Pieter Hugo

YOSSI MILO GALLERY
525 West 25th Street
February 25–April 10

Pieter Hugo, Omo Omeonu, Enugu, Nigeria, 2008, color photograph, 68 x 68". From the series “Nollywood,” 2008–2009.

Taking pictures in Nigeria is a tricky business: Between a public savvy about the monetary value of commercial photography and a police force leery of external documentarians, one can spend weeks in Lagos or Abuja and come up short. This is not the case for the Johannesburg-based artist Pieter Hugo, whose previous work offers thematic investigations of the quotidian and extraordinary in this vibrant but poorly understood region.

The photographs on display in “Nollywood,” his latest exhibition, recall film stills but are neither narrative nor cinematic. Instead, these works offer carefully staged portraits of familiar archetypes and tropes within the entertainment industry, and all were shot in the southeastern Igbo city of Enugu. Hugo focuses on mundane buildings, streetscapes, and minor dramas fused with local iconography, including ghosts and witches or Yoruba deities. With its mash-up of digital technology and the cheek-by-jowl cosmopolitan anachronism of the city, Nollywood is a thoroughly idiosyncratic—and twenty-first-century—form.

One will find, then, a double dose of representation: Hugo framing and picturing his actors with the help of a noted local production designer, and the actors in turn creating a mediated, ambiguously documentary vision of the megastate. While the individual characters that inhabit these pictures—from a curvaceous sailor to a sword-wielding “little person”—are front and center, the real treat is the assemblage of smaller details, such as a hand-scrawled billboard, the juxtaposition of equatorial jungle and dilapidated walk-up apartments, and battered oil drums, which give texture to the bewildering landscape that is Nollywood’s stage.

— Ian Bourland

“The Storyteller”

ANNA-MARIA AND STEPHEN KELLEN GALLERY AT PARSONS THE NEW SCHOOL FOR DESIGN
66 Fifth Avenue
January 29–April 9

Mounir Fatmi, Save Manhattan 02, 2009, VHS tapes, glue, table, dimensions variable. Installation view.

The somewhat infelicitous title of this exhibition—one half expects a wizened old raconteur to greet visitors—belies a nuanced attention to the iterations and variations of narrative in contemporary art. Curated by Claire Gilman and Margaret Sundell (as part of Independent Curators International), “The Storyteller” earns part of its considerable merit by recasting preconceptions that underlie this most ancient of practices, from the basic anecdote to our grander notions of history as shaped by aesthetics. If the latter endeavor has, since postmodernism, seemed a kind of hubristic folly, “The Storyteller”’s carefully chosen components suggest that history is less than the sum of its fitful parts, and that this fragmented partiality need not preclude an enriched contemplation of both its commendable and more ignominious chapters.

The majority of the works address the darker moments: vicissitudes of war, conflict, labor, trade. The watercolor and ink sketches of Steve Mumford’s Iraq, 2003–2005, address the spotty media coverage of the Iraq war—not through an attempt at some comprehensive chronicle, but precisely in the works’ schematic plainness. Joachim Koester’s Kant Walks, 2003, lends visual form to individual subjectivity, reimagining, in a series of large photographs, Immanuel Kant’s view on his morning ambulations through his Prussian hometown of Königsberg. A video installation by the Missing Books collective proffers another imagined itinerary: that of the Argentine journalist Rodolfo Walsh, twenty minutes before he was murdered on the street in Buenos Aires in 1977 for his opposition to the military junta. Juxtaposed with a mosaic-like stack of Walsh’s previously unpublished volume Un oscuro día de justicia (A Dark Day of Justice), the installation transposes some of its energies into the language of abstraction: the implicit and unspoken presence of a narrative stifled and suppressed. If Hito Steyerl’s single-channel video Journal, 2007, gives voice to a personal narrative of the Bosnian war, Michael Rakowitz’s multimedia installation Return, 2006–, brings a more collective history (of the Iraqi embargo and family business) literally alive inside the gallery walls, in the form of a living date palm.

— Ara H. Merjian

Tania Bruguera

NEUBERGER MUSEUM OF ART
Purchase College, State University of New York, 735 Anderson Hill Road
January 28–April 11

Tania Bruguera, Untitled (Havana, 2000), 2000, milled sugar cane, black-and-white monitor, DVD, DVD player, dimensions variable.

Tania Bruguera is a name familiar to anyone tuned in to the international biennial circuit. Less known are her actual installations, which are conceived in and for specific environments and are, in many cases, transient. As the recipient of the first Neuberger Exhibition Prize, Bruguera is now the focus of a painstakingly installed solo show that assembles more than a decade of her work for the first time.

“On the Political Imaginary,” however, is no mere rehearsal, and the avowedly committed character of the projects therein is augmented, but not lost, in translation. While performances that rely heavily on foreign constituencies, such as Displacement, 1998–99, or Untitled (Moscow)/Trust Workshop, 2007, do not benefit from the participation of the Cubans or Russians around whom they were conceived, they gain new life here when placed in dialogue with other works and with the museum itself––a juxtaposition with a Kongo figure from the Brooklyn Museum, and a wall cut that physically links the Moscow piece to another gallery.

The vitality of these works also owes much to the presence of live performers who inhabit the installations, their presence at once subtle yet critical to the success of an intentionally dialogic process of display and spectatorship. There is certainly a political leitmotif running through the installations, but the works never feel didactic, inviting their participants to make choices and draw their own conclusions, to act out the democratic impulses that course through the work rather than ingesting ideas wholesale. While it is easy of late to be cynical about the social potential of contemporary art (relationality, performance, “politics”), Bruguera’s balance of erudition and viscerality might make a believer out of you.

— Ian Bourland

Carol Bove

KIMMERICH
50 White Street
March 5–May 1

View of “Carol Bove,” 2010. From front to back: Untitled, 2009; Untitled (lamp), 2010; Harlequin, 2010; La Traversée difficile (The Difficult Crossing), 2008–2010; Touch Tree, 2008; Harlequin, 2010.

Identifying Carol Bove’s particular approach to the found object is no easy task. The Brooklyn-based artist plunders a broad range of styles and periods, yet her aesthetic somehow remains unmistakable. And even when the items she displays are of entirely natural origin, their manner of presentation expresses the refined imposition of a singular style. Yes, there are cultural codes to be cracked in Bove’s careful constructions and juxtapositions, but it’s their exquisite formal exactitude that captivates. To use abalone shells, peacock feathers, and delicate beaded curtains might suggest an unfortunate lapse into New Age sappiness, but Bove channels even these familiar models of conventional beauty toward unexpectedly subtle and allusive ends. Here making judicious use of this new gallery’s handsome vintage interior, the artist exudes quiet sangfroid.

Several works in the show force materials ravaged by various strains of decay into conjunction with newer, sleeker structures. The results generate an engaging visual-tactile friction and initiate an interrogation of the processes of intellectual historicization and physical entropy that poses some intriguing questions about the ways in which we communicate individual and cultural importance. Countless artists have made knowing use of the pedestal as a signifier of “museum-worthy” status, but few have produced such fine-tooled or individual bases as those here. (In the likes of Untitled, 2009, and The Oracle, 2010, they begin to resemble living things themselves in their reactive idiosyncrasies, mirroring the organic patterns of branches or veins.) Weaving the made and the grown together with rare sensitivity, Bove delves deep into the interaction of appearance, taste, and meaning.

— Michael Wilson

Michel François

BORTOLAMI
510 West 25th Street
February 25–May 1

Michel François, Interface Pavillion (detail), 2010, glass, steel, Aquasoft modeling clay, 111 x 99 x 119".

The glass case beloved of old-world museological practice has long since been reclaimed by artists as a strategic presentational device. When a project calls for that special kind of isolation, nothing else carries quite the same authority—even when the tone is ironic. For the latest entry in his “Pavilion Interface” series, Belgian artist Michel François performed—in private—inside an enormous glazed box installed in the center of the gallery. What remains of his action is a large block of multicolored Plasticine from which parts have been scooped out. The block sits on the floor in the middle of the box, while the excised portions have been sliced up and stuck around its walls. From a distance, the effect is of smears of paint; close-up, the substance of the slices becomes apparent.

If vitrine-based works by Damien Hirst—in particular, the likes of A Thousand Years, 1990—come to mind when looking at this work, what François has set out to do feels, in spite of its reported performative element, quieter and more concerned with materials and their creative transformation than do the Brit’s morbid tableaux. Plasticine is the first—and often only—“sculptural” material that most people handle and thus makes an effective metaphor for the creative process. The embodiment of malleability, the modeling clay also stands in for the playful imagining and retooling of meaning. François is an established champion of the ephemeral; here, in combining that transience with an allusion to permanence and preservation—however well worn in itself—he has produced something deceptively serious and entirely disarming.

— Michael Wilson

“Beyond Participation: Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida in New York”

THE BERTHA AND KARL LEUBSDORF ART GALLERY AT HUNTER COLLEGE
S.W. Corner of 68th Street and Lexington Avenue
February 4–May 1

Hélio Oiticica, Cosmococa—Programa in progress, CC1 Trashiscapes, 1973, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

If Hélio Oiticica’s installations offer a utopian, playful retreat from the outside world, such an ambient space is even more inviting in the nook of an institutional facility such as Hunter College’s Leubsdorf Art Gallery. Curated by Jocelyn Meade Elliott, “Beyond Participation” showcases the artistic collaboration between filmmaker Neville D’Almeida and Oiticica in New York that spawned five installations, of which Cosmococa—Programa in progress, CC1 Trashiscapes, 1973, is on display, alongside D’Almeida’s 1967 film Jardim de Guerra (Garden of War) and reproductions of Oiticica’s notebooks.

Oiticica initially sought out D’Almeida’s friendship after being impressed by the geometric elements in Jardim de Guerra. Because the stark movie lacks subtitles and is overwhelmed by the loud sounds emitted from the piece in an adjacent room, the film functions more as an archival element than an immersive experience.

The main attraction is the sensorial Cosmococa, which invites spectators to lounge on large cushions and use nail files, as images and music fill the dark space. Inside Cosmococa, viewers see projected photographs, on opposing walls, of Luis Buñuel on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, actor Luis Fernando Guimarães wearing Oiticica’s Parangolé 30 Capa 23 M’Way Ke, and a Frank Zappa album cover, while Jimi Hendrix, Brazilian forró music, and street sounds blare. The work’s title collapses the terms cosmos and coca. The wordplay is foregrounded by lines of cocaine that trace and efface the projected images, interventions that blur the line between claiming and defacing the artist’s influences.

Although such an environment feels like a carefree experiment, Oiticica’s notebook Ntbk 1/73, 1973, prescribes a surfeit of aesthetic elements for the work—an invented story, stray voices, street noise, Hendrix, forró, and drugs—enumerating the artist’s influences and demonstrating the labor that generated his vision.

— Lori Cole

Jessica Jackson Hutchins

LAUREL GITLEN (SMALL A PROJECTS)
261 Broome Street
February 21–March 28

Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Disgraced Skater, 2010, glazed ceramic, 17 3/4 x 16 3/4 x 20".

There is much more than art at stake in Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s work. Her mixed-media sculptures, prints, and works on paper, currently on view in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, as well as two solo exhibitions at Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) and Derek Eller Gallery, radiate an intoxicating experimental energy. Hutchins is interested in pure, bare life––in pain and ecstasy. Likewise, her sculptural protagonists are often sports heroes like Tiger Woods and Daryl Strawberry, and she tells their stories with a Sophoclean intensity manifested in a ferocious risk taking and a curious, visionary combination of organic matter and personal mementos.

At the center of Hutchins’s show at Gitlen is Disgraced Skater (all works 2010), wherein a humped red mass slumps over a gnarled, spindly appendage. The sculpture began as a drawing executed over a newspaper image (which is included in this exhibition in an untitled collage). Dark glazes stream across the surface of the sculpture, pulling the eye downward. Hutchins uses the velocity of materials––paint, plaster, and ceramic glaze––to swell emotionality. One sees the influence of Chinese landscape painting as she shifts the scale of nature to reflect human pathos.

Hutchins uses objects as catalysts for other works. The collages Brown Print Blue Sky and Kitchen Table Constellation began as prints created on the surface of an old wooden dining table that the artist sawed and carved into a printing plate. For nearly ten years, Hutchins has created social space within her work by incorporating usable ceramic cups and bowls. These detachable vessels wait calmly on mountainous forms, as in Leaning Figure and Last Unicorn. In Hutchins’s work, the promise of succor is never forsaken for the fleeting enjoyment of a formal argument.

A related exhibition is on view at Derek Eller Gallery, 615 West Twenty-seventh Street, until March 27.

— Stephanie Snyder

Carl Fudge

RONALD FELDMAN FINE ARTS
31 Mercer Street
February 20–April 3

Carl Fudge, Transom, 2010, screenprint collage on mulberry paper, 42 1/2 x 30 1/4".

Carl Fudge’s latest series of works takes as its touchstone the prints of Edward Wadsworth, a prominent member of the British Vorticists, who used the hard-edged geometries of machinery, technology, and war as inspiration for an aggressive, avant-garde style meant to catapult England into the twentieth century. Wadsworth’s art incorporated docked steamships painted in what was termed dazzle camouflage—sharp, geometric contrasts meant to baffle enemy range finding during World War I.

Alternating between large-scale screenprint collages and smaller woodcuts, Fudge has stripped Wadworth’s prints to a more reductive palette (black paired with a single other color, often white) and schematized the original imagery using computers. A few works—such as Aground, 2010—remain quite faithful to their originals. Even as the print doubles and distends imagery from Wadsworth’s Liverpool Shipping, 1918, it retains a recognizably representational scene, complete with stylized dockworkers. Other works, like the mesmerizing Transom, 2010, distill imagery to a tighter economy of abstracted shapes. Some of the least representational prints hew to an underlying grid in a partially ordered tessellation of shapes, while others betray a more chaotically fractured field of forms.

Unlike many of his peers (Vitaly Komar, for example, similarly represented by this gallery), Fudge appeals to the (ideologically suspect) art of a notable modernist not, it seems, to rework or ironize political resonances or the failed project of avant-garde utopias. Rather, these prints constitute a decidedly formal venture. The “dazzle” of Fudge’s work blithely appears to sidestep the insidious origins of the term’s original application in World War I. That possible ingenuousness aside, the crisp, formal sophistication of these prints and woodcuts mitigates the murkiness of their (art-)historical engagement. The delicate kozo and mulberry paper of the larger works offers a striking contrast to the rough-and-tumble imagery printed on them. Does that contrast rescue Fudge’s conceit, lifting it above the historical fray to which it might otherwise be held accountable? The prints’ formal sophistication raises such questions as much as it skirts them.

— Ara H. Merjian

Dan Walsh

PAULA COOPER GALLERY
521 W 21 Street
February 19–March 27

Dan Walsh, Days and Nights—Nights, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 4' x 20' 9" overall.

“The exhibition includes six to eight new paintings.” A curiously undecided announcement for a gallery press release, but perhaps forgivable in the context of an artistic approach so clear and careful that it is better discussed in terms of gradual shift than of sudden breakthrough. Working slowly through numerous variations on a few established themes, Dan Walsh remains focused on geometric abstraction but invests it with just enough humanity to keep formalist ossification at bay. So even while the artist sticks doggedly to repetition and patterning as picture-making devices, he allows a subtle but consistently discernible imperfection to infuse his art with life. Walsh’s style is at once highly systematic and ever so slightly offhand, displaying a simultaneous commitment to conceptual-minimal flawlessness and the wobbles of traditional production.

All the paintings in this exhibition, “Days and Nights,” employ brushstrokes arranged into lines, crosses, squares, and grids. Some of them have the look of fabric designs or circuit diagrams, but there is also a suggestion of improvisational doodling, of responding directly to the proportions of the canvas or simply making use of whatever paint was at hand, as if the artist were determined to finish off one color before moving on to the next. Walsh likes to employ simple layering and translucent effects, allowing his materials to retain their unique properties while bending them to his own project. In several of the works, these techniques give rise to pleasing optical effects; in others, they simply are what they are. And in the multipanel work for which the show is named, they simply chart a painter’s progress.

— Michael Wilson

Anish Kapoor

SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street
October 21–March 28

Anish Kapoor, Memory 2008, Cor-Ten steel, 47 x 29 x 15'. Installation view.

The past, we are told, is another country. We can access it from some directions, not from others. We lose our bearings, feel frustrated, retrace our steps. Such is Memory, 2008, Anish Kapoor’s latest attempt to perplex viewers. Constructed with twenty-four tons of Cor-Ten steel, his site-specific oval sculpture looks––from architectural blueprints––like an oversize (albeit squished) basketball. Visitors can never see Memory in its entirety: Squeezed between white walls, it can only be approached obliquely. From one entry, its burnished “skin” invites us to touch it, while from the other entrance, one can glimpse inside its hollow interior––its tunnel-like core much like the rabbit hole Alice toppled into.

Kapoor calls Memory a “mental sculpture,” and its relationship to the architecture of the museum is obvious: stressing somewhat ominous tendencies within Frank Lloyd Wright’s soaring, spiraling landmark. In the quintessentially modernist whitewashed walkways––whose walls generally serve as receptacles for art––culture gazing is a communal activity. Wherever we stand in the rotunda, we can be observed. The building has few secluded nooks, so that when privacy is achieved, it feels strangely clandestine. The deliberately obfuscating nature of Memory––disguised behind false partitions, beckoning us between barriers––underscores this sense of the personal as tied to subterfuge: Memory lures us toward it, but try to explore it intimately and security guards wave us away, and roped barricades trip us up. With Kapoor’s hollow artwork we see less than we want but perceive more about institutional authority than we think.

— Zehra Jumabhoy

Pablo Bronstein

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
October 6–April 18

Pablo Bronstein, First and Second Installations of Precolumbian Objects at the Metropolitan Museum, 2009, ink and gouache on paper, 61 3/8 x 98 3/4".

The Metropolitan keeps a substantial part of its contemporary display in an awkward position: a horseshoe-shaped suite of galleries between the first and second floors. On the floor plan of the visitor’s guide, the area becomes a ghost hovering at the rear of the museum, and even the physical presence of the gallery hugging the south stairwell gives an impression of instability: Its ceiling is rutted with runners for moving walls and lights, underscoring the transience of the shows its hosts.

Pablo Bronstein has used his time in that gallery to show a series of large-scale ink and gouache drawings that reflect on museum architecture and the notions of art and display it facilitates. First and Second Installation of Precolumbian Objects at the Metropolitan Museum (all works 2009) comprises two arrangements of sculptures on preposterously ornate, three-tiered walls, with sphinxes and hulking male caryatids that distort the room’s scale and balance. It comes off as a smirk at the Met’s Greek and Roman galleries, the upper stretches of which are adorned with heterogeneous fake columns and functionless squares of crossed bars. Those very designs appear in Six Affordable Neo-Georgian Futures for the Metropolitan Museum as decorative patterns on architectural drawings of squat, conjoined facades expanding on the Met’s present shape. The plans, laid horizontally on tables in the center of the room, seem to speculate on what might have happened if Philippe de Montebello had been succeeded by Prince Charles. In the gallery’s back corner, The Departure of the Temple of Dendur from Egypt imagines an epically oversize version of the Met’s prized shrine being carted out of the desert by horses and slaves. As the viewer approaches the drawing to examine the details of the tableau, set under an inky wash of lightless sky, he can’t help but glance left and notice, in the shadows behind a partition, a door marked STAFF ONLY. Accident or not, the juxtaposition precisely articulates the humor and tension that make the exhibition strong—the fantasies of romance and grandeur prompted by the museum, and their abrupt encounter with its mundane realities.

— Brian Droitcour