Tag Archives: New Museum

Jim Shaw’s Americana melange at the New Museum

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The New Museum’s “Jim Shaw: The End is Here” presents a retrospective of the 63-year-old West Coast artist who frames his exploration of fringe movements and pop Zeitgeist in inquisitive, art historical terms. My main takeaway from the Shaw exhibition: more is more. Especially when you hang it salon style across big galleries and fill vitrine after vitrine with esoterica. The survey of work from the 1970s onward, on view until January 10, fills three floors.

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Seven Deadly Sins

The second floor opens with a wide range of small works from the 90s–drawings of dreams and painted reimaginings of pulpy book covers. Both tend toward the erotic and the surreal. These works lay the ground for recurring subject matter in Shaw’s oeuvre: pop rendered vivid and uncanny. However, the next room of relatively stripped down recent paintings dispelled any suggestion that Shaw’s interests could be so neatly contained.  In these paintings, the difference between loose background and tightly rendered foreground gives the dense art historical and political allusion room to breathe (as in the excellent Seven Deadly Sins pictured above and below).

Detail, Seven Deadly Sins

Detail, Seven Deadly Sins

On the fourth floor, Shaw’s collections of thrift store paintings and of religious paraphernalia are on display, allowing the visitor to see the source material for much of the artist’s subject matter and share his fascination in lowbrow and weird Americana. The bad, enigmatic thrift store paintings are an odd prism with which to view American culture and the painters’ psyche; Shaw puts himself in their category by repeatedly displaying this collection in galleries.

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Installation of Thrift Store Paintings at the New Museum

Perhaps most impressive is Shaw’s dizzying collection of “didactic art,” featuring tent revival banners and tarot cards, medical texts and masonic heads. The material is probably vaguely familiar to most Americans, but I certainly never examined such cultural artifacts first hand. Even here, it is difficult to do so, simply because there is so much material to take in.

Collection of Didactic Art

Installation of Shaw’s Collection of Didactic Art at the New Museum

It is nuts–both the remnants of these fringe movements themselves and the attempt to collect and classify them into some kind of sensible order. Rather than succeeding, Shaw’s collection breaks down the border between what seems crazy and what seems reasonable. It makes you question the line in the sand between lunacy, belief, and fact–although personally I will continue to draw that line at the theory of aliens living among us.

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The pièce de résistance is on the fifth and last floor. Labarynth: I dreamt I was taller than Jonathon Borosky is a show-stopping stage-set of art and culture references blurred into a surreal suggestion of narrative that one can’t pin down. Instead, one wanders among the painted backdrops, raw wood supports, and sandbags examining the imagery. Details, like the one pictured below, surprise you as you spot Colonel Sanders of KFC fame below a large eagle. Characters, seemingly derived from the tarot card set you viewed in the didactic art collection on the floor below, make an appearance as well.

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The phrase “the sleep of reason produces monsters” came to my mind while viewing the show. The artist copied winged monsters from Goya’s famous etching earlier in the show, just as he refers to Dali, Picasso, and figures in the style of the game Monopoly in his final, ambitious work. It seemed fitting for this uncanny melange of found objects and paintings and drawings, in which oddball aspects of American culture start to feel strangely familiar.

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Chris Ofili at the New Museum

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An immersive, powerful experience of large-scale colorful canvases sounds like a step back in time to the New York City of the 1950s and ’60s, when color field artists like Mark Rothko were trying to paint a sublime experience. This retrospective at the New Museum of Chris Ofili, the British-born, 46 year-old painter, is neither abstract nor transcendental, but in new ways it suggests similar values of color and painterliness. The three floors of the museum feature works from throughout the artist’s career in this decadent and lush exhibition on view through January 25.

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P1160073P1160080The artist’s early provocative works with elephant dung, paintings from his installation at the British Pavilion done in the red, green, and black of the Pan-African flag, as well as a wall of watercolor portraits and a few choice (and for me surprising) sculptures are displayed roughly chronologically. These are all visually lush, intricately made, and well-worth a long look. What I enjoy very much about all the works in the exhibition is their merging of the figurative with the decorative in a way that, rather than eroding the content of the work, rather displaces it into a narrative realm of story and symbol. That is, rather than loosing content through the decorative and abstract–all highlighted by the colorful, wrought surfaces–new possibilities are opened up by it.

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Certainly, that’s something in itself. But what I most enjoyed was the artist-designed staging of the paintings on the third and fourth floors of the museum. I have some pictures of the fourth floor, a room of recent paintings from 2007 to 2014 displayed on a surprise of violet patterned walls that look like blown-up gouache by Gaugin. While the pictures hardly do it justice, you can at least get a sense of the overall effect: how the walls encase the paintings like velvet in a jewelry box and how the patterned surfaces play against one another in such a sensuous manner that the figurative elements within it remains slippery and suggestive rather than didactic.

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But for me the third floor held the most interesting experience. It’s also the most difficult to photograph. My photos of it, no flash allowed and taken in low light, all came out black, but I found one (below). Ofili designed a deep blue circular room to hang nine of his “The Blue Rider” paintings in. The paintings in this series, its name taken from the early Modernist journal in which Kandinsky preached his spiritual abstractions, are composed in deep shades of blue, apparently inspired by the colors of twilight and culture of Trinidad where the artist now lives.

Photo by Maris Hutchinson/EPW via the New Museum's tumblr

Photo by Maris Hutchinson/EPW via the New Museum’s tumblr

Between the low light and dark colors it is difficult to see the paintings–but to great effect. Your vision adjusts to some degree. Only in walking around the paintings, however, was I able to make out the shapes as the light shifted on the surface. These paintings seem like spiritual and formal exercises in perception and the meaning of color on one hand, but, like all Ofili’s works, were not without content. Houses, people, landscape all glimmered out of the dusky twilight. The subject matter reference films, biblical stories, and scenes from everyday life in Trinidad as well as Ofili’s imagination. The difficult perceptual experience was highly rewarding as it forces the viewer to actively pursue the suggested narrative while moving around it. Rather than being distracting, it was provocative and elusive. And very beautiful.

Three New York Exhibitions to Catch Over the Holidays

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In New York over Thanksgiving, I saw so many great shows, much of which I want to write about in more depth, and missed so many that I wanted to see. To save you from a similar fate of missing shows in the holiday chaos, allow me to point out three exhibition that will be closing soon after the New Year. Of the shows that I did see, these three stuck out as being well-worth the effort of seeing over the holidays.

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Chris Offili: Night and Day was the biggest (pleasant) surprise for me. I was familiar with the British artist’s work, from his original controversial dung paintings to his red, green, and black makeover at the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, but I hadn’t realized how lush and sensuous his large, detailed paintings could be. This gorgeous visual quality was apparent overall, and highlighted by the way they were installed in the museum. Especially in his most recent blue paintings, the viewer gets the rather rare experience of painting as one would with Rothko: an intense bodily confrontation and visual experience that grows over time. However, the subject matter quickly pulls it away from the sublime and into the lyrical.

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I, being an ignoramous, or perhaps merely too young, was not familiar with Gober’s work and wasn’t sure what I would make of the artist’s sinks and other examples of warped domesticity at Robert Gober: The Heart Is A Metaphor. What I found was pleasantly tactile work whose logic proceeded like that of dreams, intuitively making sense. It was odd, touching, bizarre–and images of it stick. I only wish I could walk through it again.

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Finally, Egon Schiele: Portraits is a beautiful and thorough show of this Viennese Expressionist painter’s work. The collection overall makes clear the stark break a young Schiele made with Gustav Klimt’s decorative style in favor of the psychological, in a city where Freud was doing his pioneering work in psychoanalysis. Remaining stylized, Schiele veered toward an expression of the inner mind, in ways that feel freshly startling. Similarly, his drawings, sometimes conventional, show his precocious skill as a draftsman.