ArtSeen
DANA SCHUTZ If the Face Had Wheels
By Kara L. RooneyThe paintings of Dana Schutz are all decadence and destruction, wit and delivery; they expand and defy meaning, like water turned to ice in the crack of a stone.
SHERRIE LEVINE Mayhem
By R. H. LossinSherrie Levine: Mayhem is anything but chaotic. The work is meticulously ordered: four artistic billiard tables, each supporting three identically placed balls; six pristine crystal skulls enclosed in glass cases; 30 identical matted and framed postcards; two minimalist sculptures atop two pianos; one tidy row of black-and-white photographs of plants.
DAVID SMITH Cubes and Anarchy
By Jonathan GoodmanBorn in Decatur, Indiana, David Smith (1906 – 1965), arguably one of America’s greatest 20th-century sculptors, came from a tradition of craftsmen; his great-grandfather was a blacksmith, and his father an engineer and inventor.
BROOKLYN DISPATCHES
Birth of a Notion
By James Kalm
“The Five Spot Jazz Club was tiny, but it had a huge influence.” I often find myself thinking back on these words, delivered by Dave Hickey during a New School lecture at the beginning of this millennium. As I trace back veins of art history and study the unlikely and humble beginnings of careers, movements, and galleries, they become even more poignant.
NAN GOLDIN Scopophilia
By David St.-LascauxScopophilia, a sumptuous, three-course banquet, is Goldin’s first foray into empathic socialization and positive humanity.
CLIFFORD OWENS Anthology
By Cora FisherFor Anthology, Clifford Owens asked 26 inter-generational black artists to provide him with scores for performance works which he interpreted in situ during a residency at PS1 last spring.
AJ FOSIK Time Kills All Gods
By Gail Victoria Braddock QuagliataTime Kills All Gods, AJ Fosik’s second solo exhibition on view at Jonathan LeVine Gallery October 22 through November 19, 2011, is a near-hallucinogenic vision of imagined deities melded with cryptozoological specimens captured in stasis.
WHAT A (SELF) PORTRAIT CAN DO
Picturing South Africa in New York
By Maxwell Heller
At first glance, Gary Schneider’s ink prints on canvas look like satellite images—mottled with whorls of light and fields of charcoal black, they recall photographs of our planet at night, or Hubble snapshots of distant nebulae.
GABRIELE EVERTZ Rapture
By Robert C. MorganThe earliest paintings that I have seen by Gabriele Evertz deal primarily with gestural forms. But saying they are “gestural” does not automatically imply that they possess expressionist content. Rather, for Evertz, the gesture holds a different status, being less about the signifier of the interior than a clear consciousness as to how the preceding strokes contribute to the final result.
Algorithmic Unconscious
By David St.-LascauxDespite the long-established and pervasive presence of the digital computer, computer art—untouched by human hands, if not by human minds—has somehow failed to gain traction, except in circles of affinity, while abstract and conceptual art have been thoroughly integrated into the art-cultural canon.
REBECCA PURDUM and MATTHEW FISCHER
At first glance, the work in the concurrent shows of Rebecca Purdum and Matthew Fischer is diametrically opposed in vision and temperament. Purdum’s paintings are vast, seemingly monochromatic color fields and Fischer’s are colorful jumbles of bold strokes.
RICHARD POUSETTE-DART East River Studio
By Robert C. MorganThere was a peculiar and unexpected aura on Saturday afternoon upon entering the Luhring Augustine Gallery in West Chelsea. I encountered a wall sculpture made of coiled steel wire, mounted on a simple wooden frame, and hung on the front wall as one entered the premises.
WILL COTTON Cockaigne
By William CorwinWhile some curators and critics may bemoan the end of the era of the 12-hour-long performance piece, Will Cotton’s debut in the arena of live-action public art, “Cockaigne,” was a short and sweet representation of the artist’s signature thinly veiled psycho-sexual imagery, which left the audience craving just a little bit more.
JOAN MITCHELL The Last Paintings
By Greg LindquistJoan Mitchell’s late paintings from the 1980s and ’90s are rich meditations on the particulars of color and records of her body’s movement in space.
AMY SILLMAN Thumb Cinema
By David RhodesWhat happens in a painting by Amy Sillman resonates with the struggle and discomfort of being a mortal, corporeal being.
RICO GATSON Three Trips Around the Block
By Charles SchultzRico Gatson’s retrospective at Exit Art, Three Trips Around the Block, ran the gamut of artistic expression. A survey spanning the last 15 years of the artist’s career (he’s 45), the work in the exhibition was by turns viscerally provocative and conceptually detached; it was unsettling at times, contemplative at others, alternately coded in contemporary iconography and resolutely abstract.
