TIME OUT NEW YORK Art Reviews 2007

Babette Mangolte
Broadway 1602
Through Sept 2

The “rediscovery” of women artists has been a hot trend in recent years, with several exhibitions spotlighting work from a feminist perspective (“WACK!” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; “Global Feminisms” at the Brooklyn Museum). While this mini retrospective of Babette Mangolte’s photographs and films might associate her with this trend, it also provides a compelling look back to the downtown New York art scene of the 1970s.

“Spaces to See, Stories to Tell” (a reference to Mangolte’s blending of art and personal history) begins with film stills and photographs of experimental dance and performance art, including images of friends and collaborators who are now famous: Yvonne Rainer, Philip Glass, Richard Serra and Trisha Brown. In one stunning black-and-white photograph, Rainer appears with the back of her head facing the camera, a stance similar to the one she employed in many of her performances. Other photographs depict the interiors of Mangolte’s loft in 1974, a mostly empty space reminiscent of the sparse sets used in avant-garde theater of the time.

In another series, Composite Buildings (1978), Mangolte seems to take a page from dance, transposing a sense of choreography onto architecture with doubled images of building facades printed on single sheets of photo paper. One is left not only with a vivid record of a lively milieu but also a reminder that bold experimentation between forms is still relevant, even in today’s market-driven art world. It’s one reason, among others, that rediscoveries like that of Mangolte should be made more often.

 

Peter Coffin
The Horticultural Society of New York
Through Sept 7

Peter Coffin is known for his work with plants and the paranormal, and with “Tree Pants,” his new series of color photographs, the New York artist combines these elements to quasi-ironic effect. Quasi because the work feels a bit too comfortable surrounded by the botanical books and reproductions of plant-related artworks that Coffin has chosen to accompany his work. Ironic because “Tree Pants” consists of pictures of trees wearing upside-down blue jeans (custom-made by Levi Strauss & Co., no less). But even if Coffin’s approach seems a little too green, his solo debut offers a welcome respite from the usual NYC fare with results that are likable, if not amusing.

The four images here were taken at the Wanas Sculpture Park in Sweden, and highlight changes over the course of a year. Spring depicts the forest’s lush green abundance with a trouser-endowed tree sprouting up in the background. The gold and yellow hues in Summer and the barren, snow-covered landscape of Winter bring to mind Brueghel’s atmospheric paintings of seasons and labor.

Though the images are attractive, the sight of anthropomorphized trees wearing jeans is less than transcendent. Coffin seems drawn to an awkward, if free-spirit sort of sublimity, as evidenced by such previous work as a corkscrew of light made from 30 postcards of rainbows arranged in a spiral, and “aura” portraits done with a rigged Polaroid camera. “Tree Pants” is more absurd than either of those, but its ambiguous juxtaposition of nature and nurture will leave you wondering just how far removed from real, untouched beauty we’ve become.

 

Liz Deschenes
Miguel Abreu
Through May 20

Liz Deschenes’s experimental approach to photography is a perfect match for the Conceptualist spin of Miguel Abreu’s programming (itself emblematic of the theory-heavy LES gallery scene). Deschenes insists on the primacy of perception, and the seven pieces here yield real-time psychedelic effects rather than simply capturing a past event, as photographs tend to do.

The series re-creates the effect of moiré patterns, produced by the interference of pixels and raster lines in digital pictures of television screens. One could regard Deschenes’s process itself as a kind of interference: She photographs a piece of perforated paper with a large-format camera and produces two copies of the eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white negative, slightly misaligning them in the enlarger. The resulting misregistration, printed large-scale and in color, makes the tiny white dots appear to pulsate. Fortunately, a diptych of monotone red-dye transfer prints, installed among the moiré photographs, provides a welcome respite from the visual overload.

Descriptions aside, Deschenes’s project is not a revival of op art, and allusions to painters like Bridget Riley would be amiss. By using an analogue camera to depict something we usually see in digital pictures, Deschenes uses old technology to interrogate new optical models. Her project is a smart blend of phenomenology and Conceptual art with a formalist bent. Though this work is laden with theories from Baudrillard and Deleuze (as an accompanying gallery statement suggests), Deschenes’s ideas about photography come through most clearly in the work itself, and spending time with her pictures is a mind-altering experience.

 

Justine Kurland
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Through April 7

Justine Kurland’s idyllic color photographs of naked mothers and children in American landscapes have an unambiguous earth-goddess bent that is underscored by the show’s title, “Of Woman Born.” To locate her subjects, Kurland drove across the country with her young son, an approach that shares affinities with other recent photographs of back-to-the-land communities, including Joel Sternfeld’s “Sweet Earth” series and JD Samson’s “Lesbian Utopia” calendar. (Kurland’s on-the-road process also puts a familial spin on Robert Frank’s iconic 1958 project, “The Americans.”)

Since she first emerged in the late 1990s with photographs of adolescent girls, Kurland’s work has walked a tightrope between the allegorical and the documentary, “set-up” and “straight.” In Expulsion, for example, a small group anxiously flees the woods, as if staying one step ahead of clear-cutting or natural disaster. Mama Baby, Ocean View, is a beach scene of mothers and toddlers so jubilant it verges on fairy-tale.

Yet despite Kurland’s celebration of motherhood as a sublimely natural state, an unnatural staginess pervades some of her pictures. Questions arise: Is Kurland’s project a utopian fantasy? A feminist statement? And what would posess a very pregnant woman to wear only galoshes on a hike through a marsh, as the subject of Wild Palms does here?

Kurland’s photographs are ravishing, and the hopeful fantasy she envisions—maternal bliss in a world without men—poses a seductive alternative to the military brutality of the real world. Unfortunately, it also borders on an essentialist cliché.

 

Tacita Dean
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Through June 6

This small exhibition dedicated to the British artist Tacita Dean, winner of the museum’s 2006 Hugo Boss Prize, presents four works making their U.S. debut. Trained as a painter, Dean is best known for her meditative, allegorical films, and three of the works here reflect on the medium and its material.

Kodak, a 44-minute, 16mm color film, flickers quietly in the back gallery of the two-room show. It was shot just before the shuttering of a Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, where black-and-white celluloid film was manufactured. Dean atmospherically records the daily processes of the factory, which are conducted both in darkness (bathed in red light to prevent exposure of the film) and bright fluorescent light (during a rare test-run using brown paper). As the piece documents the mechanics of making film, her often gorgeous footage serves as a testament to the aesthetic value of filmmaking. Skirting didacticism, Dean comments on the limitations of more technically advanced film formats. For example, had Kodak had been shot digitally rather than on celluloid stock, it could not have captured the contrasts or depths of field seen here.

In the next room, the artist presents a rear projection shot on the last five rolls of 16mm black-and-white film she could locate. Titled Noir et Blanc, the resulting image looks like an animated abstract painting. Nearby, an unexposed strip of celluloid film hangs framed on the wall, a memorial to a near-dead medium.

 

Shannon Ebner
Wallspace
Through March 17

Around the late ’70s, academics began to talk about art as if it were a language, complete with structure, syntax, signifier and signified. Los Angeles artist Shannon Ebner does an impressive job of turning this “reading” on its head by manipulating the words in her new work into a barely legible form.

For her second solo show in New York, Ebner presents nine images that diverge from her acclaimed photographs of politically loaded words spelled out in temporary landscape installations. Replacing sublime scenery and horizons with concrete and spray paint, this new series mines the territory of language through more aggressive means. Ebner’s distinct political edge is most evident in Democratizing, a picture in which parts of the word, composed of sand on asphalt, are dissolved by running water.

While Ed Ruscha seems to be an influence, the metaphorical tone of Ebner’s work is closer to Robert Smithson’s. OPIC, a radiant photograph of glistening blue squares that both compose and surround the word "entropic," invokes a downward spiral with stunning effects.

One black-and-white photograph portrays a wooden box containing letters resurrected from earlier work. Inside the hinged lid of the box is the phrase "sculptures involuntaires," a reference to Brassai’s photographs of ephemera. This allusion to sculpture as a hostage of photography’s frozen frame is just one facet of Ebner’s distinct and intelligent approach that may offer as may possibilities as she can construct.