In his new film about the untrained post-impressionist painter Séraphine de Senlis (Yolande Moreau), director Martin Provost crafted a beautiful, fair and beautifully restrained portrait of the poor, troubled woman. Though she worked most of her life as a maid, Séraphine's work is now in the collections of some of the most important museum collections in the world. Séraphine balances the familiar biopic inclination towards excessive drama and embellished heroism with terrific restrained and a very honest portrayal of the painter's problematic actions. Throughout, Moreau invests the awkward but determined spinster with such organic warmth that even in her worst moments we can't help but feel for her. Click here to read my whole review.
Last week the collective Arts in Bushwick threw a massive party, open studios and weekend-long festival, and I took the opportunity to interview two of the organizers about the event and the Bushwick arts scene. The Bushwick Open Studios & Arts Festival showcased the work of what is considered the latest of New York City's artist communities, and I was curious to understand how this new area would differ from similar places like Soho, the Lower East Side, Chelsea and Williamsburg. Click here to read the whole feature.
In an art review last month I took a critical eye to three artists with shows in Chelsea who seemed to be using the language, lingo and mode of address of pop culture to mount more or less successful critique of visual and mainstream art. And though I enjoyed Jonathan Monk's critique of Jeff Koons' inflated animals at Casey Kaplan (pictured) and Gosha Ostretsov's comic book-inspired installation at Claire Oliver, I felt that Phil Collins' participatory photography exhibition and pitch-perfect Mexican soap opera at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery was the most successful. Click here to read the whole review.
In a recent edition of my art column Wicked Artsy for The L Magazine, I wrote about two exhibitions that use clown-like figures to elicit sympathy and a kind of melancholic pity from viewers, rather than banking on their potential for creepiness. For Marnie Weber at Marc Jancou Contemporary, her ghost clowns are part of a feminist narrative about body politics and performance. With Nigel Cooke's exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery, we peer into an uneasy vision of the future where, after an apocalypse of sorts, the only remaining humans are gnomish clowns (as seen at right) who offer their artifacts in a nearly direct address to viewers. Read the whole article here.
In the latest edition of my art column I discuss two exhibitions in Chelsea that feature robotic or cybernetic figures. Nathaniel Mellor at Lombard-Freid Projects and Nicolas Darrot (work seen at right) at Cueto Project both deploy uncanny mechanical characters as objects of humor and horror. Where Mellor enacts a surreal tragedy of mythic proportions, Darrot addresses more contemporary scenarios and dialogs. Read the whole article here.
For this edition of Wicked Artsy I look at four exhibitions on the Lower East Side that cover a variety of media (video, installation, painting, drawing, sculpture) and use self-criticism and explicitly reflexive gestures to undercut their grandiose gestures. In a contemporary art scene that all too often rewards brash ambition, scandal and noise over thorough and theoretically sound production, work like that of Emmy Mikelson at NY Studio Gallery (pictured at right) is especially refreshing. Read the whole article here.
Check out the latest edition of my weekly art column for The L Magazine, Wicked Artsy, in which I discuss three exhibitions that question how art reflects and shapes the ways we create, preserve and re-evaluate cultural heritage and memories. To say that art is simply a way of preserving a culture is incredibly naive, and all three exhibitions I addressed seemed aware – to one degree or another – that to mediate cultural memory is immediately to change and adapt it. The most sophisticated engagement with this double-edged impulse towards conservation was undertaken by Yeondoo Jung in his current show Handmade Memories (pictured at right) at Tina Kim Gallery. Read the whole article here.
Three current exhibitions throughout the city question our cultural ability to create, maintain and inhabit fantasies. Is there any room left for imaginary escape in a social context of pessimism and realism buffered with plentiful helpings of sarcasm? None of these artists have a surefire response, but the fantasy solutions they offer betray various degrees of hope, skepticism and uncertainty.
Check out the second installment of my weekly art column Wicked Artsy for The L Magazine, this one about three exhibitions on the Lower East Side, including Michael Mahalchick's For What It's Worth at CANADA, pictured above.
As our depression-destined city seems poised to regain some of its former seediness after fifteen years of corporate white-washing, how fitting that pockets of grime should already be growing in two of the city’s most clean-cut museums. Fans of dark doodles and macabre minutiae will be captivated by the somber dens of MoMA’s Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities group show (through November 10) and the Neue Galerie’s survey Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897-1909 (through January 26). The former’s title, Wunderkammer, means “cabinet of curiosities” and refers to a household staple that was to 17th century European bourgeois homes as the mini-bar was to 1950s America’s suburban middle-class. The best families in the fiefdom were stocked with strange fetuses in formaldehyde and, accordingly, MoMA has amassed jars, cabinets, drawings and photographs by art superstars and unknowns from the 1860s to today. Damien Hirst’s dead animals and Louise Bourgeois’s deformed figures are obvious picks, as are the distortions of Dadaists like Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst and their precursors in the deathly visions of James Ensor and black absurdism of Odile Redon (whose "The Egg" is pictured below).
Louise Bourgeois, a 97 year-old New York émigré, was raised in a wealthy French household where her father’s affair with the live-in nanny was an open secret. Accordingly, issues of parenthood, homes, bodies and space that first appeared in Bourgeois’ Femme Maison (Woman House) drawings from the 1940s and totemic Personages sculptures from a few years later are never finally treated as in certain artists’ therapeutic art practices. Instead, Bourgeois delved further into that rich childhood material, investing her art with new creative vigor in the 1960s after a hiatus of several years.
Sculpture and installation became her dominant mode thereafter, and delightfully suggestive phallus forms her favorite subject to play with (pun intended, and backed up with evidence). Distinctly feminist implications in her work also crystallized during this phase, like the breakout work The Destruction of the Father (1974) that features a family of amorphous blobs devouring their patriarch (with its macabre red lighting and fleshy forms, the scene is not unlike the Leatherfaces’ disturbing dinner sequence near the end of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre).
Not surprisingly, one of Bourgeois’ most recent series engages the idea of the cell, spaces that protect and imprison whose artistry lies as much in the theatrics of their display as the details of the objects they contain and conceal. The concept of the woman house comes full circle in these works, while more recent installations made from clothing and salvaged fabric quietly betray Bourgeois’ worn physique. Nevertheless, her work’s broad resonance proves her lasting relevance, a delightful ability to draw us into her narrative while revealing things about our own.
