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Never Sleep
John Haberin New York City
Mary Lum and Jane Dickson
Jessie Edelman and Chris Hood
Mary Lum and Jane Dickson could make you fall in love all over again with New York. They know, though, that it cannot stand still long enough to return your love.
Their urban visions could hardly be more different. Lum's acrylics have their origins in photocollage, Dickson's paintings in scraps salvaged from the streets. Lum's look perfectly natural for a city that never sleeps, Dickson's as unnatural as the neon that must have kept her awake at night. Yet both encountered the city as strangers and value its strangeness, and that carries over into the strangeness of photography or paint itself. Jessie Edelman and Chris Hood cultivate a warmer light, away from the stress of New York, but neither can make the perfect getaway. 
Set and drift
Mary Lum has visions that are, deliberately, too flat and opaque for the unreal city of your dreams. Her acrylics are at once packed, colorful, crystal clear, and all but indecipherable, which will not make anyone give up looking for clues. If that sounds like a pretty good description of an actual city as well, they should. They began with close attention and ambivalence about what she saw. They look back, too, to Modernism's long history of encounters with the city, in photographs and prints—and their demand to reconsider and to remake the world. You could reconnect to the city after all and bring it to life.
As a Chinese-American artist, Lum may feel like both an insider and outsider in New York, London, and Paris, and she knows them all inside and out. Her walks through all three sound like my own ideal vacation and my weekends at home. If you really do love New York, they could be yours as well, and you will know her motifs by heart. They include grills, walls, and the letters they bear—or what really should be letters, if only you could puzzle them out. I could make out fully only Do the Right Thing, from the film about New York filled with conflict, affection, and hope. They also include an industrial landscape of wheels, shafts, a numbered cube, and toothed gears.
That imagery also belongs to past glorifications of industry, from the Precisionism of Charles Sheeler to early Soviet art. (MoMA has stressed their optimism and drive in recent shows of "Abstraction and Utopia" and "Engineer, Agitator, Constructor."). Lum looks back, too, with her palette of black, white, and bright primary colors. Still, her reds, yellows, and blues rest alongside maroons, burnt yellows, and olive blue-grays and the starkness of prints past has given way to more fluid shapes and busy overlays. The old look, which all but shouted its origins in etchings and lithographs, has given way as well to the sheen of color photography as rendered in paint. If her subjects could well belong to practically any city ever, her style sets the work firmly in the present.
Lum's gallery specializes in photography and photocollage, like that of Paul Mpagi Sepuya, David Alekhuogie, Sandi Haber Fifield, and Matthew Jensen. And she did take photos as she walked, experimenting with photocollage on her return as a step toward large acrylic on paper. Her work seems to have one foot in each of two media, just as it rests in two moments in time. That makes it more lively and comprehensive, but also ambivalent. Lum may know real cities, but she speaks of the results as "imaginary worlds." That leaves wide open if she can ever be at home and what this world should be.
Lum cites Guy Debord, the philosopher and social critic. Her imaginary worlds connect to what he called psychogeography and her unplanned journeys to his dérive—after a nautical term for set adrift. She could still be at sea. Could her suspicion be as much of art as of the city? Debord made his mark decrying the "society of the spectacle." If Lum nurtures the look of printed and disjointed letters, he began as a Letterist, in a movement that could trace its roots to the anti-art of Tristan Tzara and Dada.
His dissident sect of the Letterists gave way in time to the Situationist International, founded with a painter, Asger Jorn. And Lum, too, has felt the need to manage the spectacle. Art for her is never far from the heart of the city. When she eyes an import-export business in Paris, its letters assemble neatly into DIA—like the Dia arts center in Beacon and now New York. Painting for her can still take flight, much like that of early Soviets like Marc Chagall. In a show called "When the Sky Is a Shape," the most banal of geometries can, too.
Neon New York
Jane Dickson was a young artist from Chicago when she found a cold welcome at the very center of New York. It shined from storefront after storefront for blocks around. Still, she had to wonder if it was meant for her. Anyone can feel like an unwanted stranger in the city, and she had every reason to be suspicious. She need only look outside her window to see the offer of alcohol descending from above, and she could walk just a few feet more to see invitations to porn, kung fu hits, Halloween wigs, and 99¢ dreams. She need only take out her camera to make the dreams of others her own.
It was 1980, when crime and graffiti were off-putting enough. All that neon alone would have kept anyone awake at night. Still, like Jamel Shabazz in Brooklyn or, for that matter, me back then in an illegal loft, she found New York fascinating and affordable. Times Square still billed itself as crossroads to the world, although tourists then were less willing to cross it. Who knew that someone actually lived there? Apparently she did, and she has turned the photos and her memories into paintings.
Not that cheap come-ons are asking for a careful observer. Quite the contrary, not when they include invitations from a clairvoyant and a "reader advisor." Dickson, though, saw that they were peddling dreams—and not all those dreams, I fear, were empty. She could also understand the dangers and the appeal of transience, reflected in cut-off compositions and the Port Authority bus terminal, where a cop's silhouette offers the only still point in a sea of garish light and color. Do Not Obstruct, runs one sign, and move on. Still, she could see the overlay of sights and sounds behind the barricades.
Dickson observes things that others might not, and the marquee eye in Big Peep Eye becomes a counterpart to hers. I had never imagined the text of neon signs as a relatively sober monochrome set against unreal reds, yellows, and violets. Not could I have imagined their backdrop in navy blue. She has made her own contribution to the tawdry display as well, by painting on cheap materials like garbage bags and Astroturf. Felt backing in the 2022 Whitney Biennial brings the dappling of Georges Seurat and Circus Sideshow to more high-tech artificial light. She achieves a similar stippling with oil stick on linen—and a similar disregard for natural light.
Dickson aside, the biennial all but turns its back on the city. It spotlights performance art by Cha, but from sixty years ago, and Coco Fusco recalls mass graves on Hart Island, but from a boat in New York harbor. Tony Cokes opens the show with a video of the skyline and left-handed compliments, but nothing as X-rated or as comfortingly diffuse. Even "Greater New York" has little to do with New York, although the Shed's 2021 "Open Call" did reach out to local neighborhoods. I am not saying that the never-ending attempts to summarize art today need do more. Still, is today's global art scene as uniform as they think?
Dickson has since moved on to the lonesome heart of America. In returning to her old photos, she is looking back, with the risks and benefits of hindsight. Most often she crops them, bringing out the distance. Shallow pleasures fade quickly, and diffuse bright lights quickly blend together. Still, she lived there, and she knows how they felt. Artists struggling for recognition know it to this day.
A clean escape
Jessie Edelman calls her show "Getaway," but she need not go all that far in search of the perfect vacation or a clean escape. All she has to do is to look out the window. She may not even have to look that far, not when she can count on fruit or flowers in front of the window, on a living room or kitchen table—or against wallpaper within the gallery itself. Since Impressionism, flowers may appear as markers of an ideal landscape or domesticity, and Edelman looks to both. The painted frame links her to other visionaries as well, like Henri Matisse, while a dappled sky quotes Vincent van Gogh and Starry Night without van Gogh's cypresses. A getaway may presume a crime scene, but her only crime is looking back.
Just what is imagined, and what is quotation? What is indoors, and what is out? Things get messier still with Chris Hood, who would never spoil the caverns of the minds with sunlight. Edelman anchors her work in the central still-life and the frame. One can always count on clean colors rooted in realism and larger, flatter framing elements rooted in Matisse and the decorative arts. Hood looks everywhere and nowhere, and he finds something larger than life everywhere he looks.
His gallery has a fondness for realism teeming with incident and anecdote—like that of Ethan Greenbaum, Trudy Benson, Farley Aguilar, and Rosa Loy. Yet for once it, too, struggles for words. Hood's details could be "vignettes," "portals," "cave-like formations," or "sparks." When he calls the show "Falling Through Flatland," he recalls Matisse and flatness, but he is still in free-fall. Flatland is also the title of a popular account of Einstein's relativity, and he might have fallen right through a hole or two in space and time. When he calls a painting Supercollider, atoms may have smashed, and almost anything might have emerged from the collision, but the only certainty is the super.
Hood's drawing is more impulsive than Edelman's, with fewer hard edges, but his most recognizable and colorful images, too, are flowers. Most often, they fall within rough ovals, his portals. He also adds large eyes. As with his last show, people and body parts (mostly male) appear, too. Someone is looking into those portals or at you. Just what, though, are they seeing?
With both artists, mostly pleasure. Critics have compared painting now to Mannerism in the sixteenth century, with its arch quotations and distortions—and its skilled but often derivative art. Early Mannerism was far more poignant and intelligent than that take suggests, and it might not have all that many lessons for the present, but it does help to see it in light of Postmodernism. (I like to call it the Post-Renaissance.) Yet all the stress on pleasure may bring art today closer to something else again, the eighteenth century and Rococo. All those flowers and people in flight might come right out of period rooms for royalty.
Just last year brought crisp views of home by Lois Dodd and Anne Buckwalter—they, too, with portals onto a larger world as much as the artist's psyche. Edelman and Hood are less specific and leave less room for doubt. Step back, and you may admire the abundance more than the composition. Another of Hood's titles, Sisyphus Smiling, comes from Albert Camus, who took the man condemned to roll a stone up a hill for eternity as an emblem of modern life. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," he concluded. After rolling my own share of stones, I have my doubts, but who am I to deny artists like these their rewards?
Mary Lum ran at Yancey Richardson through February 26, 2022, Jane Dickson at James Fuentes through May 7, Jessie Edelman at Denny Dimin through February 26, and Chris Hood at Lyles & King through February 5.