Certain Obstacles

John Haber
in New York City

Karyn Olivier and Dana Powell

Mire Lee and Marta Minujín

Karyn Olivier presents certain obstacles. Most halfway decent artists do, and so does Dana Powell just upstairs. For both, the obstacles come with any attempt to bring their surroundings into the light of day.

Olivier opens with one—a seeming chain-link fence in front of a photo of the very property that it might protect. Not that a fence of packing materials could provide much in the way of protection, and not that the property needs one. The only buildings look abandoned, for all the surrounding greenery. And then, just when you thought that you could go no further, she lines a wall with the waist-high barriers that set off a construction site. Maybe it is just a coincidence, but Powell paints a road closed at night, receding into darkness past traffic cones. But then the hazy darkness is a formidable barrier itself.

Mire Lee does everything she can to turn you away. Elevators at the New Museum open onto the face of a seemingly unfinished wall. On my first attempt to get past, a curatorial assistant turned me away. She said that the installation was not quite ready, and it does depend on a messy assemblage of motors and materials to set it in motion. Still, could it have fooled even her? Lee has many more deceptions in store, and she is out quite literally to take you in, with Black Sun.

Not that every installation is trying to keep you out. Marta Minujín will put out a mattress or two to lure you in. Has she gone soft? Don't count on it, not for an artist who brings a creature to New York so large and colorful that the half-costumed, half-naked regulars in Times Square cannot begin to compete, not even for your selfies. There is no getting around it, although you can comfortably settle in below and look around. You never know what you will see.

Entering her eighties, Minujín is still raising her voice—about book burnings, dictatorship, sexual norms, and such lesser details as the pandemic. She means her retrospective at the Jewish Museum as at once a battle cry and a celebration, much like its title, "Arte! Arte! Arte!" It ranges from painting and sculpture in bronze to torn mattresses, installation, and video. Still, it opens, like her approach to Times Square, with soft sculpture and what I took for a smile. You can see it through glass doors well before you enter. It may be whimsical or unnerving, but it is still an invitation.

Day tripper

When John Lennon wrote "Day Tripper," he compared a lover to a traveler who cannot be bothered to stay overnight. (Try to think what that means for making love.) What then is a night tripper, and who would be around to know? When Dana Powell calls her show "Night Tripper," expect a rough ride, with not a soul in sight. Yet others leave their presence everywhere, and there is no turning away. This will be one long night.

They crack an egg or two, leaving someone else to prepare breakfast and to clean up the mess. They gather mushrooms, laid out neatly on a table, for an omelet or an acid trip. They set out a fog machine, a small black box looking way out of place on the floor, leaving everyone and no one in a fog. They have set fires that burn well into the night, behind a dark landscape that seems certain to persist. The fog and fire cannot begin to compete anyway with familiar roads, weather, and the texture of oil. They invite you in, but at your own risk.

Obstacles can cut both ways. When Karyn Olivier brought a playground to the Whitney and rail tracks to SculptureCenter, one felt trapped in the museum at night. The colorful wall in her last show at the gallery barred only the timid. Here the curtains in a photo seem to bar a physical window, while letting in the light. On video beside the stacked orange barriers, a conveyor belt carries construction materials to a destination that they can never reach. She calls the show itself "How a Home Is Made," but do not expect This Old House.

She leaves everywhere to look and nowhere to stand. In a photo, a foot steps on an unseen person's shadow, unless it is your own. Cracks develop in an apparent wall, but of asphalt roofing. And Powell, too, finds unfamiliar territory right next door. That closed road could lead from her house, on a walk at night, or yours. Those past shows gave ample opportunity to catch up with Olivier, so let me end back upstairs.

Olivier constructs an image from imperfect materials, much as professionals would construct a home. Powell is always a painter. Traditionally, a scale approaching miniatures demands precision, and she is precise about everything but the details. She makes it hard to separate the sky from the ground. The moon hovers above fresh-fallen snow that one might mistake for clouds. It descends into a dark cloud as if into the earth.

It burns no less brightly for that, amid natural and artificial light. Lightning and fireworks tear through the sky, leaving jagged trails and points of light. A dark hallway ends in a closed door and an unexplained brightness peeking out through its edges where no one would dare to go. But then a billboard sorely in need of a message towers over a gas station in the dead of night for Olivier as well. Both artists let darkness speak for itself. Come dawn, it will all be gone.

Depression and disgust

What looked like bare Sheetrock and metal studs barring the way at the New Museum is anything but. It is complete enough, thank you, and of materials better suited to retain raw feelings, moisture, and the smell. What promised a partition, waiting to display or to disclose her art, is just one wall of a tarnished shelter. Mire Lee leaves ample room for visitors, but it is stifling enough all the same. The skylit floor that so opened up last year for Kapwani Kiwanga has become confining, doubling the museum walls and then some. Just entering, through two sets of vertical plastic blinds, should let you know.

Once inside, you may have an overpowering urge to leave. Two pits in the floor hold the very blood and guts of art. One sculpture, like her Endless House at the Venice Biennale, looks like oversized intestines starved for a meal. It really might take you in. The other could be a whole body, threateningly large, but flayed and left to die. I thought that I could make out a penis, but after that you are on your own.

Each sculpture is part of or subject to a machine. It drips its thick white goo into the pits, where small rods churn the mixture as best they can. It leaves its dark stains on the slick walls and its odor of gelatin, silicone, plaster, and oil in the air. It may have you in need of fresh air. Then again, you may hesitate to leave, despite yourself. This is after all material for thought and for art.

Like Sue de Beer before her, the Korean artist takes her title from a book by Julia Kristeva that gives voice to depression, the French French writer's included. As a theorist with roots in psychoanalysis, she has much in common with Jacques Lacan, but with less post-structuralist jargon and a greater openness to art. Art, she writes, can "bypass complacency," and beauty can be sad, because it "is inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning." (Think of the ephemeral in, say, the constant motion of a machine.) It returns her to the tradition of Sigmund Freud—for whom depression was "melancholia," the body was inescapable, and disgust was a way of distancing oneself from desires and fears. Kristeva gives her longest chapter to the stark nudity of Hans Holbein and his Dead Christ in the Tomb.

Minimalism this is not, but it does have Post-Minimalism's bodily presence and fears, from Eva Hesse to the present. Is this pretentious as well as disgusting? Maybe so, but the machine and the body take many forms. Off to the side, a video has abstract shapes, artificial materials, or bodily forms in motion, and I hesitate to say which. (I thought first of walruses.) But then I was inside, and the remaining barriers were at least in part my own.

Lee's environment is hardly paradise, but then what is? A seventy-foot mural in the lobby gallery shows Eden itself as an unruly place—enough to accommodate Lilith, Adam's first wife in myth. A "she-demon" who raised his children while refusing to grant him supremacy, she has no place in the Bible, but she does turn up in The Original Riot, by Wynnie Mynerva. Born on the outskirts of Lima, in Peru, Mynerva relishes a spoiled paradise, with lush brushwork to match. Not that one can make out a story or, for that matter, count the characters. But, hey, it's a jungle out there.

Going soft

Born to Russian Jews in Buenos Aires, Marta Minujín had a conventional arts education and started her career conventionally enough, but then late modern convention called for destroying painting as we know it and casting aside its materials. She got to work with Albert Greco, one of the country's leading artists, and adopted his thick surface, dark palette, and sobriety, but in lacquer, pigment, and glue. Soon, though, she lightens up, in busy abstraction with bright colors and a touch of Surrealism. Let the party begin. This was the 1960s, when mayhem and a party had to include free love. She made her first soft sculpture in 1963 from, sure enough, a mattress.

Her sculpture in Times Square, for the full show's first week or so, is a return to her roots—or maybe rootlessness. She has lived in Central Park as well as Argentina and Washington, D.C. Her New Museum installation took a full floor for its many passages, enough to disorient anyone. Her retrospective, her first in New York, has an immersive room as well. If Yayoi Kusama can have people lining up around the block for her vacuous "infinity rooms," surely Minujín deserves the same. To my mind a soul mate, Pipilotti Rist, has two Chelsea galleries, to pour her body out.

Soft sculpture returns to Minujín's roots in other ways as well. It connects to everything that she has done, however hard and firm. First, it supplies the motifs and materials. Its broad stripes blend, well, seamlessly into the show's second series, for all-over painting in collage. There she cuts the strips from mattresses, without a hint of folk art or quilting. As one title has it, it is her Soliloquy of Mixed Emotions.

Second, it relates art to the body, hers or yours. She returned to painting in 1975 for Frozen Sex. A self-portrait is almost Cubism, but in shades of pink. Third, it verges on performance, like her stay in the park, and hers began with "happenings" (or, as she sometimes had it, "kidnappenings"), in conjunction with Alan Kaprow and Robert Rauschenberg, who shared her interest in collaboration and dance. Of course, she kept her sense of humor and, like the soft sculpture, invited one in. Opening events for Frozen Sex, at what is today the Americas Society, included a strip tease.

Last, it is political. Minujín could have better timing, but she moved back home in 1975, just in time for a military coup, and she responded with "Toppled Monuments." Franz Kafka's America greets immigrants with only a sword in place of the torch in the Statue of Liberty. Her Liberty is merely lying down, perhaps for a well-earned rest. Where there is destruction, there must also be building, and she created an entire Parthenon of Books— in Buenos Aires and again in Germany, on the site of Nazi book burnings. In photos from 1985, she and Andy Warhol trade ears of corn in payment for the Latin American debt.

Not that all is despair. She also built a Tower of Babel of books, and she likes the babble. She calls a strip collage Endemic, War, and 1000 Other Things. She could be barely able to grasp the horrors, but she is still joking. She is also communicating. You could step right into her old-fashioned phone booth, or Minuphone, back in 1969 and place a call. It turned out psychedelic sounds and colors, but you could still come with her afterward to Soft Gallery for a drink.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Karyn Olivier and Dana Powell ran at Tanya Bonakdar through July 28, 2023, Mire Lee at the New Museum through September 27. Marta Minujín ran at the Jewish Museum through March 31, 2024, Pipilotti Rist at Hauser & Wirth through January 13 and at Luhring Augustine through February 3. A related review looks at Minujín at the New Museum.