ARTFORUM.COM Critics' Picks 2007

2006: Sue de Beer, "A Fold in the Fabric," Molly Smith, Fred Tomaselli, "Ecotopia," Sara VanDerBeek.

Raymond Pettibon
DAVID ZWIRNER GALLERY
525 West 19th Street
September 11–October 20

Five years ago, Andrew Card, then the White House chief of staff, explained to the New York Times why the Bush administration planned to wait until after Labor Day to unveil its plans for Iraq: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” I’d like to think that Raymond Pettibon had this in mind while putting together his atmospheric seventh solo show for this gallery, which opened on September 11 and features over one hundred new drawings. At their best, the works boldly portray the Bush regime (mostly George, Condi, and Dick) in harrowing situations—Bush with his hands covered in blood; the trio leaning over a casket as a mother cries—while, in typical Pettibon fashion, diaristic, often-prosaic captions add ancillary subtext.

The drawings are installed salon-style, in what appear to be thematic clusters, and are among the most striking works Pettibon has made to date in both content and form. Along with the explicitly political works, there are new pictorial elements that further prove Pettibon is an artist willing to take risks: Some pieces seem to incorporate etchings of nude figures made by his recently deceased father, a technique Pettibon first deployed in his 2006 solo exhibition in Los Angeles, while a group of fourteen drawings on the gallery’s north wall glows with supersaturated colors that complement his trademark black brushstrokes. This blend of narrative and news, the personal and the political, rebellion and self-reflection, is electrifying territory for this already well-established artist, who has trailed a significant fan base since working for SST, his brother’s record label, in the late 1970s. For those who have looked for proof that punk’s not dead in our increasingly apathetic and commercially co-opted times: Your ship has landed.

Yuri Masnyj
METRO PICTURES
519 West 24th Street
June 21–July 31

Allusions to twentieth-century art history permeate Yuri Masnyj’s austerely rendered drawings and carefully composed hand-cast sculptures, though these references tend to belie the subtle humor threaded throughout this exhibition, his second solo in New York. Here, guitars, bottles, prisms, cones, posters, modern furniture, an invented typeface, and what appears to be a never-ending library of books proliferate like cards drawn from a loaded deck. With a checklist in hand, it becomes clear that Masnyj is not trying to insert himself into a certain genealogy, but instead is grappling—coolly—with the complexity of modernism’s vestiges. Take, for example, the amusingly titled watercolor and graphite drawing There Is a Lot to Read to Understand What the Fuck Is Going On (all works 2007), in which the artist depicts precariously stacked books up close and with slightly incorrect perspective, as if to insert the viewer into the space—a gesture further complicated by the gray ground that is similar to the gallery’s floor. In the drawing Trying to Understand Your Logic, a bookcase full of similar tomes and aesthetic objects is framed by two strong Constructivist lines, though the overall articulation of space is more reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints.

Like Keegan McHargue, whose show last autumn at this gallery echoes faintly here, Masnyj seems deeply engaged with formal concerns: His work is primarily flat, incorporates a limited color palette, and tends to feature sparse, remarkably well-designed interiors. However, Masnyj’s three-dimensional sculptures—which are culled from the drawings and are at once figurative and abstract, symbolic and concrete—seem a little less exactingly controlled. The translation into three dimensions serves Masnyj well. As the overlay of references throughout this show walks the line between high and low, so too does he seem comfortable working in both two and three dimensions.

Trisha Donnelly
CASEY KAPLAN
525 West 21st Street
May 11–June 14

Close your eyes for a moment while visiting Trisha Donnelly’s third solo exhibition at this gallery. A pile of pine branches in the first room and the sound of bells ringing intermittently in the second might provide just enough stimulus to trigger a memory—perhaps of the holiday season, a vacation, or something not typically associated with art. Much of Donnelly’s work operates metaphorically, as if to forge suggestive links between her practice and larger, sometimes otherworldly ideas. Subtle connections between fiction and fact abound in this show, like tiny seeds planted in the back of our minds that bloom later on. Consider, for example, R. Creeley + Levitating Wave (all works 2007), a delicate drawing on fabric that references the American poet and an imaginary oceanic event. Other works connect sound and space with a dramatic touch: HW, an embroidered cotton and steel sculpture depicting sound waves and pressure, is draped like a theater curtain at the entrance of the gallery. A series of sculptures on wheels, all entitled Braker, are embroidered with a quasi-phallic shape and placed randomly throughout the gallery, helping to split up, shift, and symbolically bookend the other artworks on view. If Donnelly’s earlier work examined artists’ ability to create, sustain, and shape myths (notably channeling Napoleon’s surrender during a 2002 performance), this exhibition forsakes narrative momentum for a precarious standoff between chaos and calculation. This is, as is always the case with her work, a risky proposition, but Donnelly pulls it off with free-floating associations and magical thinking.

Jef Geys
ORCHARD
47 Orchard Street
February 4–March 4

“What happens when feminism becomes a course rather than a cause?” This question, posed by Linda Nochlin during MoMA’s recent “Feminist Future” symposium, is amplified by 157 underlying concerns listed in Jef Geys’s !Women’s Questions?, 1965–2007, now making its belated US debut. Though Geys is not included in the feminist art canon or widely known outside his native Belgium, his community-based, dialogical approach offers a scrutiny of women’s experience since the Second Wave's heyday. Each work takes the form of a handwritten list; the repetitiveness (and seeming sincerity) of his uniform capital letters in thick black ink precludes knee-jerk responses and simplified judgment calls. !Women’s Questions? began as a questionnaire Geys hung on a classroom wall at the all-girls vocational school where he taught and, after much input from his students, has since expanded to bulky hanging scrolls and been cursorily translated into several languages. The queries range from the macro (“Do all women want to call their role into question?”) to the micro (“How does one avoid one becoming a kitchen slave?”), while highlighting a disturbing resemblance between the most pressing concerns then and now. However, a “think global, act local” optimism prevails in Geys’s practice: Proceeds from the exhibition will benefit the Henry Street Settlement.

"Photography and the Self: The Legacy of F. Holland Day"
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
December 20–March 4

This small show, tucked into the Whitney’s mezzanine gallery, posits a somber series on the Passion by F. Holland Day, The Seven Words, 1898, as a precursor to fourteen self-portraits by contemporary artists. Though the works at first appear loosely gathered from the museum’s collection, coherent themes—masquerade and engagement with individual history, for example—materialize. Strange intersections of art and life occur, and the exhibition makes it difficult not to see deeply unsettled personae and the structurally unsound facade of identity everywhere one looks (perhaps the earlier artist’s “legacy,” if you will). Day’s compulsive depiction of Jesus, which necessitated a self-transformation that involved growing his hair and losing weight, finds kinship in works by Adrian Piper, Hannah Wilke, Chris Burden, and Charles Ray. With its blend of introspection and histrionics, Piper’s Food for the Spirit, 1971—fourteen black-and-white photographs made while she obsessively read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, fasted, practiced yoga, and feared losing touch with the physical world—is perhaps most closely aligned with Day’s work. The series documents Piper’s search for corporeal reassurance, although she appears translucent and ephemeral and progressively fades away through underexposure. This seemingly confessional, diaristic mode—prevalent in “Photography and the Self”—provides compelling evidence that the psychological insights of art have transformational effects. This show is evidence that in bridging the small gap between art and life, one can find transcendence.