eight Sculptures is a continuation of Twombly’s acclaimed formally driven, pedestal-based objects. While the earlier forms were created from accessible materials and objects, generally coated in gesso to create hauntingly white forms, the new sculptures are cast bronze with a white patina creating a very similar effect. Each sculpture references the unearthed fragility of an object of antiquity, while remaining distinctly modern in its formal presentation.