Xiyadie, "Natural Pleasures" (nd), 14 x 14 inches (all works courtesy the artist and used with his permission)

LOS ANGELES — Being different is never easy, more so when you live in an infamously restrictive and conservative Communist Chinese society. Born in a farming village of the Shaanxi province, Xiyadie (a nom de plume meaning “Butterfuly in Siberia”) turns traditional paper-cut art into colorful, risqué pieces dealing with gay love and life.

Portrait of the artist with his works. (image courtesy Flazh Art Studio) (click to enlarge)

Xiyadie (pronounced Zhee-yá-dee) is currently exhibiting The Metamorphosis of a Butterfly at alternative art space Flazh!Alley Art Studio in San Pedro, California. Within 50 14-inch by 14-inch pieces created over the course of 25 years, the artist manages to cut out provocative scenes that make viewers take second, third and fourth glances just to make sure they’re seeing right. Are those two men getting hot and heavy? What kind of “natural pleasures” is the artist portraying in the piece of the same name?

Xiyadie’s papercut art makes viewers work to get it everything straight (pun intended) in their minds, which makes it even more impactful once we realize what we’re looking at. The artist marks each of his works with a mythological beauty by using multi-colored papers, cut out to form flowers, butterflies and other symbols, as if to suggest that his works — as daring as they are — should still be seen as an extension of the traditional Chinese canon.

Like many gay Chinese men, Xiyadie is also a gay married father living in Beijing. His 23-year old was born with cerebral palsy and his 21-year-old daughter is a college junior; both still have no clue as to their father’s true sexual orientation. His works don’t confine themselves to the sexuality of gay life and his scenes illustrate life beyond the bedroom.

In the Red Door Series, Xiyadie cuts with painful precision the emotional battles that rage in the process of coming out to his wife. Gone is the artist’s playful rainbow-colored experiments. In their place, an angry red paper marks the alienation, hurt and sorrow he and his wife experienced and continue to struggle with every day.

"Sneaking Around" (nd), 14 x 14 inches

Within The Metamorphosis of a Butterfly, one gets a clear sense of the artist’s exhilarating, clandestine joys and deep sorrows. He says, his works weren’t made for profit, but simply for expression. “Paper cutting is my own spiritual world. It is my world. In [that world] there are no worries and sorrows, only peace and free imagination.”

Gallery owner Joe Flazh says acceptance of Xiyadie’s work has been overwhelmingly positive because the artist touched on emotions that are deeper than sexual orientation. “[Xiyadie] addresses subjects that are relevant to the LGBT community, but also to any person, gay or heterosexual, male or female and parents. Comments have varied from, ‘I understand this piece,’ to, ‘I remember going through situations like that with my parents or kids.’”

"Disco" (nd)

Universality aside, Xiyadie wisely used papercut’s inherent beauty to tackle a touchy subject that could have set off political bombs. “Despite the fact of the sexually explicit works, there’s no hint of pornography, sleaziness or exploitation about them,” Flazh says. And perhaps that is part of Butterfly’s charm. Rather than propel on us the cold, hard facts, Xiyadie flutters and expands our minds with a flourish.

"The Reconciliation (Red Door Series)" (nd)

"Against the Wind (From the Butterfly series)" (nd)

"The Flight (Red Door Series)" (nd)

"Twining" (nd)

"Running Away from Home (Red Door Series)" (nd)

"Gardening" (nd)

The Metamorphosis of a Butterfly: A kaleidoscopic vision of life by a gay Chinese artist is on view at Flazh!Alley (1113 S. Pacific Ave., San Pedro, California) until July 14.

As a reviewer, I’ve wondered about these questions as I consider novels and short story collections, often in translation, that include impressive artwork created in response to the text, or vice versa, texts born from visual art.

Last year, there was Animalinside, a comic-book-length collaborative exchange with existential-themed text by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai and paintings by Max Neumann, focused on an enigmatic dog-being with two legs. I ended up liking the pictures more than the words, but Kraznahorakai’s prose proved to be funny in an over-the-top barbaric yawp sort of way.

I also read Paul Scheerbart’s mesmerizing “failure journal” called The Perpetual Motion Machine, published by Wakefield Press (reviewed at Hyperallergic here). Wakefield included 26 schematic drawings by Scheerbart, which added to the humor (he’s a comically bad engineer, though a skilled technical artist), and their meticulousness showed how dangerously lost he was in his utopian fantasy.

Seagull Books recently published some striking examples of art/text: The Loss Library, a collection of prose about failed stories by South African writer Ivan Vladislavic; and a children’s tale by Thomas Bernhard (yes, that Thomas Bernhard) called Victor Halfwit, in which a couple pages of text were transformed into a thick folio-fable of collage artwork, perfectly capturing the tone of Bernhard’s slightly gruesome and hilarious fairy tale.

Both books benefit from complex and hypnotic artwork by Sunandini Banerjee. After several years working on book covers for Seagull, Victor Halfwit became her first full-length, illustrated book project.

“Not having illustrated a book before — but knowing that I disliked children’s books which had pages full of text and a picture cowering in a box in the corner somewhere,” she says, “I began to read it word by word, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, and began to ‘draw’ on wherever the associations and images came to me naturally.”

Bernhard’s work is known for its intense seriousness, and Banerjee said when she first read Victor Halfwit she thought it was “simple and perhaps even a wee bit dull.” “But I found that when you take your time over it… when you pause to breathe between those words, whole worlds of pictures come cascading through the cracks and between the lines. So even though he uses the word ‘forest’ about 20 times, each forest is different. And that perhaps was the challenge.”

She said her goal was “to be true to Bernhard’s style and yet to bring in enough of myself to prompt the reader to read a little more, to bring in some of themselves and go, ‘Ah, that looks familiar,’ or ‘Hah! That’s really funny.’ Each page becomes a story in a much bigger story.”

Sunandini Banerjee, art from "Victor Halfwit" (all images courtesy Seagull Books)

She created over 200 pages of artwork based on a few pages of text. “It was an immense undertaking,” she says, “and I feel that I have to generate a new lifetime of images and memories and associations, for I have vomited everything I possessed into those pages.”

As a collagist, Banerjee is staunchly independent and when I suggested Hannah Höch as one possible influence, she politely resisted the idea. “One of the things I simply do not do is to identify any form or person as ‘an influence’ or as ‘an inspiration.’ I don’t want to be ‘like’ anyone. I want to be me.”

“It is not just a question of assembling images. One is reading, remembering, recalling, reinventing, rediscovering, associating — all at once. One is picking up on certain words or motifs and then chasing them down the alleyways of representation to see what they finally look like when you stand face to face. … After it is over, I can never remember how it was that it came to be done.”

Sunandini Banerjee, art from "The Loss Library" (click to enlarge)

Picture-filled texts make the story feel like it’s drawing two reactions out of me: first comes the calm memory of children’s books I’ve loved; second, the feeling, decidedly more abstract, of knowing that these words triggered images in someone else’s mind, and these “other” conceptions are now alive in the book. The result is a palimpsest — an overlay of visual responses each competing for dominance.

When I asked Banerjee about this in relation to her intentions with the artwork she created for Vladislavic’s The Loss Library, she said, “I don’t think there can be a specific intended effect with any form of art. One can hope or wish for something to have a certain effect, but so much of it lies in the eye of the beholder. Our idea was to have a frontispiece for every story, a pictorial representation that could be its seed or its fruit. And we wanted to treat them like old-fashioned picture plates, which is why they were printed separately and then stuck in. Not to illustrate each story, in the strict sense of the word, but to perhaps walk alongside, to accompany, sometimes even to comment, to point out.”

One thing I hadn’t even considered was what the author might think about any of this tinkering. After all, a book cover is usually something authors just have to live with and hope the publisher can do their best. With The Loss Library, Banerjee said Seagull worked with Vladislavic:

[He] was remarkable in his generosity to allow me to ‘intervene’ if you will, or illuminate if you will, his words. And for that I am grateful. Every reader, every viewer, is welcome to make of it what they will. Once it is in their hands, it is their responses that will make them read or turn away.

Sunandini Banerjee, art from "Victor Halfwit"

Though I greatly admire the artwork in these so-called picture books, I find them a challenge to read and enjoy. Their subject matter lives a complex life, the writer, the artist, and my responses all contending. And I find myself struggling to preserve my ideas and images, to preserve relationship with the author. To preserve its intimacy. Maybe because I write fiction as well as criticism, I don’t want that third partner in my reading experience — no matter how fine or complex their contribution. Mere words on the page may not be very exciting things to look at; what’s exciting is what I make of them. I want to keep that work to myself.

Installation view of "Thomas Nozkowski: New Editions and Related Drawings" at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery (all images courtesy Senior & Shopmaker)

If there is one constant about Thomas Nozkowski that I would single out, it is his lifelong insistence on subverting conventions. In 1974 he began painting on canvas board measuring 16 by 20 inches. (Let’s be clear here — Bill Jensen never painted on this small a surface because it had no historical precedence).

He used an inexpensive, mass-produced product, the same kind that comes in “paint by number” kits and carries associations with “Sunday painters.” No wonder his defiance went largely unnoticed, particularly when the 1980s rolled around.

In that hothouse decade of overstatement, his paintings weren’t big enough to fill three galleries at once; didn’t incorporate piles of broken dishes; had no nudes in soft-porn poses overlaid with nasty, stream-of-consciousness imagery; had no one masturbating. Unlike many of his peers, he made no claims on behalf of his work.

For more than half a century — at least since Hans Namuth’s photographs and film of Jackson Pollock painting — the art world has equated subversion with theatricality, which increasingly plays into mainstream society’s desire for spectacle and distraction. (No wonder there are reasonably intelligent people who think Jeff Koons is radical and even avant-garde.)

Going to The Pace Gallery didn’t change Nozkowski, which you can’t say for every artist who gets picked up by a blue chip venue. In his second exhibition at Pace (October 22 to December 4, 2010), he paired twenty paintings, all of which measured 22 by 28 inches, with the same number of drawings, all of them around 8 by 10 inches.  (Only eighteen pairings were actually shown, with the other two pairs in the office. All twenty pairs were reproduced in the catalog.) The reason for the pairing was simple enough; Nozkowski had done a small drawing in colored pencil after every painting.

Thomas Nozkowski, "Untitled (P-90)" (2010), oil on paper (click to enlarge)

By hanging the painting and drawing next to each other, Nozkowski challenged the viewer to see the works as separate, but related — a further working out of a motif. However, instead of the drawing being a preliminary work for the painting, which is the usual sequence of things, it came after the painting. The point wasn’t to see similarities, but to make more and more distinctions, and to trace the decisions the artist made after leaving one and going to the other.

Even among his most ardent supporters, the consternation was immediate. David Cohen titled his review: “Ground Control to Major Tom: Please re-hang your show.” And yet, what Nozkowski did wasn’t theatrical or, worse, gimmicky. Given that he wanted to show the paintings and their related drawings, he had two choices: to hang the paintings and drawings far apart from each other, or close together. The conventional wisdom is to sequester them in separate quarters. Nozkowski defied that wisdom.

*   *   *

While the show was up, Nozkowski used the catalogue as the basis for a second series of twenty drawings after the paintings, this time done in black-and-white. (Another constant is his tenacity — he’s got a memory like a steel trap and he never lets go of anything). The twenty black-and-white drawings are now mounted in a grid on one wall of his current show, New Editions and Related Drawings, at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery.  It makes me wish for a show including the twenty paintings and both sets of drawings. A show like that would be a revelation.

Thomas Nozkowski, "Untitled (M-28)" (2011), gouache and colored pencil on print

Drawing is one of the things that holds Nozkowski’s work together. He has done drawings in ballpoint pen — among other materials — in response to books he’s read; recalling movies he’s watched; while remembering art works he’s made or studied; or jotting down, on a moment’s inspiration, things he’s seen — almost none of which we can figure out from looking at the work. At the same time, if he likes a motif in a painting that he’s working on, but knows it has to go, he will move it onto a work on paper. One work leads to another, eventually forming a maze of motifs. One could say this maze is a fairly accurate reflection of Nozkowski’s view of life.

*   *   *

At the heart of Nozkowski’s practice is improvisation, a willingness to take something (anything) and do something else to it. He seems to have been one of the few of his generation to understand Jasper Johns’s declaration: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it, etc.”

*   *   *

The other binder in Nozkowski’s work is reflected in a remark he made to me in an interview, where he said that he always “go[es] to the opposite of what the logical move would be.” In other words, he begins by undermining his own immediate assumptions and responses to a particular experience.

This is what subversive artists working in our postmodern epoch share. They don’t have a style, which is, in the end, both a brand and a judgment. How can you produce a brand and be subversive? (It’s like selling torn jeans made by Armani!) Subversive artists always try to undermine conventions, including those that might influence their practice.

*   *   *

How far does a subversive artist go? Why all the way, of course. In Nozkowski’s case, this means that he does something in his prints that seems counterintuitive. Rather than deriving them from his paintings, as most artists do, he generated a number of his recent ones from drawings. “Untitled #1″ (2012) is a 7-plate/8 color aquatint, with a 2-block woodcut comprising thirteen colors. It improvises off of his “Untitled (P-90),” an oil on paper done in 2010. While the print has more than twenty colors, it seems to operate on the principle of bright (light) and muted (dark).

Thomas Kozlowski, "Untitled #1" (2012), 7-plate aquatint with 8 colors, 2-block woodcut with 13 colors

Nozkowski joined two shapes — one long and narrow and the other bulky and squarish — along a horizontal border near the top. A thin band, pressing against the  top edge, spans almost its entire width, like an I-beam with angled edges at each end; this has been divided into nearly three dozen different triangles, trapezoids, rectangles, and parallelograms.

Nozkowski further divided the geometric shapes into two groups: the black, gray, and white irregular ones that extend from the top edge; and a band of slightly different-sized rectangles, each done in a different color. The band of rectangles — which lie end to end like a row of children’s blocks — forms a brightly colored zone between the black, gray, and white shapes above and the bulky conglomeration of mutely-colored rectangles below.

A large squarish-form, which is made up of many small, mostly vertical rectangles, hangs down from the I-beam like a beehive surrounded by a cream-colored atmosphere.  It is a mishmash of vertical and horizontal rectangles that are all extremely muted in color. The highly varied but barely visible color seems to have been the result of overlaying the creamy, atmospheric color over the shape’s already muted colors. It looks like the sun reflecting off a wall of colors, making it impossible to see. They have literally been whited-out.

The cumulative effect of these three contrasting elements — the black, gray, and white band, the row of brightly colored rectangles, and the conglomeration of rectangles in which the creamy white has diluted all the colors — is the vertiginous feeling that one is looking at something as well as through something.  Our eyes keep refocusing.

Thomas Nozkowski, "Untitled #5" (2012), 4-plate aquatint with 22 colors (click to enlarge)

He achieves similar jarring shifts in a very different way in his etching, “Untitled #5″ (2012), a 22-color aquatint, in which variously-sized cream colored hexagons perforate a black field, and the only color is found in the hexagons lined up along the edges.

It’s as if Nozkowski wants to discover how far he can go before something falls apart and becomes chaotic and arbitrary. What an unlikely thing he has done. In “Untitled #1,” he has made most of the print appear as if it is behind a muted white scrim. It is nearly impossible to tell whether the ground is separate from the form or covers it. I cannot think of any other prints that remotely resemble the two I have discussed.

*   *   *

In the generative oil on paper, “Untitled (P-90)” (2010), which Nozkowski used for “Untitled #1,” the I-beam spanning the top goes from mostly from maroons, reds, and pinks on the left to blues and greens on the right. However, the colors between them don’t seem to follow any logic. Nozkowski undermines viewers’ expectations in different ways throughout a work, encouraging them to take the composition apart and, more importantly, put it back together.

*   *   *

Nozkowski has been celebrated for being “mercurial” and “provocative”  and making “sumptuous” works (Cohen’s terms). I am reminded of Wallace Stevens who wrote in his poem, “It Must Give Pleasure”:

But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that

Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.

We have yet to consider Nozkowski’s work, and all its formal compressions, in a broader context, preferring instead to isolate him. The reasons for this withholding seem obvious—a deeper analysis of his work would go a long way toward subverting the art world’s elevation of all those other artists who possess an abundance of style and opinions, but, in the end, have very little else to offer us.

Thomas Nozkowski: New Editions and Related Drawings is on view at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery (210 Eleventh Avenue, Suite 804, Chelsea, Manhattan) through June 16.

Dana Schutz, "Flasher" (2012), oil on canvas (all images courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery)

Dana Schutz, who is in her mid-30s, belongs to the generation of artists who grew up in an epoch where painting was routinely thought of as a dead practice. One couldn’t just be a painter, because doing so would be to enter a dusty domain crammed with empty signifiers. It would mean you were doing something that was obsolete (and reviled) — like speaking Latin to the drugstore cashier. The lines were pretty clear: dumb people became painters; smart people became conceptual artists who painted only when and if the subject called for it. This viewpoint might have started out as speculation, but now it’s a stupid and persistent prejudice.

Instead of accommodating herself, like a good student, to the pressures of the historical moment, Schutz turned the tables. If painting was no longer possible, then what would it mean to depict the impossible in bold colors and clear forms? At once macabre and funny, her early painting “Face Eater” (2004) joyfully defied the doxa, the repressive discourses demanding conformity.

*   *   *

Piano in the Rain is the title of her current and her first exhibition at Friedrich Petzel. In a painting with the same title as the show, Schutz depicts a young woman wearing a robin’s egg blue shirt and violet bellbottoms and playing a piano in the rain. She is seated in a nearly flattened profile, but the piano is tilted up slightly toward the picture plane. This spatial contradiction isn’t the only one you’re likely to notice. The young woman seems to be both sitting outside, with a raincloud floating just above her head, as well as inside a room (or on a stage?), a suggestion conveyed by the two dark green horizontal lines spanning the width of the painting. These formal paradoxes reverberate with the contradictions implied by the subject. (Who in her right mind would play a piano in the pouring rain?)

The image of a young woman with long brown hair playing a piano in the rain might initially seem like a metaphor for the absurdity of painter’s situation, but it’s not.

Dana Schutz, "Piano in the Rain" (2012), oil on canvas

For one thing, the image evokes Walter Pater’s statement: “All art aspires to the condition of music.” Music shapes time without needing to resort to narrative or reference. This state of self-sufficiency is what Wassily Kandinsky and Frantisek Kupka wanted to attain in their art. It would seem Schutz also wants to achieve this state but recognizes that it is impossible; the rain intervenes, messing up the otherwise ideal situation.

Here is another line of inquiry: Is the young woman playing something “original” or is she “interpreting” someone else’s music? What does it mean to be original if you are a pianist?  Are you appropriating someone’s music if you play it? Are there clear distinctions between originality and appropriation?

Or one might consider these questions: What is the meaning of rehearsal and repetition? Is there a correlation between a pianist’s daily engagement with her art (practice and play) and that of a painter?  What is the meaning of skill and its opposite, de-skilling, in this context?

If there is absurdity in the metaphor, it emerges when we draw equivalences between the two disciplines through the lens of academic theory. Should we listen only to de-skilled pianists to prove our bona fides in a post-studio world? Is there something obsolete about the physical contact the pianist has with the piano? Should we only listen to pianists who never touch the piano? (The pianist, we might remember, does touch the piano and the sheet music when playing John Cage’s notorious 4’33”.)

*   *   *

Correspondingly, the absurdist situations that Shutz depicts as embodiments of the painter’s predicament inform us of the extent to which her inquiry is motivated by a philosophical disposition.

In the largest, most crowded painting in the exhibition, “Building the Boat While Sailing” (2012), Schutz’s deft manipulations of space could serve as an instructional manual for art students. In the lower third of the painting, from left to right, she depicts four figures, each of which activates the surrounding space differently.

Dana Schutz, "Building the Boat While Sailing" (2012), oil on canvas

On the far left, a woman sits on the edge of the raft (an irregularly shaped geometric board tilted away from the picture plane), facing out. She holds two pieces of wood, each pierced by two nails, as if they are cymbals. Although her shoulders, head, and hair are largely flat shapes, they come across as solid and weighty.

Beside her, but lower, is a woman in the water, presumably pushing the boat forward. Her head, shoulders, and white hand (abstract shapes) and the bottoms of her feet rise above the water. Unless the woman is shaped like a horseshoe, with her head at one end and feet at the other, the configuration is impossible.

The third figure is an upside-down man — a position most likely inspired by a painting of Christ being lowered down from the Cross.  Sprouting from the painting’s nether regions, the figure flattens everything out, even as the figures around him activate the space in individual ways. On the right, slightly angled in from the painting’s right edge, a woman seated cross-legged faces away from us, engrossed in what’s going on in front of her.

If the boat (the painting) is a vehicle that is capable of transporting us (the viewers) elsewhere, then what does it mean to both build it and sail away at the same time?  Perhaps the boat (painting) isn’t supposed to take us anywhere, that it has been doomed at least since the death of God.

Does that make it as worthless to build as to deconstruct, which the figure boring into the wood (the bore is near the exact middle of the painting!) might seem to be doing?  If you do both at once, does that mean you are a dumb painter rather than a smart conceptualist? There is a sharp bite to these paintings, but, as we all know, some bites can be enjoyable.

*   *   *

Dana Schutz, installation view of "Yawn" paintings at Friedrich Petzel Gallery

This is what Schutz does so well — she asks questions that challenge the answers given by others. More importantly, she asks her questions by folding them into the painting. There is nothing extraneous, no overt or didactic message. We get everything in the work by unraveling it. There is no secret hermeneutical code we must possess to unlock the door.

One question that Schutz addresses is the porous border between abstraction and representation. In “Flasher” (2012), a man opens his flesh-colored coat, which is indistinguishable from his skin, revealing a wristwatch, scissors, schematic eyeglasses, and an array of crosshatches — which allude to the ones Jasper Johns deployed in his “Corpse and Mirror” paintings — across his torso. The “Flasher” has exposed his marked, naked body, and it has turned out to be largely abstract.

*   *   *

There is a disturbing pathos in Schutz’s work. A young woman holds a flame to her ear, while holding her index finger to her lips, as if lost in thought. She is so disconnected from her body that she doesn’t feel any heat from the flame. The colors are jaunty, while the face is impassive, a distant relative of Picasso’s depictions of Marie-Thérèse Walter.

In the back room of the gallery, Schutz mounted five small paintings of a plump, almost featureless, young woman caught in the act of yawning. Given how many times each of us has yawned in public, the paintings seem to be having their revenge. They are bored by our constant know-it-all self-regard, and you can’t really blame them.

Piano in the Rain continues at Friedrich Petzel Gallery (537 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through June 16.

Eight Extraordinary Greens (all photos courtesy of Mixed Greens Gallery)

If you have walked around the streets lately you will notice something odd. New Yorkers are smiling. Yep, it’s that time of year again, the days are lengthening and the sun seems determined to start shining. This time of year reminds us that we live not only in a world of our own construction but that somewhere out beyond the sidewalks and computer screens lurks NATURE. This is the time of year to daydream of lakeside cabins and fresh vegetable patches. For those of us who aren’t urban gardeners, or who haven’t invested in a CSA it can be tricky. Jenna Spevack’s current exhibition at Mixed Greens seems take a shot at this popular preoccupation.

Her exhibition Eight Extraordinary Greens is part public service announcement, part experiment in farming and part installation. That artist has installed a number of domestic household objects re-fitted with lights and trays of micro greens. These sculptural “microfarms” pay homage to the artist’s first experiment with urban-in house gardening in her own apartment. A tray of greens is exposed to lighting tubes within the confines of a vintage leather suitcase. Past a greenhouse-bookshelf and desk lie the facsimile  of a vintage kitchen and living room. The prop-artworks are bathed in the glow of bulbs reflected in tiny patches of green. This image is arresting in that it is unexpected.

Eight Extraordinary Greens

Viewers are invited — as if they are visitors to a hypothetical home — to wander around and to purchase the greens for a self imposed price. You are then invited to either take the greens home or to donate them for the artist to deliver to a food pantry. Proceeds from the sale are recorded on a print/receipt and hung on the wall to record the collective value of the greens harvested during the exhibition. Proceeds from the sale of these art-greens will be donated to urban agricultural projects “Bushwick City Farms” Bed Stuy Campaign Against Hunger’ or Added Value.”

Full disclosure, my visit to this exhibition taught me about three great food based not-for-profits within two miles of where I live. There is indeed an educational value to this exhibition. On another level though, I don’t think I learned anything significant about why I should grow my own food, how to grow my own food, or even where to buy affordable, sustainably farmed, organic goods. The installation of under the couch greens seems a little more like a novelty than any sort of practical suggestion.

Eight Extraordinary Greens

What are the larger implications of a project like this? I think if anything it serves as an honest departure point for conservation. I hope that visitors are tempted by the delicious greens and intrigued by the installation. Sure, the receipts on the wall tell us about what the gallery goer might pay full a bundle of micro greens, but does that really give us a larger snapshot of the value our society places on food? I honestly doubt it but I think that’s ok. Art doesn’t have to take the place of education, volunteering or other types of civic involvement it need only inspire.

More and more we see that artists seek to engage the social sector. I’m a long standing fan of activist art collectives and street artists that actively push their message and information out on to the streets and into the mailboxes of the uninformed. The point has always seemed to me, to inspire and to invite wonder. While the social good is certainly important, and I find it difficult to take issue with something that is well intended and that I support, the installation felt as if it lacked something. The focus, unfortunately, seemed on the idea of the project rather than it’s presentation. I would hold that even a conceptual artist like Joseph Kosuth relies on the visual impact of art. His installations are effective I think in particular because they do pack a mean aesthetic punch. If you want to make me care, awesome, stop me on the street and I’ll listen to your pitch, I’ll probably even give you money. Unfortunately canvassing for social causes is not art and shouldn’t be confused as such. I only venture to say that, while the issues are important, don’t let them stifle the experience or the point you are trying to convey might get lost in the shuffle.

Eight Extraordinary Greens runs at Mixed Greens (531 west 26th Street, 1st floor, Chelsea, Manhattan) until June 2.

Syd Mead, "Disaster at Syntron" (1978) (all images courtesy BravinLee Programs) (click to enlarge)

BravinLee Programs in Chelsea has one of the most eye-popping shows currently on display in the city’s art galleries. The gallery has invited Syd Mead, the futurist designer behind such cult classics as Blade Runner (1982), Aliens (1986) and Tron (1982), to exhibit his creations at their West 26th Street space.

Syd Mead checking out some student work at the Vancouver Film School (via blog.vfs.com)

The futurist visions are painted with gouache on board and reveal a very hedonist vision of the world of the future. Figures are sensual, details are abundant and the angles shift to see the world from above, below and from impossible perspectives that give the universe he imagines an ethereal tint.

What’s peculiar about Mead’s work is how it feels strangely familiar even if it is situated in another time. Like Victorian visions of the future or images of the late 20th C. created during the Jazz age, there is a slice of life feel to these scene that make them as appealing today as when they left his desk or easel.

In an era where almost all illustration is done on a computer, it’s enjoyable to see this artist’s mastery of a very physical medium that gives his visions an inviting veneer. Yet this future is not without its faults. There is no poverty, disease or sadness in Mead’s world, only 1%ers whose lives who all seem to enjoy the endless improvements brought to their lives by technology, which should be no surprise as many these images were commissioned by corporations and visually seduced the viewer with their glistening vision of commercial products.

There is also the peculiar fact that it’s hard to visually date many of Mead’s images. Some of his images from the 1970s look like they could have easily have been created last week, while others from a few years ago appear steeped in a 1980s vision of the future. This confusion doesn’t appear to be as much about details of fashion or style as competing visions of luxury that each decade projects onto consumers — in other words, the future is like shifting sands in the desert and there’s a new dune each place you look.

I received a small tour of the show with co-owner John Lee, who is an obvious fan of Mead and his work. “Syd’s work appeals to me. He’s a legend that not everyone knows. I didn’t even know who he was until around 1995 — but always loved Blade Runner. It’s a thrill and an honor to have his work in my gallery,” he says. “If I were the emperor of Japan I would designate Syd Mead a goddamned national treasure. If I were the queen of England I would fucking knight the artists I like. But I’m neither so I did what I could and gave him one person show at Bravinlee programs.”

At last week’s opening, according to the New York Times Wheels blog, “Lee established a Skype connection on his iPad for visitors to the gallery to converse with Mr. Mead in his studio in Pasadena, Calif. It was futuristic moment in itself.”

"Enzmann Daedulus Probe" (1979) (click to enlarge)

"Hypervan - Crimson" (2003) (click to enlarge)

"Hypervan Profile" (2005) (click to enlarge)

"Party" (2000) (click to enlarge)

"Cavalcade" (1996) (click to enlarge)

"MegaCoach" (2010) (click to enlarge)

"Running of The 200th KD" (1975) (click to enlarge)

Syd Mead’s Future (Perfect) continues at BravinLee Programs (526 West 26th Street, Suite 211, Chelsea, Manhattan) until June 30.

Quayola, "Strata #4" (2011) (image courtesy Bitforms gallery, NY)

Davide Quagliola (aka Quayola) an Italian digital artist, loves art. He loves his Roman heritage, brimming with Renaissance and Baroque innuendos. And he loves classical images, and the beauty of the algorithm.

Quayola  has created one of the most startling custom morphing technologies from his super-duper London based server rendering farm, transforming paintings from the ceilings of churches and museum collections to go inside, underneath and outside trompe l’oeil and encaustics. “Strata #4,” one of  his video works on view at Bitforms gallery in Chelsea was commissioned by the Palais de Beaux Arts in Lille, using the iconic paintings from the museum’s Flemish collection of Peter Paul Rubens’ and Anton Van Dyck’s grand altarpieces.

Quayola, "Topologies - Velazquez, Las Meninas" (2010) (image courtesy Bitforms gallery)

What Quayola really looks for is the alchemist’s secret, the golden rule or mean of proportions that can underlie eternal works. His HD video series about two paintings in the Museo del Prado‘s collection “Topologies — Velazquez, Las Meninas” (2010) and “Topologies – Tiepolo, Immacolata Concezione” (2010), structurally dissolve as you view them. In collaboration with an HDR photographer he works with huge images, 20,000 x 20,000 pixels, running a raw analysis to discover what is really within the paintings. Employing  a triangulation algorithm that generates thousands of polygons, he takes these icons of perfection and turns them into a mesh continually deforming itself.

Through distancing himself from the Italian land of his birth by residing in London, Quayola has decontextualized his heritage just enough to thrust it into a new century.

You can watch Quayola’s “Strata #4″ (2011) online.

Quayola’s Strata continues at Bitforms (529 W 20th Street, #2, Chelsea, Manhattan) until June 16.

A view of the Met's Schiaparelli and Prada exhibition (all images courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

It’s inevitable not to compare the new show at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute to last year’s blockbuster, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, however unfair that might be. But it doesn’t matter, because Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, a pairing of two disparate designers that gives far too much precedence to the latter, falls flat, regardless of what preceded it.

The exhibition opens to a sleek viewing area with glossy plastic benches in front of a projection of Miuccia Prada interviewing actress Judy Davis playing Schiaparelli, reciting lines from her memoir, Shocking Life. The short movies, directed by Baz Luhrman, are sprinkled throughout the exhibition as a backdrop to the perfectly styled mannequins, and while clever, serve more as ambient noise than the eavesdropping they had intended, distracting viewers from the clothes on view.

A view of the show's attempt to compare and contrast the work of both designers (click to enlarge)

The first section of the exhibition situates the two designers’ strengths in terms of the parts of women they typically dressed. Schiaparelli’s designs tended to focus on the upper part of the body, most of her more creative constructions being jackets and chapeaux, whereas Prada centers her energies on laboring over skirts, shoes and other adornments for the lower half of the body. The curators juxtapose Schiaparelli’s hats alongside Prada’s shoes, and pair Prada skirts with Schiaparelli jackets. However, nothing matches, not in the strictest sense of styling nor the theoretical sense of curation. There’s an attempt to draw many of the pieces together through visual motifs, whether they clothes have similar geometric patterns, botanical embellishments or insectoid ornamentation (both designers seem to have a propensity for beetles), but the clothes have nearly nothing to do with each other outside of that initial visual cue, especially in terms of fabric, silhouette, color and construction.

The exhibition continues by exploring similar styles they experimented with in their oeuvre before fizzling out into the last gallery, which displays Prada outfits and digital projections of Schiaparelli designs behind them. The only iconic piece of Schiaparelli they can really boast exhibiting is her shoe hat, which is shoved up at the beginning until we’re left with very few (if any) bona fide Schiaparelli designs. Though clearly easier to receive, the numerous, flashy Prada pieces (some of which are from collections so recent I’ve seen them on eBay) overshadowed the small pool of Schiaparelli. It becomes apparent that the curators may have accepted one too many outfits courtesy of Prada, and the effort in combining these two minds gives way to opening a Prada outlet where nothing’s for sale.

Shoes, shoes, shoes (click to enlarge)

The interesting (and unfortunately unexplored) aspect of note in the pairing of Schiaparelli and Prada lies neither within their shared heritage (because, really, their Italian-ness is not enough to glue the two together) nor any juxtaposition in their styles. The shear camp glamour of Schiaparelli’s lobster dress or chest suit neither complements nor challenges Prada’s sleek sturdiness. It’s like curating the works of Salvador Dali and Damien Hirst in one show: provocative at first thought, but ultimately discordant in execution.

No, the truly fascinating thread between the two is their rich, strong connections with the art world. Coco Chanel herself once commented that Schiaparelli was that “artist who makes clothes,” as she spent most of her career commiserating and collaborating with the likes of Dali, Cocteau and Giacometti. Many of her designs skirted the typical mode of female dress in the 1930s and ’40s, incorporating surrealist subject matter in her designs, from tear dresses to lamb cutlet hats. Prada, alternatively, forged herself into a great patron of the arts, collecting works from the YBAs, setting up the contemporary art space Fondazione Prada and aiding artists Elmgreen and Dragset in their permanent interventionist installation Prada Marfa.

Impossible Conversations is the smallest show at the Costume Institute I’ve seen in a long while, and while it’s nice not to have an overload of garments to process, there appeared to be less care and thought put into the small selection. It seems strange to mount another retrospective after Savage Beauty, and a lot of the creative work often seen in the curatorial department was lost. The Met is very good at mounting provocative thematic exhibitions, like Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, where a large assemblage of high fashion as well as film costumes constructed an interesting and exhilarating show. Since McQueen had recently passed, and his garments had enough impact to stand on their own without much context, it made sense to give him a retrospective. But this show sits somewhere in between “wonderfully thematic” and “impressive retrospective.” It might have been interesting to explore “impossible” conversations angle across a breadth of different designers instead of limiting it to two, but as it is, it’s simply impossible to reckon with.

Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations continues at the Metropolitan Museum (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) until August 19.

Installation view of Brooklyn Utopias in the Old Stone House (photo by Rick Schwab)

This past weekend the renovations of Washington Park and the J.J. Byrne Playground outside the Old Stone House in Park Slope were unveiled to a cacophonous crowd of thrilled children and their parents. Fittingly, I was there to see Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space, an exhibit on the second level of the Old Stone House coinciding with the park’s reopening that invited artists to respond to the ideas of bringing play to public spaces while being conscious of community and urban development.

Washington Park viewed from the Old Stone House (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

While I talked with curator Katherine Gressel and Old Stone House executive director Kimberly Maier about public play space in New York City, it was possible to see the results of the years of community planning that went into the now vibrant greenspace outside. Where once there was an asphalt field and scrubs of patchy grass, there is now a swath of green adorned with climbing toys and fountains. The 19 artists and organizations in Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space take the concept of community play spaces further in their exploration of how art can be a strategy for addressing public parks and recreation spaces, as well as examining the eminent domain and gentrification that sometimes drives these developments.

Katherine Gressel, curator of Brooklyn Utopias

Brooklyn Utopias, an ongoing series curated by Katherine Gressel in the Old Stone House, asks artists to envision an ideal city using Brooklyn as a lens. Gressel said that she first had the concept for Brooklyn Utopias back in 2008, when Brooklyn’s rising popularity and subsequent boom in housing construction resulted in overdevelopment and other consequences. Many grassroots groups have responded by taking an active role in improving neighborhoods and bringing community ideas together, and Brooklyn Utopias is a way to see how artists are addressing these same issues.

Previous Brooklyn Utopias exhibits have focused on overdevelopment, community preservation and urban agriculture, and Park Space, Play Space, in bringing play into this urban development dialogue, has organizations like the Groundswell Mural Project presenting a video of their “Dreams (Infinite Dreams)” mural created in a partnership with the Trust for Public Land as part of a greater project to transform PS 164 in Borough Park’s blacktop schoolyard into a green play space, and artists like Bettina Johae investigating how eminent domain has been used for forming parks in Brooklyn.

Bettina Johae, "Eminent domain nyc - Brooklyn parks" (detail)

The Old Stone House is an appropriate venue for exhibits on idealized urban planning, as the house itself is the result of a 1930 Robert Moses project to create an idealized replica of a 1699 Dutch farmhouse that was a site in the Battle of Brooklyn. Katherine Gressel is a painter herself and has explored the development of Brooklyn in her work, including a painting that places the Battle of Brooklyn in the contemporary Brooklyn streets, which is held in the Old Stone House’s permanent exhibit downstairs. Modern battles over public space also inspired Park Space, Play Space, including Occupy Wall Street, represented through the art of Karen Kaapcke who did plein air paintings in Zuccotti Park. (She was featured on Hyperallergic in December 2011.)

Cheryl Molnar, "Kent Ave. 2005-2011" (2012), ink-jet prints

The fact that one person’s utopia can be another’s loss is an undercurrent throughout the exhibit, as well as the impact of development on the natural and existing urban terrain of Brooklyn. Cheryl Molnar concentrated on the rapid transformation of Kent Avenue after the rezoning of the Greenpoint and Williamsburg waterfront, and the sprouting of apartment buildings, along with the opening of public space and parks, shows how in only a few years this dramatic construction project has brought both new economic and community activity, as well as major changes in the area’s character.

Marina Zamalin, "Brooklyn Canals" (2009-2011), video (photo by Rick Schwab)

Much of the art definitely has its strength in the ideas behind it over exuberant visuals, but Marina Zamalin’s transfixing video, “Canals of Brooklyn,” is a beautiful journey over the waters of the borough to find surprising corners of nature that look more like untouched wetlands than waterways in a city populated with millions. Brooklyn’s nature was captured in more accessible, yet just as easily overlooked, places in Lynn Cazabon’s “Uncultivated” works, where the artist photographed uncultivated plants found in the perimeter of Washington Park at the Old Stone House. Both demonstrated that nature isn’t just corralled in fences and that landscaped park spaces are only one aspect of greenspace to be preserved in Brooklyn.

Husk, "T.U.B. Park (The Utopian Bath Park)," watercolor, graphite and ink on paper (detail)

Of the artists that propose park projects that could be realized in Brooklyn, Husk’s is the most whimsical, yet still appealingly possible. Their proposal for “T.U.B. Park (The Utopian Bath Park)” would have hot tubs made from repurposed water towers filled with rainwater and powered by the kinetic energy of children’s play as well as gravity, water and compost, the utopia coming from the adults getting their relaxation while the children play frenetically below.

Stephanie Beck, "Circle Park, From the Park Space Series" (2012), graphite, cut paper and glue on paper

Two artists have utopian maps proposed for urban parks, with Christine Gedeon’s “OSH, Brooklyn (Plot Re-visualized)” comprised of a fiber topography of an idealized revitalization of the Old Stone House park spaces, and Stephanie Beck’s “Park Space” series of relief-maps presenting an ideal layout of parks within the city streets. Both are direct takes on the theme of artists shaping community, and the artists’ potential to propose change.

Washington Park and Old Stone House

Public programming that involves the community is an essential part of Brooklyn Utopias, and this coming Saturday, May 19, is a whole day of events at the Old Stone House and in Washington Park. At noon, Bettina Johae will lead a bike tour in conjunction with her “eminent domain, nyc” project to selected park sites of eminent domain in Brooklyn, including Prospect Park and Calvert Vaux Park, ending at Coney Island. (Email b [at] ettinajohae [dot] com to register for the bike tour.) Will Pappenheimer is hosting an Augemented Reality workshop where he will demonstrate how to use smartphones to make the windmills of his app, Sky Mills, appear in the park and invite participants to add to the skywriting of the virtual plane that layers over the sky. Game-designers Gigantic Mechanic are bringing interactive games, including the Rubber Ball Battle of Brooklyn, which mixes dodgeball with capture the flag to replicate the Revolutionary War engagement, and Shadowplay, a live-action arcade game where players play with their shadows. Other upcoming events can be found on the Brooklyn Utopias blog.

After spending time in the tranquility of Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space in the Old Stone House and stepping out into the swirls of people drawn to the park in the spring sun, it was possible to imagine that although art can be much more romanticized than what usually ends up in city planning, it is possible to bring some of its spirit into Brooklyn, and that artists are an essential voice in imagining an exuberant, yet intelligently developed, future for the borough.

Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space shows through June 24 at the Old Stone House (336 3rd Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn). 

It is Almost That was conceived and edited by Siglio publisher Lisa Pearson, who envisioned the book to be the first of several editions that would document pieces in the fuzzy area between art and text, works that are “not-quite-this-and-not-quite-that.” In her afterword, Pearson emphasizes that “categories cannot contain” and that works that are “partly (almost) visible to one world [are] often entirely invisible to another.” The twenty-six pieces that comprise the volume are not arranged in chronological order, though they are loosely associated with works that precede and follow them. Through this manner of curation, Pearson poses the question of what it means to “read” a text that reveals itself primarily as image when it is not the only work of its kind.

The title of It is Almost That is borrowed from a slideshow included in the volume by Theresea Hak Kyung Cha. Cha is best known for her text-art novel Dictée (1982), a harbinger of the recent surge in experimental memoir. Like Dictée, It is Almost That (1977), designed on black paper with white press-type, explores the effect of point of view in the project of personal narration. The piece is composed of fragments and does not offer the reader the satisfaction of narrative or declaration. Like many of the pieces contained in this book, it incites “more questions than answers.”

Excerpt from "It Is Almost That" by Cole Swensen & Shari Degraw (all images courtesy Siglio Press, © the artists) (click to enlarge)

A vigorous commitment to conceptual practice unites the artists, no matter how different the content of their work. All pieces contained in the volume are by women, including several key performance artists from the genre’s boldest era, among them Hannah Weiner, Adrian Piper and Ann Hamilton. Alison Knowles’s “A House of Dust” (1968), an exercise in randomly generated content, appears as what is arguably the first computer generated poem. Eleanor Antin’s “Domestic Peace,” a graphic notation of the artist’s emotional responses to conversations with her mother during a visit in December 1971, reveals the degree of friction between the two women that arises over mundane topics.

Some works in this collection pursue questions related to the writing process. In particular, the work of Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu & Rohini Kapil, Cole Swensen & Shari Degraw and Fiona Banner provoke a conversation about the relationship between facts and evidence. Jane Hammond’s “Fallen” (2004–), a series of paper leaves reproduced in color that carry the handwritten names of deceased American soldiers, attempts a symbolic documentation of a specific loss. When this anthology was published there was a pile of more than four thousand different paper leaves comprising the work.

Excerpt from "Fallen" by Jane Hammond (2004–)

Helen Kim’s “What Remains” (2006) is composed of photographs and text panels that chronicle one Korean family’s life in the United States. Images of empty plates, restaurant takeout containers and notes on napkins do not explicitly reveal any personal history except the sense that a person or group of people have just been missed, perhaps forever, by bad timing, or misinterpretation. Kim’s assemblage makes a powerful statement about how consumer culture overshadows our most intimate interactions.

All of the texts in the book are printed in black and white, despite that seven of the works were originally designed in color. Pearson notes the significance of her editorial decision: “Gray is the color of ambiguity, of it’s almost that, of infinite shading, of the in-between like twilight and shadows, of the merging of the white of the page and the black of the printed text. Gray is, when reading, unseen but sensed (the figurative gray is always there in the best work).” This makes sense for pieces that were originally created in black and white, though for those works originally created in color, the imposition of gray scale may overstate the metaphor.

Excerpt from “Pictures and Early Words” by Hannah Weiner (1972) (click to enlarge)

Some flatness intrinsic to the form of the anthology makes the body of work come across a little more like literature rather than visual art. And the juxtaposition of such different creative impulses can make it easy to forget that these pieces were once hard to classify. Even when presented in gray scale, many of the works have little in common with each other. This may have to do with the fact that each piece is governed by its own rules, which tend to be based in personal aesthetics rather than the collaborative ideas of a movement or group of artists. A couple of the pieces seem under-realized compared to other works in the anthology.

For example, Hannah Wiener’s “Pictures and Early Words” (1972), which attempts to translate visions of words appearing in thin air and falling around her into a typescript, reads more like an annotated diary than visual art. The few pages presented from Fiona Banner’s “The Nam” (1997), a book of descriptions about six well-known films on the Vietnam War, look like bad photocopies: fat, blank margins showing around the edges of the book and the white space between the dense type appearing unevenly grainy and smudged.

While most of pieces presented in It is Almost That are nuanced enough to earn careful study, it is a bit disappointing that a more extensive commentary is not included, given that a lack of little critical attention may have contributed to their initial disregard. The upside of this lack of analysis is that there is no distraction from the works, which demand new ways of reading, each in their own imaginative and often playful ways.

It is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists and Writers is edited by Lisa Pearson and available at Siglio Press and other online booksellers.