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No Place like Home
John Haberin New York City
2018 Summer Group Shows
Summer group shows can offer a chance to catch up with gallery artists, sheer tedium, a badly constraining theme, or a mess. For two galleries, they have you heading for home.
Both focus on the intersection of art, interior design, and architecture, in galleries that you may have left town to avoid. Not that they collaborated. They may not even have known of one another. Yet several shows did have dealers working together—not just in the same neighborhood, but as hosts for galleries outside New York as well. Some use a French movement of more than fifty years ago as a frame for art today. Still other collaborations point to themes in art year round. 
Starting on the ground floor
One gallery offers housing for the summer and another the furnishings. Could your vacation home be shaping up on the Lower East Side? Not likely, quite apart from the heat. 601Artspace calls its show "You Stand on the Ground Floor," but of course you cannot, and neither can the artists. In fact, you may have nowhere to stand at all. But then a gallery just around the corner devotes two floors to chairs, and there is no place to sit.
"Stereo Love Seats Hot Wheels" at Marc Straus, sounds like a look back at the 1960s, and it does have a contribution from Red Grooms, The Minister of Transportation from 1975. The remaining chairs are more recent, but they share with Pop Art a surfeit of cultural references, shiny objects, and activity. One floor's worth comes with occupants, while the second floor mostly turns them away. The Orientalist catches Huma Bhaba in 2007, her female figure at once enthroned and in decay. The master of war in white beside her, by Folkert de Jong, is no more in control and no less guilty. A seated nude by Mark Manders, suspended as if from a gallows, has no arms and a similarly bleak politics.
Grooms and his sleazebag with a cigarette look far less cheerful in consequence. Others stick firmly to middle-class America. Even an Italian, Sandra Tombolini, has a painted rocker out of child's room. Woody de Othello, Michael Brown, Jeanne Silverthorne, and Joel Otterson project an equally ambivalent vision of adult leisure. The jug on a stool has protruding ears, lawn furniture comes in unyielding aluminum and stainless steel, an easy chair comes wrapped in duct tape, and stacked chairs add the cacophony of a CD player and a Led Zeppelin logo. As Brown titles his work, summer art can be Desperately Optimistic.
Back to the housing crisis, Maurizio Cattelan rises above it all, as Mini-Me. He refuses to sit up straight, on a high shelf, like the bad boy he is. The entire show does everything it can to deny solid ground. Discomfort may be only implicit, as with a colorful but confining abstraction by Barbara Kasten, a ledge crossing in front of a window in a light box by Jeff Wall, or a wood model shutting up on itself by Adrian Meraz. It may be only temporary, like the bunker in a photograph by Jane and Louise Wilson—or so one hopes. Either way, it can be funny, puzzling, or downright beautiful.
Abelardo Morell has what must be the dream apartment, with a view. That stunning New York skyline, though, is only the plane of a camera obscura, much like the view from the Whitney for Zoe Leonard—and of course the silvery image is upside-down. Superstudio constructs its postcard from Niagara Falls as "reflected architecture" as well. The curators, Harriet Salmon and Jesse Penridge, treat architecture less as structure than as the means and occasion for contemplation. Heather Rowe sets mirrors into frames in the round, while Olafur Eliasson projects windows from two spotlights as a single image. Sarah Braman places a single frame against the side of a camper in what looks like a gray painting by Jasper Johns.
You already knew to expect discomfort and disorientation from art, even in the summer. And sixteen works from some forty years do not always add up. Christian Marclay glues CDs to mirrors for two ideas (and two scales) of a circular, reflective surface, in his pursuit of the confluence of sound, vision, and the passage of time. Toy-sized drones land on and take off from the top of, I am guessing, a half-size fridge (the kind that might fit into a studio or gallery office) in a video by Hiraki Sawa. Just to ask whether they belong, though, is to ask where you stand. The intersection of art and architecture sets the scene for the present.
Painting on life support
If curators these days are recovering older artists, one summer group show boasts an entire movement. The artists in Supports/Surfaces first exhibited together in 1970, and they may still pass under the radar in New York. "The Surface of the East Coast" means to change that, and its title has a double edge. It makes its case for the group's relevance not just by displaying them, but also by displaying them alongside Americans at least a generation younger. The show's subtitle, "Visible Reality," makes the case for a lasting influence in another way as well. While the group amounts to the French version of Minimalism, it exchanged art as material object for vision.
The show's ambition extends to its location, in five galleries around the city, more than one with roots in France. While Emmanuel Barbault pairs Louis Cane with Gedi Sibony, born in 1973, Josée Bienvenu offers the best overview of the five with three artists from each generation. By interspersing them, it dares one to date the work. (I, for one, could not.) And while Sibony has a clear presence these days, the three younger artists will be as new to most visitors as the French. But, hey, part of a dealer's job these days is to find the latest thing, even in the recent past.
The movement may have wished to dematerialize the art object, but it relied on recognizably Minimalist means. Like Robert Ryman and other Americans back then, it asked viewers to pay as much attention to painting's support as its surface. It just went one more step and displayed them separately. There, too, though, Minimalism got there first. What is sculpture by Donald Judd or Carl Andre if not exchanging the work for its support—the pedestal, the floor, and the room? And what is a wall of light by Dan Flavin if not the dematerialization of art once and for all?
The group also shared with Post-Minimalism a penchant for nontraditional materials. When Bernard Pagès bundled twigs in fencing, he might simply have let the airy wire sculpture of Ruth Asawa fall to the ground. When Claude Viallat dyed rope hanging to the floor, he might have pared back and thickened a wall of thread by Richard Tuttle. Just as often, their materials were household rather than industrial. Noël Dolla dyed a kitchen towel. One might see them as Arte Povera without the assault on fine art.
These artists were painters, whatever the medium, and they were out to leave not the art object, but their mark. They were also out to keep that mark fluid, often with ink on unstretched canvas or linen. It might be blue ink for Mark Devade or dye ink for Viallat, as the tracery of a net. It might be a slim red band for Dolla descending to the floor. It might be repeated marks for Cane, with white space to spare. His stamp takes the shape of an X, like the signature of a painter too unschooled for conceptual art.
The younger artists pick up on these strategies, but without the provocation. The pairing of Cane and Sibony may seem more like a contrast, with the marks of the first giving way to a far more material affair in stained aluminum. Still, Sibony has also used carpeting. The others blend together more smoothly. Adam Henry picks up the glow with the deeper stains of bands crossing a polymer haze as the edge fades to white. Mark Barrow and Sarah Parke color hand-loomed linen, while Lucas Knipscher updates tie-dye with photographic emulsion.
The gap between the early 1970s and the present holds stories all its own, not half so tidy and comforting. It saw the supposed death of painting and its revival. It saw, too, painting as tapestry, marking the achievements of the Third World and women—as in a bolder summer show of contemporary African art at Sean Kelly and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré to come. Both trends have allowed painting to leave a more fluid mark. The younger artists here reflect those stories more than a half-remembered moment in Paris, or do they? A revival four summers ago offered a broader and clearer picture with just one gallery, but this time out one can mind the gap.
Take It Easy
Many a summer group show runs to complacency, and why not? If I cannot take it easy on a summer's day, when can I? In fact, shows may grow laziest when they also grow large, and their lazy ambition says something about themes everywhere in art now. Painting, of course, is back from the dead, so two galleries in command of five spaces join for a show of it. For Matthew Marks and Greene Naftali, that means a healthy but unadventurous mix of the trendy (like Rachel Harrison, Rachel Feinstein, and Nicole Eisenman), lions (like Jasper Johns and Robert Bechtle), African Americans (like Howardena Pindell and Sam Gilliam), and the idiosyncratic. Names that I had all too quickly forgotten recur from space to space.
The body is fashionable, too, and many a show sticks to its pleasures. Let others dwell on gender, as a matter of ambiguity or pride, come fall. Paul Kasmin, Nathalie Karg, Marinaro downstairs, Asya Geisberg, and (as ever) The Hole run more to excess. Pop Art here seems alive and well. For an antidote, some galleries provide spare but by no means minimal scraps. Paul Kasmin finds them rather than politics in art from Mexico, while David Zwirner allows the props to accumulate to the point of installations.
Marianne Boesky manages more accomplished names, from Helen Frankenthaler and Lynda Benglis to Amy Sillman and Eileen Quinlan, as "Mechanics of Fluids," curated by Melissa Gordon. It may come as a surprise at just how fluid they are in media and imagery—and how much that unites them. Translucent color fields by Jill Nathanson at Berry Campbell, their paint building up at the edges, would fit right in. It may come as a surprise, too, to discover that all of them are women, but how gender relates to fluidity, with associations of the active or passive, is up to you. When it comes to painting, I still felt grateful for a summer solo show, of Matt Mignanelli at Denny. His Nocturnes have blue and white triangles as their low-resolution elements—multiplying, subdividing, and reversing before taking on spatters as signs after all of the artist's hand.
Pixels like these are as prevalent as cell phones, and "Screenscapes" at Postmasters finds them in media old and new. An array of actual cell phones with cracked screens provides a reminder of the real world. One contributor, Luke Murphy, constructs clouds even when his screens take sharp, solid angles on the floor. His solo show at Canada opens with a campfire, in a loose pile of red screens. Before the cookout is over, his range of tricks becomes more impressive still. His LEDs rise into geometric sculpture, evolve in a determined algorithm, or slowly fade away.
More than twenty galleries take complacency to a higher level. Each surrenders its space to a dealer or two from out of town, reaching as far as Australia. Condo NY adds up to international art fair without adjacent booths. This being mostly the Lower East Side, make that without adjacent streets. As in any art fair, name after rushes by. Then again, they reward complacency, since no one obliges you to consult the checklists.
The only single-artist booth in this fair also happens to be the only artist without a gallery. That makes perfect sense for Marinaro, a Chinatown gallery more likely to turn up in the alternative fairs that lean more heavily on artists than dealers. Sam Windett, a London painter, uses the opportunity for colored circles and bands against scarred fields of black and white. One might mistake them for sketches by Jasper Johns, but without the philosophical puzzles and self-reflective imagery. Such serious matters will resume any day now. In the meantime, take it easy.
These shows ran at 601Artspace through August 31, 2018, Marc Straus through August 17, Emmanuel Barbault through July 31, Josée Bienvenu through August 24, Sean Kelly through August 3, Matthew Marks and Greene Naftali through August 17, Paul Kasmin through August 10, David Zwirner and Marianne Boesky through August 3, Berry Campbell through June 30, Postmasters through August 11, Canada through July 15, Denny through August 17, Marinaro through August 3, and others with links in the text.