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Kind of Blue
John Haberin New York City
Anne Katrine Senstad and Zach Nader
Firelei Báez and Marta Minujín
You may want to watch your step at a new gallery in the Garment District, but only for a moment. Anne Katrine Senstad has built walls in near darkness, but they dissolve into light.
And so they should, for she created them from light all along. They become what Zach Nader, in new media and found objects, calls psychic pictures. They become, too, a repository for a single color, blue. 
Firelei Báez treats a room in much the same way, but with blue paper. It then, in turn, becomes a repository for a personal history, from a revolution to the present and from the Caribbean to the United States. As for Marta Minujín, a neon tunnel is only the beginning of a journey from room to room in search of small pleasures and Latin American democracy.
A container for color
Art history can easily seem a protracted struggle—between the advocates of line and color. The Met Breuer was still taking up the fight in 2018, with painted sculpture as "Like Life." Anne Katrine Senstad would rather dissolve the distinction, much like that between real and fictive walls. What seemed at first a treacherous passage in a confining space welcomes one in. It becomes not so much a space to explore as a space to appreciate the construction, the welcome, and the blue light. She acknowledges just that in the show's title, "Beckoned to Be Blue."
It can be hard to open a new gallery without erecting or tearing down walls. Sure, there are spaces left to die for, for those willing and able to pay the price. That is easier said than done, though, especially so close to midtown. And this gallery still carves out the slimmest of spaces in an office building. After the storefront, one passes two rows of cubicles on the way to a second open area in the back. They amount to a hybrid of work and display spaces for artists.
Say what you will about a "hybrid model"—more often meaning giving up on galleries, to wheel and deal behind the scenes at the expense of viewers and emerging artists alike. I can appreciate this model for taking chances on the exact opposite, but no matter. Senstad is interested all along less in fictive architecture than in real architecture as a container for color. That is what saves the installation, Elements III, from a retread. It resembles neon verticals as a hall of mirrors for Robert Irwin at Dia:Beacon or thick slabs of light for James Turrell and Doug Wheeler. This, though, is about the reality of being blue.
It is also about simplicity relative to its ancestors. Safely ensconced at the work's center, one can quickly piece together its components—freestanding pillars of paired blue tubes, plus tubes running horizontally along the walls below eye level, as a blue square outlining the gallery's no longer white cube. Senstad's concern for color is clearer still in works on paper in the back. Three of them join shaded trapezoids, for the illusion of a right-angled solid in perspective or wings in full flight, one each in strong red, yellow, and blue. A fourth has more components, like an accordion book that has gotten out of hand. Still, they look more like studies for the real deal out front.
Zach Nader paints "Psychic Pictures," too, but in Brooklyn. He also combines new and old media. Single-channel videos function much like light boxes for a cascade of images. Nader borrows them from advertising and edits out the people. He also subjects them to UV light, to heighten both their unreality and their appeal. They seem idyllic only insofar as they have left their original purpose, the commercial promise of fulfillment, behind.
He projects images onto found objects as well, including the leaves of a tree and battered aluminum cans on the floor. They could be beer or soda cans, but one cannot say for sure, another indication of broken promises. They also look out of place, as if a previous visitor had left them behind, and one could easily miss them at that. Like Senstad, Nader is going over familiar ground—in his case, a critique of consumer culture tainted by the critic's desires. Like her, too, he need not decide whether to play against the gallery as a whole or to carve out a niche, when he can have both. The contrast of simplicity in one and multiplicity in the other goes far to make them both worth the trip.
Common grounds
Just last summer and fall, Firelei Báez brought a touch of joy to Harlem, along with a sense of her past. Even with five paintings, at the Schomberg Center of the New York Public Library, one might not have seen them as an immersive installation rather than a fiery testimony to African American women. Even in a library setting, one might not have seen her as bookish at that. Look again, though, on the Lower East Side, and there is no getting around how much Báez can bring to a room. The title alone should have one thinking and wondering. It also looks to all sides.
A Drexcyen Chronocommons (To Win the War You Fought It Sideways) no doubt refers to the "star chamber" in a song by Drexciya, while "chronocommons" suggests both a wrinkle in time and common grounds in the present. To get there, one has to penetrate a curtain of cut blue paper, which extends to covers the walls and ceiling of the gallery's central room. Peeking out into the entryway, it offers an irresistible temptation. Lit from above, its cuts should also have one seeing stars. Beneath it, a floral translucent scrim recalls the unstretched canvas in Harlem. It gathers and disperses light, so that the entire room turns a luminous deep blue.
As before, the artist's reference points are eclectic. The paintings then evoked her childhood in the Dominican Republic while responding to Aspects of Negro Life—the 1934 murals on permanent display at the Harlem library, by Aaron Douglas. Here the stars recreate another moment in black history and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, not in Haiti for Myrlande Constant, but on the other half of Hispaniola. They correspond, Báez swears, to the night sky at the onset of the Haitian Revolution. The first successful slave result, it overlapped the French Revolution and created the first Latin American republic. Evidently she is up to serious research.
A back room has more history, in hangings that build on documents related to the sugar trade. Seeing photographs recently of a Depression-era refinery, by Harold Haliday Costain, or the majestic occupant of the former Domino Sugar plant in Brooklyn by Kara Walker, I almost forgot who did so much of the harsh labor and how little it was free. As in Harlem, though, Báez is in a more celebratory mood. Two paintings make the installation that much more optimistic. They depict seated women, nude except for the head scarf on one and the wild colors of their skin. Quaintly framed and resting near the floor, they add further moments in and out of time.
The installation serves as both a woman's private space and common grounds with the viewer. Bookish or not, it is touchy-feely, and it would take a determined eye to pick out constellations. Its blue and the bright colors of her paintings are two kinds of warm welcome. One might never want to leave, especially if it means stepping beyond the promise of revolution. Haiti had subsequent cruel dynasties that one might wish to forget. Its 2004 revolution bodes well, but then so have ever so many revolutions in art.
I found myself thinking of another blue room, that of Senstad closer to midtown. One relies on blue paper to direct white light, the other on blue neon. One is historical but also personal, the other formal but also sensual. One is maximal, the other minimal. Both create and burst through walls, and both invite one to stay. Art right now is eclectic to the point of confusion, but it may not hurt to seek common ground in installations.
Don't cry for me
Marta Minujín will try your patience. For her, so does life, at least in Buenos Aries, where people are used to waiting it out and making their way. So, too, does La Menesunda on a full floor of the New Museum. One must make it through eleven narrow chambers and distinct environments, one by one. The only thing keeping you from turning back, apart from museum orders, may be fear that it would be even harder than moving ahead.
The very entrance requires penetrating a Plexiglas barrier, through a human outline just slightly larger than life, like everything within. Right away, one has to mount some steep stairs in order to see oneself and cryptic others on TV. Like the old Zeniths, the surveillance cameras and clips of generals leave one trapped in a crisis that one would just as well forget. And then one descends another stairway, only to find oneself where one began. Just getting in takes patience, one person at a time, with a delay to give each a personal experience. But then Minujín has waited more than fifty years for the work's recreation in the United States.
Its title means a confusing situation in slang, and it presents no end of confusion and confinement. One passes signage, but in meaningless letters with the Cubist flair of Stuart Davis in New York. To make it to the end, one must take other signs on trust. One passes a couple in bed, with other things on their mind than art. One enters an even smaller chamber lined with pink and cosmetics, where women offer to do your nails. They just want, they say, to make you feel pretty, but not just men may demure.
Other obstacles could bring anyone to the point of panic. Press the right combination on a dial from 0 to 9, and one might obtain passage through a black door below—unless it was there all the time. Cheery color tape seems to allow no way through at all, although its moving circle has a gap on the far side for a way in and subsequent way out. One steps into a glass booth, only to step right out again. Minujín speaks of an ice box and a telephone booth, but do not expect to shed your secret identity. One might not notice, but she thinks of another room as intestines.
Still, she is not above creature comforts, and for all I know the intestines may remind her of a good meal. She has her bed, cosmetics, and old memories. One room has a padded floor, foam walls, and the sounds of lapping water, and the last rooms have confetti at one's feet. Not that the floor feels any less treacherous, where comforts and confinements go together. Hanging tresses and soft materials resemble punching bags. You could be taking your share of punches.
If the work has elements of nostalgia, the artist was in her early twenties in 1965—in a brief democratic spell between Juan Perón's dictatorship in and a military coup. Try not to cry for her Argentina. Minujín worked on not just installation art, but also "happenings," like Claes Oldenburg, Christo, and Alan Kaprow and with friends and collaborators like Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. The entry room's bright neon is right out of a more psychedelic era, but also out of flickering neon bodies by Bruce Nauman. Her politics and her importance to Latin American art for Latin American women are real but understated. Just be sure to resist the actual emergency exits in favor of her airplane door.
Anne Katrine Senstad ran at SLGallery through May 31, 2019, Zach Nader at Microscope through May 12, Firelei Báez at James Cohan through June 16, and Marta Minujín at the New Museum through September 29. The review of Báez first appeared in a slightly different form in Artillery magazine. A related review looks at Marta Minujín in retrospective.