HORSE CRAZY
Short Form #3
JEFF KOONS: PORCELAIN SERIES (GAGOSIAN, NEW YORK)
It is now the year of the Horse, but also the year of some blank mystic – the Cloud Dancer, a personified Color of the Year. Last year, it was the year of Mocha Mousse, the Pantone shade of slam poetry and the Iraq War comedown, the warm retro hue of Bright Eyes and muted protest. This year, k-pop Vanilla Sky, wired EarPods, sleepy dancing at the edge of the world. A sandman prophet dressed in all white GU. Don’t trust him. BBC News Pidgin warns even the Horse might not be strong enough to resist the charms of this beguiling Dancer: “Horse fit get speed but if e no get di endurance of Camel e no go fit cross desert.” A great proverb, let’s not forget it.
At the galleries, slower sales encourage fewer, longer exhibitions. In Tribeca, a show might now stay open for two months. In Chelsea, a Louise Bourgeois show lasts nearly six. You can visit it right now, or maybe you already saw it before Thanksgiving, and you can go again after Easter, if you’d like. The same tendency has seemingly overcome museums. One would be forgiven for thinking Rashid Johnson’s nine-month takeover of the Guggenheim’s central rotunda closed around September, rather than only a few weeks ago. The great annual reset – designed to trick us into thinking the new year begins in January or February and not with the vernal equinox in March – is no longer in effect.
When this Koons show opened last fall, critics called it “dreadfully dull.” They said, “Koons has produced a body of work that’s just as banal as the tchotchkes that once inspired him.” They were still writing under the sign of Mocha Mousse. Under the new regime, we celebrate these monumental Royal Dux figurines, these cheater-brand Polkes, all destined for the Geneva Freeport, or a corporate lobby in Doha, or maybe nowhere at all. We marvel at how well these reflective sculptures are manufactured, how terrible they appear in professional photos, how good they look on Instagram stories, how unsettling they feel in person. Not great, perhaps, but how could any of that be boring?
AYOUNG KIM: DELIVERY DANCER CODEX (MOMA PS1, NEW YORK)
Ayoung Kim’s solo at PS1 also seems eternal, like Johnson’s at the Guggenheim, yet Kim is blessed with the fortune of good timing, because her work already aligns with the new spirit of the times. Her Cloud Dancer is named Dancemaster, and Dancemaster is either an algorithm or some Orwellian overlord. Maybe both. The protagonists of Kim’s sci-fi video trilogy are delivery drivers (“dancers”) surveilled by Dancemaster through an app, which is of course brutally real and not sci-fi. Players in a “pandemic fiction,” the videos’ two dancers are the only characters we encounter as they cruise through a suite of computer-generated landscapes. Some of the images are beautiful, some look cheap, but where do they go? Together, they play out like an extended trailer for the rough cut of an unfinished film. Accompanying prop sculptures, graphic illustrations, and carpeted set pieces lend the exhibition a merch store atmosphere, a move that could be interesting if the main product were compelling or, indeed, fan-worthy.
One of the conceivably enticing possibilities of this project is that it enables Kim to perform a little more like a pop star, and a little less like a beleaguered practitioner of contemporary art. Blurring the lines between on-screen character and real-life person, dispersing fragments of a speculative near-future across formats, confronting current agones, Delivery Dancer Codex initially appears to envision a more ambitious operating method than most we’ve seen emerge recently. Certain decisions recall Matthew Barney or Anne Imhof, both polarizing artists who eschew museal polity and unqualified plaudits while still racking up a trove of institutional commissions. One would hope Kim might join them. But then, disappointingly, the exhibition remains moored in conventional forms and the conspicuous logic of art-speak. It “examines the evolving relationships between data, human beings, and the environment,” and “create[s] narratives that collide geopolitics, synthesize mythologies, and interrogate technologies.” Unfortunately, these statements ring true, just not in the way they were intended.
JOEL DEAN: A COPY OF METATRON (TURQUOISE, NEW YORK)
It was very clever of Joel Dean to take an out-of-print book, one that had recently fallen into the public domain, and make a perfect facsimile from it. Dean printed 350 copies, housed them in an old bookcase, and left them up for grabs at Turquoise’s new space on Elizabeth Street. The book is by the late Sol Yurick, the author of The Warriors, and it’s called Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel, 1985. Originally published by Semiotext(e)’s Foreign Agents imprint, which introduced Baudrillard’s Simulations and Virilio’s Pure War to Anglophone audiences, Metatron reminds us of a long-ago time when critical theory was cool and dangerous and not a pro-forma component of art school curricula. It might also recall a better time in which you could write some crazy stuff in a Greenwich Village coffee shop and receive a Guggenheim Fellowship to keep doing so. Metatron concerns many subjects – cybernetics, Kabbalah, artificial intelligence, hyper-financialization, among others – but it’s better read as a tone poem than as a cogent work of theory. It’s sometimes, not always, lucid. Arbitrarily, one passage: “We live in a time when corporate operations have become speeded up. They have become mobile: they waltz across the sea: they take wing and fly into the night: they grow slender and slip through 30 gigabyte-wide needle’s eyes. They attack and pillage one another. They split into pieces and re-coalesce. They live in this age and other ages. Metanational entities gobble up chunks of their national hosts. Nothing new about that: what is new is the informational paraphernalia and the high-speed, distance-in-sensitive, time-devouring equipment which pressages a vast political change.” As a friend of the writer put it politely in a 2013 obituary, Yurick was “the Ornette Coleman of the non-fiction essay.”
HARRISON KINNANE SMITH: TRACINGS & ARRANGEMENTS (EMMELINES, NEW YORK)
Last year, novelists Vincenzo Latronico and Zoe Dubno rewrote older novels by Georges Perec and Thomas Bernhard. This year, artists are remaking things, usually returning us to the discourse of the 1980s. At a project space located in a subway station, Harrison Kinnane Smith presents us with four works (and a checklist of nine): two of Louise Lawler’s scalable vector tracings, adhered to the wall, and two framed drawings of those tracings, credited to Kinnane Smith. The checklist also includes the photographs upon which Lawler based her tracings, as well as the original artworks captured in Lawler’s photographs, by Koons, Félix González-Torres, and Peter Halley. This is Pictures en abyme, but it isn’t the sort of mirrored hall a critic like Craig Owens could have imagined, I don’t think.
TOM LLOYD (STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM, NEW YORK)
It’s poetic that the Studio Museum reopened with an exhibition dedicated to Tom Lloyd, who was the first artist shown at the museum in 1968. Although then a contentious choice for the Studio Museum’s inaugural exhibition – not representative enough, not political enough, not Black enough, according to the detractors – it seems uncertain Lloyd’s work would be restaged today if it weren’t so seductively liminal, poised as it is between kinetic art and post-minimalism. In collaboration an engineer from the Radio Corporation of America, Lloyd programmed Christmas light-bulbs to alternate colors in rapid sequence, constructing a sort of complex visual dance among forms. Held in geometric aluminum frames, these pieces likewise seem to hold broader cultural histories, suggestions to geometric abstraction and technological research, certainly, but also to post-war urbanism and factory production; the light lenses that stud each work, for instance, were produced by Buick. Collapsing references to the auto industry and post-industrial environs into a rhythmic schema, this is sort of like a visual analogue to Detroit techno twenty years avant la lettre. The irony of the “apolitical” charges is that Lloyd gradually gave up his practice to lead the Store Front Museum, the first museum in Queens, and to organize with the Artists Workers’ Coalition. Lloyd’s is thus a small oeuvre, yet one that deserves to be considered historically, at the very least, alongside the work later produced by Jack Whitten at his Xerox residency, as well as among the work of his better-known contemporaries outright.
HELEN FRANKENTHALER: A GRAND SWEEP (MOMA, NEW YORK)
There are four other works by Helen Frankenthaler in this compact exhibition, and each seems like a good excuse to show the fifth, the operatic Chairman of the Board, 1971. It is a sprawling work of cartographic abstraction, all brilliant orange topography and raw-canvas canal, marked by sweeping felt-tip lines like a tactical map. At sixteen feet wide, this painting is one of the few that earns consideration in oversaturated terms like “physicality” and “haptic encounter.” Yet Chairman of the Board, which might also be said to genuinely “collide geopolitics,” is as perplexing as it is formally stunning: how could “square and bourgeois” Frankenthaler, a lifelong conservative, make this work, with that title, in the year of the Pentagon Papers? It becomes sort of dark to think about.
PIERRE HUYGHE: A:: LIGHT (ONE LIBERTY PLAZA, NEW YORK)
Until 1990, Chairman of the Board was owned by Gordon Bunshaft, the architect behind International Style buildings like Lever House and the Pepsi-Cola Headquarters. Lever House is now owned by Brookfield Properties, which just installed Pierre Huyghe’s A:: Light, 1999, in the lobby of their One Liberty Plaza. A drop ceiling programmed to run the Atari game Pong, or a grid of lights designed to resemble a tiled office ceiling, A:: Light here is the antithesis of Lloyd’s lightworks – it works in service to its corporate associations, rather than the other way around. Originally created around the publication of The New Spirit of Capitalism, the interactive work seems to illustrate one of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s central tenets, that the artistic critique of 1968 had been recuperated by the French bureaucracy and integrated into a new type of (flexible, networked, post-Fordist) labor. In Huyghe’s piece, the dreary tile ceiling, an icon of middle-management conformity, has been transformed, perhaps ambivalently, into a game you can play. As Brookfield Properties notes, it was the centerpiece of the French Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale. A quarter century later, the work’s reappearance in an actual office building – one home to a white-shoe law firm, a global insurance brokerage, and Business Insider – seems to function differently. Now it memorializes an already outmoded form of creative workplace, the Silicon Valley kind equipped with rock-climbing walls, ping-pong tables, and craft beer on tap. Needless to say, the party is over. On a Monday afternoon, I went to the lobby and discovered Pong running on auto-mode; apart from security, the lobby was completely empty – no one was playing.