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Gallery Chronicle (March 2016)

Thornton Willis, The Congregation, 2012, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 50 inches

THE NEW CRITERION

March 2016

Gallery Chronicle

by James Panero

Over the last century, abstract art has gone from the radical periphery to the mainstream center. But its accommodation into our visual landscape hasn’t necessarily meant a greater understanding of its forms or a greater acceptance of its language. After all, would it be too much to say we now live in an age—seemingly more than ever—when form must follow function? When abstraction must follow concreteness? Or the visual must follow the literal? Perhaps these observations are themselves unacceptable abstractions. But it does seem that the shape of things is more and more only permitted to be a product of their descriptions. Where abstraction presents formal questions, we expect literal answers.

The present moment leaves little time for the contemplative demands of the pure forms of abstract art. So we have come to rely on established institutions, serving as the self-appointed guardians of abstraction, to place literal frames around abstract forms, to put abstract art in the safe context of history, of its artists and materials—and to tell us, often through extensive wall labels, what it all means. But such a reliance on the function of abstract art naturally weakens the power of its forms. Even though we are surrounded by the raw language of shape, we nevertheless arrive as foreigners to form’s native vocabulary.

Over many years, the experience of encountering contemporary abstract art in the studios and galleries, outside of the functional mandates of the museums, has helped me understand form as a living language. Foremost among these artists has been the abstract painter Thornton Willis, whose art looks to form’s most basic elements to explore its most basic energies. “We are the primitives of a new culture,” said the Futurist Umberto Boccioni in 1911. By stripping down his compositions, Willis has taken a primitivist approach to the tensions of color, the compression of gesture and edge, and the dynamics of figure and ground to make manifest the power of form.

Willis is just one member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA), a remarkable organization dedicated to promoting the understanding and acceptance of this language of form. The mandate of this artist association, now celebrating its eightieth year, continues to be as relevant as it was at the time of its founding in New York in 1936, when the nativist art movement known as the American Scene dominated the artistic landscape. At that time, the then-new Museum of Modern Art showed little interest in American abstraction, and politics, from the WPA to the Communist Party, made strict functional demands on artistic forms.

To mark its anniversary, AAA has organized a major member exhibition, curated by my colleague in these pages Karen Wilkin, at the 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, called “The Onward of Art.”1 (A separate exhibition recently brought some of the same AAA artists to the Abrons Art Center and Morris-Warren Gallery, both on the Lower East Side, but without the breadth and clarity of the Midtown show.)

Wilkin approaches today’s abstract art not as a foregone conclusion but as an open question. “In today’s art world, when verbally expressed ideas are often valued more highly than the forms that embody them,” she writes in the show’s comprehensive exhibition catalogue, “the kind of wordless, imageless eloquence that the first members of AAA embraced has once again come into question.” With work selected from submissions by AAA members made over the past three to five years, Wilkin sought to show the “undiminished vigor and relevance of art that communicates directly through the eye, reaching our intellect and our emotions without words.”

The exhibition draws on the unusual architecture of the space—the lobby of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s 1961 Equitable Life Assurance Building, the International Style skyscraper that for many years housed the Paine Webber Art Gallery and, more recently, the gallery of UBS. Rather than a continuous wall, the gallery presents a series of panels arranged like dominos around the building core. With work hanging in a loose, salon-style arrangement, Wilkin uses each of these wall units to organize the sixty-five member artists on view.

Free from the literal explanations that intrude upon today’s museum exhibitions, the open, mostly wordless assembly becomes a tutorial on form, encouraging the viewer to find affinities among the abstract art on view. One unit built around Thornton Willis’s The Congregation (2012), a composition of colorful, Tetris-like forms floating over an orange field, becomes a conversation on the blocking of space and the tensions of figure, ground, and depth of field, especially when it is positioned next to the deeply bending forms of Lorenza Sannai’s Il sogno di Artemide (2015) and Exactly, exactly now (2015) and the halo-like loft of Lucio Pozzi’s A Fact(2015) and Fugue (2015).

“Pushing often even towards the edge of meaninglessness,” Pozzi has written of the shared spirit of the American Abstract Artists, “is one of the most precious assets we can cultivate in a culture that tends to package any and all activities into sensational or publicizeable instant explanations.”

Freed of literal meaning, abstraction gives visual license to keep looking. “Stripped of these superimposed tasks” of narrative, noted Ibram Lassaw, a founding artist of AAA, in 1938, “the underlying structure of art becomes clear. Colors and forms alone have a greater power to move man emotionally and psychologically.” Connections emerge the more you look, but the discoveries remain open-ended, encouraging further close viewing.

At “The Onward of Art,” a wall panel with Manfred Mohr, Katinka Mann, and Sharon Brant (whose work is aptly subtitled “from An Uncertain Geometry”) is tied together through a shared interest in line—which in turn binds it to the pleats of David Mackenzie, the scratches of Jane Logemann, and the creased stamps of Stephen Maine on the opposite wall.

On another wall, lines dissolve in Gilbert Hsiao’s dazzling triangleGTO (2015), a shaped canvas that connects to John Obuck’s square casements in Window (2015) and rounded bricks in Dome (2015) and Stephen Westfall’s diamond tiles in Otherwise (2013). Other arrangements similarly find affinities in the stripes of Kim Uchiyama, David Row, Li Trincere, Steven Alexander, James Juszczyk, and Mary Schiliro; the monochromes and hidden metallics of Gabriele Evertz, Marvin Brown, and Mark Dagley; the sweeping gestures of Mark Williams, Vera Vasek, Phillis Ideal, and Iona Kleinhaut; the triangles of Joanne Mattera and Roger Jorgensen; the diaphanous textures of Dorothea Rockburne, Emily Berger, and Claire Seidl; the spreading stains and hard edges of Don Voisine, Judith Murray, Nancy Manter, and Alice Adams; and the cloud-like forms of Ce Roser, Naomi Boretz, and Anne Russinof.

Themes recur, and geometry often plays a supporting role, but no single style dominates the exhibition. Any membership organization has limits, but by and large the artists here avoid fussiness and mannerism. Stephen Westfall has written that AAA “owes its longevity in part to the relative absence of a party line. The will to abstraction, after all, is generated by a variety of private impulses and historical interpretations.” Sculptures of wood and stone are mixed in among paintings, drawings, monoprints, and textiles. As an example of range, Raquel Rabinovich’s work on paper is made of “Arno river mud and glue”; Gail Gregg gilds the constructivist forms of shipping cardboard; and Edward Shalala photographs a “raw canvas thread flown with a kite with 5–10 mph winds forming a random permutation.”

Wilkin is right that the challenges of abstraction have evolved over the last eighty years. Today, she writes, “abstraction is often assumed to be empty unless it is fully bolstered with irony or a complex conceptual justification.” Such a description might easily apply to “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World,” MOMA’s failed attempt last year at a survey show of recent abstract art.

For perspective, Wilkin has added a historical section to “The Onward of Art,” which is mostly presented in the secure display cases that line the western corridor of the lobby. Here are some of the AAA’s leading historical members, including Esphyr Slobodkina, Ad Reinhardt, Jack Tworkov, Charmion von Wiegand, and, on view for part of the run, Piet Mondrian.

The connections between the current and historical work are undeniable. Reinhardt’s black-on-black squares become Voisine’s springy diagonals in Dimday (2015) and Jig (2015). It’s the amplitude of the work that has evolved. The historical abstractions here convey soft-spoken quietude. The current work enjoys no such luxury. Noise is today’s ultimate challenge. So contemporary abstraction has learned how to raise its voice, still without saying a word.

If the art of the outer boroughs is any indication, abstraction is enjoying a renaissance of late, with some of the most interesting recent work re-imagining and re-engaging with a century of abstract form. Often the best examples find ways to add impurities to abstract art’s pure nature, with new sensibilities bleeding into the edges.

Paul D’Agostino, Zeit, 2016, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, 60 x 60 inches/Image Courtesy: Life on Mars Gallery

This past month, the artist, poet, translator, collaborator, and unofficial mascot of Bushwick, Paul D’Agostino, opened his much anticipated solo show at Life on Mars Gallery.2 Called “Scriptive Formalities,” the exhibition explores D’Agostino’s “shared origins in matters of language, translation, and narrative.”

A new series of paintings, “Chromatic Alphabet,” represents an alphabet of colorful abstract shapes, while “Floor Translations” continues his storytelling around anthropomorphic paint splatters found on his studio floor. The Translations series, here collected into a catalogue of charcoal and ink drawings, with whimsical stories written out in schoolboy cursive, turns abstract stains into “The Bucktoothed Knifebeak and Althusser the Albatross.” The Alphabet paintings go the other way, transforming literature into a series of assured, hard-edged abstractions.

Sharon Butler, After Frank Stella?, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 32 x 26 inchesImage Courtesy: Theodore:Art

Meanwhile just down the hall in the gallery building of 56 Bogart Street, Sharon Butler’s latest paintings were on view last month at Theodore:Art.3 The proprietor of the art blog Two Coats of Paint, Butler has been at the center of outer-borough abstraction and coined the term “The New Casualism” to describe a new abstract sensibility. At Theodore:Art, she took a formal turn with a series of small, lyrical paintings of tail lights and other forms drawn from her studio view overlooking the Manhattan Bridge—abstractions, again, imbued with a personal narrative.

As an alternative to greater amplitude, the future of abstract art may be found in such a turn to sentiment that nevertheless manages to avoid sentimentality.

1 “The Onward of Art: American Abstract Artists 80th Anniversary Exhibition” opened at the 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, New York, on January 18 and remains on view through March 25, 2016.

2 “Paul D’Agostino: Scriptive Formalities” opened at Life on Mars Gallery, Brooklyn, on February 5 and remains on view through March 6, 2016.

3 “Sharon Butler” was on view at Theodore:Art, Brooklyn, from January 8 through February 24, 2016.

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A Bushel & a Peck at City Ballet

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Justin Peck's "Paz de la Jolla" at New York City Ballet

James writes:

If this is not turning into a golden age for classical choreography, it is at least becoming a silver age or a bronze. The recurring program of “21st Century Choreographers” at the New York City Ballet gives a welcome overview of this resurgence and highlights the company’s own role in nurturing this surprising turn of events—a surprise, given the uncertain state of contemporary composition in other performing arts.

This season’s “21st Century” program offered work by two of the brightest young stars, Christopher Wheeldon and Justin Peck, but began squarely in the late 20th Century with Ash, a ballet by Peter Martins that premiered in 1991 at the New York State Theater, along with his Infernal Machine from 2002. Some might begrudge a Martins double-header as a case of royal prerogative for the NYCB’s Ballet Master-in-Chief. Yet I appreciated the inclusion for the clear line these two works draw from the NYCB’s founding choreography of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins—and their connections to and contradictions with more contemporary work.       

Ash feels like late twentieth-century ballet, and classic Martins: cerebral, technically demanding, and spare. In its lack of narrative and its appeal to abstraction, the dance is the most Balanchine-like of the program and also the most remote in its tense counterpoint. In the late 1980s, Michael Torke, the composer for Ash, wrote a series of orchestral pieces called “Color Music.” Ash works through a similar interest in Synesthesia—the mixing of the senses—through the use of colored lighting by Mark Stanley and primary shaded costumes by Steven Rubin, which also share an unfortunate affinity to the uniforms of Star Trek. A friend commented that such a dance can be inaccessible, overly taxing on the dancers while offering little to the audience, which is perhaps true. At the same time, I found it exhilarating to watch Ashley Laracey rise above the technical demands put to her and find this ballet’s inner grace.

The story of The Infernal Machine starts out similarly obtuse. In the program, its composer, Christopher Rouse, managed to refer to a play by Jean Cocteau, a connection (or lack thereof) to the Oedipus myth, a “Perpetuum mobile,” and an orchestral tryptich—which goes a long way in saying very little. Instead, this brief, furious pas de deux of Unity Phelan and Preston Chamblee mixes robotic motion and inappropriate groping to an uncertain, uncomfortable, and uncompromising end.             

Located between the two Martins was This Bitter Earth, a pas de deux with Sara Mearns and Tyler Angle, with music by Dinah Washington and choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, which premiered in 2012. The ballet has just about everything a contemporary audience might want from dance. Wheeldon is also everything Martins is not: deeply romantic, easily accessible, employing a narrative that is clearly discernable. Here the earth tones of the lighting by Mary Louise Geiger and the dustbowl blues of Dinah Washington—interposed with a techno-beat by Max Richter—gave us a couple dancing on the edge of desperation. I am not always drawn in by the popular emotiveness of Sara Mearns, whose sense for theatricality departs from the traditional coolness of classical ballet, where emotion is conveyed through movement over physiognomy. Some have also criticized Wheeldon for the gender politics of his pairings, which admittedly at moments can become strictly ballroom. But ballet is also ready for such an infusion of red-blooded romance, for a new affection not only between the dancers but also between the stage and the audience. With Mearns perfectly cast in this role, This Bitter Earth delivered its earthly bitterness in spades.

The NYCB may have thought that by including Jeux, a dance by the London-based Danish choreographer Kim Brandstrup that premiered last year, the company was giving a nod to greater gender inclusivity in its selection of choreographers. Unfortunately, this Kim is a man, and this ballet is a manly embarrassment. Drawing on the tropes of film noir, Jeux uses blindfolds and bare bulbs to affect an arch narrative about a woman betrayed. But with business casual costumes by Marc Happel, the dance rather feels like a Bear Stearns holiday party gone wrong, with coworker Craig Hall caught cheating on Sara Mearns with Lauren Lovette, and Mearns saved by the passionate embrace of Adrian Danchig-Waring as, what, the hunky janitor? Cliché piles upon cliché in this ensemble dance that ends with a giant novelty tennis ball (the “jeux”).  On my day, Mearns, blindfolded, even inadvertently knocked her head against another dancer’s leg at one point. Clearly she wished she had stuck around on that Bitter Earth rather than head to the big city.             

Finally it was time for Paz de la Jolla, the 2013 dance by NYCB dancer and resident choreographer Justin Peck, set to music by Bohuslav Martinu. I say “finally,” because here is the dance many of us had come to see: the subject of the documentary film Ballet 422 and the product of the NYCB’s astonishing wunderkind, who has already choreographed something like twenty-eight ballets—or a number equal to his current age. Peck’s humility in the face of the tradition of Balanchine and Robbins comes across palpably in Ballet 422,—and it is on display here again in his intuitive understanding for classical movement and form. Rather than fight the tide, Peck has a remarkable ability to channel a dancer’s flow, deployed in a sunny ballet inspired by his upbringing in Southern California. What begins in beachy bliss, with splendid Esther Williams-like swimsuit costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, supervised by Marc Happel, transforms into a eddying, swirling tide of abstract, fluid motion. The ensemble becomes the ocean, with arms and legs forming the patterns of rolling surf. Sterling Hyltin and Amar Ramasar become engulfed in the waves, while a third dancer—a lifeguard?—swims out for the rescue. On the day of my performance, Georgina Pazcoguin replaced Tiler Peck in this role, which drew noticeable (and regrettable) disapproval from the audience. Pazcoguin’s gymnastic style gave a different, and not altogether uninteresting, shape to the part, even as we missed Peck’s sinuous forms. But it was the other Peck who was still on full display here—the choreographer in residence who, one hopes, never leaves his home at the New York City Ballet.                         

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This Week: Meryl Meisler & Beat Nite Brooklyn

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Meryl Meisler, Self-Portrait, The Girl Scout Oath, North Massapequa, NY, January 1975, Vintage gelatin silver print, printed 1975, 20 x 14 1/2 in

James writes: 

My Critic's Picks this week- Meryl Meisler at Steven Kasher Gallery, opening this Thursday (February 25–April 9): For the last several years, Meryl Meisler, a retired public school teacher from Bushwick, Brooklyn, has released a treasure trove of her photographs from the 1970s that recall the oddities of Ralph Eugene Meatyard and the intimacies of Diane Arbus. Her recent books, “A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick” and “Purgatory & Paradise: SASSY ’70s Suburbia & The City,” document the juxtapositions she often found with her camera—of the high and lows of a city in decadence and decline. This Thursday, the esteemed Steven Kasher Gallery will open with a solo exhibition of Meisler’s earliest work, luxuriating in the patterns and characters that once filled the hair salons, Bar Mitzvah halls, and rec rooms of her suburban Long Island upbringing and standing in contrast to the grittiness of downtown New York.

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“Beat Nite,” presented by Jason Andrew in collaboration with BRIC (February 26): The fourteenth iteration of “Beat Nite” returns to Brooklyn this Friday evening from 6–8pm, with a new focus on the arts spaces of Downtown BK. Venues will range from the MoCADA Museum to UrbanGlass, with an afterparty at BRIC. Following the “collaborative” mandate of Norte Maar, the event’s nonprofit organizer, one of this season’s highlights will be the ability to see the performance group BOOMERANG in open rehearsal at the Mark Morris Dance Center. More details here.

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Photo: Mark Davis / BOOMERANG

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