Arteviste 2016 Reviews
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Reviews 2016 § A Review of Matt Mullican: Pantagraph at Peter Freeman, New York, December 28, 2016, Pages 2-6 § A Review of Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers at PS1, Long Island City, New York, December 21, 2016, Pages 7-11 § A Review of Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest at the New Museum, New York, November 22, 2016. Pages 12-17 § A Review of Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, November 16, 2016. Pages 18-22 § A Review of Kerry James Marshall: Mastry at The Met Breuer, New York. November 9, 2016, Pages 23-26 § A (haiku) review of Maurizio Cattelan, Not Afraid of Love at la Monnaie de Paris, (unpublished), Page 27 § A Review of Jason Matthew Lee: Bromide Mayo at Crèvecoeur, Paris, November 8, 2016, pages 28-31 § A Review of Jean-Luc Moulène at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, October 31, 2016, Pages 32-35 § A Review of Kyle Thurman: A Lonely Butcher at Off Vendome, New York. October 11, 2016, Pages 36-41 § A Review of Henry Hudson: Sun City Tanning at Sotheby's S2 Gallery, New York, October 1, 2016, Pages 42-45 § A Review of Zoe Leonard's solo exhibition 'In the Wake' at Hauser & Wirth, New York, September 21, 2016, 46-49 1 Reviews A Review of Matt Mullican: Pantagraph at Peter Freeman, New York December 28, 2016 Matt Mullican has got them both: brains and brawn. If there were intellectual and athletic decathlons in contemporary art, Mullican would win handily. He has the genetic material, training, and discipline. Mullican is the son of artists Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado. His father’s work was shown earlier this year at James Cohan (New York). His mother’s work is currently on show at Park View (Los Angeles). Mullican’s brother, John, is a writer and documentary filmmaker. Few families have ”the right stuff” way this one does. Lee Mullican was a member of the three-person Dynaton Group, a loose San Francisco-based collective. The LA Times described the group as “among the wildest [in the 20th Century.] . aggressive. Romantic. Space age. Seductive.” They explored indigenous American arts and cultures, filled with mysticism, or as 2 Reviews Christopher Knight put it, “Surrealism for the New World.” The elder Mullican’s work might be described as transcendent abstraction. Hurtado’s work may be better described as figuration meets abstraction. It is certainly sympathetic with the Dynatons. Among Matt Mullican’s numerous gifts is his ability to synthesize his parental history and influences along with his training and dialogues from his studies at CalArts during the formidable tenure of John Baldessari. Mullican has recalled one of the first things perfect depiction of nonsubject matter for him. They reduce the world to its simplest form. The connections between symbols are totally individual, non-prescriptive, and non-narrative. Mullican’s cosmology is “a model for a cosmology, not a cosmology itself.” This is an exhibition that requires thinking. There are three types of work presented here, all grounded in Mullican’s symbols and cosmology. As you enter the exhibition, you see five bright, bold nylon banners, each measuring 5 x 4.5 m (@ 16.5 x 14.75 ft.) They divide the gallery’s cavernous architecture. Their intimidating scale demands attention to some of the icons in Mullican’s graphic language. 3 Reviews Like the signs and signals in the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals (United Nations Publication, ECE/TRANS/196), the symbols depict some of Mullican's cosmos of signs. They are colored coded, signifying order: the material world (green), the as- yet-uncultured (blue), culture (yellow), the arena of signs and language (black and white) and subjective experience (red).” Order and systematization are crucial in Mullican’s world. Alles in Ordnung: everything is okay. On the gallery’s altitudinous walls, are Mullican’s paintings, termed “rubbings,” a process Mullican has used since 1984. (Mullican’s rubbings were recently featured in a massive, comprehensive catalog, published in conjunction with his 2016-2017 touring exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and Kunsthalle Heilbronn, Germany.) These works are made using acrylic gouache and oil stick using transfers and reproductions. Some of the rubbings are of machines, including a pantagraph, a machine used to copying a figure to a desired scale, consisting of styluses for tracing extended sides. Think of a mechanical, manually operated enlarger. 4 Reviews These rubbings also include graphic rendering of languages, signs, interiors, and exteriors, and atmospheres, again in Mullican’s color codes. One work in particular, “Organization,” a gargantuan black and white rubbing of the 1853 organizational chart of the New York and Erie Railroad is like a 19th Century floral engraving in contrast to a hard, almost knife-sharp rubbing titled “Untitled (Center Subject of Center Language.”) Between the banners and the confines of the walls are purpose-built tables, displaying 535 sheets of paper, each measuring 30.5 x 22.9 cm (12 x 9 in.) These collages, really individual images, each cut and glued from pages in Carl Jung’s posthumously published Man and His Symbols. Most people walk past the tables. Most people do not realize that Mullican made each collage and added a hand-written page number, as well as his own serial numbers. Big deal? Yes, this is a really big deal. Jung’s book was, in effect, a post WWI examination of man's relation to this own unconscious. In Jung's view the unconscious is the guide, friend, and adviser of the conscious. Mullican reminds us to look within and to explore our own cosmologies. 5 Reviews This is not easy art. It takes time. It takes thought. It is an encounter with more cerebral issues that many exhibitions seem to avoid. It is not pretty, but it is beautiful. It is encounter with intellectual prowess combined with aesthetic brawn, on a par with Barbara Bloom and Christopher Williams. It is strong stuff worthy of both a MacArthur Foundation grant and an Olympic gold medal. 6 Reviews A Review of Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers at PS1, Long Island City, New York December 21, 2016 The smell of meat stock permeated all three floors of PS1. It was an unintended olfactory punch from the Kunsthalle’s in-house restaurant, M. Wells Dinette. Yet, the cloying, unctuous odor created an additional atmospheric in Mark Leckey's sensory assault. PS1 smelled like a fatty broth or stew in an English workingman's café, which seemed sort of appropriate given Leckey’s self-described working class background. The best way to encounter the exhibition is to take PS1's voluminous, mid-20th century elevator to the third floor. It sluggishly ascends, creaking, moaning, and beeping. It becomes a portal. You enter a different world governed by Leckey's sampling of 7 Reviews primarily British culture: visual, auditory, and cinematic. By the time you transit this world you can almost taste the café’s fatty broth. The only sense that seems unengaged is touch. Containers and Its Drivers is a reconfiguration of a reconfiguration. It needs space, and the definition provided by PS1’s architecture neatly compartmentalizes Leckey’s biography and collections. Leckey and his curator co-organizers—Peter Eleey, Stuart Comer, and colleagues—use it well. By dint of PS1’s labyrinth of stall-like spaces, the exhibition is a blocky reinvention of his 2014-2015 presentation at Wiels (Brussels), Mark Leckey: Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials. Wiels was elegant and refined in comparison. You could waltz through its adjoining expanses. That Leckey continues to rethink and reconfigure his icons, personal collections of the bizarre and the banal, and integrates new works is so fresh. At times, the films feel like the didactic lectures of Seth Price; other times the sculptures feel like Jean-Luc Moulène. In between there are 3-color LED displays simplifying the entirety of digital media and Leckey's amateur archeology of post-plastic stuff. Some of it is so wonderfully weird, like a cast of William Blake's death mask, a copy of Robert Gober’s 8 Reviews Untitled (Man Coming Out of a Woman) (1993). The interconnected rooms of displays and vitrines come together like a true cabinet of curiosities, bridging analog and digital eras. Leckey insists, “This isn’t curating, this is aggregating.” There is a foundation to all this seeming randomness: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a 1999 video. It is acknowledged his breakthrough work, perhaps even a masterpiece. It samples and collages found footage of British dance subcultures from the 1970s to the 1990s. If you are lucky enough to spot it, there is a hand-drawn road map in the small Leckey’s cumulative musical encounters. Music and sound are central to Leckey. You just have to steal a quote: “If ever there was an artist who uses left field pop music as the alter of inspiration, it’s got to be . Leckey.” (Kudos to Nadja Sayej, the guardian.com, October 27, 2016). He uses music sonically and sculpturally. The sculptural installation in which Fiorucci is projected looks like an homage to Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis. Ditto the speaker sculptures on the second floor. Both trigger visual memories of the “New Brutalist” architecture that was constructed throughout postwar Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Leckey was born in 1964 in Birkenhead, Wirral, near Liverpool. He attended Newcastle Polytechnic in northern England. This architecture would have been familiar in his landscape. (There seem to be a few other film-related homages like the street lamps that look inspired by alien life forms in The Day the Earth Stood Still and the transmission towers in the Japanese Mothra series.) 9 Reviews Leckey is a Brit.