"Make My Skin Crawl" (20011) (all images courtesy Tally Beck Contemporary)

(Liu Dao) or island6, a Shanghai-based international collective of “multimedia artists, performers, writers, curators and tech-geeks” personify the aspirations of contemporary China by skirting verboten political flashpoints and keeping their content short, sweet, flirtatious, erotic and electronic. Their new show at Tally Beck Contemporary in Manhattan’s Lower East Side uses LED lights against a mostly black background. They invoke French Concession influences endemic throughout old Shanghai. Sin City contains their signature 1930s “Boop-oop-a-Doop” Betty Boop aesthetics, personified by flickering displays of shimmying breasts, wind-blown skirts, strippers, pouty lip kisses, fervently touching toes and electronic scrawled lipstick-on-mirror confessions of tortured romantic entanglements. Shanghai, fondly referred to by the collective as the “Whore of the Orient,” doesn’t seem to promote many male figures except as occasional nefarious influences, a position they are proudly unapologetic about.

"The Sound of Leaves Departing From a Silent Tree" (2011)

“Make My Skin Crawl” (2011) eludes to the plight of aristocratic Russian émigrés vis- á-vis James Ivory’s film “The White Countess,” where Countess Sofia Belinskya works as a taxi dancer in a Shanghai bar. The work shows an enticing blond woman in a green dress carrying a red Chinese umbrella. “Love Lane Affair” (2011) is a sultry depiction of longing, loneliness and lust with a LED girl lying on her stomach kicking her heels and arching her body like a cat in heat. Admitting outright that China is a ”largely patriarchal and chauvinistic” country, the collective brings the nostalgic longings of a spurred mistress into electronic musings on a found antique mirror in “The Sound of Leaves Departing From a Silent Tree” (2011).

The most culturally perplexing piece “Poley Moley” (2011), is based on the lure to pack as many people as possible into a funeral by incorporating a pole dance striptease as part of the condolences. This outrageous staging, which is based on a real trend, believes the more people who show up at a deceased’s necropolis bash, the better their afterlife will be. Since 2000 it has become a very successful business tactic, so yes its true, Shanghai is still a slut.

However, island6 is not resting on their electronic laurels, but are thinking through the inherent nature of their medium. “Blossom Fever on Avenue Joffre” (2011) shifts the focus to the desert Bedouins of Saudi Arabia by using sand with a resin coating as its canvas. Four rose-pink hands unfurl and disappear, and the piece leans towards sculptural installation with LEDs as the accent, not the focus. This approach towards a more muted use of electronica continues with “Smoking Red Shoes” (2011), a rice paper collage with paper cuttings.

"Poley Moley" (2011)

Cutting into canvas, no matter what the medium and LED displays are not new here in the West. What is so soigné about island6 is their clever use of Shanghai’s colonial past to titillate, delight and sugar coat a nostalgic view that has seen, like the rejected mistress, better days as it morphs before our very eyes into the shinning pinnacle of the new Cathay.

Sin City at Tally Beck Contemporary (42 Rivington Street, Lower East Side, Mahattan) continue until March 11.

Kurt Tong, "Birdcage," digital c-print, 24 x 30 (all images courtesy Jen Bekman Gallery unless otherwise indicated)

The heart of a society is most open when dealing with death. Its spoken and unspoken fears and hopes, both for life and the afterlife, are embedded in rituals of remembrance and memorial. In China, this has taken the form of detailed objects made of Joss paper that are burned for the deceased. Since it’s believed that worldly possessions are relinquished when passing to the next realm, family members that have been left behind send objects for the next life in smoke, to sustain their loved ones until reincarnation. While this practice started with the burning of Joss paper money, it has transformed in contemporary times as a reflection of the growth of consumerism in China and the quest for modern material objects, even if the ritual itself remains largely unchanged. Kurt Tong has documented these Joss paper offerings in photographs, currently exhibited in his solo show In Case it Rains in Heaven at Jen Bekman Gallery.

Installation view of "In Case it Rains in Heaven" (photo by author)

Kurt Tong, "2 Million Dollars," digital c-print, 16 x 20

Officially, the burning of Joss paper is banned in China, but due to the establishment of the practice in memorial traditions, it is still tolerated. Traditionally decorated with seals, stamps and metallic paint, the paper money is burned at cemeteries and home ceremonies for the newly deceased, with some believing that it will allow the dead to live lavishly in high afterlife style, and others believing it can be used as a bribe to get reincarnated early. A stiff material made from bamboo, Joss paper has evolved into a medium for incredibly detailed objects of offering, from clothing and credit cards to cars and iPods. Tong has selected a group of these objects currently on sale and captured them on a black background, their colors and creases popping sharply against the darkness.

Kurt Tong, "Machine Gun," digital c-print, 16 x 20

The objects are all in cartoonish colors and a little absurd. While it is totally understandable why you’d want to equip your relatives with a mansion with a doorman, a Ferrari with a chauffeur and a machine gun in the netherworld, many of the objects are mundane. There’s a window air conditioning unit for your afterlife apartment (how depressing to think that even in death you will have to live without central air conditioning), and an umbrella in case it rains in heaven, per the exhibition title. Dentures and wheelchairs are practical offerings in case your ills and worldly pains are carried over to your next state.

Kurt Tong, "Dentures, Toothpaste and Toothbrush," digital c-print, 16 x 20

In Tong’s statement, he says that in 2006 “it was reported that paper prostitutes, viagra, condoms, ecstasy and gambling equipment were found outside of cemeteries” to be bought and burned. Although this resulted in a crack down on these more scandalous objects, you can still get a couple of servants to put in the fire. Other objects are purely status symbols, including a Louis Vuitton purse, maybe to carry all your Joss paper money. From this view, life after death seems like it will be a lot like life now, except with more potential for social mobility. Likely, these luxury objects are being offered to those for whom they were untouchable on Earth.

Still of the burning of the Joss paper objects (here a window unit) by Kurt Tong

All of the photographed objects were burned by Tong as an offering to his ancestors, and a video of the ritual is playing behind the front desk in Jen Bekman Gallery. (You can also watch it online.) Called “With love, from Earth to Heaven,” it is mesmerizing to watch the vibrant objects whither and flame away to ash. (I recommend turning down the distracting piano music and watching it in silence for the full effect.) There is a touching hope in the burning of the objects, hope that death can be something more wonderful than tragic. We all hope that people we have lost are in a better place, in a paradise where they can have what they want, even if it was something as simple as a plate of sushi.

Kurt Tong, "Electric Fan," digital c-print, 16 x 20

When Kurt Tong exhibited the In Case it Rains in Heaven photographs at Compton Verney in the UK in 2010, audience members were invited to cut images from magazines of what they would like sent to their deceased relatives, and also what they wanted for themselves in the next world. The responses included canine companions and golf clubs, along with stereos and expensive jewelry, the same mix of the domestic and extravagant found with the Joss paper objects. All these mass produced, consumer objects take on a deeply personal significance when used as memorials to the lives of the deceased, whether they are things they cherished or things they desired. What makes Tong’s photographs poignant, even in their simplicity, is that all these objects are haunted by the lives of people, and our earthly unease about what happens after this life, and what the weather will be like.

Kurt Tong, "Swimming Trunks, Goggles and Snorkel," digital c-print, 16 x 20

Kurt Tong: In Case it Rains in Heaven continues at Jen Bekman Gallery (6 Spring Street, Manhattan) through March 4.

Jung Lee, "Bordering North Korea # 15" (2007) (Courtesy of the artist and One & J Gallery, Seoul)

North Korea is so wacky they have their own calendar system, and it marks its centennial anniversary in 2012, the birthdate of the late Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. Dovetailing neatly with the recent passing of Übermeister Kim Jong-il, A Postcard From Afar: North Korea From A Distance, curated by Mark Feary, showcases the bull’s eye vision of Apex Arts unsolicited proposal program’s winning entry.

North Korea calls itself the Junche Republic (100). The 100 marks its centennial anniversary (2012), chosen because it is the 100th birthday of the late Kim Il-sung, the current leader Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. Feary’s curatorship asks eight artists to image what is going on behind its secretive borders. North Korea’s propaganda machine is so replete with Hollywood show-biz flash-in-the-pan razzle dazzle that it is cause for a movie within a movie, which is the real take away from this exhibit.

Peter Cave, "Kim Il-sung" (2011) (Courtesy of the artist and Arts Project Australia, Melbourne)

Eight artists were asked to envision “a state and culture that is shrouded in secrecy, being both the producer and victim of oppositional propaganda mechanisms.” The first thing Feary did was boldly approach a special art center in Melbourne, Australia that supports artists with “intellectual disabilities.” The residents were given standard photos of Kim Il-sung and Kim-Jong-il, display items compulsory in all houses and buildings inside North Korea. The residents were not told whom the pictures represented, a decidedly opposite approach of state supported propaganda painters in the DMZ. The conflicting tensions of the two portraits by Peter Cave highlight the backward alchemy of authority, image making and meaning stripped lean by the characters anonymity through their outrageous and hilarious decontextualization.

Magnus Bärtås’ short film “Madame and Little Boy” (2009) revolves around the chillingly true story of the 1978 kidnapping of South Korean film star Choi Eun-hee and her equally prominent ex-husband, the director Shin Sang-ok by North Korean master espionage handlers in Hong Kong. The couple, who were first sent to a gulag for five years for an attitude adjustment, were offered the deal of a lifetime by Kim Jong-il to make kitschy propaganda films for the motherland replete with an unlimited budget and resources. The only hitch was to proclaim publically they “defected.” The couple bit the bullet and no expense was spared to make “Pulgasari,” a 1985 action adventure thriller rivaling Godzilla, including importing technical wizards Teruyoshi Nakano and his crew from Toho studios who made the original Godzilla in arch-rival Japan. The crews were not told where they were going until their plane touched the forbidden tarmac.

Magnus Bärtås, "Madame & Little Boy" (2009) (Courtesy of the artist)

Once inside the DMZ the Japanese were so terrified of being abducted, just like the director whose orders they were following, they put their nose to the grindstone, churned out fire breathing behemoths and quickly high tailed it out of the country the minute Shin Sang-ok yelled, “It’s a wrap.” Bärtås even interviewed Choi-Eun-hee, who eventually escaped to Seoul, but her freedom is only the coda, not the main thrust of the tale. The stinging issue in this entire exhibit is the opposite of most curated shows — the reality of the absurdity of the story almost overwhelms the artists’ ability to convey it. It’s as if the 1960s cartoon characters Boris and Natasha from the Rocky and Bullwinkle the Moose show actually carried out their nefarious and dastardly deeds only to be curated and commented on some 40 years later at a special event in Tribeca.

The refreshingly simple photographic series Bordering North Korea 2005-2008 by Jung Lee shows a mesmerizing view of longing and natural terrain that cannot be touched because it stretches across a guarded and treacherous border. Apparently North Korea encourages border tourism, a vacuous and depleted theater of experience where one pays mightily and is escorted by guards to bleak, empty dining rooms and hotels for a glimpse of this forbidden terrain without the risk of being blown apart by a sniper or landmine.

Tony Garifalakis, "Leader of the Pack" ( 2011) (Courtesy of the artist)

This sense of the hidden covert also fits in with Tony Garifalakis’s special fabric, “The Hills Have Eyes” (2011) that embeds a pair of eyeballs into a rather ordinary camouflage pattern. Kim Jong-il also loved motorcycles and was probably the first North Korean biker, which led to Garifalakis “Leader of the Pack” (2011), a stitched and ornamented biker jacket.

This exhibit requires a copious amount of explanation as it uses facts that are publically available but little known to most Western audiences and creates a constructed realm of inquiry and annihilation. One of the last and most secretive places on earth, North Korea intrigues as it repels. To his credit the curator has remained virginal about setting foot inside his intended and only now after the ceremony and nuptials at Apex Art will he take the plunge and actually visit, in the flesh, the homeland of his intended.

A Postcard From Afar: North Korea From A Distance continues until March 10 at Apex Art (291 Church Street, Financial District, Manhattan).

Video projection at Boo-Hooray (all photos courtesy of the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

One of my biggest art regrets of 2011 was missing Boo-Hooray’s exhibition In All Our Decadence People Die, a show of zines and ephemera culled from anarcho-punk band Crass and their affiliates. So, when I heard about Artists’ Book Not Artists’ Book, I made sure to check out this publication house and gallery space on Canal Street.

Artists’ Book… is presented by Boo-Hooray and their neighbors 6 Decades Books. The show’s mission, as the title suggests, is to explore the fine line between whether a book is an artists’ book or not. I particularly enjoy the sarcastic and half-serious tone of Artists’ Book… Co-curator Johan Kugelberg poses an absurd question in the press release, “‘How does one tell the difference?’ the curator asks the curator.” Kugelberg specializes in the “not-artists’ books” while his cohort, 6 Decades’ Jeremy Sanders, is the artists’ books expert.

Aram Saroyan, "Coffee Coffee."

The artists’ books (or not) up at Boo-Hooray are varied in material and mission. With quite the gamut of artists — from Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg to Ed Templeton and Raymond Pettibon — Artists’ Book… displays a small history of postmodern book-based art. Punk’s influence on ephemeral art is nonstop and Boo-Hooray exemplifies this connection.

Some US President Richard Nixon-related covers from the "Artists' Book…" show (via boo-hooray.com)

Atop the gallery’s online store are the words “Quis Nos Operor Est Specialis” which loosely Google translates to “What We Do is Special,” sounding like a play on the American punk song “What We Do is Secret” by the Germs. Of course, punk and artists’ books have a long history of commingling, one just has to look at the work of Raymond Pettibon and Ed Templeton for proof.

Ed Templeton, "Teenage Smokers" and "Teenage Kissers."

Glass cases of books — open and closed — line the room at Boo-Hooray. As viewers are prohibited from getting hands-on with the items, their graphic qualities have to suffice. On one bare wall a video is projected, depicting a hand turning the pages of each book in the show. Looking much like an instructional video, this projection adds to the almost mocking tone of the exhibit. An “expert” on artists’ books dressed in a gorilla costume surveyed the room during the opening party. The pricelist for the show includes two columns in which the viewer can check whether the piece is an artists’ book or not.

"Art Cash" by Warhol, et. al.

While the curators pretend to have answers the whole point is that the viewer can never really tell whether an object is an artists’ book or not. What if the piece is commercially bound? Well, aren’t some artists’ books meant to be editioned? We even enter the realm of Duchampian irony (or just general tomfoolery) with Richard Prince’s “Catcher in the Rye,” which is simply a tampered copy of JD Salinger’s first edition with the artists’ name in place of Salinger’s. Still, some pieces, like “Art Cash” (pictured above) by Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, Robert Rauschenberg, Tom Gormley, Red Grooms and Marisol fall blatantly on the not side.

"Artists' Book Not Artists' Book" publication (image courtesy Boo-Hooray)

Of course, the exhibition has an accompanying publication by the same name, whether it’s an artists’ book or not, you decide. Artists’ Book… is an opportunity to see many generations and iterations of book art in conversation with one another. It’s also a lesson in not taking art too seriously.

Artists’ Book Not Artists’ Book runs through February 12 at Boo-Hooray (265 Canal Street, 6th Floor, Chinatown, Manhattan).

Edwin Dickinson, "Frances Foley" (1927) (image via babcockgalleries.com)

The other day, at a small cocktail party, a literary agent told me that he liked writers who knew and wrote for their audience. Our conversation soon sputtered out because I didn’t see any value in disagreeing with him. A few minutes later, a writer confided that he would keep working on a manuscript only if he could morally, ethically and esthetically justify what he was doing. For each of them the work itself could never be justification enough. It had to appeal to a larger power.

*   *   *

There are multitudes of not very good reasons why Edwin Dickinson will never be a mainstream artist like his neighbor in South Truro, Massachusetts, Edward Hopper. Dickinson is unpredictable, if not downright strange, in some of his subject matter. You can’t figure out what he is trying to get at, and you suspect that perhaps he didn’t either, which isn’t very comforting. He is not modern and urban the way Hopper is. He didn’t know who his audience was and he didn’t paint for it. As contrarian as Hopper also was, I find it harder to say that about him. Perhaps it is because it is so easy to betray Hopper’s paintings by turning them into little stories that you can stick on the work, like Post-It notes.

The Hopper we have repeatedly been given is dependable. The partitioned space in his work is secure. Dickinson’s space is unstable and dreamy. He does capricious things. He never developed a style, but worked in a number of ways, which strike us as having little do with each other. He did studio paintings based on observation and invention, and labored over them for years. Others he did outside in a single sitting. He could make an erotic nude using only different shades of gray.

Dickinson once said of the paintings he did on the spot, “They are not art. When I work outside, I am as out of control as if I were a drunken man.” Elsewhere he said: “The seen distortion is what the thought did to the sight.” He studied with William Merritt Chase and Charles Hawthorne, but he was never an “impressionist.” He painted the dilemma of trying to make order out of change and disruption, which is the world in front of us. His premier coup paintings remain fresh and even startling.

As the painter and printmaker Michael Mazur astutely pointed out; “Dickinson could easily destroy the coherence of a straightforward subject like the side of a house, as in his ‘Stone Tower’ (1941), with a smeared patch of paint that might stand for a tree or simply for itself. Only in the paintings and drawings of Willem de Kooning have I seen such spontaneous disregard for coherence within the struggle for coherence.”

Painters know and love his work, and that is important to remember. Alfred Leslie has talked about his paintings, and the one time he met him in the Cedar Bar. Catherine Murphy has been inspired by his drawings, which he made without using contour lines. Artists have kept his work alive. That is his audience.

*   *   *

Edwin Dickinson, "Locust Woods and Grass, Truro" (1934) (via babcockgalleries.com)

Lois Dodd and Sangram Majumdar are observational artists whose exhibitions opened while Edwin Dickinson in Retrospect was still up. Dodd, who is in her eighties, works strictly from observation, and does her painting in one shot, while Majumdar, who is in his thirties, combines observation and invention, and often scrapes everything down and starts over. Both deserve our attention, as well as oblige us to consider how we experience the everyday world, the one that the mass media and pop culture relentlessly try to distract us from.

Although Dodd and Majumdar are devoted to depicting what’s in front of them, to seeing everything they can about the ordinary worlds they inhabit, they not only approach painting and subject in their own way, but they also speak, in some sense, to the fast and slow sides of Dickinson. For all three artists, realism isn’t a style, but a commitment to seeing and seeing freshly.

Dodd and Majumdar reject the sterile authoritarianism of Frank Stella’s, “What you see is what you see.” They also know that observational painting and representational painting are not the same. They have many things in common, and they might even look similar, but the space in representational painting, particularly if it is based on a photograph, tends to be conventional and flattened. With neither external nor internal pressures, there is little or no space for the imagination to blossom. Reality’s waywardness has been, if not banned, at least held at bay.

*   *   *

Installation view of Lois Dodd's "New Panel Paintings" at Alexandre Gallery (via alexandregallery.com)

All the paintings in Dodd’s show were done in oil on Masonite panels. Most are vertically oriented and are around fifteen inches in height. The paint is thin and dry.  The subjects are taken from her immediate surroundings, which include rural Maine, a small town in New Jersey, and the view from her apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. They include flowers, a meadow, laundry hanging on a line, a path to a house. There is a painting of a window on a snowy day, and another done on a rainy day.

You have the feeling that nothing dramatic happens in Dodd’s life and that’s okay with her because she has no interest in telling stories. The way the work is painted,  as well as the subject matter, are candid and unequivocal. This doesn’t mean that her work is not mysterious and affecting.

Rather than setting up her views, Dodd finds subjects that are coterminous with the view she depicts. This is perhaps why she is best known for her window paintings, where the window frame is aligned with the painting’s edges. In these paintings, and the ones done of laundry on a line, the artist articulates a rectangle within a rectangle, evoking the idea of a painting being a flat thing, but refusing to deny depth. She wants both in her work.

Three works by Lois Dodd, (left to right) "Pink Geranium + Window Lock + Ochre Tree," "Dried Echinacea" and "Rainy Window" (all 2011) (via alexandregallery.com)

The window underscores a desire for order, but everything in Dodd’s window paintings conveys the inevitability of change, disruption, and disorder. In “Rainy Window” (2011), fat raindrops have gathered on the windowpane. Are we trying to look past them at the world outside? Can we look at the drops without seeing the tree branches just beyond? In “Pink Geranium + Window Lock + Ochre Tree” (2011), the artist brings together three focal points, each articulated in a different hue. Coherence might be desired, but it cannot be achieved.

*   *   *

Sangram Majumdar, "As if" (2012) (image via shfap.com)

Sangram Majumdar’s paintings are a synthesis of the observed and invented, and often involve setups. His work is psychologically charged, but not overtly dramatic.

Things have been scraped off the painting, leaving traces of their presence behind. It is as if the artist has equated seeing with layering — that in order to truly see what is there one must peel away the various coverings.

Majumdar's "smoke and mirror" (2012) (via shfap.com) (click to enlarge)

In “As if” (2012), the subject — a woman going through her black canvas travel bag — becomes a meditation on the dialogue between flatness and container. We are looking both at, and down at, her. A sharp underlying tension between volume and flatness runs along every seam and edge. The interlocking forms are abstract, even as each shape can be read as a thing. Planes and forms become tectonic plates pressing against each other. The balance achieved in the painting is momentary because soon all hell might break loose.

In “smoke and mirror” (2012), the artist orchestrates light and shadow, color (different hues of orange-reds and veronese-green), planes and inscribed lines to dance around each other, like seeing and memory. The artist puts all these formal collisions in the service of a moment in which a woman — is she dreaming or acting out — tries to put together a coat rack the wrong way. She holds a section of the rack aloft, with the top part backward, so that it resembles the gladiatorial weapon, the trident.

The coat rack’s feet and lower half divides the painting into a space on the left, in which the woman is standing half in light and half in shadow, and a plane on the right, which is painted and inscribed. By depicting this plane as a wooden screen on which we see a faded painting (or a painting fading), Majumdar underscores painting’s two dimensionality. The faded/fading painting relates the moment in the story of the Hindu deity Durga where she kills Asura. It is the source of Hinduism’s largest festival.

Majumdar equates painting’s site with sight, and identifies it as place of conflict between present and past, reality and dream, memory and desire. In “smoke and mirror,” he establishes a series of echoes and links from which there is no relief, no solution. His painting “fall into” (2011) focuses on one of the underlying questions running through the artist’s recent work: what do I throw out and what I keep?

Sangram Majumdar, "fall into" (2011) (via shfap.com)

It is a question that the best artists in each generation wrestle with, and the most ambitious ones are never able to answer. Jackson Pollock got rid of the image, but then tried to bring it back in. Majumdar, who was born in Calcutta, India in 1977 and emigrated to Phoenix, Arizona in 1991, recognizes that culturally speaking he has two sets of memories, and that disruption is inescapable. Their relationship is unstable, and each intrudes on the other, often when least expected.

In a world in which many of the most respected philosophers and thinkers are advancing that we live in a time that is post-feminist, post-black, post-I and post-studio, Majumdar knows that notions of commonality are, at best, a utopian illusion, a rehash of the paradigm of the universal that was endemic to modernism.

At the same time, Majumdar is equally aware that essentialism and the return to one’s roots were simplistic views rife with impossibilities. By refusing to become a tourist in his own past and culture, he pushes back against mainstream culture’s unspoken expectation that he should be a spokesman for his ethnicity and present it with a palatable narrative. He has neither branded himself in that way, nor ceded his work to that kind of authority. He is one of the few artists of his generation to recognize that consistency (or branding) is the easy way out.

Lois Dodd’s New Panel Paintings continues until February 18 at Alexandre Gallery (Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street, 13th Floor, Midtown, Manhattan). 

Sangram Majumdar’s New Work continues until February 19 at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (208 Forsyth Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan). 

A thoroughly modern figure, yet one who, when confronted with the complexities of modernity, retreats into books and reveries about Dante, Murphy epitomizes the passive tense: always acted upon, never acting. In the last pages, he’s blown to bits by a gas explosion (accident? suicide? Beckett is deliberately unclear) in his garret. His ashes end up strewn about the floor of a bar. This is not, to paraphrase evangelist/huckster Joel Osteen, anyone’s best life. It is, however, one lived consistently. Murphy remains — he always remains — true to his own inclinations: ceaseless self-inquiry, self-evisceration, and equivocation.

The first two sentences aptly set the stage for this story, if you can call this 300-page ode to stasis such. And it is precisely this bittersweet morsel that I return to again and again: The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. The familiar typeface, the wide spacing between words in the right-justified text, the ball-point check-mark unfaded after thirty-five years.

Distinctly oracular, the first sentence; its tone unmistakably biblical. Ecclesiastes: “Then I looked on it all, and behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.” Beckett echoes these verses, but not what follows — the biblical preacher’s call to faith. The passage in Ecclesiastes’ invokes emptiness in order to predicate more substantive redemption; Beckett’s opening line is a call to … just emptiness.

“The sun shone, having no alternative.” Off-handedly epigrammatic, this is Beckett’s encompassing idea about existence, about the universe. Things are simply here. Atoms, rocks, planets, the sun — each proceeds in its cycle lacking agency and more importantly, the author implies, without purpose.

Left, the first edition of Samuel Beckett's "Murphy," and right, the author's copy.

Of course, the dearth of agency is no surprise. No one expects self-determination from inanimate matter, but Beckett’s formulation still evokes an irreducible fatalism. The lack of purpose strikes a sharper note: “Having no alternative” refutes our admitted belief or unspoken hope that the sun shines because it (or god, or a beneficent cosmos) wants us to be warm, wishes us to revel in its splendors, to see all the world around us. Instead, our solar system’s star is defined by a negative — we are told it has no choice, and thus the question is raised: How dare we think we might have any choice ourselves?

The next phrase, “on the nothing new” involves us. We are the “nothing new,” our births and deaths, trials and triumphs. It’s all shopworn. Old hat. So the sun, fixed in an inescapable chore, shines on the ceaselessly repetitive doings of humans. Sunshine at the outset of a tale usually bodes well; Beckett’s having none of that.

Crucial here, I think, is the article’s particularizing effect; all that’s not new is presented as an entity, the nothing new. More than the mere sum of worldly stuff, it’s a concept. An abstraction more real than factories, stones, or ironing boards. The sounding of this fastidious, faintly academic note is, for me, the comedy I’m seeking when I fetch Murphy down from the high shelf (those “B”s on the very top!) risking a fall as I totter on my swivel chair, of course, too lazy to grab a step stool from the closet.

The next sentence introduces our un-hero. And he arrives with considerable promise: “Murphy sat out of it” we are told. Yes, Murphy has escaped this awful mess. He’s no deterministic cipher. The verb choice is revealing, though. He’s not bursting out of it. Hardly dashing. Or even stepping. He’s sitting out of it.

Then the twist — “as though he were free.” So, it turns out, Murphy has not escaped. He may think he has; he may look like he has. Ah, what a fool. What fools are readers to raise hopes even the slightest. Murphy, it turns out, cannot sit out of himself.

But he isn’t special, no different from you or me. Not an existential exemplar or symbolic figure. He’s the fellow down the block, the guy around the corner. He’s “in a mew in West Brompton.”

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton.

In little more than two dozen words, Beckett articulates a worldview, a theology, establishes an Everyman, probes his soul, and gives him an address. And whenever I return to those sentences — bored, duties in pursuit — I feel like it’s my address. Or at least a place I would like to live, if only for a while.

An installation view of David Goerk's "Recent Work" at Howard Scott Gallery (all images courtesy the galleries)

I set out with the intention of seeing these shows, so I wouldn’t call it synchronicity, but the simultaneous exhibitions of David Goerk and Martha Clippinger in the same building, just one floor apart, did get me thinking about art making that is concerned with the realm between painting and sculpture — from della Robbia’s bas reliefs to early modernism (Hans Arp) to contemporary art (Stuart Arends, Ellsworth Kelly, Jim Lee, and Richard Tuttle).

Goerk's "R/W 5.8.11" (2011) (click to enlarge)

While their work and praxis are very different, Goerk and Clippinger make objects that are neither — technically speaking — sculptures nor paintings, but are informed by both. One could find other affinities linking them, but I think that would be stretching the point, as well as diluting the specificity of their work.

David Goerk uses wood, enamel, gesso and encaustic to makes small constructed paintings — only one piece was larger than twelve inches — in which he uses two colors, with white being predominant. The second color is usually a primary or secondary hue.

His constructed paintings tend to consist of one or more planes extending from a box-like structure — a construction that draws the viewer incrementally into an awareness of its semi-enclosed space. (In this exhibition, “6.1.2011″ (2011) was the only plane that was directly attached to the wall.)

As this sparse description should suggest, Goerk draws a seemingly endless array of possibilities from a plane and a geometric solid, using only white and another color, that form an interlocking but discrete set of distinct views and glimpses.

David Goerk, "B/W 5.09" (2009) (click to enlarge)

For all the geometry and restraint, the experience is analogous to lying in bed with your lover and not being able to see your beloved’s face in its entirety, yet still aware of its varying textures and minute shifts. The intimate scale of these works, which can fit easily inside one’s cupped hands, serves to underscore the artist’s joining of Eros with seeing. And here I would go further and advance that the “instinct for self-preservation” is also at the heart of these works, which reveal themselves by stages and are never fully open or completely visible.

Goerk exhibited the works in groups, with each emphasizing one hue — green, blue, and red. Within each cluster the works were placed at different heights on the wall, inviting closer scrutiny. Color and materiality are inseparable, which is one reason why the work demands closer attention. By determining the material identity of a color — a thin turquoise encaustic band extending from a white plane’s narrow edge — Goerk provokes the viewer to experience the work as an interlocking combination of discrete parts, all of which are dependent on something else.

Goerk's "OW #1" (2011) (click to enlarge)

Ideally, the viewer discovers the structure by examining it, front and sides, beneath and, if possible, top. From the sunken screws to the colored material used to fill some holes and not others, everything is considered. At no point is the piece completely visible.

Goerk maintains a lively dialogue with two wonderful, still neglected artists, Mary Martin and Burgoyne Diller, along with Robert Ryman. However, and I mean this emphatically, his work does not feel derivative or overly indebted. In fact, I would advance that he has cleared ample space for himself at the table at which a number of loosely related artists are seated, and that he is spiritedly holding up his end of the conversation.

Goerk’s ability to isolate a color, as well keep all the parts in play, draws the viewer in. The gallery (or containing space) falls away, as we become acquainted with the box-like forms extending from the wall, at once small and confident.  Time is slowed down and seeing becomes episodic. Give them enough time, and you will become reacquainted with your interior spaces, the nooks and crannies where all sorts of things occur. In this exhibition, Goerk enables us to disengage from the hurly-burly world — where distractions are routinely passed off as being important events — and enter a space where reflection is possible. That’s no small thing.

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An installation view of Martha Clippinger's "Hopscotch" show at Elizabeth Harris Gallery

This was Martha Clippinger’s debut exhibition. In some ways her work is the temperamental opposite of David Goerk’s. If his work offers us a chance at intimacy and introspection, Clippinger’s mostly small constructions are like exuberant bundles of energy that you would want to go to a dance party with, especially if you were at all shy. Her work is friendly, outgoing and unapologetic about its inherent eccentricities. They might be small, but some of the pieces have sharp star-like points. The combination of modest size, implied danger and confidence is magnetic.

Clippinger's "View Askew" (2011)

Clippinger placed the work on the floor, at various heights on the wall, near the ceiling, and above the doorway. You had to keep your eyes open and look everywhere if you wanted to see what was in the exhibition. And that turned out to be refreshing, rather than didactic or coy.

Made mostly from scraps that one would find in the discard pile at a lumberyard, Clippinger joins and paints separate plywood pieces — strips, sections, oddly shaped remnants — into largely flat and layered planes or thin verticals attached to the wall. Often the shapes themselves generated the boldly colored, repetitive stripes and waves that cover their surfaces.

Martha Clippinger, "Into the groove" (2010) (click to enlarge)

Clippinger’s defiant palette of solid colors reminded me of the wacky intuitiveness of kindergarten and Southern outsider art mixed with Josef Albers’s formal intelligence. In “Into the Groove” (2010), which was painted on a slightly off, rectangular piece of wood, with a small circular indentation punched into it and two strips of corrugated cardboard adhered to its surface, Clippinger echoes the scalloped edge of one cardboard strip by painting a similarly scalloped form in black along the painting’s left edge.

Extending from the black form are two large black triangles, which have been painted in the painting’s upper left and bottom right corner. Within the remaining space, and conforming to the triangles’ tilting edge, the artist has painted four diagonal bands rising from bottom left to upper right; orange, pink, yellow, and peach. They are colors toy companies might think of using to signify a doll’s ethnicity.

*   *   *

Might it not be time to consider the impact that Thomas Nozkowski’s decision to work on 16 x 20 inch, store-bought canvas board in the early 1970s has had on subsequent generations? He endowed modest scale with a ferocious intelligence, at once serious and playful. And, although he worked small, he didn’t try to connect himself to early American modernists, such as Marsden Hartley or Arthur Dove. He didn’t show the labor that went into his work because that was nostalgic and sentimental, and, let’s face it, harkened back to Willem de Kooning and Milton Resnick. He wanted to put everything in his work without being sentimental or parodic.

As the art world celebrated the return to representational painting in the early 1980s, lavishing much of their attention on Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Eric Fischl, Nozkowski stuck to his guns and quietly gained an underground following of younger artists that included, among others, James Siena and Chris Martin, both of whom have emerged in the past decade.

Goerk and Clippinger are also insolent in their modesty. And yet, like Siena and Martin, they understand that Nozkowski’s decision was both a permission and a challenge, that it didn’t offer them a style to learn from, but advanced the idea that they too could open their own doors, walk through them, and begin their own idiosyncratic dialogs with the work of others, which they have clearly done.

One of the invigorating things about these shows — Goerk and Clippinger recognize that you can’t look back, and that only the fearful keep looking over their shoulders. They are neither looking for institutional approval nor trying to find a little niche on the shelf of received ideas and views.  Better to be impudent and on your own.  That is how you might find your own authority.

David Goerk’s Recent Work continues at the Howard Scott Gallery (529 West 20th Street, 7th Floor, Chelsea, Manhattan) until February 25.

Martha Clippinger’s Hopscotch continues at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery (529 West 20th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) until February 4.

A view of "Phantosmia" at Dillon Gallery (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

Christophe Laudamiel is not a purist. “I love fabric softener,” asserts the world-renowned perfumer turned high art dissident. While he’s no snob about lowbrow smells, his one-week exhibition Phantosmia – All But the Smell, which opened on Wednesday at the Dillon Gallery in Chelsea, is an olfactory delicacy.

The artist

Phantosmia — or, the sensation of smell without a physical stimulus — features seven unique scent sculptures that intend to christen a new art form. It declares scent is its own form of art on par with sight and sound. Additionally, the exhibition exposes the bizarre nuances and anachronistic practices of the fragrance industry. And, like any good perfume, it promises a twist at the end. For the first time in fragrance history, a perfumer has published his formulae. However, the success of the show hinges on the industry’s willingness to take the bait and the audience’s desire to believe they’ve just smelled something groundbreaking.

I was fortunate to preview the exhibition with Laudamiel and gallery owner, Valerie Dillon, last Friday. Laudamiel arrived a few minutes late, bursting in from the cold without a coat; he had clearly run from his studio a few blocks south of 25th Street. He wore a chunky metal chain around his neck which supported a silver replica of a reptilian skull. His purple Converse shoes complimented his trendy hair cut. He talked in hyperspeed. He chastised audible sniffing. He was an aromatic eccentric.

The gallery-goer is likely to already have strong opinions about Laudamiel’s work without knowing it. That’s because he’s responsible for the irresistibly annoying Abercrombie & Fitch smell (you know, the one that permeated the entire mall and attacked your idea of seventh grade cool while reviving a fledging men’s shirt company in the process). The French-born former perfume industry rock star also worked on products for Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger. Now, he’s “retired” from corporate perfumery to focus on a career as an artist.

With this kind of content, the Dillon Gallery and Laudamiel have had to solve a few technical issues. In order to communicate each of the seven distinct fragrances, the gallery erected six plastic tents for the scents labeled “At Your Own Risk,” “Fear,” “Fragile,” “The Last Virgin,” The Monkey and the Banana” and “The Whip and the Orchid.” The final scent,“Remembrance of Things Lost,” occupies the open space. Moreover, instructions and museum style explanations supplement the sculptures, helping to guide participants down new nasal pathways.

In some instances, the pieces are figurative — “The Monkey and the Banana” requires little extrapolation. Yet others, such as “The Last Virgin,” evaporate into an ethereal painting of warm memories and self-induced expectations. At the moment in fragrance art, there seem to be only possibilities.

Conversely, the traditional industry is stalling out thanks in large part to its treatment of perfumers. Unlike other artistic professions, perfumers don’t own their own output. Instead, they work as employees of a handful of major fragrance houses (such as Givaudan, Firmenich, IFF, Symrise, Takasago) that together form the International Fragrance Association. The houses sell the product to licensees, like L’Oreal and Proctor & Gamble, who have arranged deals with luxury and commercial brands alike.

Essentially, Laudamiel claims, the house creates the scents for free but charges the licensee for manufacturing the oil. The house pays the perfumers a fixed salary while providing materials and laboratory space. When the fragrance is complete, the house maintains ownership of the formula and the perfumer receives a one-time bonus, but is unlikely to share in future profits. Here, the same copyright laws that protect musician, poets and architects do not apply.

On top of this, many ingredients are under threat of a self-inflicted “extinction.” Out of concern for legal liability and varying global regulations, industry leaders have moved to impose strict restrictions on certain ingredients, including lemon and rose oil. A hazy combination of concern over allergic reactions and intrigue about lucrative research opportunities perpetuate a climate of over-regulation.

A view of Laudamiel's exhibition (image via dillongallery.com) (click to enlarge)

Because perfumers can’t use restricted ingredients, they must create synthetics to mimic them. So, the industry produces an inferior product to avoid additional cost. For example, in the sculpture “Fragile,” Laudamiel alleges that the industry limits the use of real lemon to avoid paying for refrigerated transportation trucks or requiring that merchandisers shield the product from harsh light. The art of fragrance, he believes, has started to reek of business.

Consequently, Laudamiel published all seven formulas in the exhibition. In print form, the formulas would qualify for the same copyright protection as any written document. However, with millions of dollars resting of the preservation of the status quo and a follow up exhibition scheduled at the European Parliament, the stakes are high. But Laudamiel maintains he isn’t trying to ruffle any feathers.

I asked him what he thought the fragrance world would think of his exhibition. He seemed confident that they would like it. He was, after all, just doing justice to the most underappreciated of senses. Yet, something told me that not everyone in the world of olfaction would be sending congratulatory fruit baskets — that is unless, of course, they are synthetic lemons.

Chritophe Laudamiel’s Phantosmia – All But the Smell is a short exhibition and will conclude on February 1 at the Dillon Gallery (555 West 25th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan).

June Leaf, "Recent Work" installation shot (all image courtesy the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

Before I talk about her exhibition, I want to share an anecdote about the artist. In 1997, June Leaf breezed into my studio at the Vermont Studio Center with a disarming smile from ear to ear. (It was the first time we met.) As she looked over my work, chatting and laughing, she spotted my skateboard in the corner of the room. Before I could say no, the 68-year-old woman proceeded to get up from my desk and stand on my skateboard, gently rolling back and forth. I was in love.

June Leaf, "A Couple Walking" (2010–2011), acrylic on tin, 10 x 9.25 inches

A few days later, as I droned on and on about the difficulty of being an artist, she said: “If you want to be a painter, paint. Don’t think, just do.” I was pissed, and kind of embarrassed, because she was right. I shared this anecdote because it embodies the type of person Leaf is and reflects the kind of work she makes — whimsical but serious.

June Leaf has her fifth solo exhibition, titled Recent Work, at the Edward Thorp Gallery in Chelsea. The approximately 20 works on view were completed between 2010 and 2011. They comprise painting, sculpture and dioramas. Each work is an amalgamation of various materials — tin, wire, steel, fabric, acrylic, collage, canvas and paper. Her specific subject matter (spiral staircases, stepladders, crank shafts, theaters) unifies the seemingly disparate parts, which seem to be animated as much by the artist’s restless soul as her frenetic hands.

Leaf is a tinkerer of the highest order. At first glance, her works appear playful, almost innocent. They beg to be touched. Her sculptures resemble handmade dioramas, like the one’s kids make in school, but instead of cardboard, she uses scrap metal, tin, wire and wood.

Her two-dimensional work seems to be an extension of her sculptures, perhaps offering the artist more time to ruminate. Motion is almost always suggested. In the painting “Couple Walking,” a duo walks arm in arm, as if whistling in the abyss. Though the painting is no more than a few smears of acrylic paint on a patch of tin, the picture resonates. In “Figure Descending Staircase,” a thin tin man — held together by soot and wire — walks down a winding set of stairs, one step at a time. I love how the staircase begins and ends in a void, leading nowhere. This is the stuff of dreams.

June Leaf, "Untitled (Theater)" (2010–2011), mixed media, 53h x 23.25w x 36d (image courtesy the gallery)

Detail of “Untitled (Figure Cranking)”

Much of her work features miniature men and women that have been cobbled together by scraps of wire and tin. Often, they are engaged in some activity — turning a crankshaft, descending a staircase or climbing up a ladder. In “Untitled (Theater),” she constructed a miniature diorama that sits on top of an antique sewing machine. The tableaux features two characters. The first figure is seated on a chair, near the foreground. The second figure, whose back is to the audience, runs to the edge of the stage, just past a giant crankshaft. In “Untitled (Figure Cranking),” a naked man, stooped-back, turns a hand crank, which is attached to a large device that serves no discernible purpose. The figure is small. Some people may describe him as puny. At best, he’s six inches tall. What gets me is Leaf’s attention to detail. She made sure to include the figure’s scrotum and penis.

June Leaf, "Figure Covering a Woman" (2010–2011), tin, wire, fabric, acrylic, steel rods, 26 x 32 x 20 (courtesy the gallery)

Alexander Calder’s wire animated sculptures come to mind. In Leaf’s oeuvre, however, the circus has left town and the carnies are creaky-limbed pensioners unwilling to sit still or stop working, no matter how fruitless their activity may or may not be. The figurines do stuff, but get nothing done. The best they can hope for is to receive a few brief moments of respite: to be covered by a blanket as they sleep, as in “Figure Covering a Woman,” or to set one’s head’s down for a few minutes rest, as in “Sleeping Woman.”

The work on view suggests life is an exercise in futility (or an endless journey) that is punctuated by death, and yet, we must go on. Not sentimental but loving. There is no refuge in the world, save a wooden chair to rest a pair of weary legs.

June Leaf: Recent Work has been extended until February 4 at Edward Thorp Gallery (210 Eleventh Avenue, 6th Floor, Chelsea, Manhattan).

Luc Tuymans' "The Secretary of State" (2005) in the 2005 Tuymans monograph (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

The David Zwirner Gallery is located in Chelsea and known for its expansive “historically researched” exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. Zwirner, like other high-end galleries, maintains a publishing program that produces exhibition catalogues, monographs and artist books.

On my first trip to New York City, as part of a graduate class about the art world beyond Richmond, Virginia, I remember lining up to buy my first gallery publication. It was a thin but beautiful book published by the James Cohan Gallery, filled with the colorful sculptures of Folkert de Jong, and available for only twenty-five dollars. A smart way to promote a gallery’s artists, these books are affordable and specific to a certain gallery, artist, exhibition and date. Monographs are a little like buying postcards of an exhibition, but they have more depth, scope and historical value than a simple keepsake.

Though the books that accompany large-scale museum exhibitions are beautiful, heavy enough to be used as a doorstop and commonly run you about $60, a collection of small monographs could eventually be more satisfying to a particular art viewer’s tastes and interests. Instead of having the same books on the same artists and exhibitions as everyone else, you could have a collection of slightly more obscure artists from much smaller shows. Sometimes a gallery’s books are more interesting than the artwork they regularly exhibit, and you can peruse their best artists and exhibitions from the confines of a well-constructed catalogue. Zwirner’s publications cater to a particular artist and exhibition, from which the monograph is generated.

Zwirner’s monograph for the work of the well-known and respected Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, published in 2005 for the exhibition Proper, is a good example of an overly explanatory catalogue. The press release, included in the back of the book almost as an afterthought, is all the description needed for Tuyman’s muted and haunting paintings. I don’t believe that art or artists always need to be explained and sometimes even a short press release gives away too much; all you can see afterward is what that author suggests you should. Context, however, is always a good thing, and writers sometimes forget that telling viewers what they should see in a work of art is different than telling them who made it, when and how.

In the catalogue for Proper, each of Tuyman’s 10 new paintings, exhibited for the show, are both described and explained in wordy detail by Gerrit Vermeiren, almost like an art historical text. Reading Vermeiren reminded me of that painful task art historians undertake, where they dissect and analyze each and every object within a canvas to mine it for cultural significance. While this is a prerequisite for understanding artwork from centuries ago, is it necessary to explain the significance of our current culture to such a detailed extent? Tuyman’s paintings describe murky and foreboding moments in our contemporary society, and with “anemic hues” he paints ballroom dancers, the face of Condoleezza Rice, a dust cloud from a toppled building, the perfect table setting for the perfect non-existent and absent family — these are all activities, icons, actions and ideals with which everyone today is already familiar.

The 2011 Marcel Dzama monograph.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the catalogue Behind Every Curtain, for a 2011 show featuring the more youthful New York City-based artist Marcel Dzama. Aside from the dedication at the beginning of the catalogue, which reads “in memory of Luis Miguel Suro,” a young Mexican artist who was shot and killed during an armed robbery at his family’s ceramic factory in Guadalajara in 2004, there is no other text. A perfect bound book the size of a small pad of notebook paper, it’s filled cover to cover with Dzama’s drawings, dioramas, sculptures and photographs. Dzama is known best for his ink and watercolor drawings and for how his childlike style of mark making is married to his gory and ghoulish subject matter — his drawings resemble a fairy-tale that somehow turns into a dark nightmare.

In Behind the Curtain, Dzama branches out and brings his two-dimensional drawings to life, first in cluttered dioramas filled with pale, paper people grinning almost stupidly in bright red lipstick, and again in his William Kentridge-esque black & white photographs that feature his costumed and masked characters dancing and performing.

Because this catalogue lacks any kind of explanation, Behind the Curtain, as the title might suggest, is all the more playful and engaging, like the work itself. It’s clear that there are no “answers” to Dzama’s drawn narratives, no decipherable stories behind his photographs and yet we still engage with the work as we try to understand his mysterious characters and puzzling situations. Text enters into the catalogue in the form of comic book drawing strips and tiny, scribbled text in multiple languages layered behind the drawings. Because the text describes such complicated situations, and switches back and forth between French, Spanish and English, it feels as if it’s not meant to be read. Dzama’s catalogue seems to prove that sometimes monographs are helped, rather than hindered, by little to no explanation.

Raoul De Keyser's "Steek 1" (1987) in the 2005 monograph.

Recent Work, Zwirner’s 2006 monograph for the abstract, Belgian painter Raoul De Keyser, rests somewhere between the previous catalogues mentioned and is what most monographs should be; the perfect combination of text and images, giving some explanation and context without overwhelming the work itself.

The monograph begins with a concise and compelling short essay by Wendy White, who first places Keyser into the context of his contemporaries, and then slowly lifts him away from them to highlight his unique perspective and style. She describes Keyser’s work as “accessible yet wholly ambiguous” and though she admits he’s a “painters painter,” she claims that at no point in his paintings does an “art historical trope or pseudo-conceptual framework trump intuition.” Regardless of whether or not you agree with her claims, her essay Iconoclast leaves you with enough information to form your own conclusions about the artist and his work.

It’s a shame then that the work of Raoul De Keyser is utterly bland and even boring. Sometimes painting with vivid shades of primary colors, Keyser’s canvases are sparsely populated with continent-like floating shapes. At other times they are black and white compositions of lines, dots and shapes, beautifully composed if not terribly compelling of any sort of visual meaning. Certainly his work, stylistically speaking, has historical value within the context of abstract painting and modern art. As a contemporary artist looking for relevant voices, however, this particular catalogue is about as far from ideal as you can get.

A good collection of monographs should contain the artists we already know and love, the artists we happen across and wish to learn more about and the artists whose historical relevance we should study and remember. Zwirner’s monographs, if you are visually interested and conceptually stimulated, even a little bit, by the gallery’s represented artists, are as good a place as any to begin a collection of books on art.

All of the publications mentioned in this review are available for purchase on the David Zwirner Gallery website.