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Solitude and the City
John Haberin New York City
100 Drawings from Now and the Shear Collection
At the Drawing Center, the layout is spacious and the pace is relaxed, even in just two rooms south of Soho. It could hardly be otherwise, thanks to social distancing and fears of contagion, but the fears and the isolation have entered art as well. How did we make it this far, a show asks, and where will we be "100 Drawings from Now"? And how can a single drawing collector know?
The paradox is that the future is already here, to judge by one hundred artists, each with a single new work. Yet we still do not know, and neither do they. The curators, led by Claire Gilman, speak of "upheaval and isolation," but also a "surge of activism." And the isolation is palpable, while the Center's basement "lab" lies empty and dark. Still, the names are often familiar, and the tone is comic and even hopeful. "I feel a chorus," says one, Torkwase Dyson, "in my space of solitude"—and she can only let the chorus and the solitude speak through her. 
Ways of Seeing is still an eye-opener. The 1972 TV series introduced countless viewers to the ways that painting and photography can change what one sees. As a slim paperback, its text and photo essays speak for the works themselves, the biases of their times, and how great art echoes and overcomes their limits. It was one of the first things I read about art. Its author, John Berger, has served me as a guide ever since. One year after those hundred drawings, "Ways of Seeing" is an exhibition of the Jack Shear drawing collection, with the emphasis on multiplicity.
Drawing a distance
All these months I have envied artists, who could use the lockdown to go about their work. Not that they mind interruptions now and then—or a call-out from the Drawing Center. Artists (with luck) are only human, too, and in need of recognition. Karl Haendel feels it, with "How Long Will It Be Until I'm Forgotten?" Yet his text art meanders through concerns for others, too. Rochelle Feinstein and Sam Messer reach out across the distance with sketchy portraits of one another (at work, of course), and Andrew Ross sends a get-well card to whomever will come and see it.
Rashid Johnson has his Untitled Anxious Red and Simon Evans his Insecurity Card held together (barely) with tape. Dabs and squiggles settle into not another public pool or beach from Katherine Bernhardt, but cigarettes and Xanax. Still, Johnson's red is downright splashy, and others are splashier still—most of all in darkness. Timothy Curtis drapes a president's casket in charcoal and an American flag, but also fingerprints that scatter its stars. If the casket belongs to this president, he may well welcome it. So would Xylor Jane, who calls her fractal geometry next pres. please.
They may leave it open just what counts as anxiety. William Kentridge, his text asserts, is "finding our fate" but also "escaping our fate." Annette Messager sees skeletons, but of a father helping his son into the world. A self-portrait in ink by Mounira Al Solh spreads boldly but awkwardly, clutching something to her crotch so as not to expose all. Dog walkers from Dan Perjovschi maintain their due six feet (and here I thought that they were just using long leashes to hog the sidewalk). Raymond Pettibon may well be enjoying his Twilight Zone Marathon—and not only on TV.
They may also leave open what counts as reaching out. Maurizio Cattelan may be clutching a bare branch for dear life or holding it out to you. A dog climbs all over a frightened cartoon character by Hadi Fallahpisheh, leaving its trace on light-sensitive paper like a scar, but it just wants to be friendly, honest. Deborah Roberts calls her African American portrait You Look So Much Better If You Smile—and who knows whether she means that as parental nagging or praise? Fate for Steven Holl sure looks grim. Yet the color division in his lungs between starved and oxygenated blood could be the division between red and blue Americas.
An artist can boast of anxiety at that, much as in the days of Egon Schiele and Expressionist self-portraits. Dead animals by Cecily Brown look creepy enough, but Brown's still life is competing with Frans Snyders four hundred years ago. A figure peeks out from a mansion of carved stone with strange doings behind every window, but the artist, Milano Chow, has her from strange doings, too, in pencil and cut paper. Some indulge in boasting without the anxiety. Amy Sillman renders precisely a single flower in acrylic. Rachel Harrison uses a winning density of color for a singer and three ballerinas that one can barely discern.
Most stick to traditional media, but they can boast of the exceptions as well. Chitra Ganesh appropriates a pocket mirror and "assorted trimming" for her Covid Tears. Mostly, though, I kept looking for signs of commitment and hope. Rirkrit Tiravanija copies a headline about the protests, "I knew I had to be a part of it." For Fred Tomaselli and The Times, the president can only "sow confusion," but a tornado above the clippings spins out into butterflies. Will it prove a perfect storm?
Count the ways
On the cover of the catalog for "Ways of Seeing," a woman's face looks out—a caricature save for eerily redoubled features and self-possessed or merely cautious eyes. With his break from Modernism and abstraction, Francis Picabia has long seemed a prototype of postmodern irony decades before its time. Here, between examples of Neo-Expressionism at its loosest, he seems downright reserved and sincere. So does a downcast face from the 1750s by the master of shallow excess, François Boucher. And now a thoroughly confusing show offers its own path to art's reserves of richness, but in drawing. Let me count the ways.
If I tell you that Jack Shear is president of the Kelly Foundation, surely that is all you need to know. It marks him as dedicated to formal perfection, but also wide-open questions. For Ellsworth Kelly, a field of color, the tilt of a canvas, and its edge make a wide-open painting. In much the same way, just a few spare lines coming together, for Susan Rothenberg, or the illusion of two sheets of paper floating in space, for Ed Ruscha, make a drawing from Shear's collection. It can still have you pondering the roughness of her lines, like pincers, or the literal bare bones that she may have seen. It can have you pondering, too, the white of Ruscha's paper, both real and fictive, and the many gradations of gunpowder and Scotch whiskey that defines its space.
For Shear, it has always been that way. While contemporary art dominates, he reaches back to the hush of a port and its defenses at evening for Georges Seurat. He can only admire the economy of line for J. A. D. Ingres in French Neoclassicism that chains Angelica to a rock or puffs up a portrait sitter. 
If a starry night for Vija Celmins, a Cubist guitar for Georges Braque, or an untitled "anxious red drawing" for Rashid Johnson seems busy and breathless by comparison, there is only so much that you need to see. A sketch by Jasper Johns never quite settles into his Sculpt-metal numbers, but it seems all the richer for that. The sparest of all, in black charcoal by Joel Shapiro, might outline just one piece in a larger puzzle.
Who, then, needs ways of seeing, in the plural, and who needs a monster of an exhibition? Shear packs in close to a hundred and fifty drawings, one right next to another. Staggered in height, they seem desperate to find a space to themselves. And he is only the first of three curators. Arlene Shechet, known for clotted ceramics, takes over and then Jarrett Earnest, known for long-form interviews and gender-bending critical subjects. Will they leave Kelly far behind?
You will just have to see, but the show may already seem way out of control. You will not find wall labels—just an invitation to download the Bloomberg Connects app and, from there, to find your own way. Its guides take clicking on each work for a legend and then the back arrow before you can pick another, and that is on days when the app syncs with the show. There are mistakes as well (or at least there were opening weekend), like placing Ingres in the twentieth century. As mere icons, the drawings are all but illegible, especially those in pencil or ink. Good luck in finding the work at hand.
The chaos arises in part from the pressure on curators to stand out. Who needs yet another unthemed group show or tribute to a collector, and what can it add? John Berger had a point of view as a feminist and admirer of Walter Benjamin, the Marxist critic, for all his many ways. Would that suffice today? Still, the chaos has a point in itself as well. It invites one to admire the collection's quality and not to worry about picking winners.
Seeing triple
It also invites one to look beyond individuals or juxtapositions, which are unrevealing, to a sensibility. Kelly may have the last word after all. The side-by-side presentation may itself recall his shaped canvas. You can expect his economy in a still life by Charles Demuth, but what about Andy Warhol? You knew that Warhol had a trained hand in the fashion industry, a taste for death, and a fascination with the church, but here he has a bare skull. Shear is comfortable with Picabia, Boucher's Rococo, Surrealism, and Post-Minimalism because reserve for him has its richness, too.
Can Shear's successors as curator bring their own ways of seeing? If the collection is strong enough, could anyone? With Arlene Shechet, one might hope for insight into not just the work at hand, but also her as an artist. Sure enough, she opens with Giorgio Morandi, whose still life pares Modernism down to its sculptural or architectural essence. When she comes to Brice Marden, she sees what could almost be a fire escape, except that it shares its black parallels with Barnett Newman to its left and its radiance with Ursa Major by Fred Tomaselli to its right—much as Shechet's ceramics all but bleed off the pedestal. When she comes to a storefront by Christo, she sees not the wrapping but the glass.
When she turns to history, she favors portraits and figure studies, much like Shear. As they move from more academic artists like Boucher to quirkier moderns like John Graham, Oskar Kokoschka, and R. Crumb, they suggest not centuries of continuity or change, but a rogue's gallery, of charming but stubborn rogues. Not that Shechet can avoid repeating Shear's choices either—not if she is to have her own stubborn way of seeing. Ed Ruscha's sheets with whiskey stains seem not to have found a new and revealing context so much as floated across the room. Shechet also brings some impressive seating, which may or may not count as curating. Beams of blond wood look not so much carved as hacked, but no less inviting for that.
A critic traffics in background and contrast, or so one hopes, and so does the third installment. Jarrett Earnest takes a work apiece, by Henri Michaux and Vija Celmins, as starting points for facing walls, one painted dark gray to insist on the difference. In context, the collection becomes mirrored progressions, as he puts it, from openness to precision and back again. Or so he hopes, for precision here means little more than olden days, when artists had to learn how draw. Gerhard Richter in the present is wild enough, counting his mind games, and William Blake in the past precise enough in his view onto madness and a less mundane reality. In practice, a visitor starts either wall by the entrance, while the stars of the show hang side by side at back, facing front, but the movement is tricky enough as it is.
If nothing else, just how different are they? Michaux's squiggles mirror the waves and crests of an ocean's surface for Celmins. And Celmins is precise enough, with a fine point and a fine line, but oceans are nature's metaphors for the wide open. His surface is arbitrary, quite as much as Michaux's, which may be half the point. Could art be all about the play of opposites, or is that, too, a sham? Kelly, whose estate Shear represents, occupies the center of one wall, making him (one can only presume) the perfect balance of openness and precision.
A curator's way of seeing translates into added value, as galleries and museums compete for attention, even in a pandemic. The threesome of collector, artist, and critic points to how. Still, when John Berger brought Ways of Seeing to a wider public, on TV and in print, he was not half so sanguine. He called attention to collectors and institutions with loaded agendas, financial and cultural. He also asked viewers to find their own ways of seeing—seeing through others in every sense of the words. Curators can add only so much.
"100 Drawings from Now" ran at the Drawing Center through January 17, 2021, the Jack Shear drawing collection in three parts through November 7, 2021, December 23, 2021, and February 20, 2022.