November 26, 2004
Stan Shellabarger at Western Exhibitions, Chicago
Artforum.com has posted my brief review of Stan Shellabarger's current show at Western Exhibitions in Chicago. The show remains on view until Dec. 18 and the text is archived at the text is archived at BrianSholis.com.
An earnest devotee of the Acconci-Burden School of Performative Endurance is a rare find these days, but a trip to this weekends-only gallery will net you a sighting of Stan Shellabarger, who is also influenced by Richard Long's outdoor adventures. For this show, Shellabarger dons sandpaper-tipped cotton gloves to rub a hip-height line through a combination of foam insulation and drywall covering several of the gallery's walls. He's there for the duration of his exhibition and was duly walking back and forth before, during, and after my off-hours Wednesday visit. The mark made—the width of his hand and thinner near the corners where two walls meet—bears touching human imperfections. The rest of the show is a mix of objects and documentation that serve as an index of several years' worth of performance, ranging from the quotidian (all his wax paper butter wrappers, chronologically arranged; an archive of fingernail and toenail clippings; entire notebooks filled with his signature) to the poetic (photographs depicting his twelve-hour circular walks marking the spring and autumn equinoxes; a series of twenty-six drawings with marks, reminiscent of a prison-cell wall, tabulating every breath he took during an eight-hour period). Shellabarger's dedication is evidence that the trails blazed in the late 1960s and early 1970s are still branching off in intriguing directions.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
November 19, 2004
Jesper Just at Perry Rubenstein Gallery
Artforum.com has published my brief review of Jesper Just's New York solo debut, now on view at Perry Rubenstein Gallery. I've also posted a copy in the BrianSholis.com archive. Here's the text:
Danish artist Jesper Just's New York debut presents three variations on a theme. Each of the short videos (two shot on 16mm film) uses deadpan acting as a foil for humorously preposterous situations. No Man Is an Island II (all works 2004) is set in a dark red-leather-and-mirrors gentleman's club, in which Johannes Lilleøre, the innocent-faced star of other Just videos, is one of several men scattered about the room. Unexpectedly, he rises from his seat and begins an a cappella rendition of Roy Orbison's "Crying"; in turn, and in harmony, the other men join in. Yet each remains isolated in the room and by the camera, and at the end of the song (by which point tears are streaming down Lilleøre's face) we still don't know what compelled him to start in the first place. Likewise the narratives of Bliss & Heaven and The Lonely Villa have little forward momentum. Just's lush production values, noir sensibility (his raking light and deep shadow speak volumes), and immaculate eye for detail add frisson to the ambiguity. We expect more action than we get, so the erotic tension between his vulnerable male characters takes center stage. These videos are emotional pressure-cookers propelled by little more than the resonance of sentimental song lyrics. That they are beguiling is a dual testament to the power of music and to Just's deft handling of his material.
The two newest videos in the show are not as strong as No Man Is an Island II and others he recently exhibited at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis, but if he can achieve for other subjects the emotional nuances shown in this body of work, Just will undoubtedly become a star. He's been busy this year already and is currently slated for another gallery solo somewhere in Italy this month. (I can't recall where off the top of my head.)
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
November 13, 2004
"Minimal artists try to make..." at Yvon Lambert Gallery
Artforum.com has posted my brief review of the group show curated by Jonathan Monk now on view at Yvon Lambert in Chelsea. Here's the text:
In late 1960s Paris, Yvon Lambert exhibited a group of young artists—many American—that other gallerists wouldn't touch; today, these Minimalists and Conceptual artists are considered some of the most influential of the decade and form the bedrock of a gallery program that is one of the most prominent in Paris. Berlin-based Jonathan Monk—himself obsessed with the period's artists—has dipped into the archives to give audiences a sneak peek at the Left Bank gallery's heyday. The earliest works included, a wall-based sculpture by Sol LeWitt and drawings from Dutch artist Stanley Brouwn's "This Way Brouwn" series (in which passersby were asked to sketch street directions, which he then stamped and exhibited as artworks), slightly predate the gallery's existence. Sculptures by Carl Andre and Fred Sandback, a text work by Lawrence Weiner, paintings by Brice Marden and On Kawara, and documentation of early Joan Jonas performances catch the gallery in its stride. It is an uncomplicated affair: If you like these artists, you'll like the show. Look around for Monk's own contribution, which suggests a Parisian rendezvous some years hence. Perhaps after meeting at the designated spot, you could visit a few galleries.
The review is archived here on BrianSholis.com. I mean what I say when I announce that if you like the artists you'll like the show. I do, so seeing an early Marden painting or Brouwn's works, which are unfamiliar to American audiences, is a distinct pleasure.
NOTE: I'm facing down a handful of freelance deadlines and a growing workload at the magazine, so posts here will be few and far between for a while. Thanks for your patience.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
November 5, 2004
Two L.A. exhibitions
Artforum.com has posted the "Critics' Picks" fruits of my LA trip: brief reviews of Evan Holloway's "I Don't Exist" at marc foxx and Matthew Greene's "she who casts the darkest shadow on our dreams" at peres projects. It's only by coincidence that I reviewed shows at the two LA galleries who prefer lowercase renderings of their names. Here is the text from each review.
Evan Holloway:
Figuration, a latent thread that has run through Los Angeles-based Holloway's rather formalist practice for several years, is pushed to the fore in "I Don't Exist," his fifth hometown solo. Almost every sculpture in the exhibition combines multiple figures or faces, crudely rendered and physically inseparable from geometric armatures reminiscent of his earlier work. Equity, 2004, for example, is populated by twenty-seven small nude figurines, each skewered by thin metal rods, covered with brown paint, to form a three-layer latticework cube. Relationships between figure and pure form are bolstered by human interaction in Anti Hierarchy, 2004, an eleven-foot ring suspended from the ceiling whose interior Holloway has lined with over a hundred faces, in varying hues, cast from synthetic plaster. Staring straight ahead, each gaze meets its match in the center of the loop, and the work implies a parenthetical subtitle to the exhibition: "I Don't Exist (Except in Relation to Others)". Even Cherubino, 2004, one of two fully abstract works on view, has its contingencies: its looping plaster form would disintegrate without the support of the steel base it rests on. Holloway has long encouraged an informal interdependency between object and viewer—usually by rewarding assiduous looking with surprising details—but these recent works encode that dependency in the sculptures themselves, and this show's tensions are perfectly poised.
Matthew Greene:
In his solo debut, Matthew Greene outlines the contours of a world devoid of hierarchy and false dichotomies, populated by an idiosyncratic amalgam of mushrooms and redwoods, guitars and Marshall amps, and armies of louche figures (often hermaphrodites) based on 1970s-era pornographic magazines. His landscape paintings, as large as twelve by ten feet, and black ink drawings, as small as seven inches square, are sensoriums skeptical of an Enlightenment conception of logic, developing instead by the nonlinear momentum of highly adaptable plants and animals. Regression is not inimical to progress, as it can reverse erroneous steps already taken, and Greene's paintings often look far back into history; 19th century Symbolism is only a way station (albeit an important one) for an artist whose sources stretch all the way to Stonehenge. How to see that far back and encompass such vast swaths of knowledge? Perhaps by use of a psychedelic gaze, alluded to by blushes of pink, green, blue, and orange peeking through his wide washes of black, and accessible via the heavy music referenced by his titles and the hallucinogenic fungi depicted. It takes a visionary's confidence to scrutinize, through painting, big subjects like gender, sexuality, how we come to possess knowledge, and how we measure time, yet in each work Greene does so convincingly. As the space of his paintings recedes before us, it is awfully tempting to try and step across the divide.
Both are now archived at BrianSholis.com: Holloway and Greene. I also added the Spencer Finch text from last week.