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art reviews from around new york

From the tall classical columns, you know this is serious business. You know it, too, from the men in black.

The three men stand somberly and rigidly, the shortest man in academic robes. The other two wear black suits with tall black hats. They hold lilies, proclaiming their innocence. Their faces reveal nothing, but something is dying to get out. A hint appears in the background, where a fourth portrait appears in the form of an actual portrait, framed between pillars. He may have something to say that the three men cannot confess.

From the columns and academic robe, this could be an institute of higher learning, with the suits its funders. It could seem freshly relevant today with Trump’s assault on top universities. Maybe political art will make a comeback. But no, this is a high court, and you know this is serious as well from the open coffins in the foreground, bearing Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants and anarchists convicted of robbery and murder. Their death sentence raised more than serious doubts, from Justice Felix Frankfurter to Benito Mussolini, in one crazy, mixed-up, terrifying international affair. And it inspired a painting, a wider series, and an entire career for Ben Shahn—and (as we pick up next time) it is the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Brendan Fernandes does not need much in the way of company, but he has no trouble finding it. At heart, he is just showing off. He poses while striding, facing a stubborn rock and while reaching out. It makes him at once a performer, a photographer, and a sculptor. It gives him multiple way of asserting a gay identity as well, at Susan Inglett through October 11. But are they really separate series, and who is counting anyway?

If so, photography more or less wins out. One series has him alone and seemingly confident, facing that rock. The rock gives him no quarters as well, gray, craggy, and close to life size. One additional photo substitutes a rounded cone in darker gray, in black spattered white. Much the same sculpture puts in an appearance apart from photography near the center of the gallery. For once, Fernandes will not settle for an image.

A second series might be its opposite. Its subject changes from hard rock to soft flesh, it allows him to hide, and it keeps him company. It, too, is photography. A pair of hands sticks out tentatively from behind a curtain or stage set, one black and one white. One can only guess whose, but then he never quite confirms who is striding. The hands reach out to one another and never let go.

They might be all about opposites—black and white, hard and soft, gay and straight. They might be all about accompaniments as well, in a show called “Duet.” They could be different ways of giving no quarter. Not that he is exactly conveying pleasure, much less identity. It might b challenging the very idea of identity. Even in the rock photos, he shows only his back.

The gallery itself often falls between painting and installation, behind a partition facing the street. What an interesting way to have come out. It leaves his art rooted in both identity politics and the past, a time of Minimalism and earthworks. Based in Chicago, Fernandes speaks of drawing inspiration from Scott Burton, and his show breaks for a conversation with Michael Harwood, who performed in Burton’s Group Behavior Tableaux at the Whitney Museum in 1972. Alvaro Urbano drew on Burton’s performance and Brutalism as recently as 2005.

With his broad stride and one hand behind his back, Fernandes gives no quarter, but he is concerned with gradations and accompaniment. This really is a duet. The principal rock is light as granite and the curtains are ocher and gray. You might see he is just finding himself as a gay male and an artist. He will be out any minute.

He could be writing about a work of art or art itself. “I don’t have any answers yet,” and how could he? “The questions are too big.”

But no, Aidan Ryan is writing about his uncle and aunt, Andrew Topolski and Cindy Suffoletto, and their life in art, in I Am Here You Are Not I Love You (University of Iowa Press). What happened to Topolski, who others relied on as a teacher, who counted a Soho gallery or two among his supporters, who had precious materials and “technical precision”? He emerged from Buffalo in the “Pictures generation,” only to become a footnote well before his death from cancer in 2008? What happened to Suffoletto, who set her own career aside for twenty years to manage him and his? How could she, and what allows anyone to persist in making art while others give it up without a trace? This is about two artists and his love, but also some “interesting moments” in late twentieth-century art—and it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.

Maybe you never heard of either artist. I had not, and Ryan plainly intends the book as an act of recovery—not unlike another new book, by Pat Lipsky, from the same university press. A patron and friend saw Andy’s work as akin to music, while a later critic, who savored the geometry, heard the music of the spheres. Others found a dense, cool dialogue of words and images, an intertextualism. Cindy in color plates recalls Arshile Gorky—his gentle brushwork and tantalizing bad dreams. Were their most vivid imaginings no more than promises all along?

Ryan could hardly help seeing Andy and Cindy up close (and forgive me for switching to first names along with him). He knew her all his life until her death in 2012 and stayed with them in their final home, in the Catskills. “We swam in the Delaware, ate Cindy’s meals, [and] played in huge piles of leaves.” He cannot help it, too, because of how all three thought of themselves and their art. The book is about, first and foremost, individuals and individual moments—from the arts centers and antique shops of Buffalo to returning from lower Manhattan to Brooklyn on September 11. By the time it lists Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Charlie Clough, Nancy Dwyer, and Michael Zwack as “permanent members” of the “Pictures generation” from Buffalo, they have already exchanged glances going by.

No wonder it opens in the present tense, for these are present moments and alive, even if the artists have died. It starts at the end, Andy struggling merely to snap a picture, while Cindy “does the lifting—tugging, stutter-stepping to clear a space.” It shifts to the past tense for the rest, but you may hardly notice the change. Even in the past tense, the fatal onset of Cindy’s lung disease comes as a terrifying moment in the present. Text is lyrical, too, and I am having trouble not simply quoting, leaving the narrative to them. Like fires on the horizon, life is something “we expect but never see coming.”

As a professor told Ryan, “we remember . . . not what people . . . did but what they made us feel.” He took it for a cliché but, he adds, he should have seen it as a warning. While modest in length, the book has more details than you may wish to know, but no shortage of feelings. It is the author’s story, too, as he matures into a writer, editor, and musician. It all ends pretty much where it began, with death and dying—and the note found in Cindy’s studio that became the book’s awkward title. That and the sting of a survey of the “Pictures generation” at the Met that left Andy out.

The book shines in fleeting moments, but it sees them as “opening onto a much wider world” of people and controversies. Did art in the 1990s sell out to commerce? Art for Andy was always a commodity, like the antique stores in Buffalo that fed it, and what commodity is more precious to an artist than time? Dealers and collectors are mostly admirable, even when they don’t know their own tastes, and Jean-Michel Basquiat is downright innocent. It is also a picture of what mattered personally to a generation known more for a brutal irony. Systems are fine, Andy would say, but “ideas are not art.”

It is a picture, too, of the art worlds that Andy and Cindy inhabited—although it must omit others in the movement, like Barbara Bloom, from the West Coast. How did Buffalo become home to the Albright-Knox (now Buffalo-AKG) museum, with Nelson Rockefeller (before his gift of African art to the Met) on the board and an awesome collection of modern and postwar art? How did institutions like the University of Buffalo and the Essex Arts Center nurture contemporary talent? (Hint: “you can do it with us or you can do it all on your end.”) Why did young artists then leave for New York City? Was it all to show at Metro Pictures, to enjoy Williamsburg rents, and to party at the Mudd Club? And how did Andy end up making furniture and woodworking in a village upstate?

The book is full of questions, as promised. Was his loss of stature and sales just the times—or was it the clash between critics like myself, who put art into words, and art, which surpasses the limits of my language? All well and good, but then no artist would have a chance. Is it all luck, or did his work fit uncomfortably between surface beauty, “Pictures” irony, and the “sensibility of a machinist”? Why did Cindy sacrifice everything for her art—and then, like Lee Krasner for Jackson Pollock, sacrifice her art for his? “She lets him help her move the armchair from its spot against the pale plaster wall,” and soon both are gone.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site. I do rely as much as I can on the book’s language, with minor edits to fit

What makes a photograph worth keeping? Is it something special—that special place, that special person, that special time?

True, the story goes, some collectors disdain photography as something anyone can do and too often does, before posting it online. Others, though, know just where to point and what to shoot on their way to the decisive moment. Sound awfully romantic? Edward Burtynsky goes that ideal one better. For fifty years now, he has been the first to think of not just what to shoot and what to print, but what to see. It could be somewhere that you could never reach or never wish to go. And he is in a hurry to get there, just in time for “The Great Acceleration,” at the International Center of Photography through September 28 (with a summer show at Howard Greenberg).

Born in 1955, Burtynsky has been seemingly everywhere. He is not, though, nostalgic for any of it and not in the least romantic. He is mapping, ICP says, “human alteration of natural landscapes around the world,” in an age that some call the anthropocene—meaning people front and center, effacing the natural world and remaking the planet. If you are not altogether sure whether that alteration is a great or a terrible thing, neither is he. Together with Sheida Soleimani, a refugee from half the planet away also at ICP, he wrestles with a bittersweet future. He is not looking away and not looking back.

Burtynsky is out to see what no one has seen in more than one way, starting by just being there. He has seen ship breaking in Bangladesh and auto wrecking in Arizona. He has reached textile factories in China, oil fields in Azerbaijan, sawmills in Nigeria, and silver mines in Mexico. Humanity, he explains, has come out of Africa, and now it has come “full circle.” He sees what no one has seen as well because too many have refused to see it. These are things of huge commercial value but disdained as the very name of garbage, like salt deposits, uranium tailings, nickel spills, and what they lay to waste.

Above all, Edward Burtynsky sees what others cannot because of where he stands. The Canadian adopted a high vantage point, sometimes from digital cameras and helicopters, even before he took to drones, where no one at all is exactly doing the seeing. His technological prowess has only increased over the years, with such devices as gyroscopes to stabilize flight. He is documenting technological advances, if you wish to call them that, as well. It makes the surface of the earth his canvas, with painterly images, and do not even ask who is painting. They can be wildly expressive, like the free curves of rice terraces in Asia, or startlingly geometric, with long bands and concentric or overlapping circles.

The curator, David Campany, suggests the influence of Abstract Expressionism on the camera’s “all over” picture. John Chamberlain, after all, made expressive use of auto wrecks, too. Chamberlain helped to initiate a further change in art, too, toward the commercial objects of James Rosenquist and Pop Art. Burtynsky’s subjects include a positive riot of brand names in Pennsylvania—including McDonald’s, Starbucks, Exxon, and Walmart. They could be competing to claim the intersection as their own or the entire earth. It has, Campany adds, an “unsettling beauty.”

I started with a sentimental ideal, but neither I nor Burtynsky necessarily shares it, not any more. He is not Henri Cartier-Bresson this late in the day in search of that “decisive moment.” Rather, he gains in relevance for what many before Andy Warhol once disdained, repetition and reproduction. He is not above decisive places and events, like Mount St. Helens after eruption, but he prefers subjects that retain their anonymity, as a window onto the everyday. He sees industrial transformation as a transformation in society and in human lives. It could be the price of a so-called free market or, in China, an instrument of the state.

Burtynsky calls one series Natural Order, with obvious irony, but he may not have to choose between ideals—or between ideals and no ideal at all. He is demanding that people observe and take responsibility for what is lost while responding personally to an endangered beauty. He likes the landscape best at noon, he says, for the “confusion of shadows.” He loves detail, like tiny holes in the land that appear only up close, or a field of black rubber tires. He prints big and in diptychs, to leave you asking just what is at all natural. He makes it hard to identify the subject or point of view.

Sweeping curves could belong to a highway or to erosion from frighteningly toxic waste. A salt river blends easily into suburbia and farming into tailings. People find work creating waste, but also in cleaning up. Sharp color is irregular and rare. (Who would waste good money on color in a prefab development?) Yet it and so much else could pass for touch-ups after the fact from a painter with a gifted hand.

If this is the anthropocene, with people as its ends and means, what counts as human? By far the most photos are devoid of people—and that confusion, too is a fact of modern life. Burtynsky treats some scenes as portraits of industrial and post-industrial workers, in leisure moments and numbing labor. But landscapes are for him a kind of portrait all by themselves. Burtynsky allows himself few signs of pain and plenty of bombast, but he is fine with that. There is a tempting beauty in a confusion of shadows.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Sheida Soleimani was born the same year as an emerging nation. Neither event must have seemed auspicious.

Iran declared itself an Islamic republic after taking Americans hostage and precipitating a global crisis. It had Soleimani’s parents among the many fearing for their lives. She spent her infancy in uncertainty and fear before the family’s escape to America.

She calls her survey at the International Center of Photography “Panjereh,” which means both a passageway and a window in Farsi, but theirs is not its only record of passage. She has dedicated her work to another kind of flight as well, of migratory birds, many suffering injury or disease. After so many years, can photography bring deliverance—and I work this together with a recent report on photography by Consuelo Kanaga with its sense of community and commitment as a longer review and my latest upload.

Sheida Soleimani probably cannot remember much of Iran, but everything she does is infused with memory. She knows that passage did not come easily. Her parents had to rely on separate escape routes, one more circuitous than the other, battered suitcases, and two sets of plants to make the adopted country feel like home—and she pictures them all separately, too. Even so, this is anything but documentary photography or photojournalism. In the print actually called Deliverance, her father rides on horseback, a Persian rug in place of a saddle. Elsewhere he sits on the same rug but on the floor, as if to have the best of both worlds, Islamic tradition and hipster yoga.

Husband and wife share their photographic stardom with all manner of actors, human and otherwise. Soleimani is at once a photographer, an activist, and a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator. The connections are no more than puns, but her parents and the birds are painfully real. She describes subsets of her series as about OPEC, human rights abuses, reparations packages, geopolitical violence, and testimony to survivors. She calls her longest series “Ghostwriter” because it is their story as much as hers. Never mind, though, for the only people are family, and there is no end of birds.

Birds may appear up close gripped by a healing hand or plopped down in the midst of chaos. It is a chaos at least partly of her own making. The confluence of humans and live animals may recall Surrealism, but think instead of Robert Rauschenberg and his stuffed goat. It looks more like Rauschenberg’s combines and collaborations or today’s collage and assemblage than Modernism’s dream state. Cut blue squares and paper strips dismember the narrative and bring the image that much close to the layered surface. It is less about representation than coexistence.

The very first work suggests the treachery of coexistence. A bird perches atop a mailbox filled with birdseed, as if the post office alone can no longer deliver. Well-worn letters lie near the same, and who is to say if their message has lost its urgency? The shadow of a plane hovers above as part of a rescue operation—unless it is an air assault or just a toy. Only a color snapshot pinned in the middle distance provides a glimpse of home. And yet this memory, too, is real.

For Soleimani, in the face of everything, the subject is dark, but her tone is caring and downright funny. For better or worse, she is just not a down person. She hangs the show against walls painted with comic-strip birds in a sketchy white and blue. More of them same sketches appear on paper within the photographs. Other handlers hold not birds but snakes, but they seem fully capable, and anyway they could all be loose paper models. Her parents are masked, while gesturing in pantomime, but it is all a game.

The curator, Elisabeth Sherman, leaves ICP’s larger galleries to Edward Burtynsky and includes only about forty works, through September 28. Yet it seems complete enough, because the installation and the photos themselves reach out across the space. The photos themselves, like the restaging of escape from Iran, reach out to one another. One image follows her to a safe house that once secured passages to freedom, with a glass chess set. Iran, it seems to say, has a past, but its future has only a few moves left. Whether Donald J. Trump can deny others a future is not up to her.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Artists have long delighted in flowers. It puts to the test their powers of observation and commitment to nature. It brings out the possibilities in media such as watercolor, with its fluid line and still more fluid color.

All well and good, but Hilma af Klint wanted more. She asked “what stands behind the flowers.” A show of that name asks with her, at MoMA through September 27, and it reinforces the case for af Klint as a progenitor of abstraction. Ah, but then what lies behind that? If your answer is nature, she would not mind a seemingly vicious circle. She felt pure form as essential to both.

Hilma af Klint was on hardly anyone’s radar when the Guggenheim served up a 2019 retrospective, but then neither was abstract art when she began to make it. She had a reputation, to the extent that she had a reputation, as a Symbolist, and that could upend the history of abstraction. Her first nature studies at MoMA date to 1908, when itself was barely in flower, and the Swedish artist may not yet have heard of it. Born in 1862, she came late to the job, but she had an interest in flowers even as a student, in essays and notebooks. It took a direction not even she could have expected.

She kept her studies of nature and design separate at first, but barely. Her first dated studies could be symbols in an unknown code. Curves break away from larger circles, condensing into bulbs, buds, or seemingly nothing at all. Undated studies keep their eye on the ground and the forest canopy, with ferns and soil running densely the width of the paper. You are likely to remember them for their texture without quite known whether that derives from botany or art. Subsequent studies, starting in 1918, focus on the radiance of circles and squares without a flower in sight.

Still, af Klint’s drawings have a single impetus, and within a year or two they came together at last. A flower study follows the vertical course of a branch or stem. So, to its side, do small colored circles, like stills from a cinematic color wheel. More often, she pairs flowers with an actual color wheel or rectangle, with diagonals that need never meet. Are they the components of art for art’s sake—like color wheels or nested squares in the days or Josef and Anni Albers—or even today? Do not be too sure.

In those same years, she was pursuing comparable shapes in painting, as suns, pyramids, and altarpieces. They make a point of their radiance, but are they bringing a heavenly vision down to earth? Without the obligation to compose a major painting, the madness is all the greater in drawing. She has a parallel, too, in the painstaking course from nature to abstract art in Wassily Kandinsky. Yet she is less inclined to leave flowers behind, not even when, with her Atom drawings, the lure of science shifts from botany to quantum mechanics. She worked in series and soon had her largest, Nature Studies, and she spoke of all her work as a botanical atlas.

Notice, though, how nature keeps its distance, behind the curtain behind the curtain. Some studies allow words back in, as in her student essays, but perched on spirals. In the show’s last series, radiance becomes the aftereffect of an explosion. Here she unleashes the fluid nature of watercolor, with shades of blue, yellow, and especially red changing its shade as it covers a sheet. Notice, too, though, the humility, even banality, of her approach to nature, much as in her early ferns and fallen leaves. If a fly or an ant enters the scene, it counts as both nature and art, too.

She may seem to have outstayed nature’s welcome, as modern art was coming to be. The popularity of nature studies reflects the ideals of Romanticism, from John Constable to Beatrix Potter, in observation and expression. It comes with a moral, too, ever since flowers in Flemish still life became a parable of decay and death. Still, af Klint refused all that quite as much as Modernism. Swedish winters hang on way too long for her to abandon the first signs of blossoming. What lay behind the curtain was the impress of the curtain itself.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.