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Tossing and Turning
John Haberin New York City
Kathy Ruttenberg and Elizabeth Glaessner
Siobhan Liddell and Linda Matalon
How often have you tossed, turned, and paced through a sleepless night only to greet with dismay the dawn? Kathy Ruttenberg could have anyone afraid of the sun.
A wild and wooly exhibition may put on display her fantasies or her fears, assuming that one can tell them apart. Ruttenberg works in ceramics, a medium long associated more with craft than art, while refusing almost anything resembling craft. She takes on gender roles as well, with a woman's body just barely under control, and she is hardly alone. Elizabeth Glaessner is only the latest to place it front and center in painting, while Siobhan Liddell and Linda Matalon in works on paper and assemblage offer a reminder of how the gender and the body became pressing issues in the first place. As they say in politics, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Just take care to step out of the shadows without standing in its way. 
Good day sunshine
Dawn for Kathy Ruttenberg comes sooner than you ever dreamed, with "Sunshine at Midnight." It brings with it, though, an out-of-control cast of characters and a whole new day. They may stop just sort of cheap entertainment, but temptation of every kind is part of the show. Trees stand tall, while animals with human faces circle them in an infinite or futile dance. Autumn leaves and spring flowers spread outward from the branches. Besides, if sunshine begins at midnight, you may yet get in a few hours sleep.
Already in 2018, Ruttenberg had some of the liveliest New York summer sculpture, along Broadway on the Upper West Side, but with its share of anxiety, too. With In Dreams Awake, a woman sprang from or was swallowed up by a tree, before finding herself upside down on the ground with the world on her feet. Atlas may bear the world on his shoulders, in the art deco landmark by Lee Lawrie in Rockefeller Center, but Ruttenberg handles it deftly, if only for the summer or the night. She may have been celebrating the power of dreams or just making the best of insomnia. Her title could have been a shout-out to Delmore Schwartz and his famed short story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibility," or just to folk tales with their own moral demands. Now she is wide awake and on her feet.
The real threat may be to men, if only in her wildest dreams. A young woman holds the sun, proudly, between her hands and above her head. In other works, it stands in for the head of a slippery swimmer and crowns her overgrowth of brown hair. She has it bad, with a tree perched on her head, like an ill-fitting hat, but a young man has it worse. The moon shines down from the treetops without piercing the darkness, but only on him. At least she has an abundance of rocks, earth, animals, and vegetation at her feet.
That includes the yellow flowers growing from his back while she waves a hand in scorn or belated blessing. Scarier still, he lies on his back in a bed of flowers, sliced open with two broad cuts. Who knows what to call his blood-red stuffing in place of functioning organs, other than art? Still, he is a decent enough companion and a formidable adversary. He gets a stag's head and a muscular stance now and then, while holding a cord embedded in her back. I hesitate to call it a leash.
Craft is everywhere, with tapestry and quilting as well as ceramics, with particular acclaim for the messiest clay firing. Like Arlene Shechet, Ruttenberg celebrates gender parity and diversity, while bridging the gap between porcelain and a woman's life. I cringed a bit when I heard that the opening would feature more of the same. Still, an adventurous gallery makes the most of a decent trend with a sprawling exhibition. It extends to the backyard, where one can finally get to know a plainly human cast. Yet the mythic wins out even here with, at last, some relief.
The woman does not look all that much like the artist, but is she an alter ego nonetheless? The couple face one another on the garden wall, drawn rather than sculpted, with a tree between them and 3D apples on the ground. They could stand for temptation in Eden or just the distance in a dysfunctional relationship. Still, a rug with its own floral drawing leads to a fountain—a life-size tree from which water lands in the woman's mouth. Back inside, a cut into her chest reveals a darker woods, and never mind if one cannot see the forest for the trees. Ruttenberg is a busy artist, and one advantage of being awake at night is not having to quit.
Her head above water
Elizabeth Glaessner can still keep her head above water, barely. Fortunately, there is a lot of her to submerge, and she might well feel at home underwater at that. She may be about to find out. She may not be about to discover any time soon how much of her ungainly limbs is under her control—or, for that matter, which limbs are truly hers. Still, her half-human state accords with her half-animal resources. Besides, the men in her life have it worse.
Blue Recluse could describe someone forced to go it alone or happier that way, but is the woman truly alone? She faces front, knees bent and legs spread wide, to claim as much space and dignity as she can. She may, though, need every bit of available space, physical and mental. 
That body of water may be no more than a fishtank, with her as the beleaguered specimen, and she might quickly butt her head against the top if she tries to stand. Already, her skin matches the blue of the water, as if she had already succumbed to the cold or merged with her surroundings. It seems only right that Glaessner works with stained and poured paint.
One can see why someone may find her an interesting specimen, skin tone aside. Like all Glaessner's women, she has unnaturally long limbs. Another is Galatea on Stilts. An extra pair of legs pops out from her butt, like those of a spider—unless, that is, someone else is hiding behind her back. They also broaden at her feet, bringing home, as for Mary Helena Clark, her animal nature. Her contortions alone might belong to a primate other than a woman. Others in the show cavort with horses, although none of them gets a free ride.
All come in neon highlights and cartoon colors, akin to fantasies of a woman's body in contemporary art by Jordan Kasey, Ivy Haldeman, and others. Their only half-natural features are faces. "Animalistic" has overtones of sexuality, and most, too, come paired with men. You may remember them as lustful or loving, but do not be too sure, not when a horse sheds testicles like laying eggs. While the men reach out, the woman hang back, with poses that bring out their helplessness or languor, and one burns an hourglass into her skin. Still, they have knowing eyes.
Are they really Glaessner? In a show called "Phantom Tail," she says that she found herself with a tail bone as a child. Then again, I hesitate to trust her, and that could hardly count as a phantom limb. Her confession might be no more than a continuation of her art. Galatea, of course, was Pygmalion's marble that came to life. This, though, is her art, and its men do not have much of choice.
One male hangs upside down as a woman slyly looks on. The creature on his shoulders could be an infant or a monkey. Women are more productive—like one who has just given birth to a tiny adult, who in turn gives birth to another like himself, and so on. Another woman holds a man in her arms like the dead Jesus in a Pietà, who in turn grasps another limp figure in his arms, etcetera, etcetera. If this is self-reflexive and then some, it is also self-aware. It may take that to stay above water and to keep making art.
Nothing to hide
Siobhan Liddell and Linda Matalon have nothing to hide. Yet both leave a great deal invisible or unspoken, as a reminder of the "gay plague" that many would rather forget. Liddell sets out a mere stack of paper, little different from what goes into an envelope, a printer, or the trash—the sheets only a tad larger and a little less glaring in their whiteness. She keeps them not quite lined up, with a broad circular hole running down the middle, so that you can see each and every one. Matalon may leave barely a trace on paper or thrust eight legs up against the wall and in your face. The legs are coarse, brown, and raw.
These are "Fragments," curated by Ksenia M. Soboleva, but of what? Matalon's legs are obviously dismembered and spaced just enough to disturb their falling into neat pairs. Their wax, wire, gauze, and glue become the materials of her drawings as well. She uses tracing paper, and these are human as much as literal traces. The legs, tawdry and bare, are her Goodbye to All My Drag Queens. She has had to say goodbye often.
Liddell deals in physical traces, too. The five-inch stack's refusal to line up lends plain paper a greater sculptural presence—and just what keeps adjacent sheets slightly apart? Bending over, one can see bits of white monofilament, a plastic used as fishing line but here as lumpy as Matalon's legs. The holes also translate into circles on hand prints a few feet away. Their physical presence looks all the more fragile as a result. So does misshapen bronze once one realizes that gaps between bodies served as molds.
Sure, sure, there is nothing new here. Palm prints with circles have appeared in art and online, as purported universals or last year's meme. The glop between sheets of paper or the legs call up unpolished ceramics seemingly everywhere in art now. Proud or disfigured bodies, press releases with references to Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva, politics, you name it—you may have seen them all. When "Greater New York," the series meant for emerging artists at MoMA PS1, devoted its 2015 version to the AIDS crisis, it seemed stuck in a time warp. What, though, if the whole point is to insist on the forgotten and ignored?
Liddell was companion to Nan Goldin not long after East Village art, although I could not have told you that. Matalon is new to me, and they have not exhibited together before. Yet they could pass for a single artist. Both worked largely in the 1990s, and they do not divide simply between one's assemblage and another's drawing. Liddell works with negative spaces, within and between bodies, Matalon with the thing itself. Yet even that is open to question, between one's tactile objects and the other's wispy drawings.
Both trade in traces and fragments, as evanescent as human lives. Diversity in art can come off as a smug lecture, if maybe a needful one. Not this time. Are Liddell's glass rods more polished versions of Matalon's legs? You decide, and you decide, too, when the crisis will finally be over. The gender and culture wars are not.
Kathy Ruttenberg ran at Lyles & King through April 30, 2022, Elizabeth Glaessner at P.P.O.W. through March 19, Siobhan Liddell and Linda Matalon at Candice Madey through April 16.