[Charming Angels Models Sets 71 - 225 Sirena Creator Raffa
Christel Malden
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Mel Bochner - All Sales Final! - Totah - ***
I've never really gotten the whole "painting text" thing that Bochner and Wool are known for, I get the feeling that whatever once made these paintings of words radical or interesting is invisible in our current context. I mean, I like Gene Beery but he's more focused on textual humor and metaphysics, and Ed Ruscha has a more complex visual language; Bochner and Wool seem more interested in generic turns of phrase as elements in painting-as-painting while also resisting the painterly so I'm not sure what to take from it. The edifice of art in general and painting in particular has been so exploded that just about any position of obstinacy or negation now reads as a self-evident gesture instead of the critical/intellectual stance it once was. That's just to say I don't particularly see the punctum of his method, but I do like the misery and vitriol expressed in the text. "Lost Our Lease!" is a proper motto for our times.
Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ken Gonzales-Day, David Howe, Sigmar Polke, Zoe Pettijohn Schade, Rosemarie Trockel, Weegee - The Madness of Crowds - Carriage Trade - ****.5
Carriage Trade at it again with another edition of the best group show in town. Sure, The Passion of Joan of Arc is hard to beat, but for one thing, who else would put it in a group show, and, for two, who else could curate a group show that adequately fits it into the show's thesis and not just riding on Dreyer's coattails? Certainly no one else would put it next to an episode of The Twilight Zone ("The Monsters are Due on Maple Street"). But why not? It's a tragedy that only Carriage Trade would, because such leaps of associative logic are exactly what good curation consists of. Namely, bringing the apparently unlike together into something that suggests correlations that aren't readily apparent. It's not even that hard to make those connections if you're aided by a good idea, as this show is with the subject of the crowd, specifically mob rule and the vindictive retribution of a mass that has perceived a real or imagined persecution. Thus we get Joan of Arc and suburban paranoia, but also student protests (a student film featuring Martin Scorsese and Harvey Keitel, police manuals on riots), the edifices of state and authority (Pettijohn Schade's crumbling monuments, Trockel's left side of her diptych of people climbing the walls of the Capitol), the unreality of digital life (Howe's North Korean propaganda-style painting of Mark Zuckerberg, Trockel's right side of the diptych of a woman in a VR sci-fi headset), murder (Weegee's photo of a crowd after a shooting), and lynchings (Ken Gonzales-Day's unbelievable collection of lynching postcards with the victims edited out, excising the violence-porn spectacle but retaining all the horror that such things actually existed). The show presents real-life phenomena without flat didactics, which is what separates something like Trockel's painting, a measured reflection on our contemporary condition of mass hysteria and distantiation, from the insipid tut-tutting of all that anti-Drumpf art that mistakes hysterical virtue-signaling for praxis. To the extent that art is political at all it does so by representing the nuance and complexity of life instead of mere sloganeering, and it's a difficult task to articulate that. By nature it's far more ambiguous than most people are comfortable with in these times where social polarization demands constant affirmations of whichever camp one belongs to, but, like curation, if you cut corners and go for the obvious you're not likely to end up accomplishing very much.
Doris Guo, Matthew Langan-Peck, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya - Artists Space - ****
This reminds me of nothing so much as the first Artists Space show in this space way back in late 2019 (the sixth Kritic's Korner review and the first four star review), which is sort of weird because they haven't had any comparable group shows (four "relevant" artists put together without any stared curatorial theme) in the intervening four and a half years. There's a literal resemblance because Jason Hirata and Doris Guo both dominated the same room with projectors, but there's also some correlations of content. For reference, my earlier review in its entirety: "Post-conceptual lazy appropriation art is funny, Lomex 'tweaker with glue' art isn't. .5 bonus for anti-curation." Montoya definitely inhabits the "tweaker with glue" camp, assembling found objects (cheekily enumerated with diaristic details in each work's list of materials) into wannabe Giger spiky things, and it's still not funny. The attempt at imbuing significance in the objects by noting where he got them is obnoxious, and he sticks out like a sore thumb for going for a gothy surface aesthetic where the other three artists are canny enough to avoid a gauche invocation of style. The other three are thus more on the post-conceptual side, although they aren't appropriations. You could call the work lazy, in a sense, but I didn't mean that term negatively then or now; I just mean that the artists know that art has moved beyond the need to legitimate itself through craft. Maybe tweaker art implies that as well by exaggerating pointless handiwork? I don't know, that's probably a generous reading, whatever. Peck's boxes, eggs, and audio pieces (I particularly like the "song" Small Clip 1, you can listen here) repeat the forms he used at Gandt and been working with for a while now, but that's a self-conscious decision and he has the ingenuity to iterate without coming off as complacent. McGuire has three large pink banners with stars on them hanging from the ceiling and a naked "giant" made of foam lying on the ground that seems to be an overt copping of Charles Ray's style, which is nowhere near as unfortunate as Maurizio Cattelan's budget ripoff of Ray that's up right now and unfortunately near to Ray's show that's up right now, but it seems like a bad idea to step on Ray's toes lest you be judged against him. On the website there's a photo of Death of Napoleon, another sculpture by McGuire that's similar but doesn't look like a Ray and seems like it would have been more interesting, but regardless the disjunct between the dead giant and the banners is still oblique enough to work against any facile aesthetics. Last but not least are Guo's opaque projectors, wrapped or enclosed in decorated boxes and projecting inscrutable little object compositions. The gold rings and flower buds projected onto the back was seem to be the show's favorite work by a wide margin, judging by the number of Instagram stories I saw of it after the opening, and it is a beautiful image. I joked to someone that it looks like something out of a Pinterest wedding moodboard from 2010, which I didn't mean seriously, but it does convey something about what makes these projections captivating. Just about any evocation of beauty today is wrapped up in its own derivation from an aesthetic "elsewhere," a mass of signifiers that point to an idea of something else instead of to itself. That's why fashion is boring now, it's all so many references slapped on top of each other that there's no content undergirding any of it. Guo's projectors and the tableaux inside of them manage to simply be visually precious with enough distance from any point of reference that they can stand on their own without baggage, although my comment underscores that complete autonomy is never possible. The show succeeds in general on this same logic, three of the four artists are sufficiently indifferent to the trap of stylistic surface that their work manages to exist on its own.
Olivia Rodrigo & Conan Gray, Monique Mouton, Sarah Rapson, Tony Oursler, Mia Madison, ANOHNI, Charles Atlas, Clay Hapaz, Jesse Murry - she sleeps in light / we WILL save his soul - Loong Mah - ****
Okay I'm tired of writing, I think this is probably the longest update I've ever done. I went to Carriage Trade, Artists Space, and Loong Mah with a friend so I didn't take any notes which makes reviewing a lot harder, especially when the shows are good. The show is entirely eclectic and cracked, Clay Hapaz (whose painting in the show is charming) curated the show and he spent three months installing it, which is crazy on the level of logistics, willingness on the part of the gallery, dedication on his part, and probably a few more levels I'm not thinking of. It's suitably packed with ideas and earnestly eclectic; aside from the Olivia Rodrigo and Mia Madison covers of a Katy Perry song playing on iPhones, there's newspaper clippings and old news broadcasts about child abductions, Bible verses, and those great Tony Oursler face projections onto dummies, not to mention Rapson and Atlas. Anyway, I've been working on this update for almost a week and I just remembered I don't get paid for them. Please consider donating!
Matthew Gasda - Morning Journal - The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research - ***
I know next to nothing about theater, much less contemporary theater. I've read some books by Richard Maxwell and I think he's great, but I only saw one play of his in a hotel room in Portland almost a decade ago and watched a couple of his plays when they were available online during the lockdowns, but the old camcorder recordings weren't very digestible. Other than that I like Shakespeare, I've read some Beckett, Wilde, Brecht, I liked the movie version of A Long Day's Journey Into Night, and a couple other things here or there, but I wouldn't pretend any familiarity with the medium. I was offered a press ticket to this and accepted mainly because my boredom with galleries has been getting excruciating lately, which isn't to say I had low expectations, just few. I know Gasda's name, I heard about Dimes Square like everyone else, I vaguely recall hearing about Zoomers, and I've glanced at his Twitter and Substack, but fundamentally I didn't have any real notion of what his plays were like except for the on-the-nose topicality and the presumption that there was some ideological connection to the Dimes Square social world. But Morning Journal isn't particularly topical and it doesn't have any discernible interest in scenester posturing that I associate with Dimes Square, which is a relief, but it also begs the question of what it actually is concerned with. The play is structured as a series of seven vignettes with six separate pairs of actors (the first pair returns for the seventh scene) that cycle through various interpersonal dynamics. The opening scene consists of a woman coming to catsit for another woman who's taking a trip for her father's funeral; their interaction fluctuates from tense to confessional and back because the latter's ex-boyfriend recently left her for the former. The second pair consists of female friends navigating their drunken hookup from the night before, the third is a straight couple having an argument, the fourth female friends that smoke weed and argue about their poorly matched personalities, bickering sisters in the fifth, and the sixth is a straight pair that hooked up the night before (the man is implied to be the same man discussed by the first pair, but it's years later). There are recurrent lines, props, and subjects that crop up in different arrangements throughout: yoga, smoking, sitting on a fire escape, hiccups, a cat, classical music and piano playing, a coffee table book of Medieval art, the titular journal, coffee, the idea of being someone else, and the general themes of sex and intimacy. More importantly, by the second scene, aided by the large zodiac wheel prop in the background and the twelve actors, I realized that each character's personality corresponded to an astrological sign. I tried to guess who was what (I'm from California) but it's never overtly acknowledged and I'm not certain if there's a clear sequence or not, although I'd bet money that the bickering sisters are a Leo and a Virgo. All of this is to say that the play feels like a formalist exercise, almost la Oulipo, perhaps as a strategy to move away from the overt timeliness of Gasda's earlier plays and, while I'm all for formal experimentation, the conceit feels less like a means for literary inquiry than a pretext for writing a play without a subject. The astrology archetypes standing in for characters and the brevity of each scene makes the self-consciousness of the construction explicit, so there's not much to grasp aside from the form. The duo from the first and last scene aren't as reducible to types as the rest, but the format is so elliptical that they only start to suggest fleshed-out characters before they disappear. This is an ungenerous complaint, to be sure. I'm well aware of how hard it is to get out of the pit of literary self-reflexiveness to write something that "means something," and also firsthand the difficulties of developing your practice from the ground up outside of an institutional framework/tradition. I should hasten to add that the play was perfectly competent; the actors were well-practiced as far as I could tell and the dialogue never made me cringe or roll my eyes, which is impressive for contemporary writing. But the moments of humor were mainly derived from imitations of generational patterns of speech that didn't amuse me as much as it did the rest of the audience (saying "damn" as an anticlimactic expression of sympathetic attentiveness, glib statements about behaving badly in romantic relationships), and, similarly, the general objective seemed to be not much more than a sense of semi-autofictional verity to life in Brooklyn. It did that reasonably well, but none of the scenes engaged me as much as my own mental exercise of guessing everyone's signs. Unlike Maxwell's New York City Players or the Wooster Group, Gasda's approach has no experimental or modernist pretensions, which isn't something I'm demanding, although I do think some engagement with more adventurous drama could be productive. If directly engaging with Beckett would be pretentious and daunting, then how about a consideration of what's going on with Maxwell's writing, or Robert Ashley's operas? Again, this is like telling someone they should simply become a brilliant genius, and in general I don't believe in telling artists how to do their jobs so I'm embarrassed to critique in these terms. Still, Gasda described the play as "crazy" in his introduction, which makes me wonder how straight-laced his influences are. As it stands, what I took to be the true focus of the whole undertaking was simply the practicalities of writing a play, assembling a theater troupe, and staging it, sort of like an ambitious thesis project in theater school. By that standard it definitely succeeds, and it's no mean feat to coordinate the participation of a dozen actors, a crew, even alternate actors, and to practice enough for a plausible air of professionalism. I mentioned the difficulty of working outside of an institutional framework because all of that would be comparatively streamlined if this was done within a conventional structure, leaving more room for the playwright to focus on his writing. There doesn't seem to be an existing system that generates any great playwrights so he's going it alone, and it's a lot of work to do it at all, let alone to do it with polish, much less profundity. I feel similarly about my relationship to criticism, and close to five years in I still think my own writing is sloppy and mostly dilettantish. In other words, I know how hard-won artistic maturity is in a world that no longer values it.