Clowns Art Us

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.

Wicked Artsy: Chelsea’s Multiplying Robot Armies

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.

Wicked Artsy: In Dark Humor

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.

Wicked Artsy: Private and Public Photography

In this week's edition of my art column for The L Magazine, I take a look at four photography exhibitions currently hanging in Chelsea. In these three solo shows and one group exhibition, I isolate the various ways that photography can be applied to create a sense of isolation or privacy in public spaces and rituals, and can just as effectively render a private narrative public. From the accessibility activism of Jem Cohen at Robert Miller Gallery to the photoessay on teenage angst at ClampArt, via the ominous public landscapes of Matthew Sleeth at Claire Oliver Gallery (above) and Sonnabend's Clay Ketter retrospective, photography introduces avenues through and between boundaries of public and private. Read the whole article here.

Wicked Artsy: Picturing Cultural Memory

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.

Wicked Artsy: Fantasy Lives

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.

At Chelsea’s Gladstone Gallery, Thomas Hirschhorn has turned the traditional white cube space on its head with his DIY fitness center installation Universal Gym (above). Amidst mirrors, TV screens and magazine cutouts of airbrushed and bulging models, Hirschhorn finds our fantasies alive and fit, chasing imaginary bodies on treadmills. Everything here is satire and hyperbole: nonsensical fitness machines are made of duct tapped cardboard, empty plastic water bottles coalesce in clusters at certain stations and a giant black gym ball dominates the room. We’re still capable of fantasizing, Hirschhorn answers, but these days we only dream what we’re told to dream.


Visiting the exhibition of early Kenneth Anger shorts at P.S.1 – the visionary director’s first U.S. retrospective in over a decade – also approximates a journey into fantasy space. The repressed desires of his films are brilliantly installed in a room that feels like a gallery-sized collective unconscious. Every surface is covered in red rubber, with three screens hanging from the ceiling and three TVs on the floor. Two additional rooms are draped in more muted rubber wrapping and feature quieter pieces. In films from 1947 to 1981, Anger mobilizes a variety of narrative, visual and musical techniques to undermine the norms of the times. He turns the automobile iconography of syrupy postwar suburban nuclear family dreams into a gay musical by way of creepy car fetishism with Kustom Kar Komandos (1964-65, above). Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), meanwhile, seems critical of both the countercultural dreams it documents and the dominant culture it attacks. Anger’s fantasies and anti-fantasies have aged terrifically, and encountered in P.S.1’s primal red chamber, they return with all the force of forgotten dreams.


Back in Chelsea at David Zwirner, Lisa Yuskavage (above) doesn’t subvert the white cube convention, but offers a constructive, contemporary solution to the fantasy problem. Her oil paintings drip with sexuality, and mingle childhood and adult desires for discovery and pleasure. In what look like an acid-fueled updating of Gulliver’s Travels, backpack-sporting hikers head towards hill-sized nudes under ominous chemical skies. Like the carnivalesque body politics of that early English epic, Yuskavage’s bodies are spaces of pleasure and play but also colonization and danger. Her spectacular visions alternate between ecstasy and pain, and the feeling that gradually emerges is a reluctance to indulge the former for fear of causing the latter. The glistening bodies and pregnant landscapes of her paintings suggest – like Anger’s films – that the journey to fantasyland is worth the hardship. At least it’s healthier than the oppressive fantasies parodied in Hirschhorn’s work.

Thomas Hirschhorn: Universal Gym at Gladstone Gallery (gladstonegallery.com), 530 W 21st St (between Tenth and Eleventh Aves), until April 11

Kenneth Anger at P.S.1 (ps1.org), 22-25 Jackson Ave (at 46th Ave, Long Island City), until September 14

Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner (davidzwirner.com), 533 W 19th St (between Tenth and Eleventh Aves), until March 28

Wicked Artsy: Get Installed

Check out the latest edition of my weekly art blog Wicked Artsy for The L Magazine. In it I discuss three current exhibitions of installation art around New York City: Lisselot van der Heijden at LMAKProjects on the Lower East Side, The Bruce High Quality Foundation at Chelsea's Cueto Project (pictured at right) and the group show The Space of the Work and the Place of the Object at Scultpure Center in Long Island City. These three shows illustrate the way that installation art has re-defined the ways we think about art and provide examples of self-critical contemporary art that investigates not only the nature of installation art but all media and the way they interact with viewers and gallery spaces. Read the whole article here.

Wicked Artsy: Whatever Remains

In the latest edition of my L Magazine art column I take a look at three exhibitions on the Lower East Side that ask us to picture events and the systems that produced them based on their aftermath. The image at right is from Andrea Tese's photography exhibition Boats Against the Current at Heist Gallery. Read about it here.

Wicked Artsy: Fashionably Artsy

In this week's edition of my art column Wicked Artsy – since this week is New York Fashion Week – I address three exhibitions that feature or deal with fashion photography and iconography. Miles Aldridge, whose work is featured at right, is one of the artists in the exhibition Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now at the International Center of Photography. Click here to read my article.

Wicked Artsy: Placeless Places

Check out this week's edition of my art column Wicked Artsy for The L Magazine. In it I review three exhibitions currently on show in Williamsburg, including Bernard Williams's show at Slate Gallery (pictured at right).

Wicked Artsy: Working With What You Get

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.