Charles Atlas. The Waning of Justice, 2015; installation view, Luhring Augustine, New York. Photo: Farzad Owrang.

But it is not alone. Ethel’s Fortune has three companion pieces, Terri’s Option (2015), Chai (2015), and Kiss the Day Goodbye (2015). Although described by the gallery as autonomous works, the four are linked by shared medium, duration, subject matter (most involve sunset footage that Atlas captured while at the Rauschenberg Residency in Florida), and an audio track composed by the London-based electronic artist Helm. Their combined presence creates what the gallery aptly characterizes as “one dynamic visual experience” (effectively having it both ways): an immersive, Rothko-esque bath of fiery ochres, salving lavenders, and darkling blues, in places interpolated by digital enumeration, notably countdowns. The latter element, paired with Helm’s soundtrack of gloomy, anxious electronica followed by a funerary bagpipe, serves to evoke the more brooding connotations of sunset. Behind the brilliance, we perceive a harbinger of inevitable darkness.

Charles Atlas. The Waning of Justice, 2015; installation view, Luhring Augustine, New York. Photo: Farzad Owrang.

There is a fourth companion piece, less immediate but nevertheless inextricable from the sensational meld that characterizes the exhibition. Titled Here She Is…v1, this video gives a soapbox to an exuberant and monumentally wigged drag queen, who with Southern charm rambles breezily but articulately through front-page topics ranging from trade agreements, to energy summits, to war profiteering. Though installed in its own room, this projection is clearly visible and audible from the anterior gallery, and its duration (just under twenty minutes) aligns exactly with that of the other pieces. With the dazzlingly cataclysmic sunsets and portentous musical soundtrack nearby bleeding into her performance, this improbable political commentator takes on a phantasmagoric presence: a talking head belonging to a world on a knife edge between utopia and dystopia. An absurd resolution comes by way of a lip-synced musical number, pumped loudly through all the galleries.

By now, such tendencies toward immersion and interdisciplinarity (borrowing from the worlds of music or performance) are hallmarks of contemporary art. (The exhibition I most recently reviewed for this publication, Pierre Huyghe at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is a shining example.) While signaling a liberation from modernist doctrines of autonomy and specificity that held firm almost until the end of the past century, exhibitions like The Waning of Justice also make clear the ambivalences and pitfalls within this turn—here most clearly evident in the gallery’s untenable claim that the five individual works remain autonomous despite their syncing, shared components, and unified installation. Indeed, it is clear that in order to work its magic, Atlas’ recent art requires a highly specific, technologically outfitted exhibition environment. It is impossible not to see this as a move toward confinement as much as toward liberation.

The Waning of Justice is on view at Luhring Augustine through March 14, 2015.

Roger Hiorns; Untitled (Security Object), 2013; cast stone; and Untitled (Surface 2), 2014; steel, flat screen, and youth; © Roger Hiorns; Courtesy of the Artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

I consciously use the term “situation” because, in the first gallery, the dematerialization of the object is, as we will see, the crux of the work, and in the second gallery, the presence of the live model activates a highly theatrical mise en scène, in which it would be awkward to contemplate the “props” as art objects in their own right. This is in contrast to the third gallery in the exhibition, which presents a group of works, all “Untitled” (as the others in the exhibition are), that look something like the plastic bowels of a moped. Strung from the ceiling and rigged up to a compressor, they slowly extrude foam in scatological coils. This surreal aggregation, grotesquely anthropomorphic yet somehow serene, makes itself available for perceptual exploration in a way that the other installations do not.

Roger Hiorns; Untitled, 2014; plastic, compressor, and foam. © Roger Hiorns; Courtesy of the Artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Indeed, Hiorns’ “situations” appear opaque—at least in absence of further reading. The exhibition guide reveals the origin of the plane of grit to be a “passenger aircraft engine and granite altarpiece” that the artist melted down and atomized. Similar versions of the piece have, with this background information in view, deservedly earned praise as powerfully anxiety-inducing as well as elegiac gestures—acutely so in the context of exhibitions like September 11, which ran at MoMA PS1 in 2012. However, without such a compelling conceptual framework with which to interpret “Untitled 2” (its media, listed as “steel, flat screen, and youth,” are not so enlightening), I cannot but read the work in heavy, metonymic terms: the TV as technology, the boy as humanity, the Wall Street Journal as hegemonic power, the nude as vulnerable body—all rather hackneyed dichotomies of the day, made ready-to-hand by the exhibition’s press release.

Roger Hiorns; Untitled, 2014; atomized passenger aircraft engine and granite altarpiece. © Roger Hiorns; Courtesy of the Artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Hiorns is perhaps best known for his 2008 piece, “Seizure,” in which he pumped an empty ground floor flat full of a copper sulphate solution, causing the interior to become coated from floor to ceiling in a deep blue crystalline growth. Such a work demonstrates not only a healthy penchant for the surreal, but also a sensitivity to the potential impact of processes that continue in the artist’s absence. The atomized aircraft piece achieves, or is at least capable of achieving, its own form of presence in absence. Yet Untitled 2 does something of the reverse. Its combination of readymade and theatrical components, provocative spectacle and wan social commentary, elbows out prolonged contemplation. It rings hollow, regrettably assuming the look of generic contemporary-art fare. Hiorns’ better works in this exhibition speak to art-historical traditions in more distinctive tongues—of techno-grit and foam, as it were. They offer something to behold.

Roger Hiorns runs through October 18 at Luhring Augustine.

As the youngest artist ever to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale, Kjartansson penetrated the art world’s collective consciousness with The End–Venice in 2009. This performance piece, like so much of his subsequent work, managed to be at once playful and provocative, sly and guileless. Ensconcing himself with friend and fellow artist Pall Haukur Bjornsson in a Venetian palazzo for the Biennale’s six-month run, he proceeded to churn out one painting per day, each depicting the variously posed yet invariably Speedo-clad Bjornsson.

The resulting œuvre—144 canvases in total—alluded to diverse artistic periods and riffed on numerous painterly styles. Overtly bound to the ephemeral, irretrievable conditions of their making, the canvases made explicit the duality of temporal independence and historical specificity implicit in the material work of art. Ultimately, the works inhabited an uncertain state between autonomy and implication, and despite their elemental, antic energy, they evinced a certain lack—the viewer, knowing the paintings’ role within a larger artistic project, could scarcely help but see them as material fragments of an unreproducible whole.

The End—Venice refracted the ebb and flow—backward, forward, side-to-side—of contemporary art itself; it effectively “performed” the conditions of uncertainty, ambivalence, and contingency that inform so much art making and viewing today. The End also elucidated a particular approach to the creative act that has distinguished Kjartansson’s practice, an approach that has its roots in Icelandic history and culture. As Kjartansson has explained, “You drive through the [Icelandic] landscape, and every hill, every farm, has a story connected to it. That’s how my performance works are. I don’t believe in the idea that you have to obtain the art piece to have it—or even see the art piece. It exists as a story.”[1]

Which brings us to the artist’s recent video The Man (2010), a centerpiece of the current exhibition Ragnar Kjartansson: Song at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The notion of story, and a profound attunement to the mysteries of place and time, resonates with especial force in this work; in fact, the video further illuminates those cross-currents of past and present, individual and social, aesthetic and experiential that inform the artist’s ever-evolving body of work.

A musician as well as a visual artist, and one who studied painting before turning his attention to performance, Kjartansson infuses his multi-media works with a vitality that is visual and aural, textural and rhythmic. In The Man, music and performance, time and history, are ambiguously interwoven as the artist cedes the stage to the late bluesman Pinetop Perkins. Framing the then-ninety-six-year-old Perkins against an evocatively rural backdrop—one that immediately calls to mind a Wyeth landscape—Kjartansson observes his subject with a clear-eyed calm that is resolutely unsentimental yet profoundly humanizing.

Interestingly, the naturalness of the artist’s staging is such that the viewer only retrospectively registers the scene’s essential anachronisms: an upright piano and a microphone found standing in an overgrown field; the bluesman’s slow-moving yet determined entrance on the grassy “stage,” whose austere backdrop is an abandoned farmhouse and several overhead electrical wires. Artifice and authenticity, choreography and happenstance, seem to collapse into one another in ways that seem effortless. The result is a kind of experiential interlude, a deeply personal, utterly compelling encounter with a singular man in an ephemeral moment.

The idiosyncrasies that underlie and emerge throughout The Man reiterate and affirm Kjartansson’s attunement to the omnipresence of history and the “stories” that permeate our collective consciousness. In the video, the hollowed-out, mysterious aura of the farmhouse silently collides with the frail yet animated presence of the elderly musician; similarly, the gaping desolation suggested by the house’s glassless, darkened windows is shattered by the bluesman’s lively stream-of-consciousness rhythms and commentary.

In presenting us with Perkins, an irrepressible figure whose very presence is history incarnate, Kjartansson quietly confronts us with time’s unsentimental, even ruthless, forward march, and with our own essential entanglement in a web of shared history, individual experience, and cultural memory. Wearing profundity like a blithely tossed-on overcoat, the artist leads us, finally, into unexpectedly provocative depths.

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.