Think Small

John Haber
in New York City

By Any Means: Contemporary Drawing

Microwave, x, Ann Veronica Janssens, and Michel François

Can the Morgan Library signal its commitment to contemporary drawing with a pointedly modest exhibition? By all means. But then modesty could well be a hallmark of late modern art.

At least it called for modest means, with demands for rigor rather than gesture. Yet even Minimalism could aspire to something big. It ran from wall paintings to massive steel walls—and from an engagement with its surrounding space to light shows. It could overwhelm smaller work or attention to detail. Now in its tenth edition, "Microwave" still puts scale to the test, while Ann Veronica Janssens and Michel François imagine what is left when so much else has washed away. Think small.

By all means

So is the Morgan's commitment to the present held together by glue and spittle? And what about the practice of contemporary art? It sure seems that way, on both questions, with just twenty-four drawings. Their materials include glue, spray fixative, Rhoplex (a binder in primer), and plain old blue tape. Surely collage for Betye Saar, Hannelore Baron, William Dole, John Evans, or Robert Rauschenberg relies on glue as well, and why not? Their commitment is real all the same.

They proceed, as the show's title has it, "By Any Means." That may call to mind an action hero, kicking butt by any means necessary, but here action and adventure are deliberately hard to find. Then again, the title also sounds like an apology, "by all means." Only Paul Jenkins and Roland Flexner approach studies for painting, treating ink as washes. And only Helène Aylon makes a point of color with her oil and glue as Sparkling Firmament. The rest looks mostly finicky, like graphite, watercolor, and blue tape for Christine Hiebert.

Almost everything speaks of modesty, in a show of mostly recent acquisitions, as a nice complement to recent acquisitions of contemporary art at the Met Breuer. Ray Johnson downright boasts of transience, with Drawn While Driving a Car, as does William Anastasi with his "subway drawing." John Cage doodles, as one might expect from a believer in chance and spontaneity. Much else, too, has the air of throw-aways—and only occasionally because it dares to celebrate trash as art. The selections may not go as far as spit, but Gavin Turk constructs his Rosette from exhaust emission. It leaves its mark on paper like a bullet hole.

Like Turk, the artists seek not just transience but immediacy, even if some fall short. Jack Whitten turns to Rhoplex and Stephen Vitiello to fixative in order to bypass drawing. They would rather adhere their coarse black pigment directly to paper. So do Michelle Stuart with graphite stick and powder, Jannis Kounellis with crushed charcoal, and Marsha Cottrell with toner for her mysterious museum interior. When Sol LeWitt displays folds in paper, like Dorothea Rockburne, he seeks a physical impression as much as Minimalism. Whitten himself leaves the traces of a human body, as if buried in pigment or soil.

They look to a more interdisciplinary art as well, like Frederick Hammersley, Véra Molnar, and Cottrell with early computer drawings. If one thinks of Cage as first and foremost a musician, Bruce Conner grew out of the punk scene of the 1970s, and Vitiello's soft-edged ring depicts a speaker cone—naturally so, for its sound waves have propelled pigment onto paper. With seven women and two African Americans, they reflect a commitment to diversity at that. Still, the muss and fuss suggest a museum not quite comfortable with formalism, conceptualism, politics, or contemporary art. A quarter of the artists are European and the rest American, within a decidedly abstract and Western art.

One might expect as much from the Morgan—even if one no longer enters through J. P. Morgan's old-world library. More and more, it has been staking its claim on the shock of the new, with photographs by Peter Hujar, works on paper by Martin Puryear and Wayne Thiebaud, and book art by Andy Warhol. Yet it still sought Minimalism as monument in Puryear and good old-fashioned still life in Thiebaud. Even with Warhol, it took his beginnings as a commercial artist as training in polish and craft. So often these days, museum expansions bow to the market for recent art, so that even the Frick Collection will sublet the Met Breuer. The Morgan Library can still bring something of its own to the present, but will that be enough?

Murmurs of the heart

A tiny figure poses in a t-shirt, arms raised for pumping iron. Yet this he-man pumps only a thread, and not even he can hold it aloft. It descends well below his makeshift shelf, subject to gravity but with a life of its own. Liliana Porter is not just taking him down, but also asking one to step back to see what a woman's art can do. A microwave sounds small, and a microwave oven may never leave the confines of a kitchen. And "Microwave, x" may downsize even the Roman numeral, but it, too, can turn on the heat.

As the Roman numeral suggests, the winter group show is the tenth in a series, which began as an alternative to bloated art fairs. It could hardly have predicted the monster of perpetual art fairs today. Still, it is hanging in there, and with sixteen artists it is thinking big. The first year's catalog spoke of "an international group of artists who deliberately reduce their movements and expressive media." Even now, the show sees itself as a throwback, with spare marks, few colors, and no loud messages. This is an art of the close-up—and digital only insofar as it lies at the artist's fingertips.

Past years have included Yayoi Kusama and Fred Sandback, who has divided galleries with imagined walls of just three or four threads like Porter's. This year brings Cy Twombly and Richard Tuttle, but once again mostly younger and less familiar names. It makes a pointed contrast with "Epic Abstraction" at the Met, but beware: Twombly appears in both, and a modest paperback can contain an epic. "Microwave" is nominally about the micro, but also about leaving a trace. Marco Maggi hangs an undersized paint roller, as Question Mark, but it has left dashed lines below, and its arced shadow on the wall may account for its title.

That paragraph from an old catalog, the show's only handout, also places the work "between drawing, knitting, and writing"—much as the Drawing Center has spoken of "Drawing Time, Reading Time" and "100 Drawings" for today. Yet the knitting never adds up to a fabric, no more than for Altoon Sultan in abstract art, and the text art is never easy to read. Romany Eveleigh calls her closely packed strips of stained paper One Liners, but they do not spell out a punch line. Celeste Fichter fills a grid with letters too small for any but the sharpest of eyes to make out, and I doubt that they have a message either. Alicia Mihai Gazcue displays a tattered notebook with its cover closed.

It is also small enough to fit in one's pocket, like a cell phone—or the refusal to upgrade to one. And the show's casual materials can grow a bit quaint. I prefer Twombly's doodles on a larger scale. Still, the objects thrive on small gestures, like cuts or folds in paper, and contrasting textures, like wood and something more like sandpaper for Jonathan Rider. They are also consistently embedded in the artist's studio and in everyday life. Luis Urculo could be illustrating the elements of either painting or kitchen recipes.

Befitting the backward glance, work often approaches Minimalism's grids and algorithms, like Fichter's lettering. Adam Henry lays out untidy watercolors in the tidy rows and columns of a calendar, like a Morris Louis Veil for each day of the month—with horizontals bands below to spell out the lush primary colors. At its best, too, the art crosses the line between large and small, without concern for a middle ground. Anne Lindberg dares one to count the threads that fill an alcove. She also staples them to the walls, so that one cannot overlook the plainness behind the changing shimmers of gold and gray. She calls the piece Murmur, so as hardly to break the silence, but then murmurs of the heart can have major consequences.

All washed up

A wave has washed up on Tribeca, leaving not sand but glitter. If that sounds like an overblown metaphor for the art scene, obsessed with the latest and showiest wave, Ann Veronica Janssens and Michel François are over sixty and largely new to New York. They have represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale, but their work here is ever so spare, like an installation in progress or rather washed away. A few small sculptures lie here and there, but the centerpiece consists of low corner walls badly in need of a paint job. A clothesline has shed all but its clothespins, and a puddle still lies beneath, although in epoxy rather than water. You may notice even the glitter only after a sign commanding you to stay off.

That glitter takes the shape of traces from a wave in sand, only it shines. Other materials shine as well apart from the walls. Glass donuts rest on edge, and tin rings look like silvered clay. A slim white plaster column acts as a lamp, casting its light on the floor. A text painting speaks of The Skeis . . ., and further typos or transpositions throughout cannot erase the sensation of changing natural light. One last sculpture comes close, with rust-colored trousers set upside down on a pedestal and stuffed to the breaking point. Its smooth outlines approach the early Modernism of Constantin Brancusi, but the male body has become a punching bag.

Janssens and François find inspiration in nature, but only after comic or tragic intervention. The show's title, "The Song of the Araponga," refers to a tropical bird, which they heard on a trip to the Americas for another show. They know the shore as a human destination, in a gallery so large that it all but invites beach umbrellas. The corner walls also embrace a soccer ball, seemingly blackened by disaster but in fact recycling a leather jacket, and beach sandals, in bronze but with holes from way too much wear. Not that the artists admit to an installation. They speak of themselves as former partners and collaborators, with Janssens responsible for the typos, glass, and glitter, François for the walls—but go ahead and treat the objects as one.

They come in a wave of seriously empty installations, like that of Fiona Connor in Long Island City. You may find yourself staring at the gallery infrastructure, like a metal plate in the floor, uncertain whether to to call it art. Like Trisha Donnelly at the Hudson Yards and Rindon Johnson in Long Island City, they also raise concerns for climate change and Manhattan real estate. So did Hurricane Sandy, which flooded so much of Chelsea and downtown in 2012, raising concerns for the midlevel galleries that discover and revitalize art. The araponga sure sounds exotic, but a wave in New York looks ominously at home. With luck, Janssens and François can find room not to collaborate again in the near future.

Their spareness and closeness to the ground look back to Minimalism, while the bodily presences and irregular surfaces have their roots in the Post-Minimalism of Kiki Smith and Eva Hesse. In a front gallery, Katinka Bock runs more to the latter, even when she, too, brings in sand. Her metal and ceramics look bent and fragile, with propped spheres out of Alicja Kwade. They are also just on the edge of representation—like an ordinary spoon high on a wall or a larger echo of Spoon Woman by Alberto Giacometti splayed on the floor. They come together less well than walls and glitter, but they engage visitors well by threatening to crowd them out. A third and smaller room does still better by taking one right back to when Minimalism was coming together and coming apart.

Four years earlier, the gallery picked up Barbara Kasten in the late 1970s. Her Amalgams used photograms not for ghostly presences, but for messing up the plain sense of things. Now a show takes up what came next, beginning in 1981, when she turned in 1981 to Polaroids to bring her constructions that much further into the third dimension and across the picture plane. The series title, Constructs, insists on the confluence of art and architecture or photography and what it shows. The off-center arrangements of simple shapes have the color, clarity, and sense of motion of Piet Mondrian but with studio and industrial materials. Wires, wood, and paper look stranger in light of the clothesline in back, but Kasten's boldness even after forty years is anything but all washed up.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"By Any Means" ran at The Morgan Library through May 12, 2019, "Microwave, x" at Josée Bienvenu through January 26, and Ann Veronica Janssens, Michel François, Katinka Bock, and Barbara Kasten at Bortolami through August 9.